Read All about It! RN Authors Have the Write Stuff
Monday March 11, 2002
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Nurse-authors write for many reasons: to explore, to connect with others, to make a difference. They write so that we're moved to act or reconsider our biases. They inform us or win our support; their work may broaden our understanding of the world. Some set out to be writers; others stumble into it. Nonetheless, writing brings author and reader together in a personal, intimate way.
Writer Elizabeth Berg didn't always want to be a nurse. An English major at the University of Minnesota, she set her sights on teaching. It didn't last long, though. She dropped out and worked as a waitress, actress, hotel clerk, law firm receptionist, even lead singer in a rock band, before ending up in nursing school. For 10 years, she worked in medical/surgical nursing before finding her place in an ICU. Then, yielding to friends' advice, she began to publish personal essays and short stories in 1985. In 1993, her first novel, Durable Goods, was published by Random House.
Berg has published eight novels, all of them top selling nationally - and two of them New York Times best-sellers. She's been on Oprah three times, most recently when her book, Open House, was a book club selection.
Never Change (Pocket, 2001), the latest book from Berg, is a poignant mix of laughter, bitterness, longing, and acceptance. It's also quintessential nursing. The book's main character, Myra Lipinski, RN, explains the mystique of importance that envelopes ICU nurses:
So you're eating lunch and a code is called.... It's likely you'll be needed, no matter where in the hospital the arrest occurred. The other people in the cafeteria watch you leave your bowl of soup sitting there, and they nod at you as you pass by. In the army of nurses, you wear four stars.
In Never Change, ordinary, 51-year-old Myra works as a home care nurse. Her latest patient is Chip Reardon, a high school heartthrob. But Chip is terminally ill with a brain tumor. While taking care of him, Myra is confronted with rekindled feelings.
"Myra is very loosely based on someone," says Berg. "I knew a girl in high school who was unattractive and would sit in the hall on a folding chair and sell things - tickets to dances, candy bars for fund raising - always with a big smile on her face." Berg says she always wondered what her life was like later on.
In Never Change, Myra experiences the joy of a first love discovered late. For Chip, a successful stock broker, he's discovered life's simple beauty - the wings of a butterfly, the smell of grass - all through Myra's care. But she struggles. While her home care patients, needy and unique, serve as backdrop to the story, her pain is almost palpable. Can she maintain her professionalism as she cares for Chip? Ultimately, what should she do when he plans his own quiet suicide? In the end, Myra reflects:
You can want to live and end up choosing death; and you can want to die and end up living. What keeps us here, really?
Maybe it's the same thing that keeps nurses writing.
Whatever the force, best-selling author Echo Heron, RN, has harnessed it. In her latest book, Tending Lives (Ivy, 1999), she recounts the stories of 22 nurses. Their tales are powerful testimonies to our profession. Her own experience prompted her to write the book.
"I was working in an ICU of a San Francisco hospital, and the conditions under which I was working were becoming more and more impossible and frustrating and dangerous," says Heron. "I wrote about the last shift I ever worked - describing it in detail - in Tending Lives."
Heron, a former critical and coronary care nurse for more than 18 years, has an unmistaken brand of writing, offering a picture of the overworked, underappreciated healer caught between politics and patient care.
One such vignette is of an all-too-human RN who helps a mother watch as her son is disconnected from life support:
For a time I watched her watch her son fight for his final breaths.... [T]he war being over, she wept, her arms entangled with his. All the IVs were gone save one. His breaths were shallow and irregular. The ventilator had been shoved into a corner, a white sheet had been thrown over the top - perhaps in an attempt to hide the evidence of failure.... I turned and stumbled out of the room, unable to stand the pressure inside my chest.
It's powerful stuff - and necessary, says Heron. "Any writer must write from the heart," she says. "It's so important. If what you're writing touches you, makes you cry or laugh, it's almost a guarantee it will do the same for others."
Tending Lives and Heron's other books are available in bookstores nationwide.
ED World Becomes a Stage
Pete Deer, RN, can't name the force that took hold of him and inspired him to pen his first novel, A Major Case (Xlibiris 2001)
In the book, Deer walks us through a not-so-usual 12-hour night shift in a busy ED where a coterie of cranks, clowns, and oddballs waltzes through the doors. Deer's main character is Floyd Black Elk, RN, a passionate and clinically expert nurse.
"The book began as a short story purely for my amusement," says Deer, a traveling nurse who hails from Washington but now lives in Boston. "I got about 15 pages into it and stopped." The would-be novel sat idle for nearly two years before Deer rediscovered it
Convinced he needed to finish it, Deer worked feverishly, often writing 12 to 14 hours a day in addition to his 12-hour shift in the ED. When the first draft was completed three months later, it had blossomed from a short story to a 500-page novel.
It's often said that writers write what they know. It's true in Deer's case. Comparisons come easily between him and the novel's protagonist, but he insists the story is a hodge-podge of real-life antics blended with situations that could have easily happened And he blends them with passion.
In one of the most dramatic scenes, Floyd has arranged for his grandfather, a Lakota Indian, to be flown from Massachusetts to a North Dakota reservation so he may die on his own soil. His grandfather dies short of his intended stop:
Just before he died, I could feel his soul leave his body, and no matter how hard I tried to hold onto it, it slipped my grasp.... I started sobbing, holding his body tightly to me, crying into his chest, weeping a river of grief and heartache. He was not just my grandfather, but my father as well, the only real father I ever had, making the loss that much worse. I felt so alone in the world at that moment, feeling a weight of loneliness and barren solitude come crashing down on me like a load of bricks, the hurt and sorrow so heavy on me that I wished it was me that was dead instead of him.
Deer, who enjoyed a special relationship with his own grandfather, was inspired to include him - or parts of his life - in the book. Other characters were also spin-offs of real people.
"I once cared for an elderly patient who was terminally ill," Deer says. "As I started her IV, I saw a series of numbers on her arm, and I knew immediately this little old lady, someone's grandma, had been through a horrific concentration camp experience. Her image stuck with me." The woman's character is carefully woven into A Major Case, along with dozens of others.
While online ratings of A Major Case have been favorable, not everyone fell for Deer's book initially. He sent out more than 60 query letters and received almost as many rejection letters. Then Deer decided to self-publish his book through Xlibris. For about $900, he received hardbound and softbound versions, control over the book's artwork, and his own author representative. A Major Case has been picked up by Amazon.com, but overall marketing of the work rests on his shoulders. "I'd give copies away if I could," says Deer, "but I do have to pay the rent."
Deer's advice to would-be authors is simple: Just sit down and write. "It sounds trite, but the only difference between me and another person is that I took the time and slugged it out. If you wait for your muse to inspire you, you'll be waiting a long time."
To order a copy of A Major Case, go to Amazon.com or www.amajorcase.com.
Bygone Book Holds Hidden Treasure
Elaine Herrmann, RN, got more than she bargained for when she purchased a new home: buried treasure in the basement.
An old brown journal lay innocently in the corner of the dark cellar, a woman's old hat on top of it. At first, Herrmann dismissed the journal's dramatic flowing penmanship and flowery prose as the ramblings of a bored housewife. But in 1995, she took another look at the journal, and one name jumped out at her - Farragut.
"I knew that name from my eighth-grade history class, and I knew at that moment I had an important historical document in my hands," says Herrmann. The journal proved to be the diary of Josiah Parker Higgins, a Civil War sailor from Boston. Its pages recount the story of Rear Adm. David Farragut's fleet of Union warships.
Herrmann spent six months transcribing, editing, and annotating Higgins' diary into a book, Yeoman in Farragut's Fleet - The Civil War Diary of Josiah Parker Higgins. Historians have embraced the work; it's one of a few first-hand accounts of the war written by a common soldier.
That Higgins was a sailor is particularly intriguing. Of the 2.2 million who served on the Union side of the war, only 115,000 were in the Navy - about 5%.
Higgins describes being in the middle of fighting in April 1862. Farragut's fleet struggled for control of the mouth of the Mississippi River on its way to secure New Orleans. The ships helped slash the Confederacy in half, sailing past the guns of Forts Jackson and St. Philip in the process. "I felt he reached out across 150 years to me," says Herrmann. "I had a sense of obligation to get his diary in print."
Like Deer, Herrmann chose to self-publish. Her passion - his diary - is now bound on high-quality paper. The price tag: nearly $20,000.
"It was so worth the effort and investment," says Herrmann. "When I'm feeling down, I think of this guy and how he rose above it all, how he fought to end slavery. It puts life in perspective."
To order , go to www.civilwardiaries.com.
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