NBM Talks: Podcast from the Narrative-Based Medicine Lab – Details, episodes & analysis

Monica Kidd reads an excerpt from her new novel The Crane (Breakwater, 2025).

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Follow "NBM Talks" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact and reach of narrative-based medicine with talented guests. Visit the Narrative-Based Medicine Lab to learn about our work and offerings.

In this wide-ranging conversation — author, physician, journalist, editor, mother, and Antarctic expedition guide (and much else) — Monica Kidd discusses the origins of her new novel The Crane. She also shares her creative advice for doctor-writers (“notice everything, dismiss nothing”), and tells us what she’s keeping an eye out for in her role as editor of the CMAJ Encounters column.

About Our Guest:

Monica Kidd is an award-winning multidisciplinary writer, journalist, and physician. She has published eight books of fiction poetry and non-fiction, including her new novel The Crane (Breakwater, 2025), and her creative work has appeared in many literary magazines, winning the Edna Staebler Award for Personal Essay and National Magazine Awards.  
 

Previously a reporter with CBC, her freelance writing has been featured in The Walrus, Canadian Geographic, Alberta Views, and other outlets. Monica studied ecology and evolutionary biology, then attended medical school at Memorial University.

She now works as a family doctor specializing in child and maternal health, medical humanities, and equity. She has teaching roles at the University of Calgary and Memorial University and serves as Associate Editor of Humanities at the Canadian Medical Association Journal. She divides her time between Calgary, Alberta and St. John’s, Newfoundland.

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Follow "NBM Talks" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact and reach of narrative-based medicine with talented guests. Visit the Narrative-Based Medicine Lab to learn about our work and offerings.

Described as a "hilariously offbeat and tender comedy about one bipolar woman’s messy search for love at a seaside wedding where no one can stay afloat," Leanne Toshiko Simpson reads an excerpt from her new novel Never Been Better (HarperCollins, 2024).

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Follow "NBM Talks" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact and reach of narrative-based medicine with talented guests.

Visit the ⁠Narrative-Based Medicine Lab⁠ to learn about our work and offerings.

Author and Foundational Certificate alum Leanne Toshiko Simpson shares her thoughts on the connections between her fiction writing and her path in the health humanities, and speaks about the inspiration behind her new novel Never Been Better (HarperCollins, 2024), out now.

About Our Guest:

Leanne Toshiko Simpson is a mixed-race Yonsei writer, educator, and psychiatric survivor from Toronto. She loves writing joyful, messy, laugh-out-loud stories about living with mental illness, and the moments of hope that help us get out of bed day after day.

Leanne is a graduate of the University of Toronto Scarborough's Creative Writing Program and the University of Guelph’s MFA, and is currently completing an EdD in Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto. She teaches seminars in disability arts and BIPOC literature at Trinity College and is a co-founder of Mata Ashita, a national writing circle for Nikkei communities.

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Follow "NBM Talks" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact and reach of narrative-based medicine with talented guests.

Visit the ⁠Narrative-Based Medicine Lab⁠ to learn about our work and offerings.

Nick Pimlott shares a reflection on his early days as a family physician, touching on the influence of John Berger's classic book A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor.

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Follow "NBM Talks" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact and reach of narrative-based medicine with talented guests.

Visit the ⁠Narrative-Based Medicine Lab⁠ to learn about our work and offerings.

NBM Lab member and editor of Canadian Family Physician, Nick Pimlott, sat down with us to discuss his experiences as a family doctor and second career as a writer.

About Our Guest:

Nick Pimlott is an academic family physician based in Toronto whose clinical and research interests include dementia care by family physicians, care of the elderly, and the development and application of clinical practice guidelines in family medicine and postgraduate family medicine education.

He is also the Scientific Editor of Canadian Family Physician with a strong interest in promoting family medicine clinical and education research.

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Follow "NBM Talks" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact and reach of narrative-based medicine with talented guests.

Visit the ⁠Narrative-Based Medicine Lab⁠ to learn about our work and offerings.

This original poem by Sarah Kim presents a long-held objection to the distant and impersonal approach towards patients that is traditionally assumed by physicians. An alternative is a path towards collective compassion in relationship-based care.

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Follow "NBM Talks" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact and reach of narrative-based medicine with talented guests.

Visit the ⁠Narrative-Based Medicine Lab⁠ to learn about our work and offerings.

In this fascinating conversation, Sarah Kim (Temerty Medicine Health Humanities Theme Lead) brings her attentive eye to such diverse issues as medical education, mindfulness, high performance, and the practitioner’s body, considering how they all relate back to the questions raised by narrative-based medicine.

She also reflects on her own professional journey and the value of engaging with the arts and humanities in medical training and practice.

About Our Guest:

Sarah Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family & Community Medicine at the University of Toronto, where she also serves as the Temerty Medicine Health Humanities Theme Lead. Within her medical and teaching practice, Sarah integrates the arts and humanities, mindfulness meditation, and somatic education as generative components of practitioner resilience and system sustainability.

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Follow "NBM Talks" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact and reach of narrative-based medicine with talented guests.

Visit the ⁠Narrative-Based Medicine Lab⁠ to learn about our work and offerings.

Alisha Kaplan reads an original poem developed out of a daily practice that consisted of writing a haiku each morning during a period of her life navigating graduate school and health.

Alisha is leading an upcoming workshop at the NBM Lab! Nourishing Narratives starts online October 9, 2024. Through a rich spread of stories, explore how narrative can serve as a vehicle for self-care and the care of others. Join us over the course of 4 highly interactive sessions.

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Follow "NBM Talks" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact and reach of narrative-based medicine with talented guests.

Visit the ⁠Narrative-Based Medicine Lab⁠ to learn about our work and offerings.

Poet and NBM Lab member, Alisha Kaplan, discusses her work, narrative-based medicine teaching, writing tips, and connections to her life on Bela Farm. She also shares her work and interest in food as medicine.

About Our Guest:

Alisha Kaplan is a poet, educator, and practitioner of narrative medicine. Using the arts, she works with health professionals and patients to reinvigorate medicine with care and humanity.

Alisha is also a food is medicine advocate. She splits her time between Toronto and Bela Farm, where she grows garlic, harvests honey and wild plant medicine, and hosts barn dances. Her poetry collection, Qorbanot: Offerings, a collaboration with artist Tobi Kahn, won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award from the League of Canadian Poets.

Alisha is leading an upcoming workshop at the NBM Lab! Nourishing Narratives starts online October 9, 2024. Through a rich spread of stories, explore how narrative can serve as a vehicle for self-care and the care of others. Join us over the course of 4 highly interactive sessions.

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Follow "NBM Talks" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact and reach of narrative-based medicine with talented guests.

Visit the ⁠Narrative-Based Medicine Lab to learn about our work and offerings.