R.C. Blenis

Before I was a nurse, I was a researcher. Before I was a researcher, I was a kid in Georgia who read too much and asked questions that made adults uncomfortable. The through-line has always been the same: I want to understand how people make sense of suffering, their own and others', and what it means to show up for someone when understanding isn't possible.

I studied psychology at Georgia Tech and developmental psychology at Cornell, where I spent years in a memory lab studying how people construct the stories they tell about their lives. Eventually I left the PhD to do the thing I kept writing about: sit at bedsides rather than behind data sets. I earned my nursing degree from Emory and started my clinical life in the emergency department.

What followed was an education no classroom could have given me. I worked the COVID ICU at NYU Langone Brooklyn during the first wave of the pandemic. I managed pediatric and adult psychiatric units, learning what it looks like when systems meant to hold people instead break them. I carried what I saw into notebooks, and eventually into poems and essays that tried to be honest about the gap between what we promise patients and what we can actually deliver.

The word patient comes from the Latin patiens: to endure suffering. Compassion means to suffer with. Nursing lives in that narrow space between the two, and so does writing. I teach psychiatric mental health nursing now, which means I spend my days helping students develop the kind of attention that clinical work demands: the capacity to sit with someone in crisis and remain present, curious, and useful. My "Narrative Nursing" workshop brings medical humanities into nursing education, exploring how close reading and reflective writing can deepen clinical reasoning and sustain the practitioner's inner life.

I've practiced Buddhism for seventeen years, and while I don't think of my writing as Buddhist writing, the practice has shaped everything about how I look at the world and what I believe language can do.

My work has appeared in Massachusetts Review, JAMA, American Journal of Nursing, Heavy Feather Review, Flyway, Wild Willow Magazine, The Dewdrop, West Trade Review, Modern Haiku, Presence, Panorama, and elsewhere. I live in Atlanta with my wife, where we train together in weightlifting and yoga and talk about books probably more than is reasonable.