Thanks so much for a great first class. My favorite part of any start-of-semester is the chance to read a new batch of student work. I can tell that, as a group, you all bring a lot of energy and perspective to the questions narrative medicine poses.
The prompt for our writing last week was the first sentence–and YES that was just one sentence–of Virginia Woolf’s 1926 essay “On Being Ill.” There are a few keywords already in your work that you might think about as you draft your “outsider” narrative a bit later on today.
- stigma & silence came up a bit: “Illness is a difficult subject to speak about” wrote one of you, while another described it as more of “a mix” of good and bad. Still another mentioned that it could even be a chance for a “break.” In fact, this is what illness offered many people over time: the chance to take a break, to get out of the march of time, to engage in “convalescence“, as described in the novels studied by the author of the study in the link, Hosanna Krienke
- interruption, or the idea that illness is “unpredictable” or could happen any time, or recur anytime, also popped up. This is something Ann Jurecic talks about in her book Illness as Narrative as “living in prognosis,” or having risk intrude in anxiety-provoking ways. “To live “in prognosis” is to be in limbo between health and illness without a clear life narrative,” she writes. What do we think of that?
- perspective shift, or as one of you put it, the idea that “people overlook the outcomes” on an emotional level; illness can provide “a necessary reality check”, “illness is powerful in its strength to change people.” In many ways, this is what Woolf is basically arguing (to the extent that a lyric essay has an argument.) It’s also something that contemporary disability scholars, including Tobin Siebers and Eli Clare, argue: that, in Siebers’ phrase disability (including illness) creates a perspective that is, itself valuable. He called this “complex embodiment” and we’ll come back to it and ideas like it in our third unit.
- systems: there was also mention of inequity globally about access to healthcare, and about the way control and fighting are emphasized over adapting individually or collectively. That may be as good a place as any to jump into the piece of flash fiction we’ll discuss today, Heather Ryan’s “Presented with Complaint.” That piece has hopefully already gotten us thinking about narrative (and form) but also about some of the questions about care, role, and perspective (including that of near-future robot nurses).
