Editor’s Note

Elizabeth Coletti

Dear Readers,

Being a part of the Editorial Staff of The Health Humanities Journal is a fasttrack to getting thrown headlong into discussions of narrative medicine, poetic structure’s relation to message, and more perspectives on hospitals than we sometimes know what to do with. As with past semesters, I have greatly enjoyed the process of creating this edition of the HHJ, but the end of this school year has also seen the relevance and consequence of the journal’s themes demonstrated in an unavoidable way. As I write this, COVID-19 has become a global pandemic, affecting well over a hundred countries and disrupting travel and normal operations even at UNC. Although none of the pieces in this issue of the journal touch on the coronavirus itself, as they were all written much earlier in the semester, we believe they still offer a reflection on the sometimes unsettling shared omnipresence of health.

We are all individual, creative in our own right, and more separate than we often wish to be. But experiencing illness, grappling with our own health, and contending with what it means to live in a body in this ever more connected world reveal a greater universality, which many of these poems and essays tap into. In this issue, we are proud to include the journal’s first international publication, seeing our work in the health humanities reflected in the common themes and topics of a Canadian creative writing competition. Another poem explores the way we talk about health, literally, across a language barrier and cultural divide, questions that are echoed in another essay that explores the implications of global public health on cultural burial practices and demonstrates how health dovetails with religion and governance, inextricable from the daily exercise of our lives.

In these works, a character in a short story on the diagnosis of an STD grapples with responsibility and blame, an undiagnosed disease refuses to release its hold on a frustrated student, and poets desperately attempt metaphors to convey the experience of mental illness or of watching someone else in pain. We cannot escape our own encounters and trials with health. It sways everything from the world at large down to the smallest infant in the NICU. Yet for as many myriad experiences of illness and medicine as we live through, there are just as many ways of expressing them through the humanities: through poetry, through fiction, through personal narrative and research and art, all of which we hope to showcase in this journal.

My enduring gratitude goes out to the many people who have helped to make this edition of the Health Humanities Journal a reality. Thank you to Dr. Jane Thrailkill for your support and guidance. Thank you to our generous sponsors who allow us to print copies of the journal to spread conversation in the health humanities across the campus of UNC and beyond. Special thanks goes to Dr. Vincent Kopp for funding the new annual Walker Percy Prize, which each year will be awarded to one of the pieces published in the journal by a UNC student author that best exemplifies the spirit of Walker Percy in its ability to surprise and entertain the reader while offering a new perspective on health experiences. Thank you to the board of judges and to everyone else in the English department who helped on the long road to making this prize a reality.

I must also thank the Editorial Staff for their dedication and investment of hard work and creative talent throughout this year. I have been impressed, proud, and grateful for each of you in turn as we have brought this journal to life. It truly is a monster of Frankenstein’s creation that we must piece together and resurrect each semester, and it’s been a pleasure to undertake that work at your side. Finally and perhaps most importantly, although I don’t like to play favorites, thank you to our authors who have offered up their skillful writing and personal accounts of living and talking through health. Without you, this journal would be empty and we would all be worse off.

The Editorial Staff and I are proud to present the Spring 2020 issue of The Health Humanities Journal of UNC-Chapel Hill. We hope that it can serve as a small sampling of not only the vast, interconnected ways that humanity deals with illness and medical systems, but also how those very experiences are used as inspiration, source material, and catalysts for meaning-making and creativity.

All my best,

Elizabeth Coletti

Editor-in-Chief