Sara Wasson

Biography

I'm an academic at Lancaster University, specialising in Gothic fiction of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries and writing about pain. Among other things, I am running an AHRC_funded research network called Translating Chronic Pain, an interdisciplinary critical/creative project bringing together people living with persistent pain, representatives from pain charities, creative writers, academics, and medical practitioners. We aim to better represent chronic pain experience by disrupting existing expectations of illness memoir, and to challenge current tendencies in medical humanities scholarship of narrative and wellbeing. Unlike traditional long-form illness narratives, the network will produce and explore what we are calling ‘flash’ illness writing: fragmentary, episode-focused, short-format work, both word and image. We have an open invitation for creative work here: http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/translatingpain/creative-manifesto/

Samples

(Excerpt from 'Creative Manifesto: Translating Chronic Pain'): SINCE people living with persistent pain often suffer invisibility and struggle for legitimacy and credibility; since long-term pain is often wrongly assumed to be a temporary and unnatural state; since pain experience is diverse and must be understood intersectionally (through interweaved categories such as gender, race, sexuality, and class); since pain’s causes can be cryptic, multiple, personal, social, environmental, transgenerational, and hidden; since pain science is neither widely understood or well-funded, and requires wider dissemination; since pain experience exceeds the language of medicalisation; since pain undercuts illusions of human autonomy and self-sufficiency, showing that all people are vulnerable and interdependent; since pain may impair the ability to work, in which case those living with it may be wrongly seen as not living a ‘useful’ life; since witnessing pain makes profound claims on – and poses challenges for – carers, family members, and healthcare practitioners; and since chronic pain affects every dimension of life … … I call for creative work which engages these invisibilities, these lacunae, these intersections – moments in public or in shadows, in loneliness or connection. YET – pain experience may not lend itself to established forms of either illness narration or survivorship story: the experience may lack an ending, where resolution is reached; it may lack a beginning, its causes hidden; it may break the positivity imperative – to be hopeful, a warrior, a survivor, a meaning-finder; it may be incommunicable, resisting representation, yet may simultaneously engender language; it may be a story not (only) of a personal journey, but also of wider social calamities and inequalities, both contemporary and transgenerational; it may resist plot, instead being a thing of fragments, glimpses, and moments. SO I call for ‘FLASH’ ILLNESS WRITING – short-form creative work – which expresses a moment or fragment of experience of persistent pain; – which takes either the perspective of a person experiencing the pain or the perspective of a witness (carer or healthcare professional); – which captures any dimension of experience – physical, emotional, social, economic, institutional, medical, spiritual, or creative; – which communicates in any emotional register, positive or negative; – and which can be shared and used by others to try and communicate the vivid, contradictory, and diverse realities of living with chronic pain.

All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.