Professors from two academic fields to examine memory loss

By: Fred Hintz

Posted: 10/21/08

Chris Kennedy's mother has Alzheimer's disease. She would forget her name, where she was, how to describe her basic surroundings. He took these experiences and wrote a memoir about his relationship with his mother.

"It became my way to make sense of what was happening with my mother," said Kennedy, director of the Creative Writing Program in the College of Arts and

Sciences.

This is the experience Kennedy will discuss at 7 tonight. He will speak along with Martin J. Sliwinski, a psychology professor, in Shermin Auditorium in the Shaffer Art Building.

The event, "Memory - Humans Are Beings Who Remember," is part of SU's Tolley Humanities Forum series. The Tolley forums aim to examine single issues from multiple academic viewpoints. This is the first year the Tolley forums will be open to the public.

This forum will examine memory loss from two different academic disciplines: psychology and literature. Sliwinski, professor of experimental psychology, will talk about memory loss in old age from a psychological standpoint.

Kennedy, who has published three books of poetry, said he will read from and discuss an unfinished manuscript of the memoir about his mother. The memoir is a mix of prose and poems discussing his mother's memory loss. He said he found that writing about his mother's disease helped him deal with it.

When the disease first started to take hold of his mother, he said, it was sometimes hard for her to describe her location, because she simply couldn't remember where she was. She would simplify descriptions of places where she was with comparisons of other places she remembered.

"She talked in metaphor," Kennedy said. "So it was interesting for me, as a poet, to talk with her."

fahintz@syr.edu