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When he isn't writing, Robert Oldshue practices family medicine at a community health center in Boston. He holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College, and his work has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, the Gettysburg Review, and New England Review. He is married and has two children.
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How strange is this whole process of the book's publication, given that your daily life is so different?
I've been thinking about that balance – about how my writing relates to my medical practice. I teach interviewing and history-taking over at Harvard Medical School. Today we were talking about empathy and sympathy.
Empathy, at least as we teach it to students, is an act of professionalism, a disciplined concern for others in which you consider their needs and you meet them. Sympathy is "Oh, my Gosh! I can't believe what you're going through."
At the office, I'm required to show empathy. I may personally like or dislike you, but I have to show disciplined brotherly feeling anyway. There's a distance, a role, a duty. In my short stories, I put down that role. I think I write out of sympathy. This is the place where I can explore freely ideas, or characters, or people who have moved me.
That seems to suggest that writing somehow requires less discipline than medicine. Yet it takes great discipline to get characters on the page in a way that makes sense.
My job as a doctor is to take the particulars and generalize about them – to make sure that whatever treatment I give would...
Megan Mayhew Bergman is the author of three books, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, Almost Famous Women, and How Strange a Season. She is currently writing a book on the International Sweethearts of Rhythm.
Megan is a ...
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If you enjoyed:
November Storm
Try:
Birds of a Lesser Paradise
by Megan Mayhew Bergman
Sloane Crosley is the author of the New York Times bestselling essay collections, I Was Told There'd Be Cake (a 2009 finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor) and How Did You Get This Number, as well as Look Alive ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
November Storm
Try:
I Was Told There'd Be Cake
by Sloane Crosley
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