Scott D. McLean, MD

Thank you for taking a quick look at my Gap Year blog, the inside account of my peregrinations between 2023 and 2025, spanning a former life primarily focused on medicine and a future life of letters. Peregrination! Interesting word, coined in the 15^th century: a journey, a pilgrimage, a wandering. Still, I can’t help but think of falcons.

Lyzette Wanzer’s workshop this summer –  on how to submit work for publication – led me to send a couple of poems to medmic, “Conversations, Culture & Creativity from the Health Care Community.” Eric Dessner, the ophthalmologist/editor, in short order has published one of them: “How to deliver bad news about a very sick child.”

This is my first publication since 1977. During my last 2 years at Hamilton College, five short poems made it into Red Weather, the literary journal of Hamilton College, although the soul of the publication clearly resided within Kirkland. Jo Pitkin was the editor.

“How to deliver bad news about a very sick child” I can see now, retrospectively, owes something to William Carlos Williams, specifically his poem “Tract,”  one of my favorites, but too long to cut and paste here. Williams wrote it about 1915. By old age he supposedly found it hackneyed. I may at some point think the same about “Bad News.” For the time being, I still like it.

Here is stanza XV from WCW’s “January.”

All this—

              was for you, old woman.

I wanted to write you a poem

that you would understand.

For what good is it to me

if you can’t understand it?

                             But you got to try hard –

But –

      Well, you know how

the young girls run giggling

on Park Avenue after dark

when they ought to be home in bed?

Well,

that’s the way it is with me somehow.