Double Duty

Next week, in Corvallis, the Oregon State University Department of English Visiting Writers Series is having conference titled Medicine, Writing and Humanities. They neglected to invite speakers from the Fremont Street Center for Healthy Aging, but they did invite four medical professionals who are also poets, novelists, and essayists. Perhaps they were unaware that the staff at Fremont Street also share dual identity as artists and health caregivers. 

The visiting doctors/writers will be talking about the importance of the story we tell ourselves about an illness. Fremont Street staff are sensitive to this subject, since Mother cannot tell her own story about her illness, and each one of us has had to come up with one of our own.