This spring, a colleague at the Christian Science Monitor and I collaborated on a piece that ran under the headline: “Memoirs: whose truth — and does it matter?” The context, as I wrote at the time, was a “string of high-profile scandals,” from the James Frey debacle to the revelation that Mischa Defonseca, the author of a fantastical memoir of the Holocaust—which suggested Defonseca had been rescued by a pack of wild animals—”lived in Brussels during World War II, is not Jewish, and was not raised by wolves.”

Teresa Méndez and I split the reporting, mostly because there was so much ground to cover: presumably, editors, writers, and publishers would have a wide range of viewpoints on the necessity of truthiness in modern memoir. We talked to dozens; many were happy to chat, and only a few demurred. And for the most part, almost everyone—save Jack Shafer, Slate’s formidable media critic, who had come out loudly against David Sedaris in a 2007 column—was in agreement: totally false was bad, but a little slippage was acceptable. As Sedaris told me, speaking from his home in England, “I guess I’ve always thought that if 97 percent of the story is true, then that’s an acceptable formula. Put it on a scale. Is it 97 percent pure?”

So should we judge memoir on different criteria than journalism? (Again, Shafer vociferously disagreed: “In the taxonomy,” he said, “a memoir is an attempt to capture the truth. A memoirist has all the latitude in the world to describe their interior landscape. But just because they’re hot, they can’t call the Arctic a desert.”) Well, now we have another chance to discuss anew. This week, Berkley Books announced it was nixing publication of a Holocaust memoir, “Angel at the Fence,” which was apparently fabricated by retired television repairman Herman Rosenblat. (The Holocaust, perversely, seems to be ripe ground for make-believe.) Cheers to Gabriel Sherman, who first broke the story open in the New Republic. And some questions, dear readers:

How much is too much? Do you care if a memoir isn’t 99.9 percent true? And wherein lies the dividing line between memoir and fiction?

So it’s almost 2009 (good riddance ’08), and I’ve decided to assemble a list of the best poetry books of the year. Why poetry books? Because there have been very few year-end round-ups of poetry—most lumping a book or two into “literature” lists. Also, I’ve read a lot of compelling collections this year and felt like a number have not received their due. One other note before I begin: VQR launched its poetry series in partnership with the University of Georgia Press this year, publishing six very strong collections—well, five very strong collections and my own; those books have not been considered for the list, but you should buy them and read them.

Okay, here goes…

1. Kevin Prufer, National Anthem (Four Way)
This is the collection of the year so far as I’m concerned. These poems look back on America from a not-so-distant future during and after the apocalypse that toppled our empire. Prufer’s speaker shuttles between anger and ironic bemusement as he catalogs visions of destruction and the survival of the worst of us. When the speaker sets off to find what’s left of America, for example, only the Motel 6 and Waffle House seem to be thriving. It’s like Omega Man meets The Waste Land—which is to say that’s it’s a biting social critique of our times, but it also feels legitimately visionary (and scary).

2. Chris McCabe, Zeppelins (Salt)
McCabe was one of this year’s two revelations for me. The brilliant Anglo-Saxon cacophony of his poems is held together by formal constraints in a way that reminded me, at times, of Glyn Maxwell’s The Breakage. But McCabe’s poems feel even more urgent—especially in verses about the London tube bombing, Abu Ghraib, and the amazing titular work about the Zeppelins over London during WWI, all counterpointed against the pop culture we use to distract ourselves from the terrors of modern life in the city.

3. C. D. Wright, Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon)
In a collection that hearkens back to the heyday of Modernism (and such Lefty heirs as Muriel Ruykeyser), when formal experimentation and social critique were one and the same, Wright creates a multi-voiced narrative that skips from Iraq to Mexico to the United States—examining our eagerness to invade even as we “build the great wall between us.” Hard on the heels of One Big Self (which used the same fragmented narrative style to investigate America’s prison system), Wright has become the conscience of American poetry.

4. Dan Bellm, Practice (Sixteen Rivers)
Bellm was the year’s other revelation. I had never read his first two collections, but I was enthralled by this one. In the tradition of midrash, these poems answer or elaborate particular passages from the Torah—but often filtered through contemporary culture (ranging from Neruda to Weegee) and an impressive range of poetic forms. Especially stunning is the sonnet sequence “Book of Numbers (A war diary),” obsessed with how wars are tallied “as if the one who heard / all prayer were some diligent American God, / numbering the living and the dead.”

5. Aaron Baker, Mission Work (Houghton Mifflin)
This debut collection narrates Baker’s remarkable boyhood—as the son of missionaries living in the Chimbu Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The poems explore the child’s confusion between Eastern and Western religions, between the rituals of the Kuman people and his Christian parents. Baker’s language is lush and the imagery singular, but it is the assured and complex structure—carrying us through the uncertain and unfamiliar by the force of his voice—that makes Mission Work such a surprise and delight.

6. Claudia Emerson, Figure Studies (LSU)
These poems trace the eerie and unpredictable path from girlhood to becoming a woman. But Emerson’s mind is wide-ranging and historical, not merely personal, so the book stretches from the opening sequence about an all girls school to dramatic monologues of women commenting on other women to poems in the voices of girls attempting to understand the lives of adult women. Emerson’s sharp eye and unerring ear make for chiseled lyrics in which not a word is wasted.

7. Todd Boss, Yellowrocket (Norton)
At times, Boss’s rapid-fire rhymes and hairpin turns of juxtaposition can feel like a runaway train, but the poet is in full control here. And the sounds and images that bounce us from the Wisconsin farm where he grew up to the literal storm that wiped it out to the figurative storm of a marriage jump adeptly and movingly from mere play to grave epiphany. A selection of the poems from the first section of the book appeared in VQR—and just received our Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry.

8. Katie Ford, Colosseum (Graywolf)
Ford’s impressive second book is an extended meditation on destruction and ruins in the wake of Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans. She moves from the broken levees to the Biblical flood, from the Superdome to the Roman Colosseum. She struggles against impermanence in direct, haunting language: “we will be overcome by waters / where I stand with my lanterns and cans, / with my useless preparations and provisions, / with the God I loved, I hated, and you.” These are poems worthy of their subject—which is saying a lot.

9. Fady Joudah, The Earth in the Attic (Yale)
Joudah is a Palestinian-American physician and, since 2001, a field member of Doctors Without Borders. Not surprisingly, many of his poems blend reportage with personal lyrics. At times, everything can look like war—“After the rain has bombed the earth // The ants march out of their shelters / One long frantic migration line”—but more often, the imagery of healing finds its way into scenes of devastation, as in “Pulse,” in which the poet sits with a mother after her baby has died in her arms: “We talked back towards each other, we met, we / Read verses from the Quran / Our palms open / Elbows upright like surgeons.”

10. Chad Davidson, The Last Predicta (Southern Illinois)
I’m constantly asking where the cell phone is in American poetry—which is to say, the detritus and barrage of our consumer culture that too many poets pretend doesn’t exist. Well, there are no cell phones here, but there are poems for Gold’s Gym and the last Predicta television. But, like Todd Boss, it’s the power of Davidson’s wordplay and nimble imagination that keep these poems from lapsing into jokes. Of Target (yes, the chain store), he writes: “I love you dearly, // dear church of the cherished storage bin, / dear Cheerios and the bowl to drown you in, // dear warehouse sky, dear reindeer aiming the beads / of your eyes at my impulse buys.”

Honorable Mentions
Idra Novey, The Next Country (Alice James)
Rick Barot, Want (Sarabande)
James Allan Hall, Now You’re the Enemy (Arkansas)
Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon)
Colette LaBouff Atkinson, Mean (Chicago)
Devin Johnston, Sources (Turtle Point)

There are moments in life when none of us—no matter how much we read or write in our regular lives—are particularly looking to be inspired by language. Standing in line at airport security during the travel madness that is the week between Christmas and New Year’s comes to mind as one of those times. Yet sometimes we can be surprised when we least expect it.

Ho John Lee/CC.

I was more than a little reluctant to relinquish my old passport, with its battle-scarred pages documenting midnight border crossings on the train and visas from Istanbul, but I discovered while flipping through the pages of my shiny new one that the State Department has implemented some changes in design during the last decade. My new passport’s current lack of stamps or visas made me frown, but something else caught my eye. Each set of pages now begins with a brief quote, a sentence or two from sources as varied as the people who make up our nation. And amidst the uncertainty of our world, the turbulence of our recent election, and the grave challenges (yet also remarkable opportunities) that rise before us in the new year, I think I might have unwittingly stumbled across a top ten list worth pondering.

1. …And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. –Abraham Lincoln
2. Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. –George Washington
3. We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. –Declaration of Independence
4. We have a great dream. It started way back in 1776, and God grant that America will be true to her dream. –Martin Luther King, Jr.
5. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. –John F. Kennedy
6. This is a new nation, based on a mighty continent, of boundless possibilities. –Theodore Roosevelt
7. Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America. –Dwight D. Eisenhower
8. For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest sleeping in the unplowed ground. Is our world gone? We say “Farewell.” Is a new world coming? We welcome it—and we will bend it to the hopes of man. –Lyndon B. Johnson
9. We send thanks to all the Animal life in the world. They have many things to teach us as people. We are glad they are still here and we hope it will always be so. –Thanksgiving Address, Mohawk version
10. Every generation has the obligation to free men’s minds for a look at new worlds…to look out from a higher plateau than the last generation. –Ellison S. Onizuka

Whether from a president who held the country together during its greatest crisis or an explorer whose sacrifice we will forever honor, one thing is true: no matter their brevity, words always have the power to challenge, to inspire, to help us dream. Even when we find them staring back at us from the pages of an empty passport.

In preparation for a review of “The Accordionist’s Son,” I’ve been reading some of the past work of the Basque writer Bernardo Atxaga. “The Lone Woman” and “The Lone Man” both have some interesting elements, particularly for their insights into the minds of ETA militants, but I found myself captured by “Obabakoak,” a novel originally published in 1988 that won Spain’s National Prize for Literature.

The book’s title, rendered from Euskara (the Basque language), literally means “people and things of Obaba,” a fictional town in the Basque region. Like with much of Atxaga’s work, the writer originally composed the novel in Euskara, translated it himself into Spanish, from where it was translated into English by his frequent translator Margaret Jull Costa.

There are many extraordinary things about “Obabakoak,” and chief among them perhaps is its capacity to delight. It is, in the best sense of the word, an entertainment. It whirls and skips along, riffing on stories and archetypes you’ve probably heard or read before in another form, another language, perhaps set in some other place and time. But it’s in this hovering sense of the familiar that the novel succeeds best; by invoking the “One Thousand and One Nights” or the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and recasting these moulds with the ore of Basque country, Atxaga takes us along into worlds seemingly like our own but also strange and tantalizing, filled with suspense, humor, philosophy, and local culture.

“Obabakoak” has stories within stories (and occasionally yet another story still lying in wait, nested and ready to hatch), bits of metafictional speculation and intertextuality, and games of various sorts. The cover of my edition features a picture of something called The Game of the Goose, which is explained in a brief preface and in an illuminating afterword by the author. All of these ostensibly postmodernist techniques could sink the novel in its own cheekily wrought mechanics, but fortunately, Atxaga’s narrators never take themselves too seriously. Instead, they frequently acknowledge their own inventions—one character’s uncle engages two younger literary types in food- and alcohol-drenched conversations about literature, poking fun at them for their intertextual and metafictional dalliances—while also drawing for us engaging tales indebted to various folklores and mythologies. The fact that the narrators sometimes mention the sources of their stories in no way diminishes their capacity to engage and entertain; rather, it calls attention to the interconnectedness of seemingly disparate storytelling traditions.

It is the uncle character who emerges as the most engaging person in the book. He’s a gregarious fellow, a marvelous host, and an acknowledged “19th century man.” In a way, he is the literal representation of a strain that runs throughout the book. He loves stories, telling them, listening to them, and talking about them over food and drink. The novel’s amalgamation of solid, if occasionally conventional, storytelling—Amazon adventure stories, classically ironic endings a la Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” tales of village outcasts, idiots, shamans, vaguely menacing past associates—and postmodernist play makes for an engaging combination, reminding us what we love of the old and the new. It is the uncle who, sometimes deep in the background, acts as the local literary authority, casting judgment and engendering his nephew, the narrator of many chapters, with a love of stories and a desire to tell them.

For a time, the uncle accuses his nephew and the nephew’s friend, who both come to read at a sort of literary salon, of being simple plagiarists. All of their stories, he claims, have been written before, and better, in the 19th century. But eventually, the uncle changes his mind. He comes to believe that the interrelatedness of new stories to those that came before is what deepens them. It is in this process of reinterpretation through reanimation that we add layers of meaning to our stories and make them our own.

In one example, the uncle offers multiple potential meanings for a lullaby that goes, “Never fall asleep in the woods, my dear; for a hunter might find you and take you for a hare.”  Through a series of intertextual and historical syllogisms, the uncle manages to link this simple warning to Industrial Revolution-era fears of modernity, epitomized by the development of the train and factory labor, which, in turn, led to the neglect of children who were left alone by their factory-bound parents. The same warning, he says, has been used in different forms and in reaction to widely differing stimuli, although all reflect the basic fear of children coming to harm. Even in this brief summation, I hope what becomes clear is that the uncle—and surely Atxaga is aware of this too—has a particular sense of how stories develop in our lives: what they are reactions to, what fears they hope to stave off, what traditions they draw upon. So also must these archetypes and folktales be retold to reflect changing cultures and new fears.

But where is the line drawn between nodding towards the past and deliberately plagiarizing it for one’s own gain? It’s a difficult question to answer. If known material is sufficiently mangled or refreshed, are similarities with a “new” work of fiction forgiven, or even praised? Why, for example, is it OK for Zadie Smith to fashion her novel “On Beauty” after E.M. Forster’s “Howard’s End,” but Yann Martel must defend his “Life of Pi” for its similarities with Moacyr Scliar’s “Max and the Cats?” When is something plagiarizing, and when is it a clever homage?

A chapter in “Obabakoak,” titled “How to plagiarise” and told from the uncle’s point of view, attempts to answer these questions. He does so with panache and good humor, offering four rules for plagiarizing and counseling unknown writers that:

There is a possibility that despite following the preceding four rules point by point, a plagiarist may have his plagiarism uncovered. Anyone can have a stroke of bad luck. This is especially true amongst minority cultures where, since there is little space, relations—especially literary ones—tend to be rife with intrigue, malice and hatred.

However, that stroke of bad luck need not necessarily prove prejudicial to the plagiarist; on the contrary, he may emerge strengthened from his enemy’s nets. But three conditions must be satisfied if this is to happen: firstly, he must leave scattered throughout the work ‘traces’ of the text he has taken as his model; secondly, he must find out a little about metaliterature; thirdly, he must make a name for himself. If he fulfils these three requirements, he will have built his own Praetorian guard.

He goes on to give an example of a story appropriated from Rudyard Kipling. The writer may transplant the story to a futuristic space setting, but he must also call the astronaut character Kim. In other words, when certain “rules” are followed, preferably in a clever, self-conscious manner, an author can get away with anything. But in his jocular telling, it is clear that the uncle is also claiming that plagiarism is an overrated concern, that one person’s original tale is inevitably, to others, a familiar story retitled. And for some critics a few postmodernist tricks, the same sort that Atxaga employs, are sufficient balm to heal the wound of plagiarism. Acknowledging it, but only through a nudge and a wink, makes it less true—or at least matter less.

These concerns are important to Atxaga, who, as one of a small band of Euskara-language novelists, is at the vanguard of defining his embattled culture’s literature. If Basque, one of those “minority cultures” alluded to in the previous excerpt, is to have a literary tradition, its writers will inevitably have to draw from the global well of stories, myth, folklore, and memory, thereby carving out their own place for Basque writing while also linking their works to other cultures. Or, as Atxaga writes in his own afterword:

Because, as we know, nowadays, in the middle of the twentieth century—and this is one of the characteristics of the modern age—the whole of the literary past, be it from Arabia, China or Europe is at our disposal; in shops, in libraries, everywhere. Thus any writer is free to create his own tradition. He can read The Arabian Nights one day and Moby Dick or Kafka’s Metamorphosis the next… and those works, the spirit that they communicate, will immediately pass into his own life and work as a writer.

These days nothing can be said to be peculiar to one place or person. The world is everywhere…

So I would never say that we present-day Basque writers lack a tradition; I would say that what we lacked was an antecedent, that we lacked books from which we could learn to write in our own language. Tom Thumb never passed our way and so we had no trail of breadcrumbs to lead us back home.

It is these books that Bernardo Atxaga is writing, this antecedent that he is creating for future generations, and nowhere better than in “Obabakoak.”

1. Media correction blog Regret the Error provides their annual summation in “Crunks 2008: The Year in Media Errors and Corrections,” which ranges from cringe-worthy to hilarious. (The AP’s “[Bob Novak] announced late last month he has a brain” lies somewhere between the two.)

2. VQR contributing editor Lawrence Weschler has good MacArthur Awards juju—he writes about somebody, boom they get a genius grant. I remind Mr. Weschler that my mother finds me fascinating.

3. Matthew Vollmer, who wrote for VQR in 2003, would like you to know that he’s got a collection of stories coming out. It includes the story that we published.

4. In Prospect, Tom Chatfield considers the rise of literary awards, their arbitrary and self-serving nature, and finds they’re probably a good thing.

5. “Local Newspaper Doesn’t Have a Website” sounds like a 1999 Onion headline, but David Carr writes about just such a circumstance in the Times. The triCityNews of Monmouth County, NJ is an alt weekly that makes a pretty good argument for having a bare-bones website. Says the publisher, “I don’t understand how putting content on the Web would do anything but help destroy our paper. Why should we give our readers any incentive whatsoever to not look at our content along with our advertisements, a large number of which are beautiful and cheap full-page ads?”

VQR underwent its first-ever redesign five years ago, and after twenty issues, we’re updating the design a bit. Our Winter 2009 issue will be the first issue sporting the new look. It’s slimmer and brighter, but has as much packed inside as always.

The first change you’ll notice is our logo. We’ve moved away from the segmented |V|Q|R| motif and switched to something a bit bolder. Here’s how it appears on the winter issue:

As with the old logo, the color will change each month to reflect the cover art and the feel that we want to evoke.

You’ll find the second change once you thumb through the pages—we’ve gone to a two-column layout. Here’s the opening page to J. Hoberman’s “Behold the Man: Steven Soderbergh’s Epic Film Biography of Che”:

Dual columns are arguably easier on the reader’s eye, but more important is that they allow other design changes that, in turn, allow us to save paper. We’ve tightened up the kerning and the leading, and decreased the margins a bit. Those changes would have made the pages harder to read with a single-column format, but they work just fine with this new look. Each page of VQR now has approximately 750 words, rather than the 450 that we’ve been limited to.

The Winter 2009 issue has the highest word count of any issue in the past year, but it will look like the briefest in a half-decade. We’re saving on paper, printing costs, shipping costs, storage space, and of course money with this new design. Look for the Winter 2009 issue in your mailbox and on newsstands around January 1.

Steven Soderbergh’s long-awaited epic biopic of Che Guevara is finally in limited release with wide release (as two films) scheduled for January. Our regular film critic J. Hoberman weighs in with his typical erudition and razor wit. Hoberman writes that Soderbergh’s film is “perhaps a great movie and certainly something no less rare—a magnificently uncommercial folly. For who in 2008 could possibly want an American movie on the minutiae of guerrilla warfare? And so, this undertaking adds another puzzlement to Soderbergh’s enigmatic career.” Read the full article here.

Because of a backlog in accepted work in poetry and nonfiction, VQR will be closing submissions temporarily, beginning on January 2, 2009. We’ve accepted a year’s worth of poems and essays, and it’s just not fair to writers for us to continue soliciting work in those genres. We’ll begin accepting poetry and nonfiction again when our regular reading period begins again on September 1, 2009.

Please note that fiction is unaffected; stories can still be submitted through May 29 31, 2009.

Your doctor needs a nap, according to a recent Institute of Medicine report titled Resident Duty Hours: Enhancing Sleep, Supervision, and Safety. The authors conclude that residents working a 30-hour shift should have a mandatory 5-hour sleep break after working for 16 hours.

As one of the National Academies of Sciences, the IOM is a nonprofit organization tasked with issuing evidence-based advice on issues related to medicine and health. This report is but the latest high-profile publication to weigh in on the challenge of balancing two equally compelling goals: the need for young physicians to see and do as much as possible during their formative years and the need to protect patients from medical mistakes which occur because those caring for them are making decisions while impaired from lack of sleep. Numerous studies have reported that the effects of overnight call—a fact of life for most residents during the three-seven plus years of their post-graduate training—can produce impairment similar to that of mild alcohol intoxication. In part, such findings were behind a national change instituted in 2002 that restricts medical residents of all specialties to an 80-hour week.

Now this recent IOM report ups the ante. Will hospitals start to follow such recommendations? If residents are released from duty for nap time, where will the estimated $1.7 billion it will cost to continue patient care come from? Will fewer patients be harmed? Will the same number of patients be helped?

These are not easy question to answer. VQR alumna Pauline Chen, a transplant surgeon by training and author of the bestselling essay collection Final Exam takes a look at this issue in her recent “Doctor and Patient” column in the New York Times.  If a parent has a heart attack, none of us want to think that the resident who sees her in the emergency room is too tired to see straight. However, it is equally true that if calamity strikes in the form of a late-night car accident, we all want the trauma surgeon paged at 2 A.M. to be able to save her life anyway.

As I walk home from an overnight shift at the hospital as part of my medical school training, I can’t help but wonder. I have been awake for more than 24 hours and I have to be back and ready to go in my scrubs in less than 10. Somewhere in there I’m supposed to study, eat, try to talk to my family and friends occasionally, and—oh yeah—sleep. Every day when my alarm clock goes off, I wake up tired, but I also know that I have never felt more alive. And in the middle of the night when the resident asks me something about one of the patients I have been following, I know the answer because I have been there to learn my patient’s story. Part of me wants to cheer at the thought of mandated nap time and yet the part of me that is learning to become a physician also sees with a clarity that fatigue will never touch that caring for sick and injured people cannot be learned in a year or two or in 40 hours a week.

I am still too junior in the medical pecking order to shoulder the responsibility of independently caring for a patient, but that time is rapidly approaching with a speed that both thrills and terrifies me. When it arrives, when my classmates and I are turned loose to continue our training as residents, I know that we will face the same juggling act between personal needs and professional responsibility as those who have preceded us. I just hope that the way in which we learn will continue to reflect the complex, upside-down, never predictable way in which patients make their way to the hospital.

Is there a perfect solution? I don’t know. I plan to sleep on it.

Few writers are fortunate enough to support themselves solely through their writing. Many are teachers or journalists, and there’s the occasional copywriter, clerk, or librarian. William T. Vollmann and Richard Powers worked as computer programmers. In Egypt, Naguib Mahfouz was a civil servant for much of his life. Recently, I’ve noticed a batch of young writers with medical backgrounds, including Chris Adrian (“A Better Angel,” “The Children’s Hospital”), Rivka Galchen (“Atmospheric Disturbances”), and Vincent Lam, whose first book of stories, “Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures,” won the cash-flush Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2006. He’s also the co-author of a medical guide entitled “The Flu Pandemic and You,” which is likely the only medical text with a foreword by a Nobel Prize candidate (Margaret Atwood).

The doctor-writer coterie is a large and long-established one, with Anton Chekhov being its most famous member, but also counting among its ranks Michael Crichton, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, W. Somerset Maugham, Mikhail Bulgakov, Walker Percy, and William Carlos Williams. (Thanks to the British Medical Association for providing some names I was unaware of.) Maugham and Percy gave up their medical careers early on, though Williams practiced throughout his life. Chris Adrian has not only maintained his medical practice but is also a student at Harvard Divinity School.

What does this all mean in considering these writers, besides telling us where they get their paychecks from? I’d prefer to say that it means nothing, or close to it. We could go on about sources of influence or formative experiences, but in fact, this trivia-style sampling of writers’ day jobs tells us more about the economics of writing than about the texts or the writers themselves. Sure, the medical backgrounds of many of these writers—Bulgakov, Lam, Chekhov, among others—informed some of their fictions, but so certainly does a whole panoply of other experiences: childhood traumas, hometowns, relationships, obsessions, a chance encounter in the street. (Powers was spurred to write his first novel after viewing an August Sander photograph in a museum. Haruki Murakami can pinpoint the moment at a baseball game when the urge to write overcame him. We’ve all heard these stories. And who’s to say whether Murakami’s erstwhile job as owner of a jazz club or that singular moment at a baseball game is more important to his work?)

I would offer instead that this brief examination furthers the notion that few people are what they do, that if a job—or that loftier word: profession—equals an identity, then that identity is both incomplete and mutable. We are used to saying “I am a teacher” or “I am a publicist” or “I am an accountant,” but rarely do those first two words—”I am”—reflect their literal, or metaphysical, meaning. Often, it would be more accurate to say, “I work as…”—perhaps because one has to, or one can’t monetize one’s passions. So it is the rare and lucky person that is able to subsist by doing what he loves, whatever that may be. With the successful working writer, he or she is nearly always one of those lucky few. But for any writer, that simple declaration, “I am a writer,” must always be his identity, must always be literal, or else he is lying to himself about his aspirations. That “I am” expresses something fundamental about who that person is; about his priorities; and about the perseverance that will carry him through days when the ideas or accolades won’t come. It is why even writers who support themselves through entirely unrelated work say, occasionally sheepishly, “I am a writer.” It must be true—or else it isn’t worth trying.

It’s impossible to know if Scott Turow would write legal thrillers if he weren’t also a lawyer, or if Graham Greene, John Le Carre, and Joseph Weisberg would write spy novels (to use a blanket term to describe what are diverse bodies of work for the former two and is likely to be so for the latter) without having been spies. But surely they would still find themselves writing, as would these doctors, since writing is much more than a professional choice. It’s an attempt to achieve some understanding beyond the quotidian by grasping for that “I am.” It’s also well expressed in one insurance executive’s humble maxim: “Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words.” For a time, work as a vice president at Hartford may have paid Wallace Stevens’ bills, but it was through writing that he strived for wholeness.