A Writer's Journey

Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature my mistress. – Anton Chekov

Like a host of college writers, in some measure spurred by the threat of conscription, I came to wonder of my bookish path and returned from a summer of discovery to choose the road more traveled—one that lead away from storytelling and verse to the sure shelter and cachet of a profession. In the years when American medical schools admitted only “hard science” majors and selection committees were at best skeptical of liberal arts degrees, I clicked heels and demoted my English studies to a minor.

Then followed the punishing yet satisfying pre-dawn to wee hour trials of study, internship, specialty training, and military service, followed by fulfilling decades of practice, teaching, and family. All that while, true to Frost’s metaphor, though I imagined it might be, there was little expectation of returning to the wonder-craft of prose. Aware that some in my cohort did so, physician-authors who in Chekov’s example dallied with their literary mistresses or like Keats and Crichton, abandoned medicine for composition before their healing careers began, I could but hope. Yet, when at last there was time, the skeleton of a first novel was exhumed. Enduring doubts and adversity as all authors must, that novel came to be, then another, and now more.

From the subjunctive perspective we all muse about our road not taken, of who we might have been or what may have been created. Dutifully out to pasture, we empathize with our young selves and ruminate about long ago choices, yet in the fading twilight fail to see the road diverge once again.

It need not be.