Telling Nurses’ Stories: A Writing Weekend in NYC, July 20-22

Joy Jacobson is the CHMP’s poet-in-resdence. Follow her on Twitter: @joyjaco 

Senior fellow Jim Stubenrauch and I are offering, as a part of the CHMP’s program in Narrative Writing for Health Care Professionals, a weekend of writing for nurses. We’re cosponsoring the conference with the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing and through them will be able to offer 16.5 continuing nursing education credits. The weekend will be open to nurses, nursing faculty, nurse researchers, and nursing students, giving them an opportunity to explore the power of narrative writing. We’ll write, read aloud, and create what we hope will be an ongoing community of new and experienced writers.

Our goals? Giving nurses new appreciation for their individual and collective voices and new tools for sustaining a writing practice—regardless of whether their writing is scholarly or creative. The cost for the weekend will be $675.

Click here for a detailed brochure and click here to register (under Course Category/Program on the left, click on NURSING and the course description for Telling Stories, Discovering Voice: A Writing Weekend for Nurses/SEMTSDV should appear; click on Show Detail & Register on the right* ).

Over three days, participants will work on writing stories that hold particular meaning for them. We’ll offer them one-on-one coaching sessions, as well as the option of submitting their writing for publication on this blog.

Karen Roush, MS, RN, will provide a keynote address and discussion. She brings extensive experience as a writer, teacher, and nurse to the Scholar’s Voice, where she helps health professionals, particularly nurses, become skilled, confident writers. She is the clinical managing editor of the American Journal of Nursing and a Mary Clark Rockefeller Fellow and PhD candidate in the College of Nursing at New York University. She has had numerous publications, including books, articles in scholarly journals, essays, and poems.

Special rates for attendees have been secured at New York Thompson LES, located at 190 Allen Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, not far from the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing, where the weekend will take place.*

In addition to writing workshops, we will review the elements of a “healing narrative,” explore the role of narrative in medicine and nursing, and discuss social media as a public-health tool.

* Please note that information about registration and hotel accommodations has been updated from an earlier version of this post.

Joy Jacobson is the CHMP's poet-in-resdence. Follow