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 ran for over a decade at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD, has been written up in  The Atlantic Monthly. 

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

For many years I was a weekly volunteer in the playroom of the pediatric oncology outpatient clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, where I helped children with cancer paint, read, play games, and create with play-doh. The generosity of those families who 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 have also conducted a program in creative writing for in-patient adolescent psychiatry patients at Johns Hopkins.