APRIL IS POETRY MONTH with
WWW.HEALTH-HUMANITIES.COM
Two Online Writing and Reflection workshops in April with Ronna Bloom have expanded availability for virtual/online participation !
Perhaps you are too overwhelmed to read this? Let’s be brief: this workshop will address impacts, physical or emotional, personal or professional, of caring for human suffering. In notes. A creative writing workshop. With other hesitant people. Using poems as guides. Have a rest; write something. No experience necessary.
April 15, 2020 6PM-8PM
Via Zoom
Open to all U of T Medical Students, Residents, and Learners from other disciplines.
To register contact ronna.bloom@utoronto.
In this session, use writing to explore how simply showing up and attending to your own experience is the starting point for attending to others. Through guided exercises, you’ll have the opportunity to notice your personal, professional, and physical responses –– whether you’re at a desk, in the community, or in a hospital room –– and to write about them in a reflective, open, non-evaluative way. See how being awake to yourself might help you be awake at work. No experience is necessary.
April 29, 2020
6PM-8PM
Via Zoom
Goals:
— Learn five rules for writing that can be used to reflect on one’s work, relationships, and life
— Engage with poetry as a tool for understanding and expressing challenges
— Increase awareness of the impact of the professional on the personal, and the personal on the professional
— Explore poetry and writing as practices of self-care
Workshop Leader
Ronna Bloom is the author of six books of poetry, most recently, The More (Pedlar Press, 2017) 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 is currently Poet in Community to the University of Toronto and Poet in Residence in the Health, Arts and Humanities Program. Her “Spontaneous Poetry Booth” and “RX for Poetry” have been featured in hospitals, conferences and fundraisers in Canada and abroad. She runs workshops and gives talks on poetry, spontaneity, and awareness through writing. ronnabloom.com
Open to all U of T Medical Students, Residents, and Learners from other disciplines. Sign up for one or both.
Suvendrini Lena is an Assistant Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at U of T, staff neurologist at CAMH and WCH and a playwright. Her play The Enchanted Loom was produced by Cahoots Theatre and Factory Theatre 2016 season. The Enchanted Loom, a play about epilepsy, memory and a Sri Lankan family living in Toronto, has been translated into Tamil by Dushy Gnanapragasam. The play and translation will be published by Playwright’s Press, Toronto, in 2020. Her second theatrical work, an interactive installation inspired by the psychiatric writing of Frantz Fanon, Here Are the Fragmented was co-created with Leah Cherniak and Trevor Schwellnus and premiered for a sold out run at The Theatre Centre in 2019. Rubble, a new play based on the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, is slated for production at Theatre Passe Muraille in partnership with Pandemic and Aluna in 2021.
