Fade to Quiet

" . . . dismiss whatever insults your own soul"                                                --Walt Whitman I often hear people mention that "a lot of doctors are poets." The list begins confidently with William Carlos Williams. It often ends there. My interest in Narrative Medicine moves from another list, the list of doctors who never wrote poems. At the top of this list is my father, an endocrinologist, a Fellow of The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons. My father is a brilliant physician. His patients adore him. Though he is retired a decade now, his patients friend me on Facebook to ask me how he is feeling.  We don't often ask how doctors are feeling. More often we accuse them of not feeling . While my father is in assisted living in Sedona, we talk often about Narrative Medicine, me as the poet, he as the doctor. To summarily arc his career: he started in research and was happy there, teaching and discovering insulin's effect on adipos

I arrived in Denver late at night, having flown across the U.S. losing hours along the way. Stella was four months. Her father and I had just ended it. I’d flown to Denver to spend Thanksgiving with my best high school friend, Audrey. Audrey’d said she’d leave the key under a flower pot on the front porch and would come back from Boulder in the morning, where she was presenting a paper on Kerouac. There was a snowstorm. She didn’t want to drive. The key, though, froze into the ice that gathers between the holes at the bottom of a flower pot so when I knelt (with my baby in a Snuggie inside my corduroy coat) to pick it up and feel around on the cold wood for the metal key I didn’t feel anything. I checked the flower pots on the steps and saw one at the far end of the front porch. When I lifted each of these, I moved my hand around on the snow planning to find that metal shape. I removed my gloves and felt the snow gathered under each one burn my fingertips. I carried

In thinking about patient narratives in healthcare, I think of my father's patient who had played the munchkin who hands Dorothy flowers in Wizard of Oz. One of the few munchkins with speaking lines, he was also one of the few of my father's thousands of patients whose story flowed over into my life. I think of the countless others, the faces in the shadowy rooms he visited "on rounds," (I sometimes went with him when I went to the hospital instead of walking home.) If I think of hospitals as libraries of human stories, with some of the books with spines broken open and others barely browsed, then Mr. Cucksey was fully made into his own feature film. He was practically a part of our family, a mysterious circus and movie star uncle,  though I only met him once. Mr. Cucksey lived in a community for the retired performers in Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus in Sarasota, Florida. His mobile home was connected by a small bridge with a bell on it to his wi

The other day I was listening to my playlist.  Vivaldi's Four Seasons came on and every note sounded so flat that if it weren't for the rhythm I wouldn't have known what it was. I couldn't over-ride it with imagination. I couldn't correct it by adjusting my hearing aids. This means I have to go back to the audiologist and get my ears tested in the dark little booth. Clinically, it means my hearing has declined considerably. Aesthetically, it means I have lost Vivaldi. I have been listening to Vivaldi all my life. I know the Quattro Stagioni like I know the lullabies my grandmother sang to me and which I have sung to my daughter. I know them like I know Beatles songs. Hearing aids are digital denial. They delay the actuality of deafness. Mine are excellent, and when I get them adjusted, I will hear Vivaldi again and enjoy that illusion that I can hear. However, here at the middle moment between technological cover-up and neurological over-ride, my degenerati

Back in the 90s I taught at the Juvenile Evaluation Center out in Black Mountain. My students were teenagers locked up for anything ranging from possession of marijuana to sexual assault to assault with a deadly weapon. All my students were working on a GED so they could get out before they turned 18. All had committed their crimes while high. All were in drug programs at the center--all in recovery and trying to see a new life. It is illegal for me to write their names, but trust me when I say I know their names, and I know their stories, and I know what they dreamed of getting for Christmas. I wheeled a piano out of a broom closet and played music on it while they did math. Some of them learned by ear and played for the others. I taught them equally, and I cheered them on. Next to my desk I had a yellow chair where any student could choose to sit if they needed to "chill out" and not be bothered or asked any questions. It was a place of sanctuary within an otherwise

As I begin a new school year, I think of the teacher who taught me how to teach. Marianne Weaver. The entire educational universe would be a different place if everyone could learn how to teach from Marianne Weaver. In every subject. In every institution. At every grade level. Marianne Weaver is that excellent a teacher. I first stepped into Marianne's Muscle Pump class at the YMCA a year after I gave birth. I had never lifted weights before in my life, having gone the yoga road through my twenties and early thirties but now suddenly completely uninterested in yoga. I wanted something else. Something tougher. Something that didn't ask me to develop an inner life. If there's anything I'd had enough of in that first year of motherhood, it was interiority, connection with my soul. I wanted pure, unadulterated body. When I walked past Marianne's class and heard "Modern English" singing "I'll Stop the World and Melt with You" over a roo

I saw Dead Poets Society in a theater in Piccadilly Circus in 1989. At the time I was a junior in college, studying theater, literature, and philosophy. My walks to class included passing by the former homes of T.S. Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and Sarah Bernhardt, mirroring my own passions, my own indecisiveness of what I should focus upon. I was acting in a play in a small South Kensington theater, but I was waking up at 3 am with a head full of poems that I'd crawl out my window and write by the streetlamps along Queens Gate Terrace, careful not to wake my room-mates.  One evening after rehearsal, my director and fellow castmates decided to venture into town to watch a movie. I hadn't ever asked myself what poetry was or considered it to be something of a great gift. I had written it forever and belonged to it and loved it as one feels love for something always there yet forever surprising. But I walked out of the movie with a very clear view of what I would devote m

As Thomas Wolfe becomes increasingly famous, again, and as Asheville rises with the Wolfean tide, again, here are some responses to the question, "Have you read Wolfe?" that won't make you sound like an idiot, even if you don't read Wolfe. The key here is to avoid saying, "His sentences are too long." 10. The Planned Engagement: Like a lot of people of my generation, I haven't come across much Wolfe. I plan to pick up a copy of the short stories. Do you have a favorite? 9. The Deflection: Oh, you like Wolfe! You can tour his house here! It's just over there on Market Street. You can also stand in his shoes. They've been bronzed! 8. The Shut Down: I have indeed! I've read every word, and the journals, and the letters, as well as multiple published versions of Look Homeward, Angel. I found O Lost to be much more satsifying and loved reading the two side by side, highlighting the altered passages. My dream is to spend a summer thumbi

THE RISE OF VALERIE MACON (to the tune of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald") The legend lives on from the Catawba on down, Of the poet named laureate by McCrory, Folks said O Brother. No one had heard of her, Not a song, a poem, or story. Of the governor and crew, none of them knew Anyone reads this weird stuff they called poetry. The post it was said was every bit as good as dead, And he appointed a woman named Valerie. (slide guitar in mournful sea chanty moan of Lake Superior) The Laurel is the pride of the Creative side, For whom the work of the words is of value. The craft of the verse seems obsessive at first But like love it serves to enthrall you. And from Valerie’s pen flowed the truth of men In lines that felt as they fell like renewal. This was the gift of the poetic shift, A storm in the soul that will call you. (slide guitar in mournful sea chanty moan of Lake Superior) When the press release came, the voices were

                                    for James Shaver I want to live every moment as a promise unbroken and flowing to my grandfather who when we walked to water pump In the park in Orillia looked up and announced in his French Canadian ancestry, “Quelle mélange de couleur” and I asked him what he’d said and he, being deaf and understanding the question to mean I hadn’t heard him, repeated it en Francais and I somehow understood him the second time and didn’t need to hear it the third. Language is its own water underneath the earth of thought. From his deafness, now my deafness, he only spoke to illuminate, to magnify some lost treasure the rest of us were missing. Family arguments died under the blade of a Shakespeare quote. Rough waters calmed. “You going to be a poet, pet?” he asked as we clipped the wet laundry onto the line between their cottage and the next. There was only one correct answer and I said it, cool cotton heavy in my hands on

Last February I attended the Columbia University Narrative Medicine workshop led by Dr. Rita Charon and the remarkable faculty of the Columbia Program in Narrative Medicine. I had heard about Narrative Medicine while showing a Lee Gutkind video to my Creative Nonfiction students at The Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative at Lenoir-Rhyne, the M.A. program I direct and get to see unfold. Gutkind was listing the subgenres and applications of CNF. When he said "Narrative Medicine," I knew I'd found my next fascination. In Narrative Medicine, care providers develop narrative competence, the ability to recognize, interpret, metabolize, and be moved by stories. Be moved by stories. Something happens when a group of people get together and close-read a story or a poem. It isn't a book club, though book clubs are awesome. It isn't a class, though classes are awesome. It is a community moment, one where strangers move through an experience together and are transfor