Writing for Health and Healing Retreat 2020

Writing for Health and Healing Online Retreat October 3-4, 2020 DOMINICAN UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Low Residency MFA in CreativeWriting 1

Saturday, October 3: 3:00-3:45pm PST: Welcome Meeting Please join us for a welcome session with MFA Faculty 4:00-6:00pm PST: Keynote: Dawn McGuire, MD Writing (Yourself) Well: Craft and the Neuroscience of Narrative Dawn McGuire, neurologist and author of The Aphasia Cafe (Indie Book Award, 2012) and American Dream with Exit Wound (Northern California Book Award finalist, 2018), will explore how we “write ourselves well” with works that hold fragments in place or build a narrative center from which we can mPoevrfeofromrewdabryd.JTenhneinfeeruMroabricohlogy of compelling narratives will be touched on. The talk will include examples of poems by Ellen Bass, Natalie Diaz, Christian Wiman and others, either dealing with illness themselves or with seriously-ill loved ones. 2

Sunday, October 4: 10:00-11:30am PST: Writing Workshops Workshop 1: Narrative / Poetic Medicine with visiting faculty member David Watts Workshop 2: Act Up: Enter the Tradition of Narrative Writing in Pandemic Times with Dominican Faculty member Thomas Burke Workshop 3: Diagnosis and the Divine Detail in Poetry with Dominican faculty member Joan Baranow Workshop 4: Ancestral Healing to the Future: On Genograms, Genealogy, and Poetics with special guests Norma Thomas & Raina J. Leon Workshop 5: Dreaming Up Stories / Revising the Narrative with faculty member Marianne Rogoff Workshop 6: Collective Healing through Writing with Dominican Faculty Perry Guevara 3:15-3:45pm PST: Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Information Session 4:00-6:00pm PST: Panel Discussion Audio Storytelling with the Nocturnists University of California San Francisco physicians Ashley McMullen, Emily Silverman, and producer Adelaide Papazoglou will share their work on The Nocturnists, a storytelling platform. Their work includes two new audio documentaries, “Black Voices in Healthcare” and “Stories from a Pandemic.” In this panel, they discuss the power of storytelling to heal, connect, and cultivate empathy across differences. 3

Thank you to our speakers & workshop leaders! Joan Baranow is the author of In the Next Life, Living Apart, and two poetry chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, Forklift OH, Poetry East, JAMA, and elsewhere. She founded and teaches in the Low- Residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Dominican University of CA. With her husband David Watts she produced the PBS documentary Healing Words: Poetry & Medicine. Her feature-length documentary, The Time We Have, presents an intimate portrait of a teenager facing terminal illness. Thomas Burke is Assistant Professor at Dominican University of California. He is the author of the fiction collection Where Is Home from Fithian Press. His work has been published in reviews including The James White Review, Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, The Chiron Review, and the Evergreen Chronicles; in webzines; and in anthologies including Queer and Catholic (Routledge). Twice nominated for a Pushcart prize, he received the Steven L. Smith Prize for Gay Fiction. Perry Guevara joined the Dominican faculty in 2016 and is, at present, a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. He is also the director of the undergraduate minor in Performing Arts & Social Change, which features a distinctive curricular partnership with Marin Shakespeare Company’s theater-prison program. He has authored essays on such topics as the history of medicine through Renaissance literature, embodied cognition, affect theory, and Shakespearean pedagogy in prison. He is presently writing on neurotechnology and experimental theater. 4

Raina J. León is an Afro-Latina, native Philadelphian, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, and sombra: (dis)locate. Dawn McGuire, MD is a neurologist-poet and the author of four poetry collections, most recently American Dream with Exit Wound. She has received numerous prizes, including the Indie Book Award in Poetry and the Sarah Lawrence/Campbell Corner Prize for “poems that treat larger themes with lyric intensity.” Her work appears in Zyzzyva, Nimrod International, Narrative and numerous other literary magazines, and has been featured in a New Yorker poetry podcast. Ashley McMullen, MD is a native of Houston, TX who ventured west to complete her residency training in internal medicine at UCSF, where she served as chief resident. Currently she is a primary care physician at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. Ashley is interested in exploring the role of narratives in medical education and as a tool for improving healthcare across differences. 5

Adelaide Papazoglou is an anthropologist, filmmaker, and audio producer whose work has hovered at the intersection of human affliction and narrative form. At The Nocturnists she has helped recruit, coach, and curate stories for live storytelling events and produced the two most recent podcast series: Stories from a Pandemic and Black Voices in Healthcare. Before joining The Nocturnists as Head of Story Development, she worked on a broad range of projects from short fiction and experimental films to feature-length documentaries. Marianne Rogoff is the author of the Pushcart-nominated story collection Love Is Blind in One Eye, the memoir Silvie’s Life, and numerous award-winning travel stories, short fiction, essays, and book reviews. She teaches Writing & Literature at California College of the Arts and in the MFA in Creative Writing / Narrative Medicine Program at Dominican University. During winter and summer breaks, she leads weeklong trips for writers (when travel is allowed). Emily Silverman, MD is a doctor at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Assistant Professor of Medicine at UCSF. She is also the creator of The Nocturnists, a medical storytelling movement that has produced over a dozen live shows in the Bay Area and NYC, three seasons of a podcast, and two audio diary series, called \"Stories from a Pandemic\" and \"Black Voices in Healthcare.\" 6

Norma Thomas is a graduate of Pennsylvania State University, Temple University, and the University of Pennsylvania. She retired in 2017 from CA University of Pennsylvania, School of Social Work where she served as the MSW Program Director and achieved the rank of full professor. She is currently an online instructor for the Center For Social Work Education, Widener University and the recipient of many community service awards. David Watts, MD has literary credits which include seven books of poetry, three collections of short stories, two mystery novels, seven western novels, a Christmas memoir, and several essays. He has been published by Random House, The New York Times, The Gettysburg Review and many others. He is a medical doctor, a classically trained musician, inventor and was a former television personality and commentator for All Things Considered. He has received awards for his academics and for his work in the media, in medicine, and as a poet and author. Judy Halebsky directs the Low-Res MFA in Creative Writing at Dominican University of California. She is the author most recently of Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged), which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She also writes plays, performance texts, and does live storytelling. To learn more about the MFA program, write to her at: [email protected] 7

DOMINICAN UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Low Residency MFA in CreativeWriting This retreat is sponsored by the Low Residency Creative Writing MFA Program at Dominican University of California. Our MFA program fosters a supportive community of talented writers who are encouraged to experiment across genres and with new forms of writing. In addition to Poetry, Fiction and Creative Nonfiction, Dominican offers an optional track in Narrative/Poetic Medicine, which allows students to embrace the special role that creative writing can play in the process of healing. Applications are currently being accepted for January admission. Contact Judy Halebsky at [email protected] for more information. Visit www.dominican.edu/mfa for more program information. 8