Scars, X-Rays, Tattoos, and Other Stories of The Body

A Workshop for Medical Students, Residents and Health Professionals

When you look at a body, you see a history.

Once the body isn’t seen anymore,

the story it tried to tell gets lost.

— Louise Gluck

This workshop explores how our bodies tell stories and how we respond to them in ourselves and with each other. Using poems as prompts, we'll write, aiming to explore and express some of what our bodies are saying, getting to hear and voice these implicit, ongoing conversations. In reflecting on our own embodied expressions, we’ll begin to reflect on the stories patients might be telling or not with theirs. The event is synced to Halloween, a public reminder of how we inhabit our bodies, consciously and unconsciously, by choice or by chance. 

Learning Objectives:

1. To get curious about the stories a body is telling

2. To use poetry as a way to reflect on and deepen your health care practice
3. To process experiences as a practitioner or student in health care
4. To learn five rules for writing which can offer a method of self-care and reflection

Time and place:

Thursday October 28, 2021
5:30PM-7PM
On Zoom.

Register here.

Ronna Bloom is a poet and teacher. Her most recent book, The More, was published by Pedlar Press in 2017 and long listed for the City of Toronto Book Award. Her poems have been recorded by the CNIB and translated into Spanish, Bangla, and Chinese. She has collaborated with health care professionals, filmmakers, academics, students, spiritual leaders, and architects. A frequent guest in the faculties of Nursing, Medicine, Public Health, as well at teaching hospitals, she brings 25 years of psychotherapy practice to her work as a poet and facilitator.

Ronna developed the first Poet in Residence program at Sinai Health which ran from 2012-2019. She is currently Poet in Community to the University of Toronto and Poet in Residence in the Health, Arts and Humanities Programme. Her "Spontaneous Poetry Booth" and "RX for Poetry" have been featured in hospitals and fundraisers in Canada and abroad. A chapbook of Ronna's new poems, Who is your mercy contact? will be published by Espresso-Chapbooks in January 2022.

Ronna Bloom, M.ED
Poet in Residence, HAH, University of Toronto
Poet in Community, University of Toronto
www.ronnabloom.com