Director Rita Charon and faculty of the Program in Narrative Medicine offer a month-long intensive fourth-year elective in Narrative Medicine. The next elective will be in March of 2011. Close reading, writing fiction, and reflective writing develop narrative and literary skills that end up adding to one's clinical effectiveness. In our Narrative Medicine Immersion month over the past several years, we have gathered twelve fourth-year students from P&S and from visiting medical schools for intensive craft and interpretive training, with the conceptual framework in mind that strengthening the skills of representation is a powerful means toward strengthening the skills of attention in clinical work. On the basis of student evaluations, the quality of written work produced, and projects that students undertake in the years following the intensive narrative training, the elective has demonstrated a capacity to target and improve these specific narrative competencies toward attentive and effective patient care.

The elective will include the following:

- Graduate-level training in close reading of contemporary fiction, not limited to fictions about illness or medicine but rather attending to the complexities of the act of reading. Critical and theoretical approaches will be introduced alongside the literary texts. We will read a novel a week, including works of William Maxwell, Per Petterson, Pat Barker, and John Banville. One 2-hour meeting per week. Weekly reader-response writings assigned.

- Seminar on illness narratives, including first-person accounts of illness written by patients or family members of patients and works offering theoretical frameworks of such autobiographical materials. One 2-hour meeting per week.

- Writing workshop directed by Narrative Medicine Writing Faculty. Students will read and workshop one other's work, read established writers focusing on craft and technique, and do in-class writing exercises to help generate new writing. By the end of the month, students will have written new stories or poems, revised old ones, and learned methods to critique their own work. Two 2-hour meetings per week.

To obtain more information, contact Dr. Charon at rac5@columbia.edu