WELCOME TO THE FALL-WINTER 2026-27 INTIMA: A JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE MEDICINE

Before becoming a poetry editor for Intima, but as a life-long reader and writer of poetry, my first encounter with poetry within a narrative medicine context was framed by poet Gregory Orr’s concept of Poetry As Survival—that poetry formed, in part, “as a means of helping individuals survive the existential crises represented by extremities of subjectivity and also by such outer circumstances as poverty, suffering, pain, illness, violence, or loss of a loved one. This survival begins when we ‘translate’ our crisis into language.” This idea is certainly applicable in the ways we confront healthcare and medicine, both as patients and clinicians, where so often those interactions are responding to a crisis or interruption in what we perceive as our usual state of health, or caring for those experiencing such an interruption.

But Orr’s concept is also urgently relevant in today's global climate, both figurative and literal, that is increasingly dominated by crisis. How do we make sense of and process what we witness, survive and encounter in the world? How do we envision a future—ideally one of change, transformation and hope for the continued survival and recognition of one another’s humanity? How do we navigate pain, illness and the lived experience of our bodies—or caring for those bodies individually and collectively in health professions?

I was reminded of this when reviewing the extraordinary poems we are honored to publish in this issue. For our Fall 2026 Call for Submissions, we received hundreds of poems —234 to be exact—and our six reviewers agreed, more or less, on the nineteen that in effect make sense of and process what we witness, survive and encounter in the world.

Some poems bridge large distances of different kinds. Writer and educator Kristine Crane’s poem “Diagnostics” explores the dissociative (or associative) distances our minds can travel between the present moment in an exam room and the memory of a far-off country when making sense of a life-altering diagnosis. “Diagnoses” by Tyler Fair, who is a candidate for a dual graduate degree from Yale Divinity School and UConn School of Social Work, explores the Greek origins of the word, meaning “to know apart [from another]” and the way the language of medical histories shapes self-awareness and our encounters with strangers. Therapist Irene Sherlock’s stunning “Day Drawing Down” connects the distance, between nature’s rawness after witnessing the blood of an injured animal in the snow and later counseling a mother navigating the volatility of her son’s addiction, to disparate but parallel encounters with “everything wild, untamed, injured.” And in the prose poem “A Season of Living,” Johns Hopkins student Isabelle Li traverses the distance between family, the living and the dead, reflecting on a grandfather’s passing as a metamorphosis, like the silkworms he diligently cared for in life changing form to take flight as moths.

Recently, I had the honor and privilege to attend a talk by one of my favorite poets, Tracy K. Smith, at the Cambridge Public Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she read from and discussed her latest book, Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times, and offered similar, moving language for the power of reading and writing poetry. “The intention of a poem is to take you someplace. Into someone’s life or their psyche: their sense of wish or hope, revelation or regret…How often do we feel overwhelmed in the lives we know? How often does the world as we have come to recognize it—the world as we have been taught to see it—fill us with fright?... Often enough, it is the illusion of extraordinary distance, blurring out details and shrouding motives in shadow, that makes us fearsome to one another… but poems are built to bridge distances of all kinds: between people and events separated from one another by time, geography, temperament and belief. A poem can even traverse the distance between the living and the dead.”

In short, poetry, and all writing, is a place where we encounter one another, ourselves and the world in all its complexity, contradiction and crises. Enabling these encounters is what we do in poetry, fiction, the visual arts and in narrative medicine, and we hope you will find depth and meaning in the works we've chosen for our Fall-Winter 2026-27 issue.  This work is vital everywhere, but particularly in health care, where we are so often forced into intimate encounters with our bodies, with others in clinical spaces, with oppressive and biased systems, and with pain, illness, healing and even death.

Sometimes the distance with others can be measured in inches. One line in second-year medical student Serena Choi Fernandopulle’s poem “Heart Murmur,” summarized the compulsorily intimate nature of these encounters in health care spaces succinctly and powerfully: “Minutes later I tell her I’ll be listening to her heart now. / She nods, and coughs as I press my chilling stethoscope into her chest. / This is an unnerving intimacy for strangers, / we are only inches apart, / but in this context we both pretend for each other that it doesn’t feel odd.”

In the Fiction genre, family relationships and mortality are often at the center of stories being told. Max Szredni’s beautifully written story “The Things That Are” explores with love and tenderness the relationship between an ill mother and her son. In “The Great-Grandmother,” Lilit Sargsyan, a pulmonary, critical care and sleep physician practicing in Houston, layers a young man’s relationship with his great-grandmother with her stay in the ICU, during which she poses questions evoked by time and experience through her very long life. The story “Mudhagarbha” by Georgetown University graduate Anisha Kumar builds a bridge through time to a different era, traveling back to 500 BCE India with a historical reimagining of childbirth from the perspective of a midwife still reckoning with the loss of her own mother.

Family is further defined through connections between humans and their animal friends. Writer Emily McNally in “Animal, Animal” delights the reader by sharing moments from her own clinical care and the relationship she develops with a horse named Clancy. Oncology nurse and comic Suzanne Travis shares insightful and irreverent connections between her dog's illness and her own in “Keep Your Eye on the Wall,” an essay which highlights how humor is another powerful tool we use to cope and process through writing. (You will be happy to know the dog does fine in the end.)

Writers also explore the highs and lows of the human condition as it is impacted by illness, culture, mental illness, behavior and training. In “About Bloody Time,” writer and narrative medicine practitioner Sophia Kartsonis brings the reader along as witness to a loved one's difficult hematological illness through her support as a partner. As readers, we see such experiences through a new, more empathetic lens. 

Autonomy and identity are explored in many of these essays as well. "Reflections" by Ema Arai, a third-year medical student at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, charts how an innate reserve contributed to her growth as a clinician. Psychiatrist Andrzej Koczapski unpacks a bumpy trajectory of treatment with “Grace,” a calm schizophrenic who does not want a particular form of care being offered—a haircut. (Read to the end; the elephant will stay with you.) In “The Long Good-Bye,” psychologist Susan A. Martin must deal with the practical and emotional aftermath of placing her mother into memory care. It is a must-read for anyone facing that hurdle. 

Death is also present here, in medical student Sunny Dizon’s short, poignant piece sharing a patient’s trajectory in the ICU in “I See You.” We discover a measurement of mortality in Kelsey Van Housen's meditative essay "The Patients Who Never Leave Us" as well as in psychiatrist Nancy Rappaport's well-told "See You Monday," an essay about accompaniment and kindness.

All this is to say, that the works offered in our Fall-Winter 2026-27 issue continue to exemplify the possibilities of poetry, prose, art and narrative medicine to bridge distances and transform these encounters with illness, healing, love, grief, existential questions and all the human experiences of this world through the vivid beauty of language. To quote Tracy K. Smith once more: “We dwell together in a world riddled with reasons for despair. A world brimming, too, with forms of beauty that fill us with awe, joy, wonder.” We hope you encounter all this and more in these works—that you are moved to read, write, wonder and be transformed with us. —Joseph Eveld for the Editors of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine