Writing Chronic Illness: 6 Session Workshop starting August 8
Thursdays, 4-5:30pm Pacific Time, starting August 8
Chronic illness is a physical experience, but also a narrative one. Our understandings of selfhood and what happens to our bodies over time coalesce into the way we understand the experience of being ill—and the experience of being alive.
For many people, becoming sick and living as a sick person brings with it the desire to understand lived experience through narrative. Whether it is through a narrative medical history or an illness memoir, the impulse to start at one truth and travel to another one can feel urgent, and creative nonfiction offers a container for the sharing and exploration of illness.
Linear recovery narratives tend to begin with crisis and uses hope and grit to travel a narrative line that arrives at redemption, but the lived experience of chronic illness is far more fragmented and far less directional. The flares and remissions of chronic illness refute that linear narrative and demand different understandings of how our bodies move through time. There is no tidy way to write about chronic illness. In this work, the craft challenges include the handling of time, of evolving knowledge, and of shifting realities.
In this six-session generative course, you will explore the ways traditional narrative structures influence medical understanding of what it is to be sick and what it is to be well. Working in the creative nonfiction form of your choice (from personal essay to braided essay, op-ed to memoir), you will begin to write your own illness narrative, using the truths of the body as a tether to larger human truths. Each week, you’ll be asked to write pages toward the draft that you’ll workshop during our last session.
This is a 6 week course. We meet on Zoom, Thursdays, 4-5:30pm Pacific Time, starting August 8. Enrollment is $445.