In 2012, I wrote a blog post titled, “Stories of illness and the capacity to empower, inspire and heal”. In it, I discussed the three main types of illness stories: the restitution narrative, which focuses on the return to health; the chaos narrative, which can’t imagine the return to health; and the quest narrative, whose narrator seeks to help others by sharing of his or her own experience. In this article, I want to discuss ways to develop a style and voice you can use for your own writings. Developing a “Voice” for Your Illness In his book Intoxicated By [...]

I am a fiction writer and educator living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I teach at the Loft Literary Center, a nonprofit organization offering writing classes. I first became interested in the topic of healing when I heard an interview with Siddhartha Mukherjee. He commented on the relationship between narrative and illness. In his book The Emperor of All Maladies, he writes, “A patient, long before he becomes the subject of medical scrutiny, is, at first, simply a storyteller, a narrator of suffering—a traveler who has visited the kingdom of the ill.” Dealing with health conditions is often compared to a [...]