Category: Poetry

Open to UofT students, faculty and alumni

Event: Articulating the Body: Ekphrasis at the Maude Abbott Museum (Digital Experience) 

Date: May 10. 7 pm-9pm

Sponsors: Poetry Matters of McGill University; Maude Abbott Medical Museum; University of Toronto  Program In Health, Arts and Humanities

Description: In this virtual workshop open only to University of Toronto students, faculty, and alumni, workshop leader Dr. Shane Neilson will take you through several ekphrastic exercises that will be both individual and collaborative. The workshop is deliberately constructed to start slow, at the descriptive level, and it carefully builds in a layered fashion. The body becomes animated and then begins developing links to other bodies and structures. The goal is to refine creative writing techniques. The special aspect to this workshop is that the creative materials used for ekphrasis come from the important legacy of the legendary figure of Dr. Maude Abbott who, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia, “paved the way for women in medicine” and who, based on her work as a pathologist, “laid the foundation for modern heart surgery.” Dr. Rick Fraser, director of the Maude Abbott Medical Museum and an anatomic pathologist himself, will serve as the evening’s “living exhibit.”

Size Limit: 20, so sign up now!

Link for Sign Up: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/articulating-the-body-tickets-309927831487

As part of The Winter Solstice Series
curated by Hard Feelings, I will be offering the workshop

Be Good to Yourself, Whoever You Are

Date and time

Often in work, and in life, energy moves towards projects and people but there’s little left for your own restoration. In this workshop, through the use of poems and prompts, you will be nudged into writing and reflecting on what sustains you, what you love and what you need. Take this time for yourself as a flicker of possibility of how you might take time for yourself in general.

This session is part of the Winter Solace FREE online series. For individuals who are feeling isolated, struggling to find supports, and interested in developing new ways of coping.

CRITERIA FOR PARTICIPATION:

• Self-identify as financially vulnerable

• In need of mental health and/or well being supports

• Live in the GTA

• Ages 18+

Register Here.

For info on other sessions in the series, contact Kate Scowen

A workshop for Medical Students, Residents and Health Care Professionals

Postcards from the Edge: Addressing Compassion/Covid Fatigue in Note Form

Perhaps you are too overwhelmed to read this. Let’s be brief: this workshop will address the impacts on you — physical, emotional, professional — of living through Covid while 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.

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

Time and place: 
Tuesday February 15, 5:30PM-7PM,  You will receive a zoom link when you register. 

Workshop leader: 
Ronna Bloom is a poet and teacher. Her most recent book, The More, was 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 has collaborated with health care professionals, filmmakers, academics, students, spiritual leaders, and architects. A frequent guest in the faculties of Nursing, Medicine, Public Health, as well at teaching hospitals, she brings 25 years of psychotherapy practice to her work as a poet and facilitator.

Ronna developed the first Poet in Residence program at Sinai Health which ran from 2012-2019. She is currently Poet in Community to the University of Toronto and Poet in Residence in the Health, Arts and Humanities Programme. Her “Spontaneous Poetry Booth” and “RX for Poetry” have been featured in hospitals and fundraisers in Canada and abroad. Her chapbook, Who is your mercy contact? will be published in March.

Ronna Bloom, M.ED
Poet in Residence, HAH, University of Toronto
Poet in Community, University of Toronto
www.ronnabloom.com 

To register: Open to all U of T Medical Students, Residents, Physicians and Learners from other disciplines. Register here.

A Workshop for Medical Students, Residents and Health Professionals 

When you look at a body, you see a history. 

Once the body isn’t seen anymore, 

the story it tried to tell gets lost.   

Louise Gluck

This workshop explores how our bodies tell stories and how we respond to them in ourselves and with each other. Using poems as prompts, we’ll write, aiming to explore and express some of what our bodies are saying, getting to hear and voice these implicit, ongoing conversations. In reflecting on our own embodied expressions, we’ll begin to reflect on the stories patients might be telling or not with theirs. The event is synced to Halloween, a public reminder of how we inhabit our bodies, consciously and unconsciously, by choice or by chance.

Learning Objectives:

1. To get curious about the stories a body is telling
2. To use poetry as a way to reflect on and deepen your health care practice
3. To process experiences as a practitioner or student in health care
4. To learn five rules for writing which can offer a method of self-care and reflection

Time and place:

Thursday October 28, 2021
5:30PM-7PM
On Zoom.

Register here.

Ronna Bloom is a poet and teacher. Her most recent book, The More, was published by Pedlar Press in 2017 and 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 has collaborated with health care professionals, filmmakers, academics, students, spiritual leaders, and architects. A frequent guest in the faculties of Nursing, Medicine, Public Health, as well at teaching hospitals, she brings 25 years of psychotherapy practice to her work as a poet and facilitator.

Ronna developed the first Poet in Residence program at Sinai Health which ran from 2012-2019. She is currently Poet in Community to the University of Toronto and Poet in Residence in the Health, Arts and Humanities Programme. Her “Spontaneous Poetry Booth” and “RX for Poetry” have been featured in hospitals and fundraisers in Canada and abroad. A chapbook of Ronna’s new poems, Who is your mercy contact? will be published by Espresso-Chapbooks in January 2022.

Ronna Bloom, M.ED
Poet in Residence, HAH, University of Toronto
Poet in Community, University of Toronto
www.ronnabloom.com