Writing about Illness with Emmeline Clein

"Writing about Illness" is a 6-week workshop with writer Emmeline Clein. The class will take place on Zoom on Mondays from April 13 to May 18 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. PST. The course will include weekly discussions of non-fiction craft and participants' works in progress. All participants will receive written feedback from the instructor.

“The sickbed is the incubator for almost all genius and nearly most revolution,” as Anne Boyer has observed,  but it is also a misunderstood and maligned site: a space literature sanitizes, oversimplifies, and silences. This course takes Boyer’s revelation seriously, situating the sickbed as the best seat in the house from which to see our sick society clearly. Nonfiction that renders illness honestly often takes on fugitive forms, as conventional genre strictures parallel our similarly constrictive diagnostic paradigms. We will read memoirs-cum-manifestos, critical essays, theoretical autobiographies, oral histories, scene reports from the field, communal memoirs, and art and literary criticism that delves into the chasm between ill and well. In these texts, we will see mental illness understood structurally and societally rather than as an individual affliction, physical diseases considered through the lenses of class, race, and gender, field reports from those suffering from stigmatized illnesses, and work that combines these approaches. We will read writing on illness that lives between and across genres, from authors including Anne Boyer, Audre Lorde, Pedro Lemebel, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jordan Kisner, Madeline Gressel, Alice Hattrick, and David Wojnarowicz.

Over the course of our class, students will find new forms through which to write into their own medical histories or report on a medical problem they find fascinating, learn research skills as well as workshop a piece of their own, or an outline/pitch if they would prefer.

Emmeline Clein is the author of Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger & Harm, and the chapbook Toxic. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The Nation, The Yale Review, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. She covers books at Cultured. She has taught writing at Columbia University and the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.