Journey to Narrative Medicine

I came to this work through utter necessity. I was trained to teach writing as a skill all students needed to master to succeed in college and in life. Writing was not taught then as a healing modality, or even as a method of personal communication but as a professional tool to succeed in college and to get and keep a job. But then life happens. And it happened to me in the middle of a semester—my husband died, leaving me to raise our two small children alone. When I returned to my Professional Writing class a week later, I stared at faces whose empathy for me bled out of their eyes. I knew I had to do something, say something, to keep us all from falling into one of those holes in the universe. I looked at them, smiled, and said, “So tell me, what’s it like being single these days?” Their laughter caught us, protected us, and we could then begin to talk—what to say to the bereaved, what not to say, how grief is or isn’t handled in the workplace. When I walked into my Women and Writing class, they thanked me for returning to them. They asked me how I was doing, who I was becoming. I read them the first poem I wrote after my husband’s death, and they, students from physical therapy, music, health sciences, biology, English literature, film studies, offered me the stories of their lives. My grief gave my students permission to tell the truth—to me, to themselves, to each other, and our class became a healing community for us all.

I learned because I had to that writing instruction is life instruction. Our words, our language is what connects us to each other, what helps us hold us together when life becomes unrecognizable. It is what helps us translate the traumatic images deep within our minds into stories we can tell others, helping us to incorporate them into the rest of life. A few years later this lesson hit with massive communal power after 9/11. Many of the students at the college where I was teaching were from NYC. I was asked to teach an honors class I titled Trauma and the 20th Century in which we studied trauma—what it is, how it affects us, and how writing can help us make sense of that which makes no sense.

In 2007 international faculty from writing, medicine, and psychology met at a Narrative Medicine conference in Toronto and shared resources, research, pedagogy, and our life stories, and we discovered the commonalities that connect us—our desire to use our expertise and our humanity to bridge gaps between people when they need it most. The ensuing years have demonstrated that Covid, climate change, racism, poverty, sickness, war among other crises drive us to not only seek solutions to these ills but also require that we address the traumas they cause whether we work within medicine or education. The field has become truly interdisciplinary, and that is good because we will need the participation of all of us to save our planet and those who call it home.

Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy, Ph.D.