One midwinter’s day in Seattle in 2009, I sat at my desk at home writing a federal grant proposal for investigating ways to improve health care for homeless young people. I stopped typing midsentence and gazed out the window at the rain and wind rippling the bamboo leaves in my garden. I asked myself what I was doing with my life.
I was a tenured professor teaching community health and health policy to nursing students at a large university. I was a nurse practitioner working with homeless teens and young adults in a community clinic. I loved teaching and I loved my work as a nurse, but this type of writing was not what I longed to do. I needed to find a way to merge my work in health care with my love of writing—of real writing, not the stiff, academic, formulaic writing required by my academic job, and certainly not the cold, distant medical writing in my patient clinical chart notes. Real writing to me was expressive, creative writing—reflective writing that allowed the “I” back into the frame, as, of course, I am doing now. So, as if it were a crystal ball, I typed into my computer’s search engine the words “healthcare” and “literature.” Among the results were links to narrative medicine and to the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University in New York City. Developed over the past several decades by physician and literary scholar Rita Charon and her colleagues, narrative medicine (as defined by Charon) “fortifies clinical practice with the narrative competence to recognize, absorb, metabolize, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness.” (…)
And as for real writing within my own life? In retrospect, it was fortuitous that I submitted my last federal health care grant back in 2009, at a time of extreme funding cutbacks during our country’s Great Recession. The reviewers’ feedback was that it was a worthwhile proposal and that it would have received funding if it had come in a year or so earlier, when they had more money. Around that same time, I sat in a faculty meeting where a successful older researcher showed a PowerPoint slide with a series of rolling hills leading off into the distance and a road with National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant signs, one after the other, leading over the hills and fading into the sunset. Her point was that this was how our lives as university researchers should look: this slide represented our marching orders. I stared at the slide and then whispered to a colleague, “and then you die.”
I have nothing against NIH or the researchers who stake their careers on NIH or similar grants, but I knew that slide did not represent the life I wanted. I was forty-nine years old at that point, and my mother had died the year before; the sunset in the slide seemed very real. My husband had also recently commented that if I had used the same amount of time, effort, ink, and paper that went into my grant-writing, I would have written a book manuscript—or several—by then.
Instead of revising and resubmitting my rejected NIH grant proposal, I began to write what became my first published book, a medical memoir titled Catching Homelessness: A Nurse’s Story of Falling Through the Safety Net. This was a book about my work with and spiral into homelessness as a young adult. Through the writing of Catching Homelessness, I did what I consider real writing. The act of researching and writing the book, a book which wove in pertinent events from my personal as well as professional lives, helped give some narrative cohesion to my own fractured and oftentimes confusing existence.
While writing a later chapter of that book, “Greyhound Therapy,” which deals with gender-based violence, I brushed up against a then mostly closed door to my own childhood traumas. I made the decision to keep that door closed: to open it within Catching Homelessness would have led away from the main purpose of the book, which was to illustrate the complexities involved with homelessness and its attendant ills. I knew that to open the new door would require a much different book, one that contextualized the effects of trauma on individuals and communities, and the ways that narrative and storytelling factor into health and healing.
That much different book became Soul Stories: Voices from the Margins. The opening of that door and the personal exploration of what was behind that door led to this book. In writing it, I allowed myself to stray from the clear objective facts of science and medicine into the murkier subjective part of what it means to be human, and what it means to find healing in the face of trauma. This book is the result of that labyrinthine journey.
Note: The above is an excerpt from the Preface of my book manuscript Soul Stories: Voices from the Margins, currently accepted for publication by an academic press, details to follow.
JOSEPHINE ENSIGN 