Workshop: Seeing Symptoms

An Art and Poetry Workshop with Lia Pas and Lorraine Boissoneault

A few months ago Lorraine Boissoneault contacted me about teaching a workshop together. I was only a little familiar with her work but I had heard good things about her upcoming book, Body Weather: Notes on Chronic Illness—out now!—and was intrigued by what she had in mind. We connected over our invisible illnesses and how our creative work has helped us share what others can’t see.

Lorraine also wrote a very complimentary post about me here with more information on the workshop and statistics about invisible illness:

Disabled Sci-Art

I hope you’ll join us for this short and hopefully helpful workshop next week.

Seeing Symptoms: An Art and Poetry Workshop

Description:

Join artist Lia Pas and writer Lorraine Boissoneault for an hourlong workshop exploring the ways we can use art to make invisible illnesses more visible. The session will be virtual and free. It will be held on Zoom on Thursday May 28 at 12pmPST/1pmMST/2pmCST/3pmEST. A backup date (in case of illness) will be Tuesday June 16.

Participants will need pen/pencils and paper, anatomical printouts (which can be found for free on Wikimedia by searching “Gray’s Anatomy”), and any other art materials they’d like to work with. Lia will demonstrate her symptomatology embroidery and then lead participants in a guided meditation and drawing technique to help visualize symptoms. Lorraine will share a poetry exercise for generating new ways of describing the experience of fatigue, pain, and other aspects of chronic illness. Participants will come away with new techniques for exploring their illnesses and ideas for how to translate them into descriptions to share with medical providers, as well as an increased sense of bodily autonomy.

This event will be hosted in partnership with Chicago-based queer and Covid cautious organization Parallel Play. We chose the month of May in recognition of ME Awareness month, but will be talking about other invisible illnesses as well. To register, please follow this link. You can find our access guide there.