For 25 years, Bellevue Literary Review has been publishing stories, essays, and poems that take readers into the shared space where art and medicine meet. Throughout our anniversary year, we’re marking this incredible milestone by inviting you on a journey through the BLR archive, from the beginning through the present.
Join us each week as we curate special highlights — stories, poems, photos, and more — from each of our issues.
About the Issue
Issue 36 featured the 2019 BLR Prizewinners, judged by Maud Casey, Elisabeth Rosenthal, and Jennifer Bartlett. It also included a Book Review Roundup, highlighting a quartet of debut poetry collections. Plus, the most spring-like cover in BLR‘s history!
From the Foreword
The BLR is no longer an experiment in publishing work at the intersection of literature and medicine. We’re proud that it has become an established literary journal. However, a journal is only as effective as the work in its pages, and we’re grateful for the many fine submissions we receive. Though we’re able to publish just a small fraction of them, we’re moved by the stories, essays, and poems that come our way. The subject matter of the submissions has changed over time, reflecting the changes in culture and society.
Our world has become increasingly dominated by social media, twenty-four-hour news cycles, random violence, and divisive political views. A literary journal is one of the few places a reader can turn to for creative, humane, and often lyrical perspectives on life. Literature can provide a refuge from current events and, at the same time, offer insights about the contemporary world. Great literature helps to bridge divides and connect reader to writer, person to person, in profound and meaningful ways. If we feel empathy for characters in stories or for narrators in poems and essays, and read about people with backgrounds different from ours, then we’re more likely to feel empathy for real people. At some point, all of us will become patients or family members of patients or grapple with unexpected events that alter our lives. Literature teaches us about life and emotions, can bring comfort and give us tools to help navigate our fast-paced, uncertain world.
– Ronna Wineberg, Contributing Fiction Editor
Read Highlights from Issue 36
Each week, we’ll be highlighting one outstanding story, poem, and essay from the featured issue. We encourage you to explore more from the issue on our website or, better yet, to pick up a copy!
The Kings of Gowanus
2019 Winner, Goldenberg Prize for Fiction
by Rae Meadows
Big Jim Sullivan was born in America, in Darby’s Patch, a squatter’s camp of dirt-floored, single-room shanties along the canal where hogs roamed the serpentine alleyways. When it rained, the canal flooded the slum.
“Stood on chairs,” he’d told his son Jimmy, “until the floor dried out.”
His parents had come from Derrymore in County Kerry, a village tucked between the green velvet Slieve Mish Mountains and the ocean. His father had been a fisherman. But in America, he peddled “fresh country milk” to the genteel in Brooklyn Heights from his sickly cow that ate from slop heaps and drank swill from a nearby distillery.
“When the city came, my mum stood in the doorway with an axe,” Big Jim had laughed. “They burned the house down around her.”
Jimmy took a shallow breath through his mouth as he stepped from the sagging cottage, the door clacking against its broken frame behind him. If the city wanted to burn down their house, he might go ahead and let them do it.
Harvest Moon
2019 Winner, Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction
by Julia Michie Bruckner
The September moon hovered, low and generous. Its light cut through the blinds and cast bright bars over the still child, his mother twisted around him.
The boy’s cheeks had the glow of alabaster, his under-eyes a violet translucence, his cracked lips a pallor. His fingers lay straight, with nails a seashell gray. A helium balloon drifted along the ceiling tiles, wrinkling.
Monitors surrounded the bed, with their green-glow flashes and red-blinking beeps, digits counting steadily downward. Tides of sterile saline entered his vein and traveled first to the heart, then to fingers and toes, then back heartward.
The breathing tube shone a lustrous blue, the moonlight catching its ridges as it curved between his lips. With each marching breath, the tube clouded, then cleared. Oxygen drawn in, carbon dioxide forced out. A measured rise of his chest – the essence of momentary endurance.
The boy’s mother lay in a heap of hands and hips, mountains surrounding a deep lake. Every so often she would tremble, quake, then wail.
Particle
2019 Winner, Marica and Jan Vilcek Prize for Poetry
by Jan Bottiglieri
like light is.
like my speckled skin: brim
and brink. verge.
that’s me: floating around with the light. little mote.
fluff uncoupled from the seed head: a blown wish:
stage one, stage two, buckle. glow. the doctor said more
like one-and-a-half. only particle.
Issue 36: The Cover
This issue of BLR featured artist Pamela Sztybel’s “Spring Garden” on the front cover. In the above photo, Pamela is shown holding the issue featuring her beautiful artwork, in an equally beautiful setting!
About the artist:
Pamela Sztybel has won fellowships to the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Vermont Studio Center and the Scuola Grafica in Venice, Italy. She has served on the board of the Vermont Studio Center and on the Art Collection Committee of the New School University. Sztybel has been a visiting artist at The American Academy in Rome, and a teacher at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica. She has taught at Connecticut College, West Liberty State College, Long Beach Island Foundation for the Arts, Claremont Graduate University and The Huntington Library. She has had solo shows in New York at Spanierman Gallery, Wickiser Gallery and Jill Newhouse Gallery.