I think there’s something validating about seeing your story on a piece of paper.
--from "Telling Life Stories May Help Improve Care For Cancer Patients," by Kara Lofton, West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
My work in narrative medicine has been far-reaching, including as a writer working with patients, as a health humanities scholar, and as an educator and public speaker.
I began my work in narrative medicine in 2014, writing with Jamie Shumway, who suffered from ALS, yet wrote a memoir, Off Belay: One Last Great Adventure. I worked with Jamie for ten months drafting it. This work led me to other projects, as well as the Certificate of Professional Achievement in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University, which I completed in 2019.
These other projects include:
- The Value of Expressive Writing on Quality of Life and Facilitating Advance Care Planning: A guided exercise for patients with cancer: A two-year pilot with generous funding from the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, WVCTSI, and other sources.
- The Value of Expressive Writing on Quality of Life of Patients with HIV, which was funded through the WVU Humanities Center, (prior to my directorship).
Unfortunately, a plan to move forward studying patients with Substance Use Disorder was abandoned due to the COVID-19 health emergency.
During my time working with patients with cancer, I helped coordinate an art exhibit by Lacie Lee Wallace, who was featured on West Virginia Public Broadcasting. I am also grateful to have been awarded the Susan S. Landis Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts by the West Virginia Division of Culture, History and the Arts, for my work writing with patients with cancer.
As an Honors Faculty Fellow at West Virginia University, I created a health humanities course, Medicine and the Arts, which helped undergraduate students make connections between artistic production and the health sciences, examining the historical, linguistic, cultural and aesthetic contexts in which we engage in and with healthcare. With components of service-learning woven through the course, students engaged with health humanities in both traditional classroom settings and through hands-on projects in healthcare spaces.
A frequent workshop leader in narrative medicine and speaker on health humanities, I am currently a West Virginia Humanities Council Fellow for my work in narrative medicine. I recently was a Keynote Speaker at Missouri Southern State University's Artful Medicine Symposium.
Continuing my work in narrative medicine in West Virginia, I am a creative partner in Healthcare Is Human.
My scholarship in narrative medicine and health humanities includes a co-edited anthology, Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives of Illness, Disability, and Medicine. You can learn more by reading this interview on the book at Punctuate. As well, and am a contributing writer at Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal. Later this year, my chapter, "The Interdisciplinarity of Health Humanities" will be included in The Elgar Handbook of Interdisciplinary Studies.