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Dana Walrath

Goodreads Author

Website

http://danawalrath.com/

Member Since

August 2009

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I was born in Greensboro, North Carolina but my parents moved us back to New York City before I could even hold my head up. Like all young primates, I started out using my eyes and hands long before I began to use words. Reading came late—when it did I was crazy for books. The windows of my childhood bedroom were high and faced the street. After I was tucked in for the night, I would stand in my bed and read by streetlight. Still, unlike most writers, I never kept a journal or wrote a story or poem in grade school. All of my school papers were done with great anguish and at the last minute. Instead, I was always outside running or climbing or sledding or drawing or making something with my hands.

As a young New Yorker at Barnard College, Col I was born in Greensboro, North Carolina but my parents moved us back to New York City before I could even hold my head up. Like all young primates, I started out using my eyes and hands long before I began to use words. Reading came late—when it did I was crazy for books. The windows of my childhood bedroom were high and faced the street. After I was tucked in for the night, I would stand in my bed and read by streetlight. Still, unlike most writers, I never kept a journal or wrote a story or poem in grade school. All of my school papers were done with great anguish and at the last minute. Instead, I was always outside running or climbing or sledding or drawing or making something with my hands.

As a young New Yorker at Barnard College, Columbia University, I continued to avoid writing, and split my courses between visual arts and biology: painting with Milton Resnick, printmaking with Tony Smith, and lab work on the eye-brain connections of zebrafish. My oil paintings and intaglio prints were abstractions inspired by natural and biological forms of all scales. I was equally drawn to imagery seen under the microscope, and the sweep of the earth’s surface particularly when it has been worked and touched by humans for millennia.

A teaching thread in my life began when, fresh out of 10th grade, I landed with my family in Taiz, Yemen, and was promptly hired to teach 6th and 7th grade science and math at Yemen’s first experiment in bilingual co-education. More teaching continued out of college as an artist in residence for the Dobbs Ferry New York Public Schools, and as a Biology Lab Instructor at Barnard. As a young mother struggling to find time to make art, I decided to get “practical” (I know!) and wrote a dissertation on the anthropology of childbirth from the University of Pennsylvania. Anthropology—a discipline all about connections between every facet of being human— welcomed art and science and unlocked the creative writing door for me.

Since moving to the mountains of Vermont with my husband and three sons in the summer of 2000, I’ve used stories and art to teach medical students at the University of Vermont’s College of Medicine. Creative writing and artwork was done mostly during hours stolen from sleep and squeezed between other responsibilities. The balance tipped toward creative work shortly after my mother, Alice, and dementia moved in with us. Alice had always wanted me to be a doctor. When she stood in my kitchen in early 2008, admiring the cabinet knobs I had hand painted and said, “You should quit your job and make art full time,” I listened, and I haven’t looked back. When Alice lived with us, I had the great pleasure of earning an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. ...more

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Dana Walrath’s books

Average rating: 3.83 · 1,384 ratings · 259 reviews · 43 distinct works • Similar authors

	Like Water on Stone 3.99 avg rating — 704 ratings — published 2014 — 7 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge [with CD-ROM & InfoTrac] by William A. Haviland, Harald E.L. Prins, Dana Walrath (Goodreads Author) 3.49 avg rating — 214 ratings — published 2004 — 42 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Cultural Anthropology by Harald E.L. Prins, Harald E.L. Prins, Bunny McBride 3.81 avg rating — 185 ratings — published 1978 — 36 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass 4.18 avg rating — 146 ratings — published 2013 — 6 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	I Am a Bird by Dana Walrath (Goodreads Author), Jaime Kim (Illustrator) 3.40 avg rating — 103 ratings — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Anthropology: The Human Challenge by William A. Haviland, Harald E.L. Prins, Dana Walrath (Goodreads Author) 3.60 avg rating — 96 ratings — published 1974 — 57 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Toby the Rock Hound by Dana Walrath (Goodreads Author), Jolly Roger Bradfield (Illustrator) 4.50 avg rating — 4 ratings — published 1979 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Cultural Anthropology The Human Challenge 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Here is a Place: A Story About Color 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Aliceheimer's: Alzheimer's Through the Looking Glass by Dana Walrath (2013-05-03) 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Quotes by Dana Walrath (?)

“We eagles sing no soothing songs.
Our throats can only whistle.
Instead, we hunt them down,
take them from others.”
― Dana Walrath, Like Water on Stone

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“The dominant narrative is a horror story. People with Alzheimer's are perceived as zombies, bodies without minds, waiting for valiant researchers to find a cure. For Alice and me, the story was different. Alzheimer's was a time of healing and magic. Of course, there is loss with dementia, but what matters is how we approach our losses and our gains. Reframing dementia as a different way of being, as a window into another reality, lets people living in that state be our teachers — useful, true humans who contribute to our collective good, instead of scary zombies.”
― Dana Walrath, Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass

tags: aging, alzheimers, dementia

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“Biomedicine locates sickness in a specific place in an individual body: a headache, a stomachache a torn knee, lung cancer. Medical anthropologists instead locate sickness and health in three interconnected bodies: the political, the social, and the physical. The prevailing political economy impacts the distribution of sickness and health in a society and the means available to heal those who are sick. For example, poor individuals worldwide are more exposed to toxins that make them sick, while the rich stay healthier. The social body constructs the meanings and experiences surrounding particular physical states. It determines the ideal physical body, legitimizing biomedical practices like plastic surgery to attain it. The social body also determines the boundaries of the physical body.
Some cultures locate sickness not in individuals but instead in families or communities. As any caregiver knows, we live the sickness too. And while biomedicine can cure diseases it flounders with permanent hurts, troubles of the mind, states present from birth or that are incurable or progressive. In biomedicine, these states are stigmatized and feared. We medical anthropologists have a term for this: social death.”
― Dana Walrath, Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass

tags: alzheimers, anthropology, biomedical, biomedicine, community, health, medical-anthropology, mental-health, social, social-death

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