Literature & Medicine Humanities at the Heart of Health Care®
Synapse ::: Winter 2004/05 ::: Volume I, Number 2
Literature & Medicine: From the Inside Out
Interview with Veneta Masson :::
bio, by Jolynn Tumolo :::
bio
Jolynn Tumolo, senior associate editor of ADVANCE for Nurse Practitioners, recently had the opportunity to speak with Veneta Masson, a family nurse practitioner who lives in Washington, D.C. Her collection of poetry, Rehab at the Florida Avenue Grill, a popular book in the Literature & Medicine program, (Sage Femme Press, 1999), is based on the 17 years she worked at Community Medical Care, a small, inner-city clinic she helped found in Washington, D.C. Masson is also the author of the book Ninth Street Notebook-Voice of a Nurse in the City (Sage Femme Press, 2001), which received a 2001 Book of the Year award from the American Journal of Nursing.
"Poetry Is Where My Heart Is"
An Interview with Veneta Masson
JT: How did the reading of creative literature affect your career as a health care provider?
VM: Reading connected me with the inherent soulfulness of the work we do. It’s easy to lose that in a clinic setting where you have 15-minute slots to address the entire life of a human being. Reading literature-fiction and memoir and poetry — lets you know that you are not alone. You are in a community of people who have explored the kind of situations that you find yourself in, and that can mean a tremendous amount.
One of the books that has really fed me is Intoxicated by My Illness and Other Writings on Life and Death by Anatole Broyard. Broyard was a literary critic who was diagnosed with cancer. He had a lot to say not only about his illness but also on messages that are good medicine for health workers, such as “A hospital is full of wonderful and terrible stories, and if I were a doctor, I would read them as one reads good fiction and let them educate me.”
Messages like that, especially when you are in practice and working every day, make you think. If you’ve lost the heart-to-heart connection with patients, it will jerk you back like a cardioversion.
JT: What other writers or books have influenced you?
VM: I’ve found such sustenance in Between the Heartbeats: Poetry and Prose by Nurses and Intensive Care: More Poetry & Prose by Nurses, edited by Cortney Davis and Judy Schaefer. Also Rachel Naomi Remen’s Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal.
As far as periodicals, I like the Bellevue Literary Review coming out of Bellevue Hospital. The contributors write out of that radical intimacy that one is party to when in a health and healing crisis.
Jane Kenyon’s poetry has meant a whole lot to me. She had a lifelong struggle with depression and died in her prime of leukemia. I also enjoy David Hilfiker’s writing. He’s a physician and friend who worked in a clinic similar to mine in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is Not All of Us Are Saints, meaning that people who work in nonprofit clinics in the inner city get a reputation as being zealots or saints, and that isn’t necessarily true. The way he writes out of his experience has been important to me, too.
JT: When did you begin writing?
VM: I’m envious of people who say they started writing in childhood. I wrote one poem at age 6, and that was it. In my 20s, I wrote a few things — love poems and the kind of things you write when you’re filled with the angst of young adulthood.
In the 1980s, I started keeping a journal that came out of my work at Community Medical Care — that’s the seedbed for what I write now. The journal is filled with a lot of free association and dumping of experiences that were too heavy or too hot to hold at the time. Months or years later, I went back to those experiences and was able to shape them into poems.
JT: That reminds me of your poem, "Occupational Therapy." You describe feelings of anger and grief caused by the death of a patient, then calm yourself with the thought that maybe some day you’d write a poem about her.
VM: Exactly, and I ended up writing several poems about her. I’ve handled experiences in my own life that way, too. The loss of my younger sister to breast cancer while she was in her prime triggered a whole collection of poems, some of which still aren’t done.
JT: Do you still write in your journal?
VM: Yes, although my journal writing is very different now. A lot of it is sketching or cut-and-paste — it’s more visual than it once was. I’ll write little phrases here and there, but I typically don’t write long narratives anymore. But sometimes the poetry that I write doesn’t necessarily go to the journal first, like it used to. It starts as a rough draft of a poem, and it may or may not come alive in time. Some of those rough drafts remain just that, and others get worked over. For me, a poem is a process, and it takes weeks or months or even years to finish. Just like knitting, you pick it up and put it down, pick it up and put it down, pull it out, unravel it, and then put it together a different way.
JT: There’s a lot of sadness in Rehab at the Florida Avenue Grill, but at the same time, there’s also an appreciation for the human spirit, surprise and whimsy, such as the man you wrote about in "Morning Report." Is that poem based on an actual event?
VM: What it’s actually based on is a wet girdle. [laughs] It takes place during my first year or two of nursing, back in the days before pantyhose, when women, no matter their size, wore a girdle and hose. I had rinsed out my girdle at night, and it wasn’t dry in the morning. I put it on anyway, and I remember standing at morning report in this wet girdle, just feeling overwhelmed by what lay ahead of me that day. The man I write about in the poem is so real to me now. But I can’t identify in real life that particular situation in that way. It just came along with the memory of that morning. It must have happened, but I can’t swear that it did. Most of the people in my poems are based largely on real people. But when I read that poem, I think of the wet girdle, and what it felt like to be a novice and not have any confidence that you were going to make it through a day.
JT: How would you describe your work?
VM: I think of it as healing art. Healing both to me and, I hope, to those who read it.
JT: Do you have a favorite poem or passage that you’ve written?
VM: They are all children to me. I love each of them in their own way, but there is one that expresses a lot to me. It’s called “Poem of the Week,”and I wrote it during the time my sister was alive. When I could no longer talk to her about things that were going on with her illness and her life, I’d send a poem that said what I couldn’t say. We got to joking about “the poem of the week” that I would send. The last stanza says, "For in trouble/the poem is strong medicine/like the wind that blows/where it wills,/like the serpent of brass/set upon a pole/in the wilderness."
The idea is that in times of trouble, the poem is strong medicine. I’ve used that poem a lot in trying to connect both with people who have health problems and might benefit from a poem of the week and those who are giving care at such times. For us, the poem of the week can be strong medicine, too.
JT: Have you published that poem?
VM: It appeared in more than one place, but the first was in a book called The Cancer Poetry Project: Poems by Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them, edited by Karin B. Miller.
JT: Why did you decide to leave the clinical setting?
VM: It wasn’t a conscious decision. When I left, it was a self-sponsored sabbatical. I think it had something to do with recovering from my sister’s death and taking a break from my work in women’s health care. That was a wild combination — during the three years of her illness, I was working in women’s health and was doing a fair amount of diagnosis of breast cancer. That was rough. I also realized I wanted to put together these two books (Rehab at the Florida Avenue Grill and Ninth Street Notebook), which came out in 1999 and 2001. And as I did that, I started out on another path.
It would be hard for me to go back to standard practice as I once knew it. I’ve had a crisis of faith in some aspects of health care. For now, I feel drawn to the area where health care and humanities come together. To be able to speak about it and to contribute to it is important to me. I feel like I am on a different path now. Who knows, some paths lead you back to where you were, and some paths don’t.
JT: You’ve written and published books in both poetry and prose — do you prefer one form of writing over the other?
VM: In my heart, it’s poetry that
gets to the deepest place, but I also like essays. I’ve written maybe
two short stories in my life, I don’t think that’s my medium. I’ve never
even considered writing a novel. Poetry is where my heart is.
To read Veneta Masson’s poem, “Poem of the Week”, please click here. A video clip of “The Arithmetic of Nurses,” a poem from her collection Rehab at the Florida Avenue Grill, can be viewed by clicking here.
Is there a Literature & Medicine author that you would like us to feature? Please let us know! Email Lizz Sinclair.