Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative Medicine and MFA

06/29/2026

This book looks really good for Narrative Healthcare practice.

In Poetics of Listening, renowned sound studies scholar Brandon LaBelle brings critical attention to listening as a practice, one that can wield significant imp…

05/28/2026

Curious about the deep roots Narrative Healthcare program? https://www.lr.edu/news/exploring-world-narrative-healthcare?fbclid=IwY2xjawSFN9pleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA80MDk5NjI2MjMwODU2MDkAAR6EIacmv-oao4vTxqmhJJ8uE_ic-0W0eH4V-_M4wBO9upIq2aD5_aTff9iwGA_aem_zWWJy8mJziN5o5KUbXDnng

Poet, artist and professor Laura Hope-Gill, MFA, studies and shares the healing potential of storytelling here and abroad, opening up a new approach to healthcare for her students.

05/28/2026

For health, well-being, and a better world, Wolfe-ify your life in Narrative Healthcare courses at Lenoir-Rhyne University.



Explore writing as Soul Craft

Alchemize your life into Art

Discover the mythos of narrative healing

Learn to listen to the logos of the inner voice

Experience Creative Writing as cultural renewal

05/28/2026

Thomas Wolfe wrote sweeping explorations of the nature of consciousness. Disparaged through a century when critics sought certainty and definition, Wolfe’s work, which defies both, was relegated to the far edges of scholarship and away from the educational canon of American letters. Consciousness and Neuroscience prompt revisions of our understanding of Creativity, particularly Creative Writing and Storytelling. What happens when we write and tell our stories? What forces are at play? Why is medical evidence showing health benefits to any manner of exposure to reflection and storytelling in non-critical settings? What are we encountering when we are writing and telling in FLOW? What are the missing pieces of our conceptualization of Creative Writing? We can look to Wolfe for answers as well as more questions. Thomas Wolfe was a writer for whom stories do so much more than pass the time and sell books. His books hold the soul of a man who wrote beyond the self’s personal struggle and argue for a dual life of both intellect and creative imagination. He thought deeply and paid rapt attention to his time, recognizing in himself the role of the writer as reflector and guide toward a more soulful, kind, and meaningful world. In the Thomas Wolfe Narrative Healthcare Program, we continue this work toward wholeness through Creative Writing, the medical school for the soul.

05/21/2026

A Medical School for the Soul

The following is a reframe of the Narrative Healthcare Certificate Program as a medical school for the soul, unifying scholarship from science and literature.

The Call for a Medical School for the Soul
Modern medical education was defined by Leo Flexner in 1910. his influence and thinking documented in The Flexner Report shut down more than half of the medical education programs in the U.S., unfortunately many of which were specifically for Black students. Flexner is neither shiny knight nor entirely villainous. Many ideas in his report supported a humanistic medicine while other ideas bear the prejudice of his time. The essentials of his report required medical schools be housed in universities; doctors should focus solely on pathology; and a medical degree required standardized, rigorous study.

Dr. Arthur Kleinman, a psychiatrist, identifies in The Illness Narrative, a cornerstone text of Narrative Medicine, three aspects of unwellness. There is the disease or ailment, which is diagnosed using differential diagnostics and empirical evidence. This aspect requires the familiar, modern methods of science. The next aspect, illness, is the patient’s experience of the disease or ailment. This aspect cannot be addressed by science. Science, nonetheless, has pointed to what can address it, and that is Storytelling. Storytelling also resolves the third aspect, sickness, which Kleinman defines as the cultural perspective of illness and disease. Storytelling serves this aspect as well.

A new kind of medical school is necessary if we are to embrace and apply the extraordinary findings these fields generate. In the past two decades, the field for how we define healing has expanded remarkably since Expressive Writing, Narrative Medicine, and Neuroscience started paying attention to creativity. Yet, one piece to the puzzle of well-being is missing from integrative, alternative, and clinical practice education: storytelling in its various, archaic forms.

Storytelling is our natural medicine. It is a function of autopoiesis, the capacity within all living organisms to heal from within through a process of self-reorganization. Through the devaluation of storytelling, the modern world has left this feature of our physiology, our very nature, behind. Over the course of the past century, Medical Humanities programs sought to fill in what Flexner left out: the humanness of the patients and of the doctors. These programs were often located across campuses from the medical schools, though, and the medical curriculum left little room for a full semester of Humanities courses. Dr. Rita Charon, MD PhD found a solution in the English Department when she attained her Doctorate.

The dual practice of close-reading and reflective writing to a prompt provided the solution. When third-year medical students spent 45-minutes a week over the course of six weeks close-reading literature and writing reflectively to a prompt, their empathy remained intact. The discovery cast light upon the healing properties of stories and poems. Between 1998 and 2022, 843 studies proved as much and more. For all of these, the mechanism of how writing and storytelling heal remains suspended in conjecture—oxytocin, mirror neurons, neuroplasticity, to name a few.

The natural medicine inside our stories is natural intelligence. Noted in biology as the vehicle for autopoiesis, natural intelligence in humans is seldom, if ever, discussed. It has been renamed as creative imagination and devalued until the current Neuroscience reframe. By cross-referencing Neuroscientific findings on creativity with Narrative Medicine and Expressive Writing findings on the same, this kind of intelligence holds both cognitive and physiological benefits. This latter feature calls attention to all we have nearly forgotten. It is this: until 1790 doctors and poets were both storytellers, one of the body, one of the soul. We needed both. Health is the continuum of one to the other and back again.

That’s the ouroboros of medicine: we can heal ourselves by knowing our stories so well that we can reorganize ourselves beyond emotional pain and, in some cases such as chronic illness symptoms, beyond sickness. One without the other, though, leaves us in either despair or endless pain. Reaching again back into the pre-modern world, we find Alchemy is not and was never primarily about turning lead into gold. It was embraced globally as fermentation of the self into a soul through storytelling and creativity. This fermentation is the promise of renewal. It occurs at every level of life as autopoiesis. According to the lore, it is the life-process of the universe as much as it is the life-process of the flea, and we are a part of it. Storytelling is its engine.

The creative process of alchemy was the creative process of becoming whole people by establishing and maintain a steady shifting between matter and mind. The matter of the brain with its synapses firing gets heated and confused. The mind as what we now call “gut brain” cools it down with reflection and intuition, hence Victor Frankl’s illumination of “the pause” in Man’s Search for Meaning. The pause allows us deeper consideration. It tethers us to actual reality and prevents us from flying off into our sparkling fictions and destructive obsessions. It humbles us. It modifies our thought. It doses us with conscience, compassion, and care. We of the West have let this function vanish in favor of external means of acquiring knowledge. Even Empiricism, though, is expanding to accommodate the linguistic feature of consciousness and what we have termed reality. Physics, Neuroscience, and Medicine have all turned toward Poetics in a mysterious migration.

The tether binding us to nature is language, the Word even. It reveals itself when we are telling stories and composing poems. Sharon Olds illustrates a poet’s relationship with alterity in her poem, “Improv,”
. . I know she is the locus of a gift—�and I am too, a spiral of energy, a genie, a dust-devil,�I was born with it, a life force,�it does not belong to me, or to anyone else,�I’m the container of it, the guardian.�And I love to let it out toward people—�nectary nosegay gusts of it.

Rilke speaks of our loss of this tether in his Sonnet to Orpheus 24, (italics mine)

I, 24 (Sollen wir unsere uralte Freundschaft, die großen)
Will we retain our old friendship with the great gods,
That fail to woo us, our harsh steel raised so sternly,
Knowing them not, rejecting them now, or suddenly
Being forced to search them out on our ancient maps?
Those formidable friends, who bear the dead from us,
Without touching our turning wheels, at any point?
Our banquets are distanced from them, our bathing
Removed, and their messengers now far too slow,
Whom we always overtake. Alone now, wholly
Dependent upon, yet not knowing each other,
We no longer treat the paths as lovely meanders,
But like flights of steps. In the furnace the old fire burns,
There alone, while the hammers are raised in the steam,
Ever larger. While we, like swimmers, lose strength.

Trans. A. S. Kline

Natural intelligence is how humans naturally experience our world and come to understand our place within it. It is navigation through discernment using Pierce’s “triadic logic,” a systemic knowledge engaging multiple fields. We experience life with a mix of head and heart, linear reason and associative reason, step by incremental step— as opposed to steamrolling ahead without knowing what we are doing. Story cultivates and instills this slower but more meaningful way of being. Evidence shows that this way is better for our health. When we know our stories, we know who we are, what we like, what we hope for and can live toward purpose. Narrative Medicine is folk medicine. We are returning to our nature.

In 1637 Renée Descartes famously stated “I think, therefore I am.” He revised the thought four years later, removing “I think” and replacing it with “I exist.” Four more years later, another philosopher, Antoine Leonard Thomas, changed the statement to “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.” Linear rationality was figuring itself out through philosophy. How does one rid oneself of the problems of emotion and the lore of imagination and superstition but to doubt one’s own self and leave to someone else the work of explaining who we are?

So it began, the dimming of the “secret fire” of imagination in favor of a universal light that shines when we have conquered our passions and clearly see the world as it is by way of The Divine Light of Reason. Science promised this reality. Empiricism, the root meaning experience, promised we could find it using our five senses and abolishing any other form of knowing. This edict made its way to Medicine two hundred years later. Without Narrative Medicine Research, natural intelligence would remain in the shadows of the neglected Liberal Arts Education. In the spirit of autopoiesis on the macro scale, the research is calling our attention to it, and it is in our best interest to listen and cultivate individuals’ openness to it in creative practice.

As C*D dispensaries prepare for the imminent legalization of ma*****na, so can a Creative Writing program with a Narrative Healthcare track prepare for the imminent adoption of Social Prescribing. Blue Cross Blue Shield’s partnership with Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation, Kids in Parks, which originated here is now a national initiative embraced by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Today, Asheville is a hot spot for healthcare. It is also a hot spot for non-scientific healing practices. Former chiropractic clinics now brand as Wellness Centers offering massage, meditation, nutrition, psychotherapy, and other therapeutic practices, some approved by the American Medical Association and others not. Until Social Prescribing becomes standard operating practice, graduates can still draw on the data to locate themselves in the healthcare field, charging clients for guidance at similar rates to massage and other integrative practices. The difference is that exploring our stories is no longer classified as integrative or alternative. Creative Writing/Storytelling is Medicine, and this is a Medical School.

A Pedagogy of Natural Intelligence engages the medical research, Depth Psychology, books on Gaelic culture and Druidry, sacred texts including the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Gnostic Gospels, Quantum Physics articles on Triadic Logic, Polyvagal Theory, Alchemy, and the archaic techniques of Storytelling and Poetry. These final two hold the real value for us. These hold our subjectivity, our means of establishing meaning as well as our means of self-reorganization through creativity. Without these practices, we are adrift. Storytelling and Poetry are our means of drawing natural intelligence with its healing properties from Nature.

Hospitals and clinics address only the first of three aspects of Kleinman’s framework of unwellness. Patients have been given a treatment plan, a prescription, and scheduled, physical protocols. Blue Cross Blue Shield is exploring Social Prescribing that addresses the other two. Social Prescribing covers art classes, writing workshops, walks in the forest, and more emerging, evidence-based yet non-empirical strategies. While Social Prescribing is currently pilot-program initiative, based on studies from Europe and Britain where Social Prescribing is common practice, soon it will be so in the United States. Social Prescribing USA gathers data and builds partnerships with high and low-profile institutions sharing the goal of expansion. Data declare the (in some cases superior) healing capacity of stories for chronic illness, PTSD, loneliness, depression, side-effects of chemotherapy, arthritis, asthma, and more. Yet, there are few opportunities for patients to access the kind of Storytelling that helps us heal.

As Humanists, I feel we have a responsibility to help Medicine understand the depth and the wonder they have just opened the door into. In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry,” the poet outlines the utilitarian purpose of poetry as a “natural intelligence” humans require for moral development and without which he predicts the world we are in today where money calls the shots. This is what heals us. It is what has intentionally been concealed first by Constantine and again by Newton and Locke for reasons I cannot fathom as other than politically motivation. It is the greater part of our humanity and the source of dignity, grace, and confidence that we are okay as we are, that as long as we know our story we know we belong. When we have found our stories again, we reboot empathy, the core of our humanity, in the West and the restore a natural order to the world.

05/21/2026

For those interested in the Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative Medicine's Fall course

I am the founding director of the Narrative Healthcare Certificate at Lenoir-Rhyne University writing to update you on the Fall course which I will now teach alongside Dr. Carol Scott-Conner, MD MFA MBA, a retired and world-renowned breast cancer surgeon who completed the Narrative Healthcare Certificate and MFA three years ago. She joined our program because she saw the value of Narrative Medicine in teaching her Fellows at Carver College of Medicine at University of Iowa. After completing the certification, though, she matriculated into the MFA, and now we teach together. This collaboration supports our students who are both clinicians and creatives, the very people that this exciting and inspiring new field in healthcare attracts. Below my signature I am sharing Carol’s Foreword to my forthcoming book, along with the preface by psychiatrist, Dr. Arthur Lazarus MD MBA who has also attended Narrative Healthcare courses and written extensively on the urgency for this field’s development.

The course will present the nuts and the bolts, as well as the beauty of narrative practice. This “beauty” is the focus of the research: how does human connection improve outcomes?

Here is the updated course description for the Fall course:

WRI 548 Topics in Narrative Healthcare: Body, Soul, and Story
Tuesdays 6:00-8:00 pm Laura Hope-Gill MFA and Dr. Carol Scott-Conner MD, MFA, MBA

In this course, students will practice the cornerstone skills of narrative practice in healthcare. These include close reading, reflective writing, deep listening, and the protocols of Expressive Writing. Students will read and respond to essays by practitioners employing narrative practice, as well as books that support such practices. Conveyed with language that speaks to both the Arts and the Sciences, this course presents the key concepts, skills, and creative work that brings the fields of narrative medicine, expressive writing, and other narrative-based practices to life. Whether surgeons, counselors, medical students, nurses, medical directors, writers, or any other field where humans encounter humans, this course will deepen the sense of practice and meaning. Students may join in Saturday Morning Writing Sessions 10 am – Noon EST, an informal and productive space for creativity free from critique.

To get a greater sense of what to expect in our program, please visit my website at www.laurahopegill.com, where I share some videos and the “deeper dive” into the connections among story and health.

Also, feel welcome to join us from wherever you are, whatever field you are working in, and however much experience (or fondness) you have in writing. Carol and I have created a remarkable program that will inspire you and support you in your healing work. I would be delighted to meet with you in Zoom (or a café if you’re in Asheville) to listen to your story and share the stunning developments going on in this beautiful field.

Sincerely,
Laura Hope-Gill MFA
Professor
Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative
MFA in Creative Writing
Program Coordinator
Narrative Healthcare Program
Lenoir-Rhyne University (Asheville)


Preface

Stories sustain us. They heal, connect, and illuminate the unseen pathways that shape our lives. In Bee Bread: How the Hive of Story Listening and Telling Heals the World, Laura Hope-Gill invites us into a world where storytelling is more than an art—it is a vital force that nurtures individuals and communities alike. Through the lens of narrative medicine, expressive writing, and the ancient alchemy of storytelling, she weaves a compelling case for the transformative power of stories in health, culture, and the very fabric of human existence.
The book’s title, Bee Bread, draws inspiration from an Appalachian tradition of leaving a portion of the honeycomb in the hive for the bees. This act of generosity ensures the colony’s survival through lean times. Likewise, stories function as sustenance for the human spirit, carrying wisdom and resilience across generations. Laura, both a storyteller and a scholar, explores this profound parallel, showing how the ancient practice of oral storytelling finds new relevance in contemporary medicine, psychology, and personal healing.
At its heart, Bee Bread is a journey—one that traverses time and disciplines, from Indigenous storytelling traditions to the contemporary field of narrative medicine. Laura seamlessly blends personal memoir, cultural history, and scientific research, demonstrating how stories rewire our brains, rebuild our communities, and restore our sense of belonging. She delves into the intersection of creativity and neuroscience, revealing how storytelling reshapes memory, emotion, and even our physical health.
Yet, Bee Bread is not merely about storytelling; it is about storylistening. In a world increasingly dominated by digital noise and fragmented attention, Laura reminds us of the power of deep, attentive listening—how it fosters empathy, counteracts burnout, and serves as a bridge between people, cultures, and even generations. She challenges us to recognize storytelling not just as entertainment but as a sacred practice capable of transforming individuals and healing societal wounds.
In these pages, you will encounter stories of resilience, loss, renewal, and the unexpected magic that emerges when we truly engage with one another. Whether you are a healthcare provider seeking deeper connections with patients, an artist exploring the roots of creativity, or simply a seeker of meaning in a chaotic world, Bee Bread offers a nourishing feast for the mind and soul.
Let this book be the honeycomb left behind—the sustenance you can return to whenever you need wisdom, healing, or inspiration. The stories within are waiting, ready to work their alchemy on you.
Laura Hope-Gill has gathered the pollen from many flowers, and the result is both sweet and sustaining. May Bee Bread nourish you, as it has so many others, in the timeless tradition of storytelling and listening.

Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA
Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry
Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
February 2025


Foreword

Aspiring physicians can choose any field of inquiry for their premedical major, but their schedule must accommodate a daunting amount of science and mathematics. Is it any wonder that most choose to major in one of the sciences? The American Medical Association reported that the most recent data showed that of more than 22,000 students matriculating in medical school in 2020, fewer than 4% majored specifically in the humanities (1). This excludes those with majors in the social sciences or “other.” My own experience as an electrical engineering (premed) major was perhaps typical. It prepared me well for the scientific rigors of medical school in 1972, but left an unfilled need. Poetry, fiction, essays – all of the things I had loved – were shoved to one side, to wait. Wait until what? Until when? Was it not the human touch that had drawn me to clinical medicine, rather than to a career in medical research?
The growing interest in the medical humanities reflects this need. Think of the two intersecting circles of a Venn diagram – one, scientific medicine, and the other, the humanities. The intersection of the two, the medical humanities, comprises a burgeoning area in which physicians, medical students, and creative writers can read and reflect. I was drawn to Narrative Medicine late in my career.
Sometimes the universe aligns – just so, some positive convergence of forces led me to Laura Hope-Gill, the Director of the Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative at Lenoir-Rhyne University. I was totally ensorcelled by her unique combination of genuine warmth with an almost incandescent intellect. I began my studies under her in spring 2019. It was, in retrospect, the last normal year many of us would experience. None of us foresaw the dark days of 2020 and the pandemic which swept the world, claiming all too many brave souls and irrevocably scarring the hearts and minds of many survivors. The need for Narrative Medicine, a way to share stories, to combine reflective writing and introspection, to create an environment that might heal the soul, had never been more acute. Under Laura’s direction, a certificate program (and an MA program) blossomed into an MFA program. I was one of the first graduates of the MFA program.
In a perfect world, each of us would be privileged to study under such a tutor. But this is an imperfect world. Hence the need for this book. Think of Bee Bread as a gift from the author, Laura Hope-Gill, to you, the reader. In it, Laura describes her early experiences as she, herself, obtained the requisite training in Narrative Medicine. She explains close-reading, where “not a single word is left upon the page,” and writing in the shadow of the text – the basic techniques of Narrative Medicine. The practice of Narrative Medicine facilitates deeper comprehension of oneself and others, helping to foster empathy and counteract burnout and moral injury. All of this is carefully explained.
But the very name “Narrative Medicine” demonstrates both its strengths and limitations. It suggests a methodology useful primarily to “heal the healers” or to help the wounded – in short, something mainly applicable to the medical arena. Yet, we live in a time when a much wider section of humanity needs healing.
My own experience serving on a series of Institute of Medicine (now National Academies) committees which advised NASA on a variety of astronaut health issues may be relevant here. We were particularly involved in questions related to long-duration missions beyond low earth orbit. A mission to Mars, for example, with current propulsion, might require six months in transit – cooped up in a small vessel, watching the earth dwindle to a small blue dot. One of our major concerns was lumped into the category of “psychosocial interactions.” Is it so inconceivable that some of the techniques of Narrative Medicine might be valuable during such a voyage? Might the crew meet periodically to read, reflect, write, and share stories? Could that provide a measure of healing in that sterile environment?
It is to the universal need for healing that Bee Bread speaks. Storytelling has a far wider application than Narrative Medicine, telling and receiving stories contains the power to sustain and nurture us, and this book is replete with stories. Read it from cover to cover, or to dip into it at random whenever your creativity and your spirits seem to flag. Linearity, as Laura explains in this book, is an old concept long overdue for retirement.
Bees go out to a variety of flowers, return with pollen, and fill the comb with their honey. Honey is the most obvious product of their labors, and the one most of us know and enjoy. Laura reminds us that if you harvest the honey, Appalachian tradition requires that you leave behind a succulent chunk of honeycomb for the bees. Lesser-known than honey, perhaps, is “bee bread” – a method used by the bees to store pollen for the winter, when the days are short and dark, and there are no flowers. This book combines the sweetness of honey with the life sustaining power of bee bread.
Part memoir of a generous and fascinating life, part treatise on creativity, part historical exploration spanning most of the current era, part introduction to alchemy, Bee Bread will challenge you to think. It will expand your horizons, show you new ways to access your inner spark of creativity, and open your heart to the healing properties of storytelling. The author, a poet with a scintillating intellect and deep knowledge of creative writing, alchemy, medicine, and history, has gone forth and gathered grains of pollen from a vast range of flowers. The resulting honey is both sweet and singular. Let it linger on your tongue as you savor the endless days of summer. Then allow Laura’s Bee Bread to sustain you, long after you have read and reread this book, during those long dark nights of winter, when the world patiently and stoically awaits the coming of spring.

Carol EH Scott-Conner MD PhD MBA MFA
Professor and Chair Emeritus
Department of Surgery
University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine

https://www.lr.edu/narrative-healthcare-certificate

The Narrative Healthcare Certificate develops the narrative future of medicine, a field that proposes that effective care requires increased human engagement.

02/24/2026

A lot of journals are open to submissions!

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16i4NLpMBG/

We can't wait to read your poems!