Writing Health and Care Stories

Do you suffer from chronic illness, or disability, or do you care for someone who does? Dr Lily Dunn explores how writing can be a powerful tool for expression.

As my doctorate was concerned with the transformative power of writing memoir (and then later, a book that evolved from the doctorate, a commission from Manchester University Press, which is due to be published next year), I did a lot of reading of illness memoirs and the democratic and playful power of creative nonfiction for exploring perspective, identity and the individual - not always conventional - story. I was most drawn to hybrid writing, because it appeared to make up the rules and wasn’t concerned with fitting into any kind of genre or criteria. A lot of illness memoir tends to fit under this umbrella. One of the leading texts I read was The Wounded Storyteller, by Arthur W Frank, part memoir, part ode to Narrative Medicine, and I was particularly struck by this quote: ‘The ill body is certainly not mute – it speaks eloquently in pains and symptoms – but it is inarticulate. We must speak for the body, and such speech is quickly frustrated: speech presents itself as being about the body rather than of it.’ And I set about looking for texts that experimented with what I considered ‘embodied writing’ – hat which seeks to give language to the experience of the body, visceral, sensory, vital and alive.

Embodied writing is writing from within rather than about bodily experience, often the experience of suffering. It is the immediate, unmediated narrator at the centre, or in the undertow, of an emotion or physical sensation. Because to capture an embodied experience, you must re-enter what it feels like to be caught in the chaos of illness or trauma, and to find a language for something that has no face, that is senseless.

Embodied writing also often explores what might otherwise be considered ‘wordless’ or ‘unspeakable’. American academic Leigh Gilmore writes of how trauma, which stems from the Greek meaning ‘wound’ refers to the self-altering, even self-shattering experience of violence, injury and harm, and that trauma is ‘beyond language.. that language fails in the face of trauma and trauma mocks language with its insufficiency.’

You might want to write a story that has been silenced, or overwritten. It might be a minority story, or a traumatic story, or a story of illness, or dissociation or disembodiment – experienced through symptoms, or from misdiagnosis or a form of medical colonisation. It might be a story that mainstream culture has failed to even conceive of, like in the case of Carmen Maria Machado’s excellent and experimental memoir, In the Dream House, and its exploration of lesbian domestic abuse and coercive control, because ‘our culture does not have an investment in helping queer folks understand what their experiences mean.’  Through her writing, Machado attempts to discover language and symbol for queer domestic abuse, and interrogates the culture invested in the silencing. Finding a language for a personal experience which is not fully understood by the mainstream gives concrete form to the unnameable, and by doing so invites the reader into the experience. A body finds its own language. A body speaks.

If this appeals to you, you might like a workshop that London Lit Lab has coming up in December. A 2-hour live Zoom session (14th Dec, 2-4pm) that will appeal to those of you who live with a chronic health condition, past trauma, or care for someone who does, and want to find a new and distinct language that is specific to that experience. It will be a safe space where tutor Andrew Kaye Kauffmann will introduce texts, encourage discussion and gentle writing exercises. We have kept the price reasonable at £20 per place, but there are also two half price places and two free places for those who want to apply. You can find out more about the workshop here

We have another couple of interesting workshops and courses in November. Short Story Bootcamp, with award winning short story writer, Ruby Cowling, runs from end of November to start of February, and is a mini mentorship course that will help you get your short stories ready for submission.

If you’re struggling with a work in progress, come and join Julia Bell in her Live Online Zoom interactive workshop on 30th November. Julia is a brilliant teacher - she was my supervisor on my PhD, and she runs the MA in creative writing at Birkbeck University of London. More details here