New book on storytelling for health now available!
Professor Mike Wilson’s new book, Storytelling, has just been published by Emerald Press as part of the Arts for Health series, which is edited by our colleague and collaborator Professor Paul Crawford from the Institute for Mental Health at the University of Nottingham.
The book explores the potential for storytelling as a creative practice for health and well-being. It considers how storytelling might help us reconsider the relationships and power constructs that traditionally exist within healthcare contexts, and how it might restore agency to patients. At its core is an exploration of storytelling not simply as an act of speaking, but also of listening, a process for thinking, evaluating and understanding, rather than simply as a means of conveying information and experience from one person to another. It brings together the author’s own personal experience and reflection over thirty of years of researching and practising storytelling, alongside a collection of case studies representing diverse approaches to storytelling for health, including theatre, stand-up comedy, writing, visual arts and digital storytelling. Most importantly it approaches its subject primarily not from the point of view of the medical practitioner or educator, or even the patient, but through the lens of the practitioner of storytelling as a creative and everyday practice. It is a book with the storyteller at its core.
