Workshop Information

click the links below for coordinator information

Cathy Spagnoli

Allen Peterkin and
Allison Crawford

Mark Weisberg and
Guy Allen

Rita Charon

Workshop Schedule

Wednesday May 7th, 2008
---------------------------------------------------
Telling Your Family Tales - Cathy Spagnoli
(9:00am - 12:00pm)

Overview:
The story treasures found in our families need to be shared. Professional storyteller and writer Cathy Spagnoli helps participants to unearth a rich range of their own stories. She shows how visual organizers, interviews, and other techniques from several cultures can help us to find more of our own personal tales. Cathy also tells several of her own family stories to model simple but effective ways of family storytelling. Participants are then guided to remember and shape their own stories. As the rough plots of stories emerge, Cathy helps participants to explore the uses of voice, gesture, language, and more to enrich their own telling. A time to share and to reflect ends the workshop as you go out to share more of your life, through story.

Writing and Healing - Allen Peterkin and Allison Crawford
(9:00am - 12:00pm)

Overview:
This workshop will review some of the literature on the clinical applications of writing in various healthcare contexts. We will provide demonstrations of two narrative-based therapies used in clinical contexts with men and women living with HIV/AIDS and with women who have suffered perinatal loss. Participants will be given writing exercises derived from these models and will be shown how to enhance their own narrative competence and how to use writing strategies with clients and patients struggling with illness.

What Happened? - Mark Weisberg and Guy Allen
(9:00am - 12:00pm)

Overview:
Guy Allen and Mark Weisberg will lead this workshop in turning observations and experiences into narratives with power and impact. When we make stories, we construct a place people can enter and experience for themselves. This workshop will present examples of good narratives that create these spaces and offer guidance and an opportunity to write them. We will take 30 minutes to write. We will read our stories and talk about them. We will observe how powerfully narrative shows us and our experience to others----and to ourselves.

Saturday May 10th, 2008
--------------------------------------------------
Narrative Medicine - Rita Charon
(9:00am - 12:00pm)

Overview:
Narrative medicine connotes a clinical practice fortified with the narrative competence to perceive finely, to represent forcefully, and to read closely one’s and one’s colleagues’ texts. By teaching the literary skills of close reading and reflective writing in clinical settings, practitioners of narrative medicine help health care professionals to make audible and visible to themselves and colleagues urgent and salient aspects of patients and patient care that until the narrative acts remain hidden and silent.

This workshop will invite participants to write about clinical or personal practice and then to experience the process of collective “hearing” of our representations. By writing about our clinical experiences—either with patients or with persons in our private lives—we find that we see and can grasp these experiences with freshness and power. By reading aloud what we have written, even if the writing is accomplished in three or four minutes in the seminar room, we “borrow” our colleagues’ listening apparatus and are able to hear/perceive all that we encoded within the writing. Lest this sound goofy or bizarre, please join us for the hard work and exceptional illumination that close reading and reflective writing bestow on our clinical lives. This workshop is open and welcoming to clinicians and non-clinicians. All of us have illness to behold.