Essays & Articles

My work in essays, profiles, and articles reflects my wide range of interests on narrative, medicine, psychiatry, and the natural world. In an early essay, "Becoming a Storyteller," which appeared in Finding Change, I reflected on the origins of my narrative impulse. I have written about the drastic changes that have come through climate change to the Rockies in Colorado, where I grew up, in an essay that appeared in Driftwood: "Pine Beetles."

AfterWards, the program in narrative medicine that I run at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD, has been written up in the Johns Hopkins Children's Center News. It was also the subject of an article in The Atlantic Monthly.  I co-authored a piece on AfterWards in Hopkins Medicine Magazine.

My work with AfterWards led to my becoming a guest contributor on the "On Being" blog of American Public Radio.

Since 2013 I have been a weekly volunteer in the playroom of the pediatric oncology outpatient clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, where I help children with cancer paint, read, play games, and create with play-doh. The generosity of those families who have opened their lives to me led to a series of patient profiles that I published on the Johns Hopkins Pediatric Oncology Website.

My interests in psychiatry are reflected in "The 90-Year-Divide," an article on Sigmund Freud and Adolf Meyer that I co-authored for Johns Hopkins Magazine. I also conduct a program in creative writing for in-patient adolescent psychiatry patients at Johns Hopkins.