Episode 173, #LiteraryMagsandPopularAcademics

Medicine, literature, academic writing, submitting to literary journals: we wander all over the map with guest Danielle Ofri.

Funny thing—writers for popular pubs tend to see literary magazines as an unsurmountable challenge (I know I do) and vice versa. Danielle Ofri, though, straddles both worlds as the Editor-in-Chief of the Bellevue Literary Review and a regular contributor to the New York Times and Slate as well as journals like The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine, making her the perfect person to talk to about that crossover, as well as the crossover between a career with confidentiality at its core, and one where telling the whole truth is key.

Episode links and a transcript follow—but first, a preview of the weekly Top 5 for Writers that will be dropping into #AmWriting paid subscriber inboxes on Monday, August 26, 2019: Top 5 Questions for Your Novel's Main Character. Not joined that club yet? You’ll want to get on that!

Got a friend who needs more #AmWriting?

As always, this episode (and every episode) will appear for all subscribers in your usual podcast listening places, totally free as the #AmWriting Podcast has always been. Find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Outcast, Spotify and everywhere else. This show notes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend.

To support the podcast and help it stay free, subscribe to our weekly Top 5 email.

LINKS FROM THE PODCAST

#AmReading (Watching, Listening)

Danielle: Ragtime E.L. Doctorow and Little King, Salmon Rushdie's short story excerpt in the New Yorker from his book, Quichotte.

KJ: Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport

#FaveIndieBookstore

The Strand again! We don't mind repeating a good one.

Our guest for this episode is Danielle Ofri, the author of What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear; Singular Intimacies ; Incidental Findings; Medicine in Translation; Intensive Care; What Doctors Feel;Best of the Bellevue Literary Reviewand the forthcoming When We Do Harm, a Doctor Confronts Medical Error.

She is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Bellevue Literary Review, a journal that explores issues of health and humanity. fiction and non-fiction and poetry. Find their submission guidelines here. Find out more about at Danielle at DanielleOfri.com, and Listen to her TEDMed Talk: Deconstructing Perfection, here. You can listen to her TEDMed talk Fear: A Necessary Emotion here.

This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwritingfor details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s Inside-Outline template.

Find more about Jess here, and about KJ here.

If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.

TRANSCRIPT (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)

KJ: I'm KJ Dell'Antonia

Jess: and I'm Jess Lahey.

KJ: And this is #AmWriting

Jess: with Jess and KJ.

KJ: #AmWriting is the every week the podcast about writing all the things that you might be writing, fiction, nonfiction, short pieces, long pieces, essays, pitches, humor, proposals. And most of all, this is the podcast about sitting down and getting the work done.

Jess: 01:52 I'm Jess Lahey and I'm the author of the Gift of Failure and a forthcoming book on preventing childhood substance abuse. And I had to think about it for a second. What am I writing? And you can find my work. Let's see. Pretty soon in air mail, but I generally am in the New York Times, Washington Post, places like that.

KJ: 02:11 It must be August. I am KJ Dell'Antonia. I am the author of How To Be a Happier Parent. I'm the former editor of the Motherlode blog at the New York Times where I still contribute occasionally. I'm also the author of a novel that will be coming out next year and you can find my work most often at the New York Times. But just incidentally, just by the way, pretty soon you'll also be able to find a little something by me and Wendy Aarons at the New Yorker.

Jess: 02:42 I mean I did not know if you were going to announce this today, but I am like burst rocketing bursting. This is a bucket list thing. This is huge and big bucket. Oh yeah. We'll be talking about that more because there's, it's cool and there's a lot to talk about there, but we have a guest, our guest today I'm so excited to talk about because my husband came home from work and he said, Oh my gosh, there's this woman you must talk to. I heard her speak. She's incredible. Her name is Danielle Ofri. She is a physician. She's at Bellevue hospital and is a writer of lots of different things. She writes for sort of traditional publishing about she has a forthcoming book on medical error.

Jess: