‘Poetry and a Medical Life’ – A Reading and Conversation with Conor Mc Donnell, MD and Bahar Orang, MD (webinar) – December 3, 2020

The AUTHOR MD series is hosted by the Program In Health, Arts and Humanities at the University of Toronto (www.health-humanities.com) and the Gold Humanism Honor Society, the Alan Klass Health Humanities Program, and the Office of Educational and Faculty Development at the University of Manitoba.

For more information, please contact allan.peterkin@utoronto.ca.

The AUTHOR MD SERIES was created to provide a platform for Canadian physician- writers to share their work broadly and to deepen a conversation on the role of creativity and reflection in a clinical life.

Conor Mc Donnell is a physician & poet. He has published two chapbooks, The Book of Retaliations (Anstruther Press) and Safe Spaces (Frog Hollow Press). He received Honourable Mention for The Fiddlehead ’s 2018 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, was shortlisted for the RawArtReview 2019 Charles Bukowski Prize, and was runner-up in the Vallum 2019 Contemporary Poetry Prize. Recovery Community is his debut collection.

Recovery Community explores intimate connections between deftly-layered moments of trauma illness and loss. This collection of poems, shot through with personal and professional experiences from physician-poet Conor Mc Donnell, recruits actors addicts and artists to a Greek-chorus rallying call: first-time experimenters are serenaded by the drugs that seek to trap them, Shelley Winters is raised from a succession of hollowed out pre-dug Hollywood graves, while the film industry retreats to the shadows under the glare of a 21st century lens. The poems in Recovery Community reinforce the value of doubt and conflict as necessary tools to navigate existence, and Mc Donnell sketches a map toward resilience with crooked lines of caution that linger long after reading this unique debut collection.

Available for pre-order and purchase anywhere books are sold or at the publisher’s website http://mansfieldpress.net/ when the book is launched in Nov/Dec 2020. Otherwise, order from Kirby at knife fork book in Toronto https://knifeforkbook.com/, Toronto’s pre-eminent indie poetry store.

Bahar Orang is a writer and physician-in-training living in Toronto. She has a BASc from McMaster University and an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto. She completed her MD at McMaster University, and is now completing specialty training in psychiatry in Toronto. Her poetry and essays have been published in such places as GUTS, Hamilton Arts & Letters, CMAJ, and Ars Medica.

Part lyric essay, part prose poetry, Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty grapples with the manifold meanings and possibilities of beauty. Drawing on her experiences as a physician-in-training, Orang considers clinical encounters and how they relate to the concept of beauty. Such considerations lead her to questions about intimacy, queerness, home, memory, love, and other aspects of human experience. Throughout, beauty is ultimately imagined as something inextricably tied to care: the care of lovers, of patients, of art and literature, and the various non-human worlds that surround us.

Available for purchase anywhere books are sold, and on the publisher’s website (https://bookhugpress.ca/shop/author/bahar-orang/where-things-touch-a-meditation-on-beauty-by-bahar-orang/) or from Another Story Bookshop in Toronto (https://www.anotherstory.ca/?searchtype=keyword&qs=where+things+touch&qs_file=&q=h.tviewer&using_sb=status&qsb=keyword)

Log in information will be sent to webinar registrants prior to the event.

Facilitators:  Allan Peterkin and Jillian Horton present Conor Mc Donnell, MD and Bahar Orang, MD