Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Poetry and medicine

19 February 2018 Leave a Comment

Emma Storr

The practice of medicine is very demanding emotionally, whatever specialty you are in. Writing, for me, is way of processing that emotion, and often also trying to distill a particular interaction with a particular individual while also saying something about the everyday human experience of illness, vulnerability and joy. It’s a way of thinking out loud and responding to my experience in a creative way.

I love trying to craft a piece of writing by choosing the right words and, in the case of poetry, shaping the poem on the page. I am also in awe of the human body and brain. Writing gives me a way to explore the mystery of the way we function mentally and physically at a lot of different levels. It keeps me learning. I like the way that poetry allows an opening of our senses and blurs the artificial divide between art and science. [Read more…] about Poetry and medicine

The therapeutic art of weeding

19 February 2018 4 Comments

Lorraine Ritchie

Weeding is the unglamorous part of gardening. It doesn’t produce anything, Rather, it un-produces. Weeding makes things disappear, dissolve. Weeds do not end up in vases on the table to add colour and fragrance to the household, and weeders do not get their own columns in the daily papers and magazines. But, believe me, weeding is good for your health, especially if you derive the same level of satisfaction as I do from pulling, tugging and digging them out on a regular basis. Both physical and mental health is well served here.

Moments of magnitude

19 February 2018 2 Comments

Sandra Arnold

4 September, 2010. 4.35 am. Wild horses stampede through my dreams. The earth trembles beneath their feet. The earth is shaking, cracking. Imploding. A plane is plummeting from the sky.

Chris’s voice above the din: “What the hell…?”

Then we’re lurching across the floor. Switch on the light. Nothing. Pitch black night. A giant fist picks up the house and slams it back down. And throws it sideways. The floor, the walls are rattling. Glass shattering. A vortex of sound fills every room. The dog! Get under the bed! But the dog! Bookcases are falling. The earth is heaving. Here. Now. Under us. This is it. We know it now. The Big One. [Read more…] about Moments of magnitude

A scoop of chips and a pinch of enlightenment

12 February 2018 4 Comments

Annette Rose

In my humble suburb there is a chippery. In fact, a more humble chippery couldn’t be found: a simple roughcast building with a slop of paint applied to its walls and only an ‘A’ certificate to reassure customers it’s safe to eat there. It’s nearing lunch time and I’m feeling a mite peckish. The chip man springs to attention behind the counter as if expecting me.

“I saw you coming,” he says.

“A scoop of chips, please,” I say, and hand over my two dollars.

His face lights up as if my order is a big one, not a tiny little one. As soon as the chips hit the singing fat he starts telling me a story, not a story to stimulate the appetite, mind, but one to cast a spell …

Firewood: it warms you more than once

12 February 2018 Leave a Comment

Pat White

There’s an old saying about firewood:

It warms you more than once.”

Maybe even three times, or nine, depending on how you count it. A tree has to be cut. Next it may have to be shifted, or cut into lengths for splitting. The lengths have to be stacked somewhere, before the splitting axe is brought into action. Once splitting is finished the firewood has to be stacked again and stored somewhere dry to wait for burning. When days are cold, wet or frosty during the winter months, loads of firewood will be taken from their shed to the fireside. Only then does the burning wood in the grate provide warmth to all. In the meantime, those people involved in the gathering process have managed to be warmed several times over.

“Undying: A Love Story” by Michel Faber

12 February 2018 1 Comment

Sue Wootton

Michel Faber is the award-winning author of several novels and collections of short stories, among them The Crimson Petal and the White, Under the Skin and The Book of Strange New Things. Born in 1960 in the Netherlands, Faber’s family migrated to Australia in 1967 where he was educated and for many years worked as a nurse. Faber now lives and writes in the Scottish Highlands.

In 2014 his wife, Eva Youren, died from multiple myeloma. Undying: A Love Story is a collection of poems that chronicles Faber’s grief. He wrote two of the poems while Eva was very ill, and most of the rest on the other side of her death, in the strange new world of bereavement – “a world”, he writes, “that did not have my dearest friend in it”.

I hadn’t known such need for poetry before. I wish I’d lived into my nineties, with Eva at my side, and never written these things.”