As if the Center for Nursing Advocacy hasn’t done enough in support of our winter issue, they just published a comprehensive review on their website — probably the most thorough and thoughtful review we’ve ever received (literary magazines aren’t reviewed very often, and when they are, the reviews are usually brief). Beyond a basic hat tip, I wanted to take a moment to thank Sandy Summers, Harry Jacobs Summers, and their staff.

With each tribute section I seem to become more nervous — not that our readers won’t enjoy it, but that the group we’re focusing on might not see the selections as a representative sample of what they’re trying to do. Would the collected poets appreciate the collection?

We usually approach an issue knowing very little about the special section’s genre — and maybe that’s what draws us there to begin with, the excitement of exploration and discovery. So I try to enlist as much insider help as I can. With the slam issue it was Susan B.A. Somers-Willett and Mark Eleveld of EM Press. With the forthcoming Cowboy/Western issue it’s CowboyPoetry.com.

About a year ago I sent an email to Sandy Summers, asking for help in finding acceptable nursing iconography to use as cover art. Try doing a Google image search for “nurses” and you’ll see the problem (hint: Make sure SafeSearch is ON). No other vocation is more fetishized, more gendered, more the victim of sexist and belittling stereotypes. If it’s not “Hello Nurse!”, it’s a cartoon angel with breasts just as big.

As I was looking for work, I found the relatively famous paintings by Richard Prince, who didn’t seem as controversial to me as I suddenly realized he was for nurses. To me, the paintings are attacking the same archetypes that we’d all like to overcoming — he paints over the covers of old pulp fiction novels featuring nurses, silencing them beneath masks and burying them in hellish tones. The statement seemed obvious to me, but a lot of nurses on the blogosphere and in reviews disagreed. The options for cover art seemed to be softcore porn, or the cheesy stock photos in nursing manuals. I needed help, a nuanced and thoughtful eye.

What I got from Sandy was much more than that. The Center for Nursing Advocacy is a powerhouse in the nursing community. She embraced the idea of the issue immediately, and put out a call for submissions in their monthly newsletter. As a result, we received more submissions from nurses than for any other special section — and that volume, coupled with the “unique access” and insight implicit in the nursing profession, created what might be our strongest issue ever.

And the nurses like to read other nurses, too. A literary magazine’s traditional audience is other literary writers. Of our several thousand subscribers, it’s only a fraction, maybe 25%, who have never submitted. Not so with nurses — we’ve received orders from hospitals, med school libraries, doctors’ offices, and
from hundreds of individual nurses who seem not to be writers themselves. That trend continues, as the orders roll in thanks to this new review.

I’ve found the nursing profession to the the most cohesive we’ve come across — and for good reason. There are some 12 million nurses in the world, one of the most highly-trained and intensive careers, yet also one of the most thankless. They do crucial work for a public that often ignores and belittles them, from a TV drama like Grey’s Anatomy showing nurses as peripheral subordinates, to a band like Blink-182 featuring a “porn star nurse” — few complain. We can do better than this.

Anyway, I’m pleased that the nurses were pleased with the final results of Rattle #28. It’s unfortunate that the cover didn’t come across as I’d hoped, after all — unable to find evocative iconography for the modern role of nurses, I thought we might get away with an old ephemara collage, as a way to contrast the traditional view with the reality featured in print. In retrospect, I think the comparison would have been better served if I’d used a modern image as divider art inside. But as Harry Jacobs Summers concludes in the review:

RATTLE ’s issue tells us something about the vital work nurses do for patients. But more fundamentally, it reveals the nurse poets to be thoughtful and articulate observers of the human condition. And that is a worthy tribute.

I couldn’t agree more, and I’m glad that it came across.