The Dizzy & Unfixed Path: Narrative, Meaning, and Living Beyond the Cure Story
Hosted by Narrative Mindworks, NWNMC, & OHSU Center for Ethics in Health Care
Event details
September 10, 2026
6:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.
OHSU Rood Pavilion Conference Center
Event description
Join us for a 90-minute Narrative Medicine Workshop with authors Kimberly Warner (Unfixed) & Rachel Weaver (Dizzy).
Medicine often imagines illness as a linear narrative: symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, recovery. Yet many people—patients, caregivers, and clinicians alike—find themselves living inside stories that refuse this arc. Chronic illness, diagnostic uncertainty, grief, disability, and other forms of disruption rarely move neatly from beginning to end. Instead they ask us to inhabit uncertainty, to revise our understanding of hope, and to discover new ways of making meaning when no definitive resolution arrives.
Drawing from their memoirs, Kimberly Warner and Rachel Weaver will explore how narrative can become a practice of attention rather than certainty, helping us remain present to lives that are still unfolding. Through readings, reflective writing, and small-group discussion, participants will examine how stories shift when cure is no longer the destination and meaning emerges through relationship, adaptation, creativity, and community. Journals and pens provided.
Registration Cost: Free with suggested donation of $10
Rood Pavilion Parking Information:(opens in new tab) After 5pm parking is open to non-patient visitors. Street parking is also available in the south waterfront neighborhood.
Questions? Reach out to derek.mccracken@narrativemindworks.org
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Interested in purchasing a copy of Dizzy or Unfixed from a local independent bookstore? We’ve partnered with Bold Coffee and Books in Portland, OR to stock copies. Be among the first to reserve one of a limited number of copies in stock now for pick up at Bold. Order by September 5, 2026 and we can bring the book to you at our event. See details here for Dizzy and here for Unfixed.
Facilitators
Kimberly Warner
Author
Kimberly Warner is an award-winning author, filmmaker, speaker, and essayist whose work explores chronic illness, identity, embodiment, grief, and the search for meaning inside uncertainty. Her writing has been praised by Publishers Weekly and Kirkus for its lyricism, emotional intelligence, and philosophical depth.
Warner’s acclaimed debut memoir, Unfixed, emerged from her widely followed serialized Substack of the same name, where she quickly cultivated a devoted readership drawn to her rare ability to illuminate the emotional and existential realities of living inside an unpredictable neurological system. In Unfixed, Kimberly chronicles her descent into a world shaped by chronic illness, neurological instability, family secrets, and the destabilizing realization that the foundations of identity may be far less fixed than we imagine. In Warner’s world, water becomes both metaphor and lived experience: disorientation, drift, immersion, survival.
A sought-after voice on resilience, uncertainty, and the human capacity for adaptation, Warner speaks nationally on chronic illness, identity, narrative medicine, and finding steadiness in an unfixed world. She has served on editorial boards, hosted panels at leading institutions, and contributed to medical education initiatives focused on embodiment, patient experience, and meaning-centered care. She continues to publish weekly essays, interviews, and films exploring the hidden intelligence within adversity and the quiet beauty of lives that refuse to resolve neatly.
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Rachel Weaver
Author
Rachel Weaver’s novel Point of Direction was named a Top Ten Book To Pick Up Now by Oprah Magazine and won the Willa Cather Award for Fiction. Rachel’s recent medical memoir, Dizzy, was described by Maureen Corrigan on NPR’s Fresh Air as ‘an arresting new memoir’. Dizzy is a braided memoir of Rachel’s time working in the backcountry of Alaska and her time in the medical world as a chronically ill patient with a mysterious illness. A medical mystery and a cautionary tale about our broken-down system, Dizzy is a story about perseverance in pursuit of answers, of learning to live with life’s uncertainty, and the struggle to find joy in an imperfect but beautiful world.
Her second novel, released in June 2026, The Last Run, was described by Alaska Magazine as ‘A page-turning, authentic Alaskan tale that you’ll want to devour in one sitting.’ Rachel’s essays and short fiction have appeared in The Sun Magazine, Gettysburg Review, Blue Mesa Review, Southeast Review, Medicine and Meaning, River Teeth, The Healing Muse, and others. Prior to earning her MFA in Writing and Poetics at Naropa University, Rachel worked for the Forest Service in Alaska studying bears, raptors and songbirds. She teaches at Wilkes University’s low-residency MFA program and at Lighthouse Writers Workshop where she won the Beacon Award for Teaching Excellence. Rachel holds a CPA in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. For more information visit https://rachelweaver.net/
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Derek McCracken, MS, MA
Facilitator
Derek McCracken, MS, MA is a New York-based health equity director whose narrative practice spans academic (Columbia University pedagogy instructor), non-profit (director at Narrative Mindworks and Say Ah!) and clinical spaces (lead facilitator at Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine). Derek migrated to the health humanities in 2015 after a long career as a creative director at Hallmark Cards. He is thrilled to see this event highlight members of Narrative Mindworks, and the West Virginia University Connective Tissue series, publisher of Dizzy.
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Alexis Rehrmann
Facilitator