Chronic illness is a physical experience, but also a narrative one. Our understandings of selfhood and what happens to our bodies over time coalesce into the way we understand the experience of being ill—and the experience of being alive.

American culture is heavily invested in the linear recovery narrative, which begins with crisis and uses hope and grit to travel a narrative line that arrives at redemption. Chronic illness refutes this narrative and demands different understandings of how our bodies move through time.

In this four-session generative course, writers will explore the ways traditional narrative structures influence medical understanding of what it is to be sick and what it is to be well, and begin to write their own stories of illness, using the truths of the body as a tether to larger human truths.