"Narrative Medicine” in the Age of COVID-19: The Power of Creative Writing to Reimagine Environmental Crisis

ABSTRACT

Adopting a "narrative medicine” approach to examining selected examples of contemporary "corona writing” presents rich possibilities for developing a methodological approach to explore the complex relation between eco-anxiety and the recent explosion of literary creation across variously widespread digital applications. Very little extant research exists around the wellbeing and therapeutic potential of the written word (e.g., bibliotherapy), and/or exploring the possibilities for using modes of creative writing (e.g., fiction, nonfiction, poetry, prose, and dramatic writing, among others) for therapeutic benefit (e.g., autoethnography, therapeutic story-telling, strategic story-telling, writing therapy, poetry therapy, and/or elements of psychodrama, etc.). The aim of this chapter therefore is twofold (1) to contribute to this dearth in critical scholarship concerning the wellbeing implications of creative literary expression in times of environmental crisis from the perspective of "narrative medicine, " and (2) to shed some important light on the ways in which the current explosion in "corona writing” signals a particularly significant alignment between creative literary expression and new ways of engaging with the imaginative and psychological challenges of the Anthropocene. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.