Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: I’m a big admirer of Jenna Le’s poetry (full disclosure: I chose her book Manatee Lagoon for the Acre Books poetry series), and even more impressed that she’s written three books of poetry alongside her full-time job as a radiologist. A contributor to our Issue 17.1, Le writes fantastic poems, often with formal elements, and her images are both quotidian and surprising: a dishwasher, Pap smear, and bus stop, for example (in different poems). I asked if she’d share her experiences as a physician and writer as part of our series on writers’ jobs:
How would you describe what you do for your day job?
I’m a musculoskeletal radiologist: a type of medical doctor focusing on problems of the bones, joints, and related tissues. I use my medical and technological understanding to help sick people get tests (such as X-rays, ultrasounds, CT scans, and MRIs) that are performed in an optimal, often personalized way to reveal what is ailing their bodies, and then I interpret the images the machines produce, essentially translating thousands of pictures per day into words. I also use my understanding of medical images to perform procedures such as cancer biopsies and injections to treat pain. I do this in an academic setting where I teach students and postgraduate trainees to do what I do.
What do you enjoy about that job?
There’s something kind of trippy about immersing yourself in an MRI, letting the images wash over your eyeballs in waves. I once heard a radiologist colleague describe the experience of reading a CT scan of the lungs, of seeing all those tiny bronchi bifurcate over and over again, as being like flying through the branches of a tree. It’s like you’re airborne, you’re in flow, surrounded by dreamlike sights when, all at once, meaning rises up to meet you. In an instant, bewilderment resolves into comprehension—that can feel quite rewarding.
How, if at all, does your day job inform—or relate to—your writing life?
Like poetry, a radiologist’s job is situated at a crossroads between the verbal and the visual. Every day, my job impresses on me the power of electing to use language that is clear, vivid, and animated, as opposed to verbiage that is tortuous, dull, or cluttered with jargon. “Muscular” and “dynamic” are adjectives often used to describe effective poetic language; having a job focused on musculoskeletal health, on helping people achieve ease of movement, keeps this ideal before my eyes in a very real way. Additionally, both poetry and radiology deal with questions of what it means to see: what is the impact of the visual on belief, on feeling, on action? What things, once seen, can’t be unseen?
What creative projects are you working on right now?
Lately, I’ve begun writing about childbirth, motherhood, things like that, and just seeing where it leads me.
Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), and Manatee Lagoon (Acre Books, 2022). Her poems appear in AGNI, Verse Daily, West Branch, and elsewhere.
