Writing - Corpus

Crip the Lit: Here we are, read us

1 April 2019 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

In 2016, frustrated by the lack of deaf and disabled writers represented in New Zealand writing, Trish Harris and Robyn Hunt founded ‘Crip the Lit‘. Sassy and bold, Crip the Lit is unashamedly remedial in purpose. “We want,” say Harris and Hunt, “to tell our stories our way”. I first encountered Crip the Lit through their presence at Wellington’s annual Lit Crawl festival. In the 2018 festival, for example, the Crip the Lit panel debated the moot that “there is no such thing as a disabled writer. We are all just writers.”

Crip the Lit’s newest venture is the publication of a ‘pocket book’ (available in multiple formats to suit many kinds of pockets): Here We Are, Read Us: Women, Disability and Writing.

The poetry of getting back to living

1 April 2019 Leave a Comment

Gail Ingram

I’m from Christchurch. On my website, I introduce myself by saying ‘writing saves my life’. Before 15 March 2019, I was going to try and persuade you how this was so. I wanted to argue that I had evidence of this, that in the experience of writing Contents Under Pressure, my soon-to-be published poetry manuscript, I supported my damaged children in the wake of the Christchurch earthquakes, and, in doing so, kept them living.

I wanted to communicate some of what it felt, as a mother, to support teenagers who were suffering severe mental stress, and how necessary and large the task was to work our family back to health. I wanted to be there; attend the hours and days and weeks in doctors’ appointments, school appointments; listen and learn and implement coping strategies, model them; and most of all, through it all, give love and survive.

We are not alone: poetry in medicine

10 September 2018 2 Comments

Isabelle Lomax-Sawyers

The day I flew to Dunedin to begin my first year studies in the health sciences, my wonderful best friend came to Wellington airport to see me off and gave me an article he’d been nagging me to read for ages. It was Leslie Jamison’s essay The Empathy Exams. In it, Jamison explores the complexities of giving and receiving empathy through stories of her experiences as a medical actor playing a standardised patient, and as a patient herself. It turns out my best friend was right, of course; I read the whole essay twice through on the plane, and so began my love affair with medical creative writing.

“All hitched up”: a chemotherapy story

11 June 2018 5 Comments

Elizabeth Brooke-Carr

How many New Zealanders are receiving chemotherapy this week for cancer and other conditions? The number must be in the thousands. Yet this common medical intervention can never be a commonplace experience, evoking as it does such wildly fluctuating levels of both hope and anxiety.

Poet Elizabeth Brooke-Carr writes of receiving her first round: [Read more…] about “All hitched up”: a chemotherapy story

Living in the A zone

7 May 2018 2 Comments

Kaitrin McMullan

When my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I had the good fortune, as a storyteller and dabbler in the arts, to be able to give up poorly-paid work and move into a kind of early retirement … albeit with an elderly dependent. Swapping poverty for poverty, not too hard! The rational was that we (my partner and I) would move in and care for Mum while her brain still lived at the same address as her body, in order to make the most of these precious years, much as some people decide to devote time to their children’s early years, only in reverse. Luckily Mum’s disease has progressed very slowly and in a benign way, and we now find ourselves in a four-generation “compound” with family living next door and a rainbow gate connecting the two houses.

[Read more…] about Living in the A zone

Atlas – a literary medical journal

30 April 2018 2 Comments

Helen Ker

Atlas is a literary medical journal, published in print and sold in bookstores around New Zealand, that offers an alternative to the usual scientific discourse that surrounds our bodies. It hopes to shift medical conversations away from the rigid and prescriptive to a literary form that accommodates our human complexities.

I started Atlas in my third year of medical school because I was beginning to see that certain parts of the illness experience are missed through our predominantly scientific ways of theorising illness and treating people. I realised that this had the potential to undermine the quality of patient care because illness is far more than just a pathological process.