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
BLR‘s sixth issue featured Charles
Barber’s essay “Songs From The Black Chair” — which became the first BLR piece to win a Pushcart Prize — as well as writing by Hal Sirowitz, Alicia Ostriker, Cortney Davis, and Samuel Menashe, who received The Poetry Foundation’s first Neglected Masters Award.
From the Foreword
“Illness is a transforming event, apparent to doctors and lay people alike, affecting not only a patient, but also a world. Disease changes one’s family, network of friends and even caregivers. Few live in isolation; we have a lasting impact on one another, although we may not be aware of the exact nature of this influence. When a person copes with illness, a web of complex relationships emerges, and these can be filled with loss, anger, affection, hope, and appreciation. Illness often brings about the coming together of strangers. These relationships create the stories that shape our thinking. Writing about them can help give meaning to the narrative of our lives. One of the pleasures of reading is entering into a writer’s universe and broadening the scope of our own experience.”
– Ronna Wineberg, Contributing Fiction Editor
The launch event for this issue was held outdoors in the beautiful Bellevue Hospital garden. Readers included Suzanne McConnell and Charles Barber, whose work is highlighted below. (Suzanne, as many of our readers know, went on to become BLR’s longtime fiction editor, and just retired from this post in 2025.)
Read Highlights from Issue 6
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!
High Water Mark
by Suzanne McConnell
It is late afternoon. My husband and I have drifted over the main canal to this quiet section. I wander into an expensive jewelry store. A handsome, well-dressed salesman is at my service immediately. “Sto solo guardando,” I say. I’m just looking. “Ma tutti sono belli.”
“Si, belli, sono tipici di Venezia,” he assures me. “Centuries of craft. You have taken the boat to Murano where is the glass blowing to make the jewelry…?”
No. There is enough to see in Venice. Venice is precisely the balm and whimsy we need. Because we are drained. We are barren. In the last month we aged beyond our years and we feel those we have—I in my mid-forties and my husband nearing fifty—and the passing of time as a burden we are grieving.
Songs from the Black Chair
by Charles Barber
A thousand men each year sit in the black chair next to my desk. I am a mental health worker at the Bellevue Men’s Shelter. These men are between 18 and 80 years old, usually black or Hispanic, usually with a psychiatric problem and a substance abuse history (crack, heroin, and alcohol), often with a forensic history (usually released from prison that day), and quite often with a major medical illness.
At some point during the interview with these men, I get around to the questions: “Are you hearing voices?” “Have you ever seen things that other people didn’t see?” “Have you ever tried to hurt yourself?” A few times a month I hear responses like, “I thought about jumping in front of the subway,” or “I can’t tell you whether I’m going to hurt myself or not.” Or I am shown wrists that have recently been cut, or bellies and limbs and necks with long scars. At that point, I calmly tell my client in the black chair that I think they need to go to the hospital in order to be safe. Almost always they agree without complaint.
Ambulance
by Harvard Johnson
“This restaurant has a fine ambulance.”
What my friend, of course, must have
meant was that this restoration
had a fine ambience, but some of
his words in the rain came unstruck from time to thyme,
as patents from one ward sometimes wonder into an udder,
where they almost flit in, though
God knows no one knows their names,
where their faces seem almost familiar
until looked at closely…..
Nurses on Parade (early 1940s): This is one of many patriotic parades in which Bellevue nurses participated. The location is Fifth Avenue near Rockefeller Center, and the banner hanging from the building urges one to buy bonds. (Photo courtesy of Bellevue Hospital Archives)