Issue 36 Foreword
Ronna Wineberg
Welcome to the 36th issue of the Bellevue Literary Review. The idea for the BLR took shape in 2000. We’ve been publishing the BLR for almost eighteen years—since the fall of 2001. At eighteen, a child becomes an adult in the United States. The journal is now entering its adulthood.
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.
Writing is done in solitude, and a journal provides an opportunity for a writer to become part of a literary community. Sometimes a writer’s first published piece appears in the BLR, giving the author new visibility. We include comments in a rejection if we feel the work is strong. Writers often email us in return, and we’re pleased to hear from them. We didn’t anticipate this kind of literary conversation when we created the journal or that publication in the BLR can give affirmation of a writer’s skills, sometimes when the person needs encouragement the most.
This issue showcases the winners of the Bellevue Literary Review Prizes, and these pieces provide a panorama of perspectives on life and illness.
“The Kings of Gowanus,” by Rae Meadows, winner of the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, is a powerful story about the difficult life of an impoverished twelve-year-old boy, his thirteen-year-old sister, and the day they watch their drunken Irish father fight. “Big Jim Sullivan had the fists of a giant and, when he was sober, he could take anyone… This fight, like all of them, would be a cross between an Irish Stand Down and a street fight. Knockout or death.”
In lyrical language, “Bird Season” by Daniela Garvue, which won Honorable Mention in Fiction, tells the story of a Nebraska man who has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The piece weaves the progression of his illness with his elegant observations about the migration of cranes.
Winner of the Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction, “Harvest Moon” by Julia Michie Bruckner, recounts a wrenching night when she was an exhausted resident in the hospital, caring for a brain-dead young boy connected to a ventilator. At the same time, she tried to help the mother say goodbye to him before the ventilator was removed and his organs donated.
In the Honorable Mention for Nonfiction, “Lone Wolf,” Ellen Gunnarsdottir takes us to Reykjavik, Iceland. Her grandfather was “the only doctor who did not see patients by appointment.” Instead, he embraced the chaos of his clinic. She writes of him when he’s at home and also when he’s at his office where she worked as a receptionist when she was fifteen. Though he was surrounded by patients, she realizes “…he was a lone wolf, the loneliest man I’d ever known.”
The Winner of the Marica and Jan Vilcek Prize for Poetry is “Particle” by Jan Bottiglieri. This elegant and spare poem captures a flicker of the experience of being examined for skin cancer. “stage one, stage two, buckle. glow. the doctor said more / like one-and-a half. only particle.”
“Dusk in Dupont Circle” by Martha Addy Young, won the Honorable Mention for Poetry. It beautifully portrays a heron snatching a bulging rat, and then the poet surprises the reader, moving from the reality of the heron to memories of the death of someone close to her. “‘It’s heavy,’ you cried, heaving yourself up, pushing/ out your arms to stop the fluid from filling your lungs.”
We’re pleased to include the moving essay “Touch,” by Stephanie Wu, a student at NYU School of Medicine. Students write essays as part of their medicine clerkship, which is one of the first intensive exposures to clinical medicine for the students. This essay—about her interactions with a patient who has lymphoma of the skin—won the Daniel Liebowitz Prize for Student Writing.
Many stories in this issue focus on families. “The Opioid Epidemic Handbook for Parents,” a striking piece by Jamie Zeppa, explores how parents deal with a daughter’s addiction; the story is structured in the form of an intake questionnaire for a treatment center. “The Awful Thing,” by Christina Robertson, finds humor and poignancy in the tale of two elderly Alzheimer’s patients who fall in love at the nursing home where they live. Their adult children and especially the man’s wife struggle to adjust to this new reality. In the lovely, touching “Emancipation” by Elizabeth Chase, a concerned mother debates how to step back but still help her seventeen-year-old son who wants autonomy but has been diagnosed with a devastating cancer. He tells her, “You can’t force me to do something I don’t want to do anymore, Mom. Wake up. Those days are over.”
The poems explore illness, aging, and also our contemporary world. Two poems—“100 Miles from the Mexican-American Border” by Kali Veach and “Frontier,” by Steven Cramer—depict the fraught experiences of immigrants at the border. “Untouchable” by Michelle Boland looks at aging’s inevitable effects on our bones: “What, in flowery youth/ seems resilient—evocative/ lines joined at erotic angles—/ whittles, become brittle.”
The book review, “Beginning in Devotion: Four First Books,” by Dante Di Stefano, is a round-up of debut poetry collections from BLR contributors, and he finds much to admire in these collections.
We’re grateful to the Goldenberg, Buckvar, Vilcek, and Oratz/Knapp families for generously sponsoring the Bellevue Literary Review Prizes, and also to this year’s contest judges, Maud Casey for fiction, Elisabeth Rosenthal for nonfiction, and Jennifer Bartlett for poetry.
The author Willa Cather wrote that fiction depends on “Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there… It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named…the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.” We hope the stories, essays, and poems in this issue of the BLR will transport you to places both named and unnamed, and give you a new understanding of life, other people, and our fluid world.