Update January 28 at 12:01p.m. Nellie Herman was scheduled to speak at Western Michigan University Thursday night. The event has been canceled.
More details can be found below.
Author Nellie Hermann says "narrative medicine" is the use of creative writing and narrative to enhance our capacity for understanding and empathy in clinical settings, or any other social encounter. Telling a story and the hearing or reading of it has the power to untangle our psychological knots and to help others untangle theirs.
Hermann's first novel The Cure for Grief had an autobiographical basis and she says writing it provided an opportunity to work out issues in her own life. The book won acclaim in Time magazine, Elle, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and others, and was chosen as a Target "Breakout" book.
In her second novel The Season of Migration, published in January 2015, Hermann imagines the life of Vincent van Gogh during the ten months from August 1879 to June 1880 during which he lost touch with his older brother and benefactor, Theo. Van Gogh struggles with his search for meaning and purpose in his life, dealing with what he feels is his brother’s rejection, and with the death of a stillborn sibling on his birthday also named Vincent. He lives in a mining town called Borinage in Belgium and tries his hand at being a priest but his artist’s eye draws him in another direction.
Parts of the novel incorporate letters van Gogh wrote but never sent to his brother, exposing the workings of his tormented soul. Although Vincent wrote hundreds of letters to Theo over his lifetime, only a selection of his letters have been found, and none written by his brother, and so they offer only one side of the story. Hermann intertwines parts of real letters with her fictionalized perspective on the part of the story the letters leave untold.
If narrative medicine plays a part in The Season of Migration, it is in the hints of van Gogh’s already evident emotional struggle, even in the subtle nuances of madness to come. The reader can’t help but grow in understanding of the artist's tormented spirit, the waves of depression the suffered, and feel empathy for him.
A native of Newton, Massachusetts, Hermann now lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is creative director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. She teaches creative writing to undergraduate and graduate students, medical students and clinicians.
Hermann had been scheduled to on Thursday, January 29, at Western Michigan University. But the Center for the Humanities says the event has been canceled. The following message came from the Center for the Humanities:
With regrets the Center for Humanities has canceled the Nellie Hermann talk scheduled for Thursday, Jan. 29 7:00 p.m. , Dalton Center Recital Hall, WMU. Our guest speaker is ill and will not be able to travel. We hope to reschedule this event with Nellie Hermann but have not yet determined a new date. When confirmed, we will post the new event date and time on our website, social media, etc.
