Telling our Medical Stories Slant
Tuesday, Sept. 24, 6:30pm ET

SOLD OUT! — This program has reached maximum registrant capacity. We hope you’ll register for other Festival programs!

In this workshop, participants will learn how to translate their personal stories of illness and disability into poetry, something Dickinson herself practiced, and something that’s employed by practitioners of Narrative/Poetic Medicine.

The workshop, led by poets whose work centers around medicine and disability (from the perspectives of physician, caregiver, and as patients themselves) will be both reflective and generative and will include the reading and discussion of a medical poem by Dickinson as well as a poem by a contemporary “medical poet.” The workshop will culminate with a generative exercise involving the translation of participants’ medical histories into poetic form.

About the Poets

Catharine Clark-Sayles is a physician who recently retired after forty years in practice. She completed her MFA in poetry and narrative medicine at Dominican University of California in 2019. Her first two books of poetry, One Breath and Lifeboat, were published by Tebot Bach Press. A chapbook, Brats, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her fourth book, The Telling, The Listening, was published by Saint Julian Press in October 2023.
clarksayles.com

Rosemarie Dombrowski is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix, AZ, the founding editor of rinky dink press, and the founding director of Revisionary Arts, a nonprofit that facilitates self-care and healing through poetry. She’s published three collections of poetry and was the winner of the 2017 Split Rock Review chapboo competition. Her work has appeared in Poetry Daily, poets.org, on local NPR affiliates, national NPR podcasts, the TEDx stage, and elsewhere. She teaches at ASU.
rdpoet.com