The Role of Narrative in Medicine
Sayantani DasGupta, a faculty member at Columbia University’s Program in Narrative Medicine, lends her perspective on the importance of narrative in medicinal practice to Creative Nonfiction Magazine in the article “Narrative Medicine, Narrative Humility.” The article is definitely worth a read in full, but below is a particularly poignant excerpt: “Narrative Medicine is the clinical and scholarly movement...
The Case for Really Reading
We recently blogged about an article by Tim Parks wherein he suggests that we don’t need stories. Parks admits that the idea that stories help us “to shape a trajectory for ourselves in the increasingly fragmented and ill-defined social world we move in” seems viable, but he dissents, claiming that there is no way around the truth...
Five Etymologies that May Change the Way You Think About Literature
Did you know that the words ‘fiction’ and ‘dough’ are closely related? Read on to find out how, and for more eye-opening information about the origins of common literary terms. 1. Scene It probably doesn’t surprise you that before the word ‘scene’ was applied to literature in general, it was solely a theatrical term that meant the...
Truly Embellished Nonfiction
Nonfiction writers and readers are no strangers to the dialectic between those who think there is room in nonfiction for embellishment, and those who disapprove of any kind of fact-bending. At the heart of the debate seems to be a disagreement of what it means for a story to be true. Is a story true...
The Sheldonian’s Laughing Head
”Here in Oxford, exposed eternally and inexorably to wind and frost, to the four winds that lash them and the rains that wear them away, they are expiating, in effigy, the abominations of their pride and cruelty and lust. Who were lechers, they are without bodies; who were tyrants, they are crowned never but with...
