The Manual of Disaster: Creativity, Preparedness, and Writing the Emergency Room

Abstract

This article offers a critical examination of creativity discourse at the intersection of two disciplinary fields: health and humanities. In contrast to creativity’s long-standing associations with making, imitation, or invention, we examine the relatively recent emergence of what we call creativity’s preparatory capacity, particularly within critical discussions of health-care and illness narratives. Working with fictional representations of the emergency room in physician-writer Jay Baruch’s short-story collection Fourteen Stories: Doctors, Patients, and Other Strangers (2007), we identify how particular narrative techniques are revealed in a range of emergency scenarios – both within and beyond the fictional setting – and what such deployments of creativity might signal for the future of literary studies more broadly.