Community Empathy Write: What Can Be Learned by Writing into Women's Experiences of COVID-19
Heather Sloane Cleary, PhD, LISW; Chelsie Baylor, BS; Chantal Crane; Savanna King; Victoria Starnes & Duvonna Goins | September 20 | 9:45-10:45 am
Topic: Art, Conceptual | Knowledge Level: Intermediate
Dr. Cleary and a selection of fellow participant researchers/writers will discuss the preliminary findings from a five-month creative writing project focused on women’s experiences of COVID-19 (Community Empathy Write (CEW)). Emily Dickinson was chosen by Dr. Cleary as the poet to “activate” the CEW because of an uptick of interest in her as an artist and woman both by scholars and by popular media during the pandemic (Muresan, 2018; Roy, 2020). Dr. Cleary grounded the project in history, theory, and both research and writing group method (Adams et al., 2021; Charon, 2006; Schneider, 2003; Slater, 2015; Witkin, 2014 ). Dickinson’s work inspires wonder about what will happen to women’s stories in the chaos of COVID. The CEW prompts were informed by participant writers and community stakeholders who were surveyed prior to the initial writing. Each month, the community of writers were given three prompts, two poems (one Dickinson one contemporary poet of color) and one news story distilling social science research about women and COVID-19. The presenters will discuss creative writing as a method to explore collective community experience of a pandemic. Participants will have the opportunity to hear a sample of short pieces written by members of the writing research community and learn more about the prompt development. The audience will have the opportunity to write into a prompt, share, and receive strengths-based feedback to get experience with the writing group method. Participants will learn about how the CEW fits into other community writing projects around the country and a movement within medicine nurturing empathy for patient experience called narrative medicine.
Presentation Objectives:
· Provide an overview of community-engaged writing and collaborative autoethnography method to collectively explore health concerns like COVID-19 from personal experience wisdom
· Describe the benefits of university/public school partnerships in elevating lost narratives of women's experience with COVID-19
· Demonstrate how poetry can be used as data and part of legitimate participatory inquiry about public health concerns