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dawndavies · 5 years ago

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Reading and Writing Health/Medical/Trauma Stories

I created a web page on medical narrative here, but I thought I would shoot this out as a blog post for writers who read my blog and and are working on memoirs that involves some aspect of medical storytelling. I have run into more than a few of you at workshops or writers conferences. Feel free to share this resource or contact me with questions.

If you are interested in taking an online workshop with me in writing medical stories or personal medical narratives, leave a comment below. I'm putting an affordable online course together.

Medical narrative, and now narrative medicine, is one of my special interests. I have written several essays on illness, and a few short stories that dabble in medical themes.

Here is a list:

"Four Animals," an essay on living with Sjogren's Syndrome. Published in Blood and Thunder, and later in Mothers of Sparta.

"Mothers of Sparta" the essay, first published in Arts & Letters, and later in Mothers of Sparta.

"Kicking the Snakes," an essay on anxiety and pain, first published in New Plains Review, and later published in Mothers of Sparta.

"Keeping the Faith," an essay that describes living with OCD without naming it, first published in Chautauqua Magazine in 2016, and later in Mothers of Sparta.

"Fear of Falling," an essay chronicling postpartum OCD, first published in HerStories Anthology, 2015, and later in Mothers of Sparta.

"Arrhythmia," an essay published in The Missouri Review in 2018.

"Music to Be Played If I Fall into a Coma," an essay on music and facing death, published in issue #56 of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, 2019.

"Angels in the Architecture," a short story about facing death, published in Cleaver Magazine in 2019.

"Something Merciful," a short story featuring a narrator with mental illness, published in Southern Gothic Revival Anthology in 2016.

The first medical memoir I read was The Other Side of the Mountain, by Jill Kinmont. As I did with most medical books, I read it far too young, and was profoundly affected (affected = terrified) by her story.

I credit this book with my subsequent obsession with medical narrative, as I continued to look for stories about health and medicine to help make sense of my own (at the time) undiagnosed ODC, which had a pronounced somatic/medical component as early as elementary school.

Now I am interested in contemporary narratology, that is, the ways narrative and narrative structure affect our perception about how we deal with our bodies, illness, disability, and how we, either in sickness or in health, relate to others, who may be in various states of sickness or health themselves.

I'm happy to share what I have learned and am continuing to learn, about the genre. This page will cover the basics. Stay tuned as I expand this page by collecting more resources for everyone to use.

To begin, here is a list of resources for those interested in reading more about medical narrative/narrative medicine or submitting your own medical narratives to journals.

Literary Journals that focus on medical narrative:

Humanism Evolving through Arts and Literature (HEAL)

Florida State University College of Medicine

Abaton

Des Moines University

Ars Medica

A biannual literary journal

Atrium

Northwestern University

Bellevue Literary Review

A journal of humanity and human experience published by NYU

Blood and Thunder

University of Oklahoma

Body Electric

University of Illinois College of Medicine

Configurations

Johns Hopkins

Dermanities: Journal of Community and Person-Centered Dermatology

An online, open access journal on the dermatological humanities

Ether Arts

The Ohio State University College of Medicine

Examined Life Journal

University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine Writing and Humanities Program

Healing Muse

SUNY—Upstate

Hektoen International

A Journal for the Humanities

Helen H. Glaser Student Essay Awards