Bellevue Literary Review celebrates 25 years of stories on illness and recovery

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: Three doctors, two poets and a fiction writer walk into a windowless hospital conference room, not the start of a joke, but of a prestigious journal, “Bellevue Literary Review,” now celebrating its 25th anniversary.

Our senior arts correspondent, Jeffrey Brown, reports for our ongoing coverage of the intersection of health and arts, part of our Canvas series.

Woman: As it turned out, rehab centers like Young Stroke Survivors, they liven up the place.

Jeffrey Brown: On a recent afternoon, more than a dozen writers took to this stage.

Woman: We talked about suspicious rashes, aches and pains we were all afraid to tell anyone about.

Jeffrey Brown: Reading works on the themes of illness, recovery, and discovery.

Woman: The specialist’s recommendations were clear, removal of all the parts of me that made me, biologically at least, a woman.

Jeffrey Brown: The gathering, lunch, and literature at New York City Winery was a collaboration between the nonprofit Writers Read and “Bellevue Literary Review.”

Dr. Danielle Ofri, Founding Editor in Chief, “Bellevue Literary Review”: The medical system beckons. It’s safe. We will guide your child across the glass bridge, but your eyes and your emotions, they see only the abyss.

Jeffrey Brown: Dr. Danielle Ofri is the founding editor in chief of “BLR,” as it’s known, and was a contributor to this event timed to celebrate its quarter-century anniversary.

Dr. Danielle Ofri: There’s lots of writing about health out there, but most of it is very prescriptive, top 10 tips for your asthma or diabetes.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

Dr. Danielle Ofri: But not a lot dealing with what it feels like to be ill.

Jeffrey Brown: The experience.

Dr. Danielle Ofri: The vulnerability of illness is so intense and universal.

Jeffrey Brown: Ofri is a clinical professor of medicine at NYU and attending physician at Bellevue, a large public safety net hospital in Manhattan. And it was here that she and colleagues first had the idea to start a small informal collection of writing.

Dr. Danielle Ofri: We took out a one-line call for submissions, poetry, fiction, nonfiction about health, illness, and healing. And we got 1,000 submissions in the first just couple of weeks. Like, it just poured in. This was paper submissions. And…

Jeffrey Brown: This surprised you?

Dr. Danielle Ofri: It surprised me, but didn’t surprise me, because I think that our medical system does not deal with an entire aspect of what it means to be ill, to go from the sort of land of the healthy to the land of the sick. That whole journey, we don’t talk about that at all.

Jeffrey Brown: Many years and 50 issues later, it’s an unlikely literary success, publishing short stories, poetry, and essays by a wide range of contributors, medical practitioners, and others, including work by then-emerging writers like Celeste Ng.

The journal has also grown into a larger literary arts organization with events, writing workshops and more.

Siobhan McKenna, Contributor, “Bellevue Literary Review”: Writing enabled me to take a step back from the nursing and process.

Jeffrey Brown: Siobhan McKenna, who worked as a traveling nurse during the COVID pandemic, was published by “BLR” in 2024, writing of her experience caring for people at the end of life.

Siobhan McKenna: Growing up, I had a lot of anxieties about death and dying and I wanted to be able to face that in a really intimate manner and see that process and demystify it a little bit.

Jeffrey Brown: What does the writing do for you?

Siobhan McKenna: The writing allows me to see the humanity in my patients, because when you’re in an ICU or even in an outpatient clinic, you’re not always able to take the time you need to reflect on the patient as also a person in that moment. So writing allows me to process those emotions and feel what I couldn’t necessarily feel in real time.

Jeffrey Brown: There is, of course, a grand tradition of doctor writers that includes Russian playwright Anton Chekhov and American poet William Carlos Williams.

Dr. Oliver Sacks, Novelist: I’m addicted to patients. I can’t do without them.

Jeffrey Brown: More recently, Oliver Sacks and novelist and memoirist Abraham Verghese. At the recent reading, pediatrician Vidya Viswanathan wrote of her experience as a doctor parent.

Dr. Vidya Viswanathan, Contributor, “Bellevue Literary Review”: To her, a button battery was just another toy, not poison. But the pediatrician in me screamed, you’re losing time. The thought of the battery burning through Laka’s (ph) esophagus was paralyzing.

Jeffrey Brown: She says storytelling is intercultural her job as a physician.

Dr. Vidya Viswanathan: A big part of it is learning how to listen and how to make a space where a patient feels comfortable sharing their story. So if I come in the room and I’m not approachable and I’m not ready to listen, then I might miss a big part of what could lead me to the right diagnosis.

So in many ways, the storytelling of the parent or the child is as important as the work I’m doing in managing their condition.

Jeffrey Brown: “BLR” has also been a home for all who interact with the medical system.

Rebecca Dimyan, Contributor, “Bellevue Literary Review”: I remember the chronically ill mother I wasn’t ready to become.

Jeffrey Brown: Rebecca Dimyan is author of “Chronic,” a memoir about her experience with endometriosis, a chronic disease that can cause severe pelvic pain during periods.

Rebecca Dimyan: It’s a very personal, like, intimate thing to write about illness, to write about pain, to write about emotions. Even though they’re oftentimes experienced by other people, it’s still kind of an uncomfortable topic.

But it started with a few little essays that I had published here and there. And people would reach out and they would send me e-mails, and they’d be like, “I’m so glad you wrote about this.” So, even though I might be reluctant, it’s something that I feel better about once I talk to other people and they come up and they share their own experiences.

Jeffrey Brown: Does the writing about it end up helping you as doctor or me as patient, or is it about processing the experience?

Dr. Danielle Ofri: All of the above. The experience of people who write, for sure, they find that grappling on the page with this is very helpful for them to sort out their experiences. But then people read and say, oh, that’s what I experienced or that’s how I was feeling.

Jeffrey Brown: From its origins in a windowless hospital conference room, “BLR” now receives some 5,000 submissions a year.

Danielle Ofri says there’s plenty of writing yet to be shared.

Dr. Danielle Ofri: Illness never goes out of style. There’s always a new set of people getting sick and dealing with those same diseases again. Cancer is new for every single person, right? And every new medical student, every new nursing student who faces their first patient who dies is grappling with that.

So it’s always there.

Jeffrey Brown: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at Bellevue Hospital in New York.