Creative Writing in Healthcare

3.0 credits

The field of narrative medicine honors stories of patients, families, and clinicians. For example, illness narratives can illuminate patient perspectives, and clinician narratives can provide insight into medical training and practice. This course applies an attention to narrative to study the craft of creative writing and to practice narrative construction, with a focus on creative nonfiction. Through examination of prose, we will investigate elements that influence narrative composition and efficacy, such as structure and form, voice, tone, and more. Students will have the opportunity to perform close literary analysis, engage with rigorous study of narrative craft, as well as to apply this knowledge to create and revise their own forms of narrative. This course is designed for individuals interested in health, creative writing, medicine, nursing, public health, medical anthropology, clinical psychology, and other health-related or creative arts fields to gain practice in narrative construction related to health.