AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

Q: What happens when you mix a doctor with a writer
A: A book diagnostician.
September 7, 2007

On the plane again, just can’t wait to get on the plane again… After returning from a marvelous month on the sea, on the Northern Coast of Spain, I’m flying again. This time, I’m going to a conference for doctor-writers in Virginia. I’ve been pondering the fusion of these two disciplines lately and this conference is my second one this year with this target audience in mind. The genre of narrative medicine or literary medicine is exploding these days. Dr. Rita Charon of Columbia University, one of the pioneers in the field, describes it as “the narrative competence to recognize, absorb, metabolize, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness.” Many medical schools now offer elective courses on lit med. It is believed that health care providers can improve the effectiveness of their care through this type of writing, by developing the capacity for attention, reflection, representation, self-care, and affiliation with patients and colleagues. My favorite narrative medicine writers are: Atul Gawande, Audrey Young, Emily Transue, Manoj Jain, Alok Khorana, Darshak Sanghavi, Rick Boyte, Eliza Lo Chin, and Pauline Chen.

Dear AMP Community,
This is my first time connecting to this service.
I’m thrilled to announce the birth of my debut novel, ARIA.

History
A decade ago, I was trapped alone in a monsoon in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. My travel companion had departed the day before. I had run out of books to read and had already written my postcards. I was a 23-year-old medical student on holiday, a privileged Iranian-American unacquainted with suffering. As I waited for the rains to end, I had little else to do but sit with myself. The spiritually perplexing issues posed to me by my patients with unimaginably difficult lives percolated through my mind. I realized I was woefully unprepared for making sense of the maelstrom of sickness and dying that I was witnessing in the clinical setting. I began to write. A novel was born, the story of how great loss might manifest in the context of a comfortable US life. I had seen grief take a variety of forms in different parts of the world. This seemed worthy of further exploration. I kept writing after my return from Indonesia, stealing quiet moments in the interstices of medical work. Finally—for publication is a lesson in delayed gratification and patience—my writing is publicly accessible. My novel, Aria, is now in bookstores, is available on amazon.com worldwide, and is being translated into five languages.