Join us in Paris this spring!
Announcing a new spring offering and my next workshop
Hello everyone! My apologies it has been so long since my last post. This fall has been surprisingly busy — in addition to my regular teaching I taught two grief workshops and two prose workshops. Lots of productive work but not enough time for dreaming up what comes next or for drafting newsletters. I do have a good idea for my next post, however, which I hope to get to in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I wanted to just send a quick announcement about my next grief workshop (details at the bottom of this note) AND a new exciting offering coming this spring: The Paris Pause: a restorative week in Paris for healthcare professionals.
A few years ago, my colleague Delphine Taylor and I began a new initiative for Narrative Care in Paris (thanks to a small grant from the Columbia Global Center in Paris, the same place where I did my incredible fellowship at the Institute for Ideas & Imagination back in 2018-19, ah, what an innocent time), gathering French healthcare practitioners who share an interest in humanities-related work in medicine. Delphine is a practicing internist who teaches at Columbia medical school; we met back in 2008 when I first started there, when one of my tasks was to develop trainings for the faculty to help them to read and react to student writing. Much of the writing done in the medical school at Columbia is done as part of a particular course — Foundations of Clinical Medicine, a mandatory course on social/behavioral aspects of care — which Delphine has directed since 2005. Since our first visit to Paris in May of 2023, we have been meeting twice a year with the French group, and are developing another mini conference there for this May.
In any case, through our work in Paris at the beautiful Columbia Global Center campus, called Reid Hall, in the 6th arrondissement (which, by the way, has a podcast, and you can hear Delphine and me talking about narrative medicine work in this episode), we started to brainstorm about other programs we could offer that could utilize this beautiful space and also offer people a path into creative work. To that end, we’ve come up with the Paris Pause. We are excited to launch this and hope this is only the beginning!
I won’t lay out all the details here because any interested folks can click the link to find out more. Suffice to say, we hope this week will rejuvenate and restore, and that it also might offer people community and some new ideas for how to incorporate creative work in their lives beyond the Pause. Anyone who is interested in the program and wants additional writing-related consult with me will also be invited to reach out for that. If anyone is interested and has questions not answered by the description, please email parispauseretreat@gmail.com.
Please spread the word to any interested colleagues or friends!
In addition I wanted to share the details for my next grief writing workshop, which will begin on January 25th at 3pm Eastern and will run for six Sundays, ending March 1. These workshops, which I have done five of now, just keep getting more and more interesting, and I am grateful to all who has signed up for them so far. Something is developing here, in this work, and I am eager to keep pursuing the path to see what it is (more on this, I hope, in next newsletter installment). Please reach out if you have any questions.
I think that’s it for now. Thank you as always for reading!
Nellie