“Small Rain: A Reading and Conversation with Garth Greenwell,” moderated by Nellie Hermann

For our November rounds we are thrilled to welcome Garth Greenwell, award-winning author of What Belongs to You and Cleanness, who will be speaking about his most recent novel, Small Rain. In Small Rain, a poet’s life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind.

Small Rain is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value–art, memory, poetry, music, care–are thrown into sharp relief. Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. Small Rain surges beyond the hospital to encompass a radiant vision of human life: our shared vulnerability, the limits and possibilities of sympathy, the ideal of art and the fragile dream of America. Above all, it is a love story of the most unexpected kind.

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for many other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner and the LA Times Book Prize. His second work of fiction, Cleanness, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and a New York Times Notable Book. His nonfiction appears widely, and he writes regularly about culture for the Substack newsletter To a Green Thought. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Harold D. Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU.

Garth Greenwell will be in conversation with Nellie Hermann, core faculty of Columbia Narrative Medicine, who has published two novels, The Cure for Grief (Scribner) and The Season of Migration (FSG).

Narrative Medicine Rounds are monthly rounds held on the first Wednesday of the month during the academic year, hosted by the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Rounds are supported by live captioning. If you have any other accessibility needs or concerns, please contact the Office of Disability Services at 212-854-2388 or disability@columbia.edu at least 10 days in advance of the event. We do our best to arrange accommodations received after this deadline but cannot guarantee them. A recording of our Virtual Narrative Medicine rounds is available following the live session on the Narrative Medicine YouTube channel, and you can watch other recent Rounds events there.