An enormous thank you to Sarah Hope Kagan, PhD, RN, FAAN, FGSA, AOCN, GCNS-BC.University of Pennsylvania Professor of Gerontological Nursing. Lucy Walker Term Professor, Abramson Cancer Center at Pennsylvania Hospital. With Sarah generously volunteering to reach out to her vast network of fellow nurses, Fence was able to circulate the below letter soliciting writing from nurses far and wide. Sarah's writing is worth your attention: recent publications include "Ageism, older people, and hospitalization: Walking a path through the past, looking to lead in the future" and "Treating Our Malignant Climate: Global Heating, Healthy Climate, and Cancer Nursing"
You can browse a robust list of Sarah's publications here.
June 29, 2021
To all nurses:
Fence literary magazine invites and welcomes submissions of writing in any genre (though with an acute interest in nonfiction) by nurses from all areas of possible practice for the Winter 2021 issue of the journal. Our deadline for submissions is August 31. If you find yourself needing more time, we can still figure out how best to proceed.
In the wake of the Covid pandemic, we want to honor you, hear from you, and share with our readership your raw experiences in the field, your ideas in terms of the ethics, policy, and your standards of caregiving, how you have cared for the ill, the elderly, and the dying during the time of Covid or otherwise. We hope you might be willing to share in writing your ideas and most evocative stories with our readers. Our editorial domain, "Other" (innovative and genre-transgressing nonfiction), places work in both the print journal and Fence's online platform “Steaming.” We will be selecting work for both of these formats from the responses to this call for submissions. The print journal necessarily has limited space for our selections and any images published there must be black and white, but we have abundant and indefinite space online and are also delighted to present color images and multimedia files there. We are committed to publishing everything nurses send us. You can read a sampling of Fence nonfiction at https://www.fenceportal.org/ under the heading “Steaming” (just scroll down from the top).
Length is open – 5000 words would be around the maximum and would be perfectly fine, while even 250 words could be the minimum of what we’re looking for. Images could be included in B&W in the print journal and in color on the website. We simply, above all, want to see the pandemic and health care through your eyes, your experience, and your point of view, especially things that may be surprising, poignant, frustrating, or a call to action for our readers. If you’d like to run an idea by us before committing to writing, please feel free to email us at any time with your thoughts, questions, and/or concerns at jasonzuzga@gmail.com or sarah.falkner@gmail.com. We, the editors, are happy to lend our hand as editors if desired or if it may be of assistance.
In recent issues, Fence has published several pieces of nonfiction writing by authors tackling the subjects of illness and death.
In Issue 36, published in 2020, Adrienne Walser wrote, in her memoir-essay "Entertainer of the Year" about her struggles with severe rheumatoid arthritis since childhood, chronicling her family's early support (her mother died from choking a few years after diagnosis) and romantic adult life while navigating the health care system. As a child, she was catastrophically injected with a serum containing the element gold; as an adult, she has dealt with emotionally indifferent doctors, infuriatingly ineffective and/or grueling treatments, and, after a fall, she suffered neck damage needing a skull halo to heal. (You can both read and listen to Adrienne read her astonishing and gently brutal piece in our issue 36 podcast episode: 2.2 FENCE 36 Episode Two:.)
In Issue 37, our Spring/Summer 2021 issue, Fence published a long excerpt from actor Emily Bevan's book The Diary of Losing Dad. She describes her job playing the role of Amy Dyer, a “partially deceased syndrome” sufferer pivotal to the story told in the BBC3 Bafta-award-winning television programme In the Flesh created by Dominic Mitchell. The show, also starring Luke Newberry, around which Fence published a multi-genre portfolio including script, essay, images, and interview, takes place after a pharmaceutical company has developed a cure for risen zombies. Rounded up and rehabilitated, each "partially deceased" person must be injected daily via a “Neurortriptyline” gun (the drug's name a nod to the early antidepressant) through a hole kept open between first and second vertebrae. The recovered and back-to-their-old-selves undead are, as the series opens, in the course of being uneasily reintegrated back into their communities under medical supervision. The filming of the second season of the show's episodes coincidentally occurred for Emily during the aftermath of her beloved father’s stroke, after which he remained in hospital under the British health care system until his death from underlying brain cancer all over the span of several months. Filming occurred close enough to the hospital for Emily to visit her father frequently during production. You can listen to an interview with Emily about her book here:
Thus, at Fence, we’ve published two views of the medical system from a patient’s perspective and a family member’s perspective, but we have yet to have nonfiction of any sort written by a medical professional on the caregiving side. We hope to rectify this situation with your help.
We want to hear from you and learn more about the experience of being a nurse, we want to learn what moves, exhausts, and compels you about your nursing practice and the health care system in general. We want to hear about what it was like on the front lines vs. Covid. We want to hear about your experience. A little biographical and geographical detail will be of great interest to the audience for this work, but we also realize that for many security and privacy reasons, some of you may want to remain anonymous or change the names of people and places. Please don't hesitate to pursue publication if you wish to remain anonymous, and we can help you edit your piece to accomplish that if needed.
Remember that our readers are all familiar with being treated by nurses in some way or another at some point, but, other than through entertainments like the television series Nurse Jackie or the play and film W;t, few understand exactly, fully, consciously, what is required of a self in actual nursing from your expert point of view. Again, we’d love to hear from you with any questions or concerns.
All best,
Sarah Falkner and Jason Zuzga
Fence Other/Nonfiction Editors
In Issue #39 and here online, we include the resulting portfolio of essays, poetry, and witness across the nursing specialties. The work offers us hard-fought wisdom, raw emotion, beauty, and no easy answers. This is a Covid-era Fence space of encounter between the art of nursing and the art of literature, for literary writers and nurses to meet, learn from each other, and cross-pollinate through words.
You can read an introduction to the work by Sarah Falkner, one of the Fence Other Editors, here.
A PORTFOLIO OF WRITING BY NURSES: TABLE OF CONTENTS. • Tina Carlson • KD Seluja • Sally Helmi • Christine Riley • Jane Slemon • Renata Bubadué • Diane Kraynak (pictured on back cover of the issue) • Geraldine Gorman • Charles March III • Mary Ann Thomas • Sarah Comey Cluff • Brenda Beardsley • Shirley Stephenson • Nicole Aicher • Amanda Reilly • Angela Todd • D. Liebhart
