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Friday Find: Dispatch from Iowa City, A Guest Post by Ronald H. Lands, M.D., M.F.A.

by Erika Dreifus on
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Ron Lands has to be one of the most impressive (and modest) people I met in my M.F.A. program. So when I learned that Ron – who earned an M.D. well before he tackled the M.F.A. – was attending a two-day event on “The Examined Life: Writing and the Art of Medicine” at the University of Iowa’s Carver College at April’s end, I was eager to request a guest post. Ever generous, Ron agreed. Here’s his dispatch from the conference (you can learn more about this event, and check out the online archive, here).

“The Examined Life: Writing and the Art of Medicine”
University of Iowa, Carver College of Medicine
April 28-April 30, 2010

by Ron Lands

Medicine and literature often share the same topics; life and death, suffering and loss and everything in between. As they have every year since 2006, medical students, physicians, nurses, patients, and caregivers convened in a city known for its great writers, to collaborate regarding the power of writing in making sense of these grand themes and to demonstrate that the practice of medicine is an interpretive work.

A cardiologist put a human face on illness by blending his profession with his hobbies, interpreting the patient’s heart pathology by ultrasound then photographing the person in their home and writing poetry about the experience. An English professor wrote a play based on her personal experience with cancer and an actor interpreted and performed this dramatic work. Academicians shared tools and techniques to empower other educators to exploit the power of writing to cause reflection and nurture empathy in their students. Researchers presented data hoping to identify a physiologic link between writing and stress reduction in caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients. A literary scholar turned physician offered a powerful examination of metaphor in the language of pain. A leukemia patient and her hematologist shared their five-year journey from diagnosis to a durable and sustained remission, using essay, memoir and colored pencil sketches drawn during the trauma of her bone marrow transplant.

Flannery O’Connor, one of many great writers associated with Iowa City through the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, said, “I write to find out what I know.” “The Examined Life: Writing and the Art of Medicine,” further demonstrates the clarifying effect that reading, writing and reflection can bring to the chaos of illness for those who suffer and those who witness the suffering.

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Ronald H. Lands teaches in the Department of Medicine at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville campus, where he practices and teaches Internal Medicine, Hematology and Palliative Care. His fiction has appeared in New Millennium Writings, descant, Washington Square, and many others. He has published essays from the intersection of writing and medicine in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Annals of Internal Medicine, Journal of the American Geriatric Society, and the Journal of Palliative Medicine. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Friday Find: 92nd Street Y Virtual Poetry Center

by Erika Dreifus on
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Let me tell you, it’s tough enough for us New Yorkers to manage to attend even a fraction of the literary events in NYC. And we live here! Obviously, it’s much harder when you live elsewhere.

That’s why all of us should be grateful to this Virtual Poetry Center from the 92nd Street Y:

“In a renewed effort to share with a wider contemporary audience some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this page (to be regularly updated) features archival recordings by some of the best writers of our time.”

Caution: Some programs are available only in excerpted form. Still, the chance to watch/hear from Chinua Achebe, David Grossman, Cynthia Ozick, Frank McCourt, and so many other literary luminaries (poets and prose writers) is a sheer gift.

Have a great weekend, all. See you back here on Monday!

(cross-referenced as the “featured resource” in the May issue of The Practicing Writer, which will go out to subscribers today.)

Friday Find: 10 Questions to Ask an Agent Before You Sign

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

As Guide to Literary Agents blog contributor Felice Prager astutely notes, “Authors are often so excited about finding representation that they sign an agreement without knowing if the agent is an ideal match. In addition to agreement-specific issues regarding money and terms, there are other questions you should ask before you sign anything.” Here are Prager’s 10 such questions. I sure wish that I’d seen them before I signed with my first agent, a perfectly nice person but, as it turned out, “not quite right” for me.

Enjoy, and have a great weekend. See you back here on Monday!

Friday Find: Guide to Pronouncing Writers’ Names

by Erika Dreifus on
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I loved this post by Fiction Writers Review Editor-in-Chief Anne Stameshkin, linking to a most useful resource: a guide to pronouncing writers’ names. No longer must you wonder how to say “Michael Chabon” or “J.M. Coetzee”–or be (even unwittingly) embarrassed by your mispronunciations.

I’ve blogged before about the misspellings my name seems to inspire in print/online, but you might be surprised by the mispronunciations. Usually, it’s just my surname that causes problems: “DRAY-fus” or “DREE-fus” instead of “DRY-fus.” More astonishing, to me at least, is that sometimes a not-so-mellifluous “Eh-REEK-ah” precedes some version of the last name. Um, no. (I’ll just add that when a “DRAY-FOOS” [variable syllabic stress] comes from the vocal chords of a French-speaker, it’s never held against that person! When appropriate–and when I was doing dissertation research in Paris it was quite often appropriate–I’ve relied on such pronunciation myself.)

But my focus on the pronunciation of my own name means that I sometimes stumble over others’. I remember the first time I mentioned the name of New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman in front of a writer who actually knows her. “It’s TREEZ-man,” he said, icily.

While we’re on the subject of names, you may enjoy this post from my other blog, on author Allegra Goodman’s English and Hebrew bylines (and my own–sort of).

Have a great weekend, everyone. See you back here on Monday.