The Monthly interviews New Zealand poets, Renee Liang and Loredana Podolska-Kint, regarding poetry with people working in the field of medicine – Part 2 – Renee Liang’s poetry with women in medicine

How do your projects come about?

Renee Liang

My project started because I had been asked a couple of years ago, randomly, to take a poetry class during a medical conference for women. It had an aspect of therapy about it for the women doctors. It was to be a way of allowing the women doctors to reset, to de-stress. I decided to make it interesting, a bit quirky, and so it became, literally, a writing course, a writing workshop, in fact it was to be run like any other writing workshop except it was being delivered to a specific group of participants, my peers in the field of medicine. The participants were allowed to write any type of poetry they wanted to and that was turned into a chapbook. I produced only three copies, but that started things off.

What happens after that first project and chapbook?

Renee Liang

Because the first workshop had been a bit chaotic, I decided to think ahead this year, so the second project had a little more constraint about it where doctors had to “bear witness”. For example, there could be stories we are privileged to hear from our patients in our medical practice, stories which can be quite personal, often quite confronting, and we could include our own stories, which sometimes you don’t pay a lot of attention to, as well. Participants could also “bear witness” to world events, or issues of equity or colonisation.

I decided to offer online workshops, because I wanted to make access more equitable, so that people who didn’t have the resources to take time off and attend a conference; they had a series of online workshops they could go to. Loredana attended three of those workshops. Now, I offered them online not just because I wanted people to have access to the project but also because I was hearing from a lot of people that they were very stressed out and they just needed to be something else for a while. They just needed to use poetry as an escape, perhaps to allow themselves some time to find themselves again.

For quite a few of those people, they didn’t know they were poets but I think I managed to convince them that they did have some poetry in them, and I cemented that by publishing them.

Publishing the participants was a big part of the project?

There is nothing like being published in a real live book to give you the feeling that you are actually a poet. I have always been part of a chapbook group over many years, and I used what I had learned over those years to get something published.

There are a number of ways of publishing poetry. It is possible to go for something substantial, something really big, high quality, and that increases the cost and the risk or you can go for something much smaller, with a specific audience in mind. I knew who the audience would be because of the uniqueness of the project, poems by doctors, so I had a good idea how many we might sell. I published 100 chapbooks in the end.

We had a hand-made aesthetic as well which I think made the project quite special and there was certainly a sense of community with the project. It was at the conference where I thought it seemed like it would be fun to get people to muck in. We had people working with glue and pens, and actually creasing the paper, and putting the chapbooks together, and there was something very valuable about that experience.

Loredana Podolska-Kint

I unfortunately didn’t make it to the conference but I did make it to three of the online ZOOM workshops in the lead up to the conference where the putting together of the chapbooks took place. Much later I met Renee at a writer’s conference where I was able to get a few copies of the chapbook from her.

I was one of the people who needed that outlet, who just needed to write poetry about some of the crazy things which were happening to me at work. And it worked. It worked by reconnecting me to poetry, which I had started to feel a bit of a disconnection. In many ways the workshops allowed me to be reconverted to poetry.

Where did all these doctors come from? How did they know they could be part of this project?

Renee Liang

I will take you all the way back. There is a Facebook group called, “New Zealand Women in Medicine”, and you have to be a women doctor in New Zealand. It is a closed group, it has thousands of members, and a member has to invite you to be part of it. You also have to post your medical registration because the group has to keep people out who are not doctors.

The group mutually supports the other members, we give each other advice, things like that, and so the group has nothing to do with poetry. But every now and again I get to pop up, I already had a bit of a reputation as a poet, and suggest that people could write some poetry.

I suggested that I would put together some workshops for this project in the lead up to the bi-annual conference, and I wanted to keep them as relaxed as possible, so there was a Google Form where people could sign up.

The workshops were organised so that if you couldn’t make one workshop you could attend another. Some people attended one, some attended more, but everyone attended when they could. That was very important because I know how difficult it is to commit to something outside of your medical practice. You are committed to your patients, you work long hours and you don’t want to commit to something and not turn up because you feel like you are letting people down. I made it clear that if you couldn’t attend one particular workshop you could attend another. No-one was letting anyone down.

It sounds like it was organised as a community arts style project with a particular group of people participating in workshops which worked for them and a publication at the end of the project?

I think that’s right. There were four workshops, there were workshop notes, and essentially it was a writing course. From there I suggested that if people who attended wanted to be published, wanted to work towards that, then there was a date that they had to submit something to me by.

I chose not to edit too hard, I was a gateway, not a gatekeeper, and I wanted to get as many people as possible to be published. I decided the publication date would be at the conference. Some people didn’t manage to get something finished for that deadline, but I did decide to get as many people published as I possibly could.

Everything was quite tight regarding the schedule, I did have a Printer lined up who had worked with me before and in the end there was a real feeling that this community of women doctors had come together and the chapbook was the end result.

The quality at times might not have been as tight as I would have liked, but there is a real community feel to the project. And there was a sense that people involved were rewarded with publication very quickly.

I was also able to say to people that this experience, attending a workshop, or workshops, writing a piece of work, getting that piece of work published, and having that happen very quickly, experiencing the excitement of writing and being published, well it won’t always be like that. But this experience should encourage people to either start, or keep. writing.

When people were reading their poetry at the conference there were people who were crying, there was quite an incredible response to the work. That was amazing and a great end to this particular project.