Category Archives: Writing Life

Restoration Row podcast features my essay “Plant Life”

Writing Life

I am honored that podcast Restoration Row will feature my essay “Plant Life” in its first season.

The episode airs Monday, May 7, with audio of the essay, followed by an interview with me, by podcast founder and host Uzochukwu Chima.

I profoundly agree with the podcast’s mission statement:
Restoration Row is a weekly podcast that explores the resilience of the human spirit through deeply personal stories shared by people from around the world. We hope after hearing each week’s story you become more convinced about the restorative power of love and human connection and that sometimes healing can be found in the most unexpected places. 
We believe that the world of healthcare today is lacking in real empathy and human connection. In this podcast, we explore the healing effects of empathy, love and human connection through amazing real life stories.

I’m back

Journalism, Writing Life

Hi, I’m back.

I apologize to my reader(s) for being absent so long. I thought I knew why I gave up this blog last fall – because I felt demeaned by the way a certain magazine changed a story of mine without asking.

But as I got over it, and sat down to restart this blog last weekend, a deep, paralyzing sadness came over me. What the hell? I thought.

So I dove into the emotional laboratory of my journal to place this feeling. And hey, it’s my old frenemy, helplessness, powerlessness, to help or save or protect something. I can’t protect my stories from careless or uncaring editors.

Well, so what? As a writer I should have thick skin. Why is this feeling paralyzing?

Oh, wait, right. I couldn’t protect Mama from herself. (I went into medicine to learn how to fool people like her into saving themselves. But I couldn’t save her.) I couldn’t keep her from crushing Daddy.

There was the patient I couldn’t save in med school because t I couldn’t make my residents listen. It’s still a heart-twisting memory. That failure to save someone who desperately needed help set off a crisis for me. It resolved in my med school senior thesis (a play I called “The Moment of Death: Or, How Your Doctor Got That Way.”)

Helplessness and I go way back.

Should I stop taking risks I can’t control the outcome of? No way.

Maybe I should send my stories out and trust them to take care of themselves. But they’re not just stories. I have a debt to the people who trusted me to tell their truth with actual facts. If the copy is wrong, I’ve betrayed them, by not being able to control the editorial process.

I can’t resolve this dilemma. But recognizing it helps. Here I am.

Science Writing Sinking: It’s Not Just Me

Journalism, Writing Life

Aha! Or rather, uh-oh. I’ve been writing about how hard it is being unable to write, but I just learned it’s not that I can’t write. The problem is that I can’t find anyone who’s listening. The problem is the writing economy. Especially the science-writing economy. I’m not alone in isolation, but that’s no consolation.

At The Open Notebook: The story behind the best science stories, freelance science writer Kendall Powell writes

[T]he collapse of print advertising, declining magazine subscriptions, the enormous availability of free content online … has writers of all kinds talking and writing about their job security fears and inability to make a living wage in journalism.

Continue reading Science Writing Sinking: It’s Not Just Me →