Description
Editorial Board
For Authors and Reviewers
For Readers
New & Noteworthy
Feedback
Acknowledgments
Theme Issues and Related Materials
Ars Medica is a new biannual literary journal that explores the interface between the arts and medicine, and examines what makes medicine an art. Ars Medica allows a place for dialogue, meaning making, and the representation of experiences of the body, health, wellness, and encounters with the medical system. Content includes narratives from patients and health care workers, medical history, fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and visual art.
Ars Medica strives to:
* be an internationally respected source for thoughtful and provocative fiction, nonfiction and art that addresses the interconnections between medicine, health, illness and the body, broadly defined as the medical humanities.
* to appeal to a diverse literary audience, while also being relevant to a wide range of professional readers
* to be used as a learning tool by students and their professors in health care and academic humanities
* to provide a much needed forum for nonprofessional artists and patients to express their experience of illness and recovery
* to humanize the face of healthcare in Canada and to be a voice in the ongoing Canadian healthcare debate in Canada; and to enter into an international dialogue around related topics
* to increase the international representation in the journal including reportage and commentary
Published biannually.
ISSN: 1910-2070
Ars Medica strives to:
* be an internationally respected source for thoughtful and provocative fiction, nonfiction and art that addresses the interconnections between medicine, health, illness and the body, broadly defined as the medical humanities.
* to appeal to a diverse literary audience, while also being relevant to a wide range of professional readers
* to be used as a learning tool by students and their professors in health care and academic humanities
* to provide a much needed forum for nonprofessional artists and patients to express their experience of illness and recovery
* to humanize the face of healthcare in Canada and to be a voice in the ongoing Canadian healthcare debate in Canada; and to enter into an international dialogue around related topics
* to increase the international representation in the journal including reportage and commentary
Published biannually.
ISSN: 1910-2070
Editorial
Address
Ars Medica
Department of Psychiatry
9th Floor
600 University Avenue
Mount Sinai Hospital
Toronto, Ontario, M5G 1X5
CANADA
arsmedica@mtsinai.on.ca
Ars Medica
Department of Psychiatry
9th Floor
600 University Avenue
Mount Sinai Hospital
Toronto, Ontario, M5G 1X5
CANADA
arsmedica@mtsinai.on.ca
Editorial
Board:
Robin Roger
Founding Editor
James
Orbinski
Contributing International Editor
Rex Kay
Founding editor
Allan
Peterkin
Founding editor
Ronald
Ruskin
Founding editor
Allison
Crawford
Managing and Founding editor
Publishing
Ian MacKenzie
Designer and copy editor
Natalie Ruskin
Copy editor
Beth Sadavoy
Copy editor
Liz Konigshaus
Executive administrator
Advisory
Board
Guy Allen
Jacalyn
Duffin
Jock
Murray
Jeff
Nisker
Thomas
Ogden
Adam
Phillips
Mary
V. Seeman
Anne
Marie Todkill
Legal Advisors
Stanley
Kugelmass
Adrian Zahl
We welcome submissions of short stories, personal narratives of illness, creative nonfiction, poetry and visual art. Two issues of Ars Medica are printed per year. The deadline for submission to the Spring issue is February 28, and July 30 for the Fall issue. Submission by that date does not ensure review and consideration for the upcoming edition. Each submission is reviewed by our editorial board. We will try to provide a response within 6 months of receipt of submission.
Please see the bottom of this page for some further writing suggestions.
Guidelines for Submissions:
1. E-mail submissions are preferred, with Microsoft Word attachments only.
2. Poetry should be typed single-spaced up to two pages, and prose double-spaced to a maximum of 3000 words. We recommend sending poetry as an attachment, to protect formatting.
3. We will not consider previously published manuscripts or visual art, and a signed statement that the work is original and unpublished is required. Copyright remains with the artist or author.
4. Payment will consist of copies of the issue in which the accepted work appears.
5. Please indicate word count on your manuscript and provide full contact information: name, address, phone number, fax, e-mail address.
6. Please submit manuscripts to arsmedica@mtsinai.on.ca
On Writing For Ars Medica (suggestions):
We are often asked about which qualities we look for when we select a piece for publication in Ars Medica. Members of our Editorial Board and our Advisory Board come from diverse healthcare and literary backgrounds, and the short answer is , "We know good writing when we see it." Those of us who do clinical work and encounter narratives of illness everyday have come to identify what feels honest, fleshed out, embodied. We have become demanding readers to the extent that familiar stories of diagnosis and treatment have to bring something new and particular to the telling and to our experience. All of the usual rules of storytelling (and writing workshops ) still apply: Create characters we care about and let them speak through dialogue. Show us their world through almost cinematic detail, don't just tell us it exists. Build dramatic tension within a structure of a beginning, a middle and an end. If you're writing non-fiction, let yourself enter the piece so we know why you were moved to write about it. Keep up the pacing so we want to know what happens. Leave us feeling something, be it confused, uncomfortable, enlightened, curious or wanting more. Work on your voice as a writer. Readers, like patients, want to be in good hands and to remember what was told and how.
Endings don't have to be happy or tidy. As Board Member Rebecca Garden says: I look for work that defies expectations and conventions, whether formally or in terms of content. We all shoulder the burden of conventional narratives and tropes of illness and medicine. The work we publish should communicate in surprising and arresting ways and break through the dominant narratives of illness (e.g. courageous battles ending in triumph or uplift)."
James Wood., in his book, " How Fiction Works," describes something he calls "thisness" -the sense that a detail or quality is so intrinsic to the thing it describes, that we can't imagine it otherwise.
Some of us also like to become disoriented , "defamiliarized," to turn a conventional description on its head. (The images we publish can do this too. Some of you will remember Jane Martin's cover of a bouquet of roses juxtaposed against her husband's fresh post-op cranial scar. Beautiful and unexpected).
We primarily receive submissions from writers about being a patient (or their family member) or about being a professional (a doctor, nurse or healthcare worker).
In the former, we sometimes encounter unprocessed details which have specific, charged meaning for the teller but which are unclear to the reader. These pieces in many ways resemble journaling or therapeutic writing. The author is too close to the events or uses personal code and short-hand which leave gaps. As a result, we are not fully invited into the experience. Stories of trauma and loss are often fragmented, because they remain so for the writer and have not yet been crafted through the personal and creative steps which render them coherent and universal.
Writing personal narratives may indeed be healing, but to be literary, there needs to be distance, an "observer's eye" which allows us to see the full picture.
In the latter category-stories by healthcare professionals-we often see too much detachment. Diagnostic efficiency cuts to the chase ,abbreviates or over-simplifies the story and fills it with jargon, acronyms and even cliché.These narratives are journalistic or more like a rushed case presentation . The subjective is edited out and the reader may know what to think, but not what to feel.
Sometimes, we get the sense that a story has been misappropriated, that the author-clinician has not obtained permission to tell it from the client or patient who lived it or else the author has not fully moved the piece from fact to fiction. Our position is that re-telling something shared in confidence in a defined therapeutic context is unethical unless the patient's co-construction is fully acknowledged or else the narrative has moved well beyond the personal and particular.
In contrast, some of the most compelling pieces we receive are written by doctors or nurses who have become patients themselves. Suddenly the world they know so well has to be re-explained and re-examined, as if encountered for the first time. Everything is suddenly new. And terrifying.
Each issue of Ars Medica embodies many of these ingredients in its stories and poems of birth, illness, aging and the death of loved ones. We are introduced to doctors, nurses and other clinicians who either care too little, too much or struggle with finding the right balance with each patient. We meet patients trying to find their way as they navigate illnesses and forge new identities.
We encourage authors to read a sample copy of the journal before they submit works and to refer to our submission guidelines on this webpage. Individual copies of Ars Medica can be ordered from: lkonigshaus@mtsinai.on.ca.
Editorial Address
Ars Medica
Department of Psychiatry
9th Floor 600 University Avenue
Mount Sinai Hospital
Toronto, Ontario, M5G 1X5 CANADA
arsmedica@mtsinai.on.ca
Please see the bottom of this page for some further writing suggestions.
Guidelines for Submissions:
1. E-mail submissions are preferred, with Microsoft Word attachments only.
2. Poetry should be typed single-spaced up to two pages, and prose double-spaced to a maximum of 3000 words. We recommend sending poetry as an attachment, to protect formatting.
3. We will not consider previously published manuscripts or visual art, and a signed statement that the work is original and unpublished is required. Copyright remains with the artist or author.
4. Payment will consist of copies of the issue in which the accepted work appears.
5. Please indicate word count on your manuscript and provide full contact information: name, address, phone number, fax, e-mail address.
6. Please submit manuscripts to arsmedica@mtsinai.on.ca
On Writing For Ars Medica (suggestions):
We are often asked about which qualities we look for when we select a piece for publication in Ars Medica. Members of our Editorial Board and our Advisory Board come from diverse healthcare and literary backgrounds, and the short answer is , "We know good writing when we see it." Those of us who do clinical work and encounter narratives of illness everyday have come to identify what feels honest, fleshed out, embodied. We have become demanding readers to the extent that familiar stories of diagnosis and treatment have to bring something new and particular to the telling and to our experience. All of the usual rules of storytelling (and writing workshops ) still apply: Create characters we care about and let them speak through dialogue. Show us their world through almost cinematic detail, don't just tell us it exists. Build dramatic tension within a structure of a beginning, a middle and an end. If you're writing non-fiction, let yourself enter the piece so we know why you were moved to write about it. Keep up the pacing so we want to know what happens. Leave us feeling something, be it confused, uncomfortable, enlightened, curious or wanting more. Work on your voice as a writer. Readers, like patients, want to be in good hands and to remember what was told and how.
Endings don't have to be happy or tidy. As Board Member Rebecca Garden says: I look for work that defies expectations and conventions, whether formally or in terms of content. We all shoulder the burden of conventional narratives and tropes of illness and medicine. The work we publish should communicate in surprising and arresting ways and break through the dominant narratives of illness (e.g. courageous battles ending in triumph or uplift)."
James Wood., in his book, " How Fiction Works," describes something he calls "thisness" -the sense that a detail or quality is so intrinsic to the thing it describes, that we can't imagine it otherwise.
Some of us also like to become disoriented , "defamiliarized," to turn a conventional description on its head. (The images we publish can do this too. Some of you will remember Jane Martin's cover of a bouquet of roses juxtaposed against her husband's fresh post-op cranial scar. Beautiful and unexpected).
We primarily receive submissions from writers about being a patient (or their family member) or about being a professional (a doctor, nurse or healthcare worker).
In the former, we sometimes encounter unprocessed details which have specific, charged meaning for the teller but which are unclear to the reader. These pieces in many ways resemble journaling or therapeutic writing. The author is too close to the events or uses personal code and short-hand which leave gaps. As a result, we are not fully invited into the experience. Stories of trauma and loss are often fragmented, because they remain so for the writer and have not yet been crafted through the personal and creative steps which render them coherent and universal.
Writing personal narratives may indeed be healing, but to be literary, there needs to be distance, an "observer's eye" which allows us to see the full picture.
In the latter category-stories by healthcare professionals-we often see too much detachment. Diagnostic efficiency cuts to the chase ,abbreviates or over-simplifies the story and fills it with jargon, acronyms and even cliché.These narratives are journalistic or more like a rushed case presentation . The subjective is edited out and the reader may know what to think, but not what to feel.
Sometimes, we get the sense that a story has been misappropriated, that the author-clinician has not obtained permission to tell it from the client or patient who lived it or else the author has not fully moved the piece from fact to fiction. Our position is that re-telling something shared in confidence in a defined therapeutic context is unethical unless the patient's co-construction is fully acknowledged or else the narrative has moved well beyond the personal and particular.
In contrast, some of the most compelling pieces we receive are written by doctors or nurses who have become patients themselves. Suddenly the world they know so well has to be re-explained and re-examined, as if encountered for the first time. Everything is suddenly new. And terrifying.
Each issue of Ars Medica embodies many of these ingredients in its stories and poems of birth, illness, aging and the death of loved ones. We are introduced to doctors, nurses and other clinicians who either care too little, too much or struggle with finding the right balance with each patient. We meet patients trying to find their way as they navigate illnesses and forge new identities.
We encourage authors to read a sample copy of the journal before they submit works and to refer to our submission guidelines on this webpage. Individual copies of Ars Medica can be ordered from: lkonigshaus@mtsinai.on.ca.
Editorial Address
Ars Medica
Department of Psychiatry
9th Floor 600 University Avenue
Mount Sinai Hospital
Toronto, Ontario, M5G 1X5 CANADA
arsmedica@mtsinai.on.ca
Table of Contents
Volume 7, Issue 1
Volume 6, Issue 2
Volume 6, Issue 1
Volume 5, Issue 2
Volume 5, Issue 1
Volume 4, Issue 2
Volume 4, Issue 1
Volume 3, Issue 2
Volume 3, Issue 1
Volume 2, Issue 2
Volume 2, Issue 1
Volume 1, Issue 2
Volume 1, Issue 1
Volume 7, Issue 1
Volume 6, Issue 2
Volume 6, Issue 1
Volume 5, Issue 2
Volume 5, Issue 1
Volume 4, Issue 2
Volume 4, Issue 1
Volume 3, Issue 2
Volume 3, Issue 1
Volume 2, Issue 2
Volume 2, Issue 1
Volume 1, Issue 2
Volume 1, Issue 1
Ars Medica is featured in an article on medical literary
journals - A Love of Story, in Print and in
the Clinic (MedPage Today)
Ars Medica has joined with the American Society for Bioethics + Humanities (ASBH) as a partner journal. The purpose of ASBH is to promote the exchange of ideas and foster multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and interprofessional scholarship, research, teaching, policy development, professional development, and collegiality among people engaged in all of the endeavors related to clinical and academic bioethics and the health-related humanities.
Ars Medica has joined with the American Society for Bioethics + Humanities (ASBH) as a partner journal. The purpose of ASBH is to promote the exchange of ideas and foster multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and interprofessional scholarship, research, teaching, policy development, professional development, and collegiality among people engaged in all of the endeavors related to clinical and academic bioethics and the health-related humanities.
Reviews
Ars Medica has endeavored to foster links with Canada's writing and artistic communities. Part of this outreach led to the creation, with the Humber School for Writers, of the annual Writing About Healing Workshop. The writing community has enthusiastically welcomed the concept of Ars Medica, as these comments from award-winning Canadian authors demonstrate:
I'll be keeping it in mind for projects in the works. Knowing Ars Medica exists will encourage me to follow stories or ideas that might work for you further down the line. - Marni Jackson, Writer
What a brilliant idea. - Gail Singer, Documentary Filmmaker and Academy Award Winner
Everything I've read in Ars Medica has been interesting. - Nancy Richler, Novelist
By defining a territory- health, healing, illness, dying- and insisting on literary excellence in approaching it, the Editors of Ars Medica have carved (excuse the expression!) a new way in to the arts of expression. I think both general readers and those looking for specific stories of this nature will be nourished in these volumes. Ars Medica is exciting: writers can see something opening here, when so much is closing, and readers can find a centre in many independent, varied works. The Editors and founders have also put energy into building a base for this magazine, as evidenced by their launch, which I attended, and which was greeted with great enthusiasm. - Katherine Govier, Toronto novelist and National Book Award winner
Please select below for reviews of Ars Medica:
Canadian Medical Association Journal (2008) [Article on Narrative Medicine by Ars Medica Founding Editor Allan Peterkin]
Medical Post (2007)
Left Atrium Review (2005)
Canadian Medical Association Journal (2003)
Comments/Questions?
Do you have comments or questions about any of our journals? We would love to hear from you. Tell us what you think – write, email or call us at:
University of Toronto Press — Journals Division
5201 Dufferin Street
Toronto, ON M3H 5T8 Canada
Tel: (416) 667-7810 Fax: (416) 667-7881
Email: journals@utpress.utoronto.ca
Ars Medica has endeavored to foster links with Canada's writing and artistic communities. Part of this outreach led to the creation, with the Humber School for Writers, of the annual Writing About Healing Workshop. The writing community has enthusiastically welcomed the concept of Ars Medica, as these comments from award-winning Canadian authors demonstrate:
I'll be keeping it in mind for projects in the works. Knowing Ars Medica exists will encourage me to follow stories or ideas that might work for you further down the line. - Marni Jackson, Writer
What a brilliant idea. - Gail Singer, Documentary Filmmaker and Academy Award Winner
Everything I've read in Ars Medica has been interesting. - Nancy Richler, Novelist
By defining a territory- health, healing, illness, dying- and insisting on literary excellence in approaching it, the Editors of Ars Medica have carved (excuse the expression!) a new way in to the arts of expression. I think both general readers and those looking for specific stories of this nature will be nourished in these volumes. Ars Medica is exciting: writers can see something opening here, when so much is closing, and readers can find a centre in many independent, varied works. The Editors and founders have also put energy into building a base for this magazine, as evidenced by their launch, which I attended, and which was greeted with great enthusiasm. - Katherine Govier, Toronto novelist and National Book Award winner
Please select below for reviews of Ars Medica:
Canadian Medical Association Journal (2008) [Article on Narrative Medicine by Ars Medica Founding Editor Allan Peterkin]
Medical Post (2007)
Left Atrium Review (2005)
Canadian Medical Association Journal (2003)
Comments/Questions?
Do you have comments or questions about any of our journals? We would love to hear from you. Tell us what you think – write, email or call us at:
University of Toronto Press — Journals Division
5201 Dufferin Street
Toronto, ON M3H 5T8 Canada
Tel: (416) 667-7810 Fax: (416) 667-7881
Email: journals@utpress.utoronto.ca
Funding for Ars Medica is generously provided through the Mount Sinai Hospital Foundation; the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital; and from the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto.
