From a Camera in 1960s New York to Short Fiction
One Question Across Three Rooms Gene Altman, photographer and author, makes more sense read as one long habit that changed instruments. He spent the 1960s on New York sidewalks with a camera. He spent 42 years afterward in clinical and forensic psychiatry in Hawaii. He now publishes literary short fiction. Three different rooms, one question […]
What Forty-Two Years in Psychiatry Taught Me About People
I was born in Chicago in 1941, studied Far Eastern languages and literature at Harvard College, went on to Stanford Medical School and a psychiatry residency, and then spent 42 years in clinical and forensic psychiatry in Hawaii. That is the part that fits on a page. What it leaves out is that the work […]
Why So Many Psychiatrists End Up Writing Stories
Why Do So Many Psychiatrists Write Fiction? Psychiatrists write fiction because the work trains the exact attention a story requires, sustained close listening to how another person tells the story of their own life. The step from the consulting room to the page is a change of form, not a change of subject. A clinical […]
The Long Tradition of Doctors Who Write Fiction
This guide covers the history of doctors who became writers, the reason medicine keeps producing storytellers, and where to start reading. Jump to the section you need. Why do so many doctors end up writing fiction Which famous doctors became writers, from the nineteenth century on Are there psychiatrists who write fiction What medicine gives […]