By Renée K. Nicholson
I bare my wolf teeth, curly lipped
smile. It has been said that the ill
are wounded in body and voice.
This is true, and not. I run
the doctor and nurse into my
wilderness. That’s not quite it
either, but I’m shapeshifted,
wolf-girl, rejecting the hero journey
punted out of my teeth-bared story. Turn
it inside-out. Colors pour out of me, thick
lines of blue, yellow, red, muddied
together, thick and brushy and mad.
Not rainbow and yet not despair. Wild
beauty is still beauty—
a wind blowing off a summer storm,
lightning clearing an ashen sky in bold streaks:
bright, mighty, and without remorse.
The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process
The arts show us the contours of our existence. I think of this the same way a physician might talk about the contours of a body part or organ. The shape tells us something important, if we have the tools to understand it. The humanities give us the tools, the methods, and the language to interpret art. I've spent most of my life in the arts and several years running a university humanities center, and perhaps this is the best way I've found to talk about the arts and humanities together. I've also spent the last decade working in both art and humanities in medical and clinical spaces, and perhaps those experiences are also blending and bleeding into my artistic and humanistic work.
I’ve been thinking a lot about health and medicine, aging and dying. Along with being a writer, I’m a chronic disease patient, and the connections there feel resonant. For all our scientific discoveries, there is still so much we don’t know how to effectively treat. “The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient, while nature cures the disease,” Voltaire wrote. I have heard it said that “Good readers make good doctors,” and have seen health professionals who are profoundly moved by art of all kinds. “Someone said that artists generally have a gift and a wound—the gift, which makes them able to write, and the wound, which drives them to feel they have to do it,” Sharon olds said in an interview for Literature and Medicine. I often wonder how Olds’s view applies to me. I readily recognize where my work lands in that filling of the wound category. More importantly, how does my illness directly relate to how I craft?
There is a strain in medicine that privileges the biomedical above all else, where cool science reigns supreme. What I find ironic is when I hear clinicians who hold this point of view, they tend not to see the underlying narrative: a hero’s journey. Physician, armed with scientific knowledge, saves the day for patient. It’s not great for patients not to be the center of their own stories, but I’d argue it’s also unfair to science. Science continues to evolve, to reveal its secrets, and in many ways feels ultimately like a revision process, not unlike what writers and other artists do. And, despite the focus on the cool and objective, many great science research is ultimately steeped in creativity. My favorite artists, humanistic scholars, clinicians, and scientists are all compelled by wonder, deeply curious about the world around them and the worlds within them.
We live in a time fracture and cleaving, but really, things overlap much more than our compartmentalization would allow for. Maybe art helps with that. Because it has the potential to transport us from our sense of time and place, and also, paradoxically, connects us to our sense of time and place, too.
Because of the work I’ve done in art and medicine, I believe art also has deep and important resonances with other disciplines and in other parts of our lives. I think if we embraced that, if we fused things back together and celebrate the overlaps, we might find a great sense of reparation in that, something akin to hope.
What was the inspiration for your creative work?
My piece came out of work I’ve done in the health humanities discipline of narrative medicine and from my experience in the medical system. Illness often feels like a wilderness. But the wilderness has its great, perhaps ferocious beauty. I’d been writing about this in academic ways, but I needed another way to frame what I was understanding, what my lived experience was trying to show me.
