Jenn Ashworth - Medicine Unboxed VOICES

Medicine Unboxed

In this episode of Medicine Unboxed: VOICES, Sam Guglani talks to Jenn Ashworth, author of 'A Kind of Intimacy', 'Fell' and most recently 'Notes Made While Falling'. In this discussion, Jenn talks to Sam about her encounters with doctors as a child raised in a Mormon community and about the role of fiction in her understanding of the world and of illness. Jenn talks about her experience of becoming ill after the birth of her child, her feeling that she was “too ill to even want healing... to imagine that was even possible” and how she translated this into her writing. “My writing changed through being ill. Previously I wanted to use writing to speak, to communicate…afterwards it’s more about listening, a process by which I shed my layers, my armour, my certainty, my expertise - and let the world get me.” Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/