Writing Illness and Narrative Medicine with Sarah Klenbort

For anyone who's suffered illness or worked in healthcare — learn to shape your experiences into a publishable story.

Learn to take real-life experiences and shape them into engaging publishable stories. Drawing on the tenets of Narrative Medicine, this workshop will examine what makes a good story—both fiction and nonfiction. If you are a healthcare professional and/or have ever experienced illness, and you want to write about it, this workshop is for you. We will begin by looking at published pieces by Oliver Sacks and others, then quickly move on to write our own.

Learning outcomes

As part of this workshop, you will:

• Create well-crafted stories from real life experiences as either health care professionals or patients

• Investigate what makes strong writing about illness and medicine

• Understand what to include and what to leave out of a good memoir/piece of fiction

• Learn about publishing options in this field

Format

This is a hybrid workshop with a focus on craft; it will be held in-person at State Library of Queensland and live streamed to an online audience via Zoom. This workshop is suitable for writers of all levels and backgrounds.

About Sarah

Sarah Klenbort is a lecturer in creative writing and literature at the University of Queensland. She’s published over 40 short pieces in Best Australian Stories, Guardian Australia, Overland, Island, Southerly, Eureka Street and other publications here and abroad. Her writing has won prizes including the Inktears Short Story Competition, the Field of Words Memoir Competition, the Wet Ink/Cal Short Story Prize, and the Mslexia Short Story Award. She lives in Toowong with a Welsh husband, two Australian daughters and rescue cats, Heathcliff and Rochester.

For more information about Queensland Writers Centre’s Program of Events and answers to FAQs, please visit: www.queenslandwriters.org.au/program-info