"The Healing Muse" Reading at Wells College
Editors and writers from this year's issue will read selected works.
Date
11-03-11
Time
7:00 pm
Location
Art Exhibit Room, Macmillan Hall
General Info
The Wells College Visiting Writers Series presents a special reading of the recently-published eleventh issue of The Healing Muse. The reading will take place at 7 p.m. on Thursday, November 3rd, in the Art Exhibit Room of Macmillan Hall. Light refreshments will be available.
The selections will consist of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. The readers at the event include two editors, Deirdre Neilen and Nancy Schreher, Healing Muse Board Member Dr. Cindy Wojteck, Wells English Professors Bruce Bennett and Cynthia Garrett, Ithaca poets Sarah Jefferis, Joyce McAllister, and Tish Pearlman, and Auburn poet Heidi Nightengale. The Healing Muse is the annual journal of literary and visual art published by SUNY Upstate Medical University's Center for Bioethics & Humanities.
Deirdre Neilen wrote in her editor’s note to the current issue: “We began The Healing Muse to encourage a dialogue among all those engaged in healing: clinicians, patients, caregivers, and friends. Each year we are humbled by the stories sent to us and delighted by the artistry used to convey them….
In this issue we meet people struggling and coping with the after effects of electric shock treatments, amniocentesis results, drug dependency, and the death of a loved one. Sometimes they write about their own experiences, sometimes they describe another’s, but in every case they craft an indelible phrase, a unique image that brings the reader as close as possible to what it felt like to hear that diagnosis or live that prognosis. The courage, the wit, and the passion they record linger in the reader’s mind and heart, linking us in ways social media can only envy.”
Poet, doctor, and Harvard University professor Rafael Campo wrote: “The Healing Muse, one of the first literary journals to recognize the connections between creative self-expression and healing, remains one of the foremost in the burgeoning field of the medical humanities. It has grown to become an instrument of healing for our entire troubled culture.”