The Body Alone is an inquiry into the experience, meaning, and articulation of pain. It is a personal hybrid account incorporating research, scholarship, and memoir to examine chronic pain through the multi-lens of medicine, theology, and philosophy. Broken bodies tell broken stories. Nina Lohman’s pain experience is portrayed through a cyclical narrative of primers, vocabulary lessons, prescription records, and hypothesized internal monologues—fractured not for the sake of experimentation but because the story itself demands it.

In both form and content, The Body Alone represents boundary-pressing work that subverts the traditional narrative by putting pressure on the medical, cultural, and political systems that impact women’s access to fair and equal healthcare. This is more than an illness narrative, it is a battle cry demanding change.

Nina Lohman is founder and publisher of Brink, a literary journal that champions hybrid and cross-genre works. She is Literary Programming Director for the Mission Creek Festival. A 2023 Iowa Artist Fellow, her writing has been supported by the Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Iowa Arts Council. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

This event will be moderated by Larassa Kabel who received her BFA with honors in 1992 from Iowa State University with an emphasis in fibers. She currently lives in Des Moines, IA where she works as a full-time artist and independent curator. She has received numerous grants and awards including an Iowa Arts Council Fellowship, and her work has been shown nationally and is in several corporate and private collections including the Des Moines Art Center, the White House and the World Food Prize.