A reading and discussion with writers and health professionals

Fees: Members $15 | General Public $20 IN-PERSON + STREAMING

Join us for this special event, a reading from the new anthology, Where it Hurts: Dispatches from the Emotional Frontlines of Medicine and the 25th edition of The Healing Muse, a literary journal based out of SUNY Upstate Medical University. Guests will read works relating to illness, care, medicine, and the doctor-patient relationship, showing how literature and storytelling can be instrumental in bringing about holistic healing and create community. A moderated discussion will follow the readings, including a chance for the audience to ask questions.

More about Where it Hurts:
A moving look at the challenges and triumphs of caregiving, told through candid literary accounts by more than 60 doctors, nurses, and other healers. Where It Hurts invites us to peer into the space between health and illness, life and death, through the voices of the people who work on medicine’s frontlines: doctors, nurses, EMTs, therapists, and more. In raw and revealing essays, stories, and poems, they share what it’s like to deal with difficult patients, life-changing diagnoses, private doubts, painful failures, and the victories that keep them going.

More about The Healing Muse:
Now entering its 25th year, The Healing Muse is the annual journal of literary and visual art published by SUNY Upstate Medical University’s Center for Bioethics & Humanities. We welcome fiction, poetry, narratives, memoirs and visual art, particularly but not exclusively focusing on themes of medicine, illness, disability and healing.

Featured presenters:
Liz Bowen is a poet, scholar, and clinical ethicist based in the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University. She is associate editor of The Healing Muse and co-president of the Health Humanities Consortium. Liz is the author of two poetry collections, Sugarblood (Metatron Press, 2017) and Compassion Fountain (Trembling Pillow Press, 2022).

Nina Gaby is a psychiatric nurse practitioner, addictions specialist, writer and visual artist who has recently returned to her hometown of Rochester, NY after 23 years in Vermont. She is widely published and her artwork can be found in numerous collections including the Smithsonian, Arizona State University and RIT. She has been on faculty at the University of Rochester, St. John Fisher, and Norwich University. Gaby currently has a clinical practice in general adult psychiatry over telehealth for a primary care practice in Vermont and runs local workshops here in Rochester.

Trisha Paul is a pediatric oncologist and palliative care physician, a narrative medicine scholar, and a writer at the University of Rochester Medical Center. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from New York University, and her work has appeared in anthologies and medical journals such as JAMA. She is a Field Notes Editor for Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and her essay “Stroppy Sevens” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Paul loves caring for her Little Free Library, dancing barefoot, and collecting anything made of cork. She lives in Rochester, NY with her family.

For many decades, Anais Salibian both conducted a private practice in a mind/body healing modality (teaching it internationally) and taught creative non-fiction writing classes. Her two areas of expertise merged when she developed Writing to Heal classes, which emphasize how craft elements address the damage done to the nervous system by stress and trauma. In 2004, she received Writers & Books Teacher of Adults Award for the Creation and Appreciation of Literature. Her current website, penaspathway.com, provides information about her writing and her courses in writing to heal.

Deirdre Neilen is Associate Professor of Bioethics and Humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University and Editor-in-Chief of The Healing Muse, Upstate’s journal of literary and visual arts. She teaches a medical creative writing elective for fourth-year medical students and offers a writing workshop for medical alumni during the annual alumni weekend. Her own creative work includes short stories and essays in Academic Medicine, The Examined Life Journal, Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics, New Letters, and Northeast Magazine, among others. Her great joy comes from discovering new writers for The Muse and fostering the connection between reflective practice and medicine.