Weekend Writing Retreat for Nurses

UPDATE, July 16, 2013: This event has been canceled. Please check the Narrative Writing for Health Care Professionals page for other events to be scheduled soon.

If you’re a nurse who writes or one who wants to write, please join us for Telling Stories, Discovering Voice: A Writing Weekend for Nurses, to be held July 19-21, 2013 in New York City. This is a chance for all nurses and nursing students to strengthen and expand their capacity to write in a variety of modes and genres, including personal essays, poetry, and fiction, as well as blog posts and articles on clinical and health policy topics. We’ll write together in a safe and supportive environment, share our writing aloud, offer encouragement and constructive feedback, and discuss the role of narrative in medicine and nursing. We’ll also examine the potential for using social media as a public-health tool.

The conference will be led by CHMP poet-in-residence Joy Jacobson and senior fellow Jim Stubenrauch. This special event is co-sponsored by the Center for Health, Media & Policy at Hunter College (CHMP) and the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing, and is offered as part of the CHMP’s program in Narrative Writing for Health Care Professionals. Participants will receive 17 CE contact hours.

We’re very excited that Karen Roush, clinical managing editor of the American Journal of Nursing and the founder of The Scholar’s Voice, will be the keynote speaker. Karen has extensive experience as a writer, teacher, and nurse and has published books, scholarly articles, personal essays, and poetry.

The price for the conference (including continental breakfast and lunch each day) is $675 + $20 registration fee until July 1; $725 + $20 fee after July 1. Groups of six or more from one institution receive a discount price of $575/person. Students receive a 20% discount. Register for the event online at https://ceweb.hunter.cuny.edu/cers/CourseBrowse.aspx. (In the “Search Courses” window at the upper left, enter course code SEMTSDV.) Or call 212 650-3850.

Want to know more? Check out these two blog posts about last summer’s workshop: in the first, attendee Patricia Wagner Dodson, BSN, RN, MA, CCRN wrote that “in this workshop community of real nurses and real writers, a consensus seemed to emerge: the stories need to be told. The workshop was the beginning of the telling.” In the second, I shared some of my own impressions of the weekend, with excerpts from pieces written during and after the workshop by two other participants, Karen Hardin, MS, RN and Amy Dixon, BSN, RN. — Jim Stubenrauch, CHMP senior fellow