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Writers Workshops

Writing and Medicine Online 2020-216

Course #2020-216
Wednesdays Starting July 22 6:30 pm–8:30 pm running 6 weeks
Cost: $240 Instructor: Erika Jo Brown

Please note that this is an online workshop conducted via Zoom. Participants will be provided information on how to join the online sessions once they complete the registration process. 

As Daniel Defoe prefaces his riveting A Journal of the Plague Year, “I have set this particular down so fully…to those who come after me, if they come to be brought to the same distress, and to the same manner of making their choice.” Three hundred years later, his account of the bubonic plague in London remains a poignant reflection of a public health crisis.

This interdisciplinary writing workshop pulls together artistic and scientific disciplines to explore healing, health, and humanism. We will address thorny issues one faces as clinicians and patients. Topics may include death and dying; disease; gender, sexuality, and reproduction; disability; mental health; activism; and racial and ethnic health disparities.

At a time when routines are upended, this workshop carves out time to process clinical and cultural events through poetry, short stories, and memoir. We’ll appreciate narrative as an invaluable diagnostic and therapeutic tool. Participants will identify techniques to improve expressive and persuasive writing. By reading diverse accounts, we’ll access new reserves of empathy and cross-cultural competence. Readings will include work by Atul Gawande, Mary Roach, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as The Bellevue Literary Review, based in Bellevue Hospital in New York. Participants are not limited to health professionals – any interest with the body is welcome.

About the instructor

ERIKA JO BROWN is the author of the poetry collection I’m Your Huckleberry. She teaches Medicine and Society, and other writing and literature courses at the University of Houston. Since 2016, she’s led weekly creating writing workshops at MD Anderson Children’s Cancer Hospital. Brown earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston, where she won the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry and was recipient of an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor/M. D. Anderson Foundation Fellowship.

Please note that online workshops are nonrefundable. By registering for an Inprint Writers Workshop you are agreeing to Inprint’s registration  policies.