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pandemic

Dr. Kimmery Martin—Charlotte’s Bestselling Writer of Medical Novels

October 04, 2021 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

Aspiring writers are often advised to “write what you know.” I am not sure if anyone gave this advice to Dr. Kimmery Martin when she decided to try her hand at writing fiction, but she certainly wrote about what she knew in her debut novel, The Queen of Hearts, which came out in 2018. 

As a former emergency room physician in Charlotte, Kimmery is very familiar with Charlotte’s medical community, and this background is reflected in The Queen of Hearts.  At its core, this novel is about the evolving friendship between Zadie Anson (a pediatric cardiologist) and Emma Colley (a trauma surgeon).  These women first became friends in medical school, and both go on to pursue successful medical careers in Charlotte.  Their friendship, however, is threatened when secrets from their medical school days start to surface. 

Kimmery’s medical background is also reflected in her second novel, The Antidote for Everything, which was published in 2020.   In this novel, physician Georgia Brown works as a urologist in a hospital in Charleston.  Her best friend and fellow physician Jonah Tsukada is also employed at the same hospital.  Their medical careers are tested when Jonah is ordered by the hospital administrators to stop caring for transgender patients.  Within the context of this novel, Martin shows how members of the LGBTQ community sometimes face discrimination when seeking medical treatment.

Kimmery’s third medical novel, Doctors and Friends, will be released by Berkley on November 9, 2021.  Like her first two novels, Doctors and Friends deals with the friendships among physicians. In this case, the story focuses on three women physicians who have been friends since medical school.  They have established their careers in different cities, but they gather together for a reunion each year. When this story opens, their annual get-together is disrupted by the outbreak of a global pandemic.  Even though Kimmery wrote the initial draft of this novel before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, her novel uncannily anticipates the impact of the current pandemic on the lives of physicians and others in the medical community.

I recently contacted Kimmery and asked her for more information about how she came to write Doctors and Friends.  Here is what she sent to me:

For most of my adult life, my day job has involved battling disease. In an average shift at work, I’d fight carcinogens, genetic mutations, blood flow obstructions, and, not least of all, microbial invaders. It’s a bit of a misnomer to call my career a day job, actually; like every ER doctor, I worked days, but also nights, weekends, and holidays, all of it blurring together into a ceaseless stream of injured, sick, and suffering human beings.

Being an emergency medicine physician in Charlotte may sound like the job from hell but in many ways it’s the best job in the world. The ability to ease suffering, even a little, balances the years of grueling training and the hardships of practicing this particular specialty. What could be more gratifying than snatching life from the jaws of death? Every ER doctor knows the fierce joy—and sheer relief—that grips you when you revive a pulseless child or restore consciousness to someone blue and lifeless. 

We fight pathogens all the time in my job. I thought I understood them.

In 2018, I had the idea to write a book centered around an infectious disease doctor and an ER doctor. My first novel, The Queen of Hearts—which is set in Charlotte—had just been published and I’d just finished writing my second novel, The Antidote for Everything, both of which are medical fiction. By 2019, I was well into the process of creating my own personal fictional pandemic. I spent the majority of the year researching, outlining, and writing the first draft. I interviewed more than forty experts in various fields of science and medicine, a process which extended into 2020.

Obviously, the world has changed mightily since I first began the process of writing Doctors and Friends. As one of my protagonists says, we’ve all morphed into armchair virologists after our collective experience during a real-life pandemic. Maybe we’ve been sick, or we’ve developed long-term symptoms, or we know someone who’s been hospitalized. We know about spike proteins and mRNA, variants, and origin theories. Millions of us have endured the indescribable grief of losing a loved one to a disease that literally steals their breath.

I’m still a bit stunned by the politicization of our real-life disease. Our understanding of SARS-CoV-2 —and response to it—was evolving on a daily basis just as I was honing the final portrayal of my nasty little fictional virus. It’s hard enough during normal times to whittle an infinite universe of words into a coherent and interesting story. It’s nearly impossible while getting hammered with hundreds of news stories, scientific articles, and social media outrage on the subject. The novel is not always representative of reality. Some of the unrealities in the book stem from what we writers like to call creative license (it’s fiction, y’all!) but some, I must admit, are related to the incompetence of the author. Even so, I might have to get NOT ABOUT COVID tattooed on my forehead in an attempt to ward off the inevitable fallout from people who have strong opinions about what is or is not real when it comes to the nonfictional coronavirus pandemic we’ve endured. Which, of course, is everyone. 

I loved writing this book, even after getting slapped by the irony of it all. So far, all my novels have featured friendship as a fundamental theme and I revel in this concept: your friends are the people you choose to love. There’s no familial obligation or romantic entanglement. It’s a purer form of attraction: you care for these people not because you have to but because of who they are. Friendships, especially those that endure over time, are a blessing beyond measure. 

In my own case, the friendships forged during medical school and my ER career are among the most intense and cherished of my life—and I hope some of that is reflected in the novel. 

For Kimmery, the medical world plays an integral role in all of her novels.  Her central characters are shaped by their experiences as physicians, and her plots are structured around medical crises or concerns.  Kimmery’s deep knowledge of the dynamics of medical school and the inner workings of hospitals is reflected in the lives of her characters and in the unfolding of her plots.  For more information about Kimmery and her medical novels, please click on the following link:  https://www.kimmerymartin.com/

Anyone who has lived in Charlotte for very long knows that our city serves as a medical hub for our region.  Charlotte is home to famous hospitals and medical clinics, and soon it will have its own medical school.  In addition to its excellent medical facilities, Charlotte is also home to many remarkable medical professionals, including one of the country’s top writers of medical fiction—Dr. Kimmery Martin.  Storied Charlotte is all the richer because this doctor/author is in our collective house.

Tags: fictionmedical novelspandemic

Tanure Ojaide’s Narrow Escapes

April 10, 2021 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

Tanure Ojaide is a well-known Nigerian poet, but he is also the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies at UNC Charlotte.  I met Tanure shortly after he came to UNC Charlotte in 1990, but it was not until last year that our mutual interest in poetry intersected.  Shortly after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the editor of Exchange (a publication of UNC Charlotte’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences) decided to run an article about the response of UNC Charlotte’s poets to COVID-19.  Tanure and I were among the poets the editor interviewed, and each of us had a poem included in the article:  https://exchange.uncc.edu/poets-reflect-on-impact-of-challenges-on-human-spirit/  In both cases, our poems were about taking walks during the quarantine, but our paths soon diverged.  Whereas I wrote just one poem related to the pandemic, Tanure went on to write an entire collection on this topic.  Titled Narrow Escapes:  A Poetic Diary of the Coronavirus Pandemic, this collection came out this month from Spears Books.  For more information about this book, please click on the following link:  https://spearsmedia.com/shop/narrow-escapes/

Tanure asked me if I would write a blurb for the book, and I happily agreed.  As I state in my blurb, Narrow Escapes is presented as a series of poetic diary entries, spanning from March 19, 2020, to October 31, 2020.  Each of the poems is a response to the coronavirus pandemic, but they vary in focus from the global impact of the pandemic to the very personal impact on one’s family members.  All of these poems pack an emotional wallop, but the personal ones are especially gut wrenching.  For example, the poem “When the Coronavirus Comes to the House” captures perfectly the anxiety and anguish that parents feel when their children are stricken by a deadly virus.  In many ways, this poetic diary has the feel of a verse novel, for there is a continuing narrative that ties these poems together. The poems in Narrow Escapes narrate the unrelenting progression of a global pandemic.  It is a narrative that we all are experiencing, and that is what gives this book its universal appeal.

I recently contacted Tanure, and I requested that he send me a statement about what prompted him to write this book.  Here is what he sent to me:

The poet is a restless human being whose reflexes are like antennae that respond to what is happening around. I have always known that no part of the world is separated from another and this connectedness has been strengthened by globalization. Thus, when there was the outbreak of the strange virus that turned out to be Coronavirus or COVID-19 in distant Wuhan, China, I had no doubt it would get to wherever there were human beings. It did not take long for it to get to Europe and watching the fatalities in Italy, Spain, France, and Britain, my anticipation became more real because of the connections between Milan, Madrid, Paris, and London and American cities. Within a week California and New York got the virus and the rest is familiar history.

Much as I used to refrain from jumping to write on issues or events as they unfolded, COVID-19 was a force that compelled my imagination to do something immediately. What else should a poet do than follow closely the spread, disruptions, fatalities, fear, near misses, and triumphs of this mysterious virus that doctors did not then know much about? It was current but its lasting currency intrigued me. As a global person, I follow happenings across the world. The heavy toll in northern Italy that I know through Milan and Bellagio told me that this was serious business. At a point, especially in late March through June, 2020, the trepidation was palpable. Doctors did not seem to know what to offer as treatment and many people who went to hospital died. Most of those who contracted it did not only die lonely but were gurneyed into cold trucks for mass burial as at a time in New York. For me, that was a threat that one should not take lightly. My family hunkered in religiously during the period of the lockdown.

What else could be more menacing as to move a poet to write than the entire world attacked by a tiny mysterious virus that behaved like a trickster? The pandemic offered me an opportunity to reflect on the vagaries of life and things. Why not write day by day as the charts of hospitalized folks rose to higher and higher peaks? The television stations and social media presented graphic images again and again that made nights riddled with nightmares. I often woke at night to jot down my reflections on the past day and my anticipation of what would come later that day. There was gloom but after some time there was a sense of defiance. What could be more poetic a subject than a dance of defiance against death in many narrow escapes? Some days, I had one entry or two or even three depending on Aridon, my muse. Each diary entry was like a dot in a circle and daily I added more dots to fill up the circle to make meaning about life. I was baring my heart as I tried to write entries that should communicate poetically. Unlike my earlier poems, there was barely a long poem in this collection. I was mobbed by images and thoughts of a global world which had taken for granted its confident development that it thought nothing could change its trajectory of progress. The poet loves this delusion of humans. COVID-19 levelled the world in a sense as developed and developing countries were equalized. The powerful and the weak faced the same threats and ironically a superpower nation led by an erratic president fumbled in handling the pandemic. For some act of fate up till now, Africa has not suffered close to what Europe and North America went through in fatalities.

The COVID-19 pandemic started from very far away. I knew it would come to the United States but did not foresee its coming to my home. It came really close to me. My lastborn son and daughter contracted it as they developed coughing and tested positive. Whether that was a fluke or not, I can’t tell because within three months my daughter caught it again and COVID-19 showed to us its ugliness as I never saw it from a distance with other people. She was in a ventilator for a day and those hours were the most traumatic I have experienced. She came out of the critical state and got moved to a step-down ward before being discharged for rehabilitation. It took her several months to get to relative normalcy even though she feels the side effects of  COVID-19 will remain with her for a long time. Imagine your family narrowly escaping a fatality and your suppressed jubilation and somber solidarity with others still mourning their loved ones!

Given that April is National Poetry Month, I thought it would be fitting to include one of the poems from Narrow Escapes in this week’s Storied Charlotte blog post.  I ran this idea by Tanure, and he kindly gave me permission to include the following poem:

We Are All Casualties

We knew people ambulanced to hospital

but did not return,

we know who returned on their own feet

but stunned to silence by their vulnerability;

we know those whose relatives or friends

either lost or won their personal battles.

All the while we have stayed at home.

It is not that distant despite social distancing—

those who grieve for the dead,

those who participate in muted celebrations,

and those who suffer enervating trepidations

from the fatalities trucked to mass graves

and the losses no words can convey.

Dead, positive, or negative

we are all casualties of COVID-19.

I think that Tanure is right when he says that we are all casualties of COVID-19.  This pandemic has had an impact on all of us, and as a result, we all can relate to the poems in Tanure’s Narrow Escapes.  Tanure’s newest poetry collectiondeals with a global pandemic, but at the same time, it relates directly to Storied Charlotte. 

Tags: CoronavirusCOVID19pandemicpoetry
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