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
While the daily dramas of pneumonias, heart attacks, and cancers played out in real time down the hall of the Bellevue Hospital, three doctors, two poets, and one fiction writer came together in a conference room to discuss how these human stories might inspire a literary journal.
The first issue of Bellevue Literary Review was published on September 17, 2001, and our memories of that time are inextricably linked to 9/11. BLR’s long-planned inaugural reading was scheduled for the first week in October, and certainly no one in New York City, or in the country, was in a celebratory mood.
When the first American bombs dropped in Afghanistan several hours before the reading was scheduled to begin, we thought for sure that no one would show, but more than 100 people came to Bellevue Hospital for BLR‘s reading. All filed past the posters of the missing people, still plastered along the entryway, to the rotunda of a city hospital to hear poetry and literature read aloud. Hospitals have always been sites of vulnerability, human experience, and emotion. That night was no exception.
From the Foreword
“At the first writer’s conference I’d ever attended, the keynote panel discussed ‘inspiration.’ Speaker after speaker lamented the difficulties of generating ideas for stories and offered various techniques and strategies. It’s so simple, I wanted to call out, just come to Bellevue. Every day is another tour through humanity.
If great literature arises from an unflinching examination of the tender underbelly of human existence, then a literary journal is a natural development for an institution such as Bellevue; its halls have witnessed two and a half centuries of human drama. Bellevue Literary Review was created as a forum for examining the human condition through the prism of health and healing, illness and disease, and relationships to the body and mind.”
Photos from BLR’s Issue 1 Launch, October 2001
Read Highlights from Issue 1
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!
Cousin Esther Goes To Chicago
by Cori Baill
That sure was a nice send-off you had for your cousin Esther. There was no one there who had a bad word to say about her, but there sure was lots and lots of talking….
Here I go all off track before I even start to tell you what I wanted to say. It’s been kind of busy since Esther’s funeral so it’s already taken me too long to sit down and write. I wanted to tell you just how it was down there at the hospital. I was there, you know, when she was so real bad sick. You’re her close kin and all, but I was there almost every day on account of my job.
How Air Moves
by Leslie Roberts
I watch the back of my mother’s head in the mirror, how she turns slightly to one side to check if my skirt’s white bow is even and centered. The skirt is soft over my rigid fake form. Underneath, a body cast, a molded tank top extending down over my hips, my new ectoskeleton, my nautilus, crawled into, where I live now. A big bright yellow sun cracks through the bedroom window where my mother dresses me. Today I am going to the senior prom. Today I managed to walk up three steps by myself.
Peeled Grapes
by Sharon Olds
When I call my mother on Mother’s Day
I thank her again for making me, and for
lamb chops, for smocked dresses, for Buster Brown
Mary Janes, my metatarsals
blue in the radiation box. She laughs, she loves this,
she says, I hope you haven’t forgotten
that I peeled you grapes, when you were sick.
You what?! When you were sick, I would give you
a bowl of peeled, chilled grapes.