The Need for Narrative: Grappling & Reckoning with These Times

Join us for a new virtual basic workshop and online course!

Registration for the workshop is now closed! Inquire below to be added to our waitlist, should space become available!

Inquire About the Waitlist!(link sends e-mail)

We tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being narrated. This remark takes on its full force when we refer to the necessity to save the history of the defeated and the lost. The whole history of suffering... calls for narrative.

 Paul Ricoeur

The Need for Narrative: Grappling & Reckoning with These Times, a new narrative medicine basic workshop, invites you to join the narrative medicine international community in bringing our creative resources to the task of locating ourselves in these unprecedented times and exploring the power of narrative work to bring our experiences into focus.

COVID-19 transformed human experience on a global scale, forcing us into isolation yet uniting us in an immediate response to illness, mortality, and the harrowing task facing our healthcare systems and workers. The pandemic illuminated disparities in healthcare, race, and social justice, and the dramatic political polarizations and still-present histories of discrimination that shaped those disparities and allows them to persist. The May 25, 2020 murder of George Floyd, among many other events, prompted thousands to risk health and safety for the sake of marching for justice and reform, demonstrating that responding to this pivotal moment in time involves far more than the monumental task of attempting to temper a virus on a global scale.

The seemingly overwhelming complexities and interconnectedness of our moment call for narrative reckoning. How do we begin to engage with the fear, uncertainty, and burnout of navigating any or all of them? How do we understand our own experiences of loss, illness, caretaking, injustice, or activism in relation to the experiences of others so that we can find perspective and understanding? How do we find ways to cope and move forward?

This workshop offers narrative and creative work as a means to engage with these questions through creative and scholarly presentations by the Narrative Medicine faculty on creativity, philosophy and ethics, and witnessing of self and others, as well as intimate group work with other participants engaging with literature, film, and art. We are also honored to welcome distinguished guest speaker Nigel Hatton, PhD(link is external and opens in a new window), Associate Professor of Literature and affiliate faculty in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Merced, Adjunct instructor at Mount Tamalpais College at San Quentin Prison, Lecturer in Narrative Medicine, Contributing Editor to The James Baldwin Review, and Fellow at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, who will speak to us about narrative medicine’s potential as a tool for social justice.

While neither poetry, art, science, nor medicine (narrative or otherwise) can provide us with certainty on how to respond to this current moment in our history, all of these tools can help us to hold our questions and experiences and create spaces to grapple and reckon with them together. We hope you join us.

Workshop Description & Objectives

We are excited to share a new learning experience in a virtual format that brings together participants from all over the world for a weekend of intensive skill-building in narrative medicine practice. The narrative medicine faculty and program directors have worked to create an intimate and immersive experience, including lectures, small group work, literature, educational and networking resources, continuing education credits, and direct interaction with narrative medicine faculty. Our format combines live virtual sessions and asynchronous learning modalities to deliver an introduction to the field that provides the same learning, connection, and transformative experience as traditional in-person workshops, while taking into consideration the fatigue and burnout of demanding virtual schedules. 

Narrative medicine recognizes the aesthetic capabilities of its practitioners as fundamental instruments necessary for effective care. Acts of perception and attention ignite our narrative practice. Seeing, hearing, sensing, taking in that which we witness begins the process toward healing, and narrative medicine training attunes us to those skills within ourselves. We grow toward our own powers to attend to our patients through the schooled avenues of close reading, deep listening, and concentrated witnessing of works of art. This intensive workshop will offer rigorous skill-building in narrative competence and provides an intensive introductory experience to the methods and skills of narrative medicine. These practices are then applicable to unlimited clinical and non-clinical settings. Participants will experience plenary presentations by the founders of the Division of Narrative Medicine, and guest lecturer Nigel Hatton, PhD(link is external and opens in a new window), in both live and asynchronous formats, and will engage with faculty, guest lecturer, and each other live via Zoom for interactive presentations, Q&A, and small group work. Participants will learn effective techniques for attentive listening, adopting others’ perspectives, accurate representation, and reflective reasoning. Plenary presentations by faculty open up themes of how stories and art work, exploring concepts such as creativity, ethics, bearing witness, and empathy, while the small groups practice rigorous skills in close reading, creative writing, and responding to the writings of others. Close reading is an integral part of the workshop as is short prompted writing and discussion. Participants will gain access to our online resources prior to the start of the workshop where all information necessary to prepare for the weekend is provided, including literary texts, film, visual art, and seminar articles in the field of narrative medicine by leading educators.

The Workshop live content will be held on Friday between 5:00pm-8:00p, Saturday between 9:30a-6p and Sunday between 9:30a-6p (all times EST).

Narrative Medicine

The effective care of the sick requires deep and singular knowledge of the patient, competence, and commitment of the physician, and a sturdy bond of trust between the two. Despite the many sociocultural and professional factors that may divide doctors and patients, and the impact of political and economic pressures on health care as a whole, effective medical practice needs to replace hurried and impersonal care with careful listening and empathic attention. By fortifying clinical practice with the ability to recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved by stories of illness, narrative training enables practitioners to comprehend patients’ experiences and to understand what they themselves undergo as clinicians. Professionalism, cultural competence, bioethical competence, interpersonal communication skills, self-reflective practice, and ability to work with health care teams can be strengthened by increasing narrative competence.

Many persons engaged in health care, including patients, providers, and literary scholars, are seeking fresh means to engage in powerful, person-centered care. Attentive listening, creative contact, singular accuracy, and personal fidelity are often missing from the routines of our practices. Among the many responses to the failures of our current health care system is Narrative Medicine. Developed at Columbia University in 2000, Narrative Medicine fortifies clinical practice with the ability to recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved by stories of illness. We realize that the care of the sick unfolds in stories, and we recognize that the central event of health care occurs when the patient gives an account of self and the clinician skillfully receives it. Our experience and research have shown that the clinical routines and teaching methods of narrative medicine can transform practice and training. Time-tested teaching approaches can help participants to convey to their students the skills of empathic interviewing, reflective practice, narrative ethics, and self-awareness.

Work and study with us virtually for a weekend. Connect with colleagues from the world over to learn the narrative skills of close reading, attentive listening, and creative writing. Find out how your own imagination can reveal things you know unawares. Experience the deep bonds that can form among clinicians and those who care about health care in short periods of small group intensive narrative work. Recognize and be recognized as ones who have care within them.

Asynchronous Resources:

(available via University secured online platform several weeks before workshop dates; live faculty Q&A during the weekend follows the recorded lectures.)

• Orientation: Workshop Guidelines, Introductory information, and Welcome Board
• Participant Profile: Voluntary, Including Bio/Contact Info/Headshot
• Discussion/Resource Boards to connect across Professional Backgrounds
• Discussion Boards for Pre-Recorded and Resource Content
• Pre-readings and Course Literature            

Recorded Lectures:

• “Fostering Creative Courage: Writing for Change, Affiliation, & Healing” by Nellie Hermann, MFA
• “The Ethics of Vulnerability and the Face of the Pandemic” by Craig Irvine, PhD

Live Schedule (all times EDT and all sessions held on Zoom):

Friday October 22nd

• 5:00-6:30pm: Telling, Listening, and Living through Stories: Conjectures, Refutations, and Concordances within Narrative Medicine | Rita Charon, MD, PhD
• 7:00-8:00pm: Small Group Seminars | Breakout Rooms

Saturday October 23rd

• 9:30-11:00am: Small Group Seminars | Breakout Rooms
• 1:00-2:30pm: GUEST LECTURE | Nigel Hatton, PhD
• 3:30-5:00pm: Small Group Seminars | Breakout Rooms
• 5:30-6:00pm: Faculty Q&A for Recorded Lectures | Nellie Hermann & Craig Irvine 

Sunday October 24th

• 9:30-11:00am: The Legacy of Untold Stories: The Look of Silence and Narrative Intervention | Maura Spiegel, PhD
• 12:00-1:30pm: Small Group Seminars | Breakout Rooms
• 2:30-3:45pm: Witnessing Self and Other | Deepthiman Gowda, MD, MPH, MS
• 4:00-5:30pm: Small Group Seminars | Breakout Rooms
• 5:30-6:00pm: Weekend Wrap-Up | Narrative Medicine Faculty

Audience

We invite nurses, physicians, physician assistants, dentists, chaplains, social workers, therapists, public health professionals and other clinicians, as well as writers, academics, scholars, and all those interested in the intersection of narrative and medicine to join us. By combining these groups of participants, we can all learn how to unify what are sometimes divided efforts in patient care, integrating the ethical awareness and sensibility with the clinical recognition that can ensue.