"Please keep on beating"-Participation in a Creative Workshop Offers Unexpected Benefits to Women With Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy.

Takotsubo cardiomyopathy (TCM) or "broken heart syndrome" is a rare condition that is more common in women than men, particularly those who are postmenopausal. It mimics a myocardial infarction and psychological factors have been implicated in its etiology as well as being consequences of its presentation. As part of a public engagement project we brought together 8 women (of 12 invited) previously diagnosed with TCM to facilitate a discussion, through participation in a creative workshop-based process, about their illness experience, how they made sense of it, and the meaning it had for them in their lives, and to identify areas of unmet need. Through a range of creative activities we identified that participants had high levels of unmet need in terms of information and psychosocial support. All participants enjoyed the creative process and meeting other people with a diagnosis of TCM. The workshop overall was perceived as empowering. Exploring patient narratives during artist-facilitated workshops is one approach for providing the first steps to addressing unmet need, although the importance of ensuring psychological safety cannot be over-stated.

Authoring Pain: Fragmentation and Autofiction in Maggie Nelson's Bluets.

This article analyzes Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) as a prominent example of the fragmentary narration that can result from the experience of pain and loss. I demonstrate how Nelson's disparate ruminations on her obsession for the color blue, her heartbreak, and her quadriplegic friend's chronic pain defy the superimposition of a teleological plot over these experiences, in favor of episodic reading and sporadic not-knowing. Still, the autofictional nature of the text-with its alternatively overbearing and elusive authorial presence-challenges any naïve emotional investment in it. Focusing on Nelson's narration of her quadriplegic friend's experience of chronic pain, I conclude by highlighting how Bluets calls for a reconsideration of the reader's stance vis-à-vis the description of suffering, as well as of simplistic critical approaches to illness narratives as life-writing.

Investigating Public trust in Expert Knowledge: Narrative, Ethics, and Engagement.

"Public Trust in Expert Knowledge: Narrative, Ethics, and Engagement" examines the social, cultural, and ethical ramifications of changing public trust in the expert biomedical knowledge systems of emergent and complex global societies. This symposium was conceived as an interdisciplinary project, drawing on bioethics, the social sciences, and the medical humanities. We settled on public trust as a topic for our work together because its problematization cuts across our fields and substantive research interests. For us, trust is simultaneously a matter of ethics, social relations, and the cultural organization of meaning. We share a commitment to narrative inquiry across our fields of expertise in the bioethics of transformative health technologies, public communications on health threats, and narrative medicine. The contributions to this symposium have applied, in different ways and with different effects, this interdisciplinary mode of inquiry, supplying new reflections on public trust, expertise, and biomedical knowledge.

Disembodiment and Identity in Literary Depictions of Epilepsy Surgery.

This article explores the often perplexing experience of being an epilepsy surgery candidate, as portrayed in four book-length accounts: Laura Doermer's Moritz mein Sohn (Moritz my son, 1990), David B.'s L'ascension du haut mal (The ascent of the high evil, 1996; published in English as Epileptic, 2003), Ray Robinson's Electricity (2006), and Alberto Capitta's Il giardino non esiste (The garden doesn't exist, 2009). Building upon critical disability studies and the work of French poststructuralists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I analyze issues of embodiment, identity and narrative (re)construction in the postsurgical alleviation of chronic illness. I argue that these texts highlight the inevitable disruption of self that brain surgery entails and ultimately resist biomedical normativization. They also call for a narratological reconsideration of current illness narrative typologies, among which Arthur Frank's "chaos narrative" emerges as the best suited to accommodate the chronic fragmentation of consciousness and voice in epilepsy.