What Prometheus Taught A Doctor Turned Stroke Survivor

by Dr. Bevan Choate

At 36 years of age, I was a titan.  I was a full-fledged urologist.  A urologist is a surgical cyborg and the only surgical specialist mentioned in the Hippocratic Oath (“. . . I will not cut for stone.”)  We use lasers to treat stones, robots to yank cancerous prostates, and general irreverence when the going gets tough. Despite this self-adulatory salvo, I wasn’t much like the surgeons you see on television. I drove a beat-up car, paid down student loans, and genuinely loved my patients.  It was my calling, my purpose in life.

I was a titan; not a god.  We’ve all at one point or another been privy to the fool with a god complex.  Icarus taught us how that story ends.  According to some in the medical community, “The only difference between God and a surgeon is that God knows he’s not a surgeon.” Be that as it may, I was not going to be some high-falutin surgeon type.  I prided myself in my work in the trenches and strived to improve the lives of my patients.

Then, on 12/3/2020, the music stopped.  I had suffered a life-threatening stroke.  After nearly dying twice, I ultimately underwent three brain surgeries.  I walked out of the hospital with an aluminum walker in February of 2021.  Within the months of therapy I engaged to improve my coordination and regain strength, I wrote a book titled The Stroke Artist. It’s a no-frills divulgence of the microcosm surrounding brain injury, penned from my perspective as a young surgeon.

After suffering such a catastrophe, I had no desire to write a book.  My friend and former colleague tried to convince me to start writing down the humorous and frankly absurd experiences I endured as a doctor turned stroke survivor.  I needed a reason.  He muttered something about posterity and I refused, stating “I don’t want to remember this shitshow.”  Yet, I ultimately agreed citing that the act of typing will be an excellent form of therapy for my feral left hand.  After a few paragraphs, the storytelling began to take on its own life.  I was no longer a titan and I was now chained to a boulder. Yet, I still had an opportunity to help others by sharing my experiences.

Prometheus gave the world fire and suffered dearly for it. I may have tried giving “fire” to many of my patients.  This doesn’t change the fact that I am now a “mortal” bound to a catastrophic brain injury.  From this I learned that no matter how high we think we are flying, humility is right around the corner.  My error was not in the work I did or my past intentions.  My error was in not allowing myself to grow further as a human being.  For more years than we can fathom, humans have survived and thrived on community and fellowship.  We rely on external constructs like religion, scientific models, and behavioral therapy. These concepts are often strengthened through community and practice. I was blind to this essence because my former brain thought I was achieving this by helping others. Maybe so, but perhaps I could have done it better.  After all, our modern-day brains ARE the same ones we had 200,000 years ago. 

 Is it not a god complex to think you can make yourself whole by treating the many parts of others? Didn’t Dr. Frankenstein try that? Can’t be, right? I was a titan. I mean, come on, I thought I was the most self-aware doctor on the planet.

To say you are the “most” anything pretty well misses the mark for self-awareness.  The moniker I gave myself does not matter. I still had a complete blind spot.

I realize now that my true life had been on life-support prior to my stroke. I previously avoided community and fellowship because my poorly evolved brain thought I was getting it in spades on a daily basis in a hospital.  My relationships with friends and family suffered throughout my years in medicine.  I somehow managed to avoid those that gave me a chance to be vulnerable, self-reflect, and be fulfilled.  I was always too tired or too busy. To a brain, simulation is the same as reality.  To a heart, it’s a dreadful cancer. 

Not to get too elder millennial, but is social media often not but a simulation of community and fellowship? Now, more than ever, we need to come together in a way that our hearts can enjoy.  It only took a stroke and writing a book for me.  I don’t recommend either, but if your passion is in writing, write from the heart and write when you don’t think you want to.  

Dr. Bevan Choate is a urologist, artist, and author of The Stroke Artist, a self-penned story that speaks to all who have, at one time or another, faced and then overcome life’s unplanned obstacles. Just when Dr. Choate had found his stride as a successful surgeon, he suffered a stroke, and the music stopped. Overnight, he went from the ship’s captain to a passenger floating aimlessly at sea. His story is one of grit and the determination to be better—despite the odds. Dr. Choate received his medical doctorate from Texas Tech Health Sciences Center and completed a five-year residency through the University of New Mexico Hospitals. He now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife and dog Indi and pursues painting, fly fishing, and urology.

Double the Recipe for Poetry

by Colleen Alles

The Recipe from The Binnacle Boy

The year I was born, Newberry Medal winner Paul Fleischman published a collection of three long, short stories—one of which features a deaf girl who reads the lips of fellow townspeople as they whisper confessions to a statue of a binnacle boy. This is how she discovers how the entire crew of the Orion was murdered.

The story was impossibly imaginative to me the first time I read it in 5th grade—so much so that years later, I sought out a copy of Graven Images (Candlewick Press). In the book’s afterward—published nearly 25 years later—Fleischman, who writes for young people, does something amazing: he explains where he got the idea.

Or rather, how.

In biology, Fleischman writes in the Afterward, fertilization usually takes two parties; I’ve often found it to be the same with books.

Here’s how it happened: Fleischman had been researching sealers—men who sailed the South Atlantic in the 1800s hunting seals. One detail—a photograph of a boy carved from wood who held a ship’s compass—stayed in his mind. These ornate statues were called binnacle boys. Around the same time, he happened to catch a television program about South America in which a long line of people waited to approach a statue of a saint to pray. He was also reading the Old Testament at the time, thinking about judgmental or pious characters. Lastly, a few memories from his own life bubbled to the surface of his mind—in particular, the time he spent living across the street from a school for the deaf.

This is the magic from which The Binnacle Boy emerged. Devouring Fleischman’s explanation, I was in awe. This is how you do it, I thought. He’s given away the recipe for writing:

¼ cup random facts you find fascinating—the ones that perch on your shoulder and won’t leave you alone, even as you’re falling asleep

¼ cup what you are reading

¼ cup what happened to you this week

¼ cup your most pertinent memories

Double the Recipe for Poetry

So, how does Fleischman’s generous recipe sharing connect to the world of poetry? I think the same recipe can be used to create meaningful and impactful poems—that the poems we feel in our bones come, in part, from this recipe. The more a reader connects with the key ingredients, the more he or she will remember the poem, read it again later, share it with someone else.

Which is what we’ve seen happening lately with a bit of a resurgence of interest in poetry as of late—everything from the influx of Rupi Kaur poems dominating my social media feed to Amanda Gorman’s unforgettable reading at President Biden’s inauguration. My home state is (finally) taking steps to create an official position for a Poet Laureate. When war broke out in Ukraine in late February (rather, when the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine re-escalated in late February of 2022), amidst news articles and opinion pieces, I encountered more than once loved ones sharing the Ilya Kaminsky poem We Lived Happily During the War.

How we heal

Last week, in West Michigan, there was one afternoon when it felt nice to be outside on the back deck, despite the wind and 52-degree temperature. The sun was out. Spring had sprung—kind of. My daughter remembered we’d bought popsicles on our last adventure to the grocery store, and jubilantly licked at her grape treat, insisting she didn’t need a coat.

I sat next to my dog on the deck, idly running my fingers over his ears. I’d learned a few days ago that he would likely need surgery, which didn’t come as a surprise. He’d been struggling for weeks—an injured cruciate ligament. Not life-threatening, but not easy either to watch him limp along on our evening walks—particularly as I use that time to catch up on news podcasts detailing the horrors of Putin initiating attacks on Ukrainian civilians.

At one point, I looked up and saw a cardinal in a high branch of a nearby tree. I watched it hop three times toward a nest I had never noticed. Cardinals make me think of my father—a native of Southern Illinois and lifelong Cardinals stan. He was due to have surgery as well at the end of the month, and while there was no reason to capital-w Worry, I had been thinking about his heart, which doctors had recently noted may need a pacemaker down the line. I’d also been letting go of a friendship that meant a lot to me, yet had grown too threadbare to continue, and I’d had to learn how to let it go, as much as I had wanted to keep holding on.

All of this is to say, suddenly, as the cardinal chirped out, as my daughter grinned at me with purple all over her lips, I wrote a poem in one moment in my head about how when we are hurting, there is always something we can do to take steps away from the depths of our uncertainty and into a place of more optimism, more light, more hope.

I pecked how we heal into my phone in the forty-five seconds before I heard my husband’s truck pull into the driveway, which made the dog bark, and Mara desperately needed to wash her sticky hands, and I was sure it was time to start making dinner—even as I looked forward, later, to taking a longer look at my quickly-drafted lines to see if there was anything in what I’d written worth sharing.

Colleen Alles is an award-winning writer living in West Michigan. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in a number of literary magazines. Her first full-length poetry collection, After the 8-Ball, is available now from Cornerstone Press (the University of Wisconsin, Steven’s Point). Colleen is a graduate of Michigan State University and Wayne State University, and a contributing editor for short fiction at Barren Magazine. When she isn’t reading or writing, she enjoys distance running and spending time with her family, including her beloved hound, Charlie. You can find her online at www.colleenalles.com, on Instagram at ColleenAlles_author, and on Twitter at @ColleenAlles.

Creating Accountability in Your Writing Practice

by Rennie Saunders

Can you work without a deadline? Be honest. If someone asked you to write a paper, and said you could turn it in anytime you liked, would that paper ever happen?

For many of us, the answer is no. Many writers, myself included, recognize that a deadline is one of the necessary evils of writing. Sure, it’s fun to sit down and draft without any agenda, but when real productivity has to happen, it’s time to call in the writer’s dutiful drill sergeant: accountability.

Accountability is all about setting up real consequences and outside pressure so you can get something done. But it might not be enough to simply set a due date on your calendar. Sometimes, accountability is a very real editor breathing down your neck, telling you that your work needs to be done by Tuesday or else. Sometimes it’s a friend reading your draft, begging you to keep going so they can find out what happens in the next chapter. External motivation can save the day when you can’t figure out how to trick yourself into filling up that blank page.

But what happens when you don’t have a deadline, or an editor, or a friend reading a draft in progress? How do you summon that powerful outside force of accountability when you’re writing something entirely on your own?

It’s about learning what works for you, and then making it happen. Do you just need to carve out an hour on your calendar? Make an appointment with yourself to write and set alarms and reminders. Do you work even better if you set a goal, and then ask someone to check up on you? Tell yourself you’ll write 500 words by 5pm on Tuesday, then recruit a friend to call you at 5pm and make sure you’ve kept your promise. If you pay attention to the factors that make you more likely to be productive, you can set yourself up to succeed.

Sometimes it’s all about finding the right person to support you. If you were trying to go to the gym regularly, you’d probably call a friend and set up a time to meet at the gym every week. Or maybe you’d hire a personal trainer. When you know someone’s waiting for you, you show up. And once you show up, you might as well work out, because you’re at the gym already, right?

That’s the psychology that worked best for me as a writer, and it’s why I started my nonprofit organization, Shut Up & Write, over a decade ago. At the time, I was working on a sci-fi novel, and couldn’t focus or make progress on my own. I decided to start a writing group in a local cafe with the idea of just showing up to write. We wouldn’t read each other’s work, or critique anything at all. This group would simply write quietly together in a cafe for an hour. That was all I needed to get motivated: I just needed a place to show up and shut up.

By starting a writing group, I’d not only made a promise to myself to write for an hour a week, I’d made a promise to an entire group of writers who were depending on me to show up for them. It was a setup that was nearly impossible for me to make an excuse to abandon. And so, I showed up and I wrote. Finally, I’d figured out how to crack the code and get my writing done. I just needed a hefty dose of accountability, which for me meant setting aside a regular time to write with others.

Ultimately, accountability is about making a commitment to yourself, but it’s much easier to do that when you find people in your life who will support you. As writers, we learn to seek out friends who will read in-progress drafts, editors who will set deadlines, and in my case, other writers who will just show up.

Creating an external support system shouldn’t be too elaborate – in fact, when we try and set lofty goals it makes it easier to miss them. But an accountability system is an essential piece of a disciplined writing practice, and when you bring other writers into the mix, comes with the added benefits of community and connection.

Rennie Saunders has built an 80,000 -person global writer’s community based on his simple, highly effective formula – Shut Up & Write. Since 2007, SU&W has inspired writers of all genres and experience levels to meet for weekly writing sessions, no critiquing or feedback required. With hundreds of chapters in over 350 cities across the globe, the process is proven to work.