Review – Page 7

‘Withstanding’ by Helen Jacobs

5 December 2016 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

At almost 90, Christchurch poet, lifelong environmentalist, tramper and gardener, and former Eastbourne mayor Elaine Jakobsson (pen name Helen Jacobs) has published a new poetry collection with the wonderful title Withstanding.

There are a multitude of ways to stand, all of which nourish the theme of the collection: age. Withstanding takes a clear-eyed look at the joys and difficulties of standing up, standing down, standing with, standing for, taking a stand, longstanding, understanding and, most of all, how to stand it.

Writing poems, for me, is a way of thinking about my life and interpreting it, summarising it, and as I age so my poetry takes on different themes, which might or might not be relevant to others who are also aging … I am always delighted when others find something in them.” Elaine Jakobsson (aka Helen Jacobs)

Cancer and all the other shit

5 September 2016 Leave a Comment

Mary McCallum and Lauren Wepa

Talking about cancer is tough and will test you. However talking is one of the small things that helps us feel normal—whatever that is.”

Lauren Wepa was 20 when she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Cancer and all the other shit is the book she wrote to help people who don’t have cancer keep talking to people who do.

Mary McCallum interviews Lauren Wepa:

Cancer and all the other shit is a bitter, angry-sounding title. Is it a bitter, angry book?

I guess for some people it may come across like that but if you relate it back to the primary target audience (young people with cancer), that’s just how we describe a really dumb, unfortunate and not fun situation. And cancer can cause quite a bit of frustration, especially when there is a breakdown in communication between the patient and his or her family and friends. The aim of the title was not to scare people off but make them chuckle on the inside and make them want to read more. I’ve had a lot of positive feedback about that title, because that’s what cancer is, shit. [Read more…] about Cancer and all the other shit

Creative Spaces in the Community: ‘Artsenta: the First 30 Years’

22 August 2016 3 Comments

Barbara Brookes

Artsenta: the First 30 Years by Kath Beattie

We are often oblivious to the health initiatives taking place in our communities. This came home to me forcefully while reading the recently published history of Artsenta, a Dunedin-based supportive art studio which started life at Cherry Farm Psychiatric Hospital in the 1980s. Artsenta was the initiative of Dr Julia Aranui-Faed, and grounded in her belief that creativity is integral to well-being. Artsenta: the First 30 Years charts the evolution of this idea in practice, an idea whose philosophy is well-expressed by long-time Artsenta staff member Heather Martin:

… to focus on art and the well bit inside everyone”. [Read more…] about Creative Spaces in the Community: ‘Artsenta: the First 30 Years’

4 doctor writers: Oliver Sacks, Paul Kalanithi, Gavin Francis and David Galler

8 August 2016 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

There is a long and noble tradition of doctors who write about medicine. The best of this writing brings to the page powerful insights about what it means to be a human being—the kind of insights that are sparked when the steel of medical science is struck by the flint of medicine’s art. Language is one of the key medical arts, and memoir and essays make wonderful genres for the development of such sparks.

The Case of the Missing Body

18 July 2016 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

The language of the body is amazing… I couldn’t hear it but the physiotherapist could.” Jenny Powell

Like the ‘disembodied lady’ described by Oliver Sacks, poet and teacher Jenny Powell has lived her life without a sense of body. Confused and frustrated by her inability to feel connected to her joints and her movements, she started to investigate, piecing together a comprehensive picture of her condition. The result is a fascinating and informative book: The Case of the Missing Body (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2016)

Suffering patient, suffering doctor

30 May 2016 2 Comments

Seething in the Gordian knot: a view of 2015’s Man Booker-nominated novel, A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara.

Sue Wootton

A Little Life is a big book, a hefty tome of over 700 pages. But the length is important, because this is a story about pain, and stories about pain take time. What doctor hasn’t felt the competing pressures of already running late, an ever-filling waiting room, and the current patient just beginning to find a way to explain what hurts? Yanagihara gives Jude St Francis, her main character, plenty of time. Page by page, the reader enters an increasingly privileged relationship with this injured man. Very gradually we begin to understand that not only does Jude have wounds, he is a wound. Worse, he is a wound that cannot heal. The reader’s deepening access, over time, to Jude’s ‘little life’ (past and present) thus parallels the position of a doctor in a long-term doctor-patient relationship—except that as a reader it’s possible to put the book down for a while and take a break from the relentless suffering it describes. [Read more…] about Suffering patient, suffering doctor