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— Everything BLR. —
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Creativity in Medicine: Navigating Uncertainty through Art and Literature
Explore how poetry, stories, and visual art can help us make sense of medicine’s complexities in this new online class.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 22 highlights
A short history of nursing, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR featured on PBS News Hour’s CANVAS Series
Watch PBS News Hour’s Jeffrey Brown report on BLR’s 25th Anniversary, featuring BLR Editor Danielle Ofri and BLR writers reflecting on why poetry, storytelling, and writing matter, especially in moments of illness.
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What We’re Reading Now
Looking for your next literary escape? Here are some recommended reads from our editorial team.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 21 highlights
A look back to our 10th anniversary, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR BookTalk with Author Morgan Talty
Join us on June 11 for a live conversation as we dive into Morgan’s book Fire Exit, which was the inaugural selection for BLR’s new Book Club.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 20 highlights
A special dedication, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR Book Club | “Fire Exit” Week 7
In this final week of the BLR Book Club’s review of FIRE EXIT, the question of whether Charles will have a relationship with Elizabeth in the future persists.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 19 highlights
Early writing from two best-selling authors in the BLR community, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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— See what’s new with us at BLR. —
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 22 highlights
A short history of nursing, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
-
BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 21 highlights
A look back to our 10th anniversary, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
-
BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 20 highlights
A special dedication, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
-
BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 19 highlights
Early writing from two best-selling authors in the BLR community, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 18 highlights
The stories that stay with us, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR Spring Reading with Authors from Issue 50
Join us on May 28 to celebrate the launch of Issue 50. We’ll hear from the issue’s authors live as they share their stories, essays, and poems.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 17 highlights
The power of intimate storytelling, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 16 highlights
Stories, poems, and essays on the immense emotional landscape of illness, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 15 highlights
Thought-provoking reads on the vast range of abilities and disabilities, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 14 highlights
Throughout our 25th anniversary year, we’re marking this milestone by inviting you on a journey through the BLR archive, with special highlights — stories, poems, photos, and more — from each of our issues.
— Come join us, online, or in person. —
UPCOMING EVENTS
WATCH OUR PAST EVENTS
Mapping the Mind
Mapping the Mind — part of BLR’s Conversations on Creative Writing in Healthcare series — is a dynamic conversation about writing the inner life. With Susannah Cahalan, Damon Tweedy, Sarah LaBrie, and Danielle Ofri
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Writing the Body
Writing the Body — part of BLR’s Conversations on Creative Writing in Healthcare series — brings together four best-selling authors whose work confronts illness as it is lived in the body. With Porochista Khakpour, Meghan O’Rourke, Rebekah Taussig, and Danielle Ofri
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BLR Fall Reading: Animalia
Watch writers and poets read their works from BLR‘s Issue 49, ‘Animalia,’ as part of BLR‘s live, online fall reading.
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BLR Book Salon with Anne Fadiman
Watch our exclusive BLR Book Salon with renowned writer Anne Fadiman, author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.
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BLR SPRING READING 2025: WINNING WORDS
Watch a celebration of BLR‘s 48th issue and the winners of the 2025 BLR literary prizes. Featuring exciting new works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, plus interviews with our prizewinners.
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BLR BookTalk with Venita Blackburn
Watch acclaimed writer Venita Blackburn and BLR editor Suzanne McConnell’s conversation on Venita’s award-winning debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California.
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BLR Writing Webinar: The Book Doctors Are In!
Watch medical writers Danielle Ofri, Damon Tweedy, Esther Choo, and Perri Klass discuss writing, careers, and ethical dilemmas as part of our workshop series.
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Narrative Arc: The Journey from Writer to Reader
Watch Narrative Arc: The Journey from Writer to Reader, celebrating the unique relationship between the writers who bring words to the page and the readers who receive them.
— Read interviews with BLR authors, editors, readers, and more. —
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Interview: Lara Palmqvist
“The very idea that no story is final—be it the story of one’s own self, or the story of a nation—is ultimately something in which I find great hope.”
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Interview: Sabah Parsa
“Humor is the easiest for me to write in any piece, fiction or nonfiction.”
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Interview: Jack Coulehan
“Clinical care provides the subject matter for many of my poems, and some of the themes I explore in them…have driven a process of self-discovery that I think has made me a better doctor.”
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Interview: Meredith Talusan
Fiction allows me to further portray realities from perspectives outside the majority, not just at the level of my lived experience but in terms of a broad range of possible trans, BIPOC, immigrant, and disabled experiences.
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Interview: Manini Nayar
I rarely know how a story ends until I get there. A story has its own life, and I am immersed in it and on the margins at the same time, both participant and recorder.
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20th Anniversary Editorial Roundtable
In honor of BLR’s 20th anniversary, we’ve invited editors past and present to offer reflections on the BLR’s founding and its evolution over two decades of publishing.
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Interview: Julia Levine
I have loved the natural world since I was a small child and it is my inability to see it accurately that pains me.
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Interview: Nina Adel
Almost all of my work takes place in the realm of the hybrid… I myself am just a regular person and artist who finds rules very difficult to adhere to.
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Interview: Yalitza Ferreras
English has now become my primary language, although I experience it as a syllabic language, which I attribute to my brain being wired for Spanish.
— A new set of great reads with each click. Refresh for more. —
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fiction
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nonfiction
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poetry
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Storm Chasers
by Calvin Hennick. “During the week we have left in Hawaii, Liz occasionally mentions that maybe I should go back to the hospital to see my father, and I say no, and she says family is important, and then neither of us says anything for a while. My dad has managed to ruin the trip.”
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Plazoleta
by Eric Stener Carlson. “The ants climbed up the front of Macedonio’s sweater, circling the buttons. They arrived at Macedonio’s chest, interested in a yogurt stain. “
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Spectrum
by Ian MacLean. “In sleeping, Joseph’s eyes moved under their lids, as if he still searched the ward and the land out the window for phenomena. Planets churned in arcs and stars collapsed somewhere in that blackness, and he searched for this too, his eye movements aligning with the movement of heavenly bodies.”
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Winston Speaks
by Jill Caputo. “Winston sold candy at the bus station on Wednesdays because that was the only day Georgia could give him a ride there. He kept the goods in the pack on the back of his chair: Snickers, Milky Ways, Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, M&Ms, both peanut and plain…”
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The Hardest Parts
by Fernando Álvarez-Perez. “Victor has evaded physical activity with crafty excuses his whole life, but he decides that boxing could be an acceptable diversion. He doesn’t have to hit anyone. There’s something thrilling about hammering away at the heavy bag in a hot warehouse under industrial fans, the contented exhaustion after.”
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Housekeeping
by Ryan Pollard. “I was coasting along like every other rudderless late adolescent…My particular drift happened to be tied to a disability I had yet to face, and it would be a while still before I finally found my footing.”
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Thinking in Clichés
by Denitza Blagev. “After all the pain and blood, you almost begin to think of death as the next therapy, because that’s what it is, you realize. Death is part of the process.”
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The Little Things
by Joan Malerba-Foran. “I’ve never been what you would call a good sleeper. I make it through the night about twice a week, and those nights are never consecutive.”
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His Own Time
by John Thompson. “I did a little time once. It wasn’t a long bit, but that doesn’t matter much. Time is time.”
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Avtomat Kalashnikova
by Rachel Hall. “Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov wakes in gray light to the sounds of the injured soldiers in the cots beside him moaning, crying out.”
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How Air Moves
by Leslie Roberts. “Underneath is a body cast, my new ectoskeleton, my nautilus, crawled into, where I live now.”
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Radon Gas and the Believers
by Andrew C. Gottlieb. “But its impossible to go very far without seeing a sudden dark opening, the sloping, rotting framing of an abandoned mine entrance, or the colorful, dangerous scree sloping downhill: the remnant tailings from the ore processing that once happened here, spilling from a now filled-in shaft that one hundred years ago…
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The Only Fat Man in Lascahobas
by Evan Lyon. “Georges, the owner of St. Gabriel’s Funeral Enterprise, is the only fat man in Lascahobas.”
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The Father Shift
by Trish Travieso. “I was twenty-three years old the first time I saw my father wearing a dress.”
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Every Day Anew
by Pia Jee-Hae Baur. “I dislike switching doctors, primarily because every time I have to recount my medical history, I have to decide how much I should lie.”
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You Know What She Means
by Elizabeth Schultz. “And here is another thing you do not remember: your parents telling you that you have polio, and that they are taking you to St. Margaret’s Hospital in Northridge.”
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Flu Shot
by David Watts. “She stands in my examining room unable to sit, pacing, then stopping tensely, as if paralyzed by the urge to pace. Three times she has made this appointment, three times a no-show.”
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Cancer, So Far
by Elizabeth Crowell. “Last summer, the moths clung to the shingles of our house. They fluttered right past us, mottled wings snapping, through our open door.”
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Mental Health Days
by Sakena Jwan Washington. “With practiced pain, I delivered an Oscar-worthy performance of smiles and congratulations, and then escaped to the bathroom and sobbed until my eyes were bloodshot.”
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Subway Stories
by William Walker. “My son is a rule follower and rules generate endless questions, the answers to which often reflect the crushing reality that I cannot guarantee his safety, that there is an unsettling element of chance in a city of over eight million people.”
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Relic
by Stacy Nigliazzo. “Quietly, they concede, / leaving pennies / at your feet.”
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On Finding One Grey Pubic Hair Four Days Before My 48th Birthday
by Alison Townsend. “I didn’t know / one went grey down there too. / Hadn’t imagined / that even sex / might lose its color.”
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Luggage
by Ted Kooser. “I’ve given away the black Samsonite suitcase / that for thirty-five years enfolded my suits / like a wallet…”
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Lithium and the Absence of Desire
by Virginia Chase Sutton. “It is not advertised on the pill bottle, merely mentioned / in the product description from the drug store. / You have no idea what you are giving away.”
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The Christmas Patient
by John Kay. “Blood draws dissolve into Christmas lights, / veins dizzy with the latest medications.”
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A Spring Without Us
by Talia Bloch. “The playground has been locked for months. / A swing coughs dryly in the shade.”
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Papa (Bi-Polar) Bear
by Lila Dlaboha. “You didn’t come to bed until morning / You opened and closed doors all night / while I slept in the ambient soot…”
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Blind Choreography
by Susan Buis. “They told me that other senses / would rush in. Now the atmosphere / is shredded through trees, each / fragmented scented, audible.”
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The Oncologist
by Carole Stone. “Do you have an appetite? / No. / Are you anxious? Yes. / Irritable? Yes. / I hand in the questionnaire.”
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Telephone
by Judy Katz. “These days I think of you / on the yellow chaise / with your Parkinson’s / and hatred of telephones, / and make myself call.”
Polish it up, send it out! Opportunities from...
@iselemagazine
@narrativemag
@blreview - specifically for work (all genres) on the themes of health, illness, and healing (note the amazing judges!)
@fourwaybooks
@storybottleco
This week's featured issue — part of our 25th anniversary lookback— showcases winners of our annual contest and much more. The BLR Prizes for this issue were selected by judges Francine Prose, Cornelius Eady, and Susan Orlean.
https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-22-highlights