Diversity plays an important role in how people experience illness and healthcare as patients. Listening carefully to stories of how race, class, age, gender, sexuality, and disability can affect patient experience can be revealing and provide much needed change to health communication in the patienthood narrative. This book is a collection of vibrant and engaging essays by scholars of narrative methods in health communication. Each chapter takes readers into the fascinating world of patients who use stories from their personal lives to challenge us to rethink, reimagine, and reformulate what health communication means in practice. Each section of the book focuses on an important aspect of the theory and practice of the patienthood narrative. Part one explores the important ways that telling and sharing patient's stories can lead to learning, empowerment, and advocacy. Part two explores several key forms of diversity and how they affect patienthood. Part three illustrates how personal, relational, and cultural aspects of identity intersect to shape the patient experience.

Diversity plays an important role in how people experience illness and healthcare as patients. Listening carefully to stories of how race, class, age, gender, sexuality, and disability can affect patient experience can be revealing and provide much needed change to health communication in the patienthood narrative. This book is a collection of vibrant and engaging essays by scholars of narrative methods in health communication. Each chapter takes readers into the fascinating world of patients who use stories from their personal lives to challenge us to rethink, reimagine, and reformulate what health communication means in practice. Each section of the book focuses on an important aspect of the theory and practice of the patienthood narrative. Part one explores the important ways that telling and sharing patient's stories can lead to learning, empowerment, and advocacy. Part two explores several key forms of diversity and how they affect patienthood. Part three illustrates how personal, relational, and cultural aspects of identity intersect to shape the patient experience.

Writer and illustrator, Gina C. Browning, says some of the verses in her poetry book first came to her in her dreams as she was recovering from surgery years ago. The poems and illustrations in Moonbeam Dreams gradually evolved into a keenly rhymed, fantastical romp through a fantasy land, with weird and wonderful characters for readers of any age to enjoy. Her poetry truly is for the young at heart. Browning thinks her dreams are fun and adventurous, as she always looks for the positive side to everything. Her book encourages children not to be afraid of the dark, and to believe in themselves and their abilities so that almost anything is possible. Browning says dreams can come true either in daylight or night if you believe in them strongly enough.

Wind in the Aspens is a different Gina Browning. This collection of her poetry allows us to perceive a woman growing into an understanding of the sparseness of life. Without blinking, she lets us observe secrets usually kept concealed beneath the folds of flamboyant opera dresses and personifications kept hidden away in operatic characters. What we find here are not pretty song lyrics, but rather a deep wondering, a certain coming to grips with the rawness of life, and the questions left behind, unanswered and chilling.
Denise Kusel, journalist, author of Only in Santa Fe
Gina Browning's poems in Wind in the Aspens are personal, raw and immediate, powerfully and unabashedly feminine, and so gut-wrenchingly honest that I felt guilty while reading them, as if I had filched her journal from her bedside. Whether painting pictures of her sometimes-bucolic, small-town childhood, sharing the unspoken sadness of miscarriage, or revealing-and reveling in-her sensuality, Browning tells stories with the authority of a goddess, casting word-spells that melt in the mouth like chocolate. Wind in the Aspens is about life, naked-and perhaps best read under the covers with a flashlight and some tissues.
Hollis Walker, journalist, author of the book
Zink: The Language of Enchantment
This collection of poems by Gina Browning invites the reader to travel beyond everyday life into the world of luminous spirit, love and immense joy. The author uses lyricism and intense imagery as she delves unflinchingly into many different facets of human existence. Her insistence on unwavering beauty even in the darkest moments of despair confers a heartbreaking grace upon the reader.
Anne Whitehouse, author of the novel Fall Love and the poetry
collections, The Surveyor's Hand, Blessings and Curses,
and Bear in Mind