Veneta Masson has practiced nursing for 35 years, mostly in inner-city Washington, DC. Along the way, she found an outlet to express everything she was witnessing and experiencing -- poetry. Veneta started putting together essays and poems about her nursing life and today has two collections in print, Ninth Street Notebook
VT: How did you get started writing poetry?
Veneta: I wasn't one of those who always wrote. I started keeping a journal while I was involved in the nitty-gritty of primary health care. It wasn't poetry in the beginning, just a place where I'd dump stuff at the end of the day I didn't know what to do with. As I added material, it started to look like narrative poetry. But I realized I didn't know diddly about Poetry with a capital "P." So I took poetry workshops for a few years at a wonderful writing center we have here.
VT: How did you start publishing your poems and writing?
Veneta: I started writing poems for the annual report of the clinic where I worked. Then I began to wonder if I could submit my poems elsewhere. The Journal of the American Medical Association and the American Journal of Nursing both have poetry pages in their magazines. So I sent my work to them. To this day, most of my writing has been published in the realm of healthcare.
VT: How about your books?
Veneta: I thought, why buy a red sports car in middle age when I could publish my books myself? So I created my own imprint called the Sage Femme Press. In the past this was considered less than kosher if you wanted to be taken seriously. But everything is changing, thanks to Amazon and word-of-mouth. My books have even been adopted by a number of schools.
VT: Do you face any particular challenges as a poet who's also a nurse?
Veneta: With my nursing background, the thing that's been challenging is that I'm right on the edge of sentimentality -- the grand taboo in most writing these days. But with nursing you're, of course, in the middle of life and death drama. I now review essays and poetry submissions for the American Journal of Nursing. They're often about death -- ironically we feel most alive in these on-the-edge experiences. I have to be careful in my writing not to call fall over that edge. But the discipline of nursing has been my seedbed, my writing garden. That's where it all comes from.
Veneta graciously sent us one of her poems, called "The Nurse's Job," originally published in the journal "Nursing and Health Care Perspectives." Click here to read it.
