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My essay, "Listen, Carefully," was published today by Electric Literature/Okey-Panky. I love the Okey-Panky tagline, "Literary oddments for busy people." They state that my essay (or is it really a prose poem?) is a 4-minute read. It includes a link to my 7-minute digital storytelling video of my reading of the piece, accompanied by my photographs.
"Listen, Carefully" is part of my book and digital humanities project, Soul Stories: Voices from the Margins. In "Listen, Carefully" I parse out some of my criticisms of the practice of narrative medicine, as well as rhetoric of listening—and of silence. As part of the background research for this essay, I stumbled upon a medical textbook that focused exclusively on the "difficult patient" and billed itself as a physician's field guide to the difficult patient. It had a chapter for each type of what people in the medical field (and allied health fields) stereotype as a "difficult patient." I attempt to examine our use of such terms and the harm it does to not only patients (or communities, because we also label certain communities as difficult), but also to our own humanity as health care providers.
