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conversations about medicine and life

Poetry

Speaking human

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Sue Wootton

National Poetry Day 2018Billed as a “one day extravaganza of poetry”, New Zealand’s National Poetry Day happens annually on the fourth Friday of August. Every year it seems to get a little stronger, a little more extravagant, with poetry-related events happening in communities all over the country – and beyond. This year, for example, Edinburgh, Berlin and Spain were also involved in celebrating the art of poetry Aotearoa-style.

One way or another, thousands of people from all walks of life were exposed to a dose of the poetry bug last Friday. I hope it’s contagious. I hope it spreads.

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A little book with big feathers: “Poems for a World Gone to Sh*t”

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Sue Wootton

Poems for a world gone to sh*t

‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul – ”       Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

I was browsing in the bookshop, and a book flew into my hands. It was called Poems for a World Gone to Sh*t.

A “world gone to sh*t” – that seems a fair diagnosis of the current age. And who can say they’re not to some degree infected by the hopelessness this tends to engender? It’s a widespread general malaise. But here in the bookshop this bold wee book fluttered in my palms. I opened it, and read the epigraph by Oscar Wilde:

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

It was my first inkling of why Poems for a World Gone to Sh*t had flown so urgently out of the shelves. It’s that fully-feathered thing, a book of hope. It deserves a perch in every human soul.

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“XYZ of Happiness”: C is for Harriet

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Mary McCallum

XYZ-of-Happiness-coverWe were a very new press, barely begun. The daughter of an old school friend had been diagnosed with cancer and was writing a blog. A bunch of us who’d been at school together began to read it. One of our group, illustrator Fifi Colston, sent me an email: ‘You could do worse than make a book about this.’ I agreed. This young woman knew how to write. Her blog posts had strong read-me titles and energetic don’t-argue-with-me first lines. They were focused on one event or idea and they told that story with economy and humour and knew where to end. She didn’t feel sorry for herself. She celebrated life. She often said how lucky she was.

Harriet came to meet with us – that’s me and my son and publishing sidekick Paul Stewart – in our shoebox office. This vibrant young woman with creamy skin and a red shiny coat that squeaked when she walked, who adored food – brownies, pizza – and friends and skiing, had osteosarcoma and things weren’t looking good, but she had an enormous love of life and capacity for hope. She was 19, after all. We talked about what a book would look like.
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Living in the A zone

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McMullan family Sunflower Judging Day
McMullan family Sunflower Judging Day

Kaitrin McMullan

When my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I had the good fortune, as a storyteller and dabbler in the arts, to be able to give up poorly-paid work and move into a kind of early retirement … albeit with an elderly dependent. Swapping poverty for poverty, not too hard! The rational was that we (my partner and I) would move in and care for Mum while her brain still lived at the same address as her body, in order to make the most of these precious years, much as some people decide to devote time to their children’s  early years, only in reverse. Luckily Mum’s disease has progressed very slowly and in a benign way, and we now find ourselves in a four-generation “compound” with family living next door and a rainbow gate connecting the two houses.

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Atlas – a literary medical journal

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Helen Ker

Atlas literary journalAtlas is a literary medical journal, published in print and sold in bookstores around New Zealand, that offers an alternative to the usual scientific discourse that surrounds our bodies. It hopes to shift medical conversations away from the rigid and prescriptive to a literary form that accommodates our human complexities.

I started Atlas in my third year of medical school because I was beginning to see that certain parts of the illness experience are missed through our predominantly scientific ways of theorising illness and treating people. I realised that this had the potential to undermine the quality of patient care because illness is far more than just a pathological process.

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