R.C. Blenis

Before I was a nurse, I was a kid in a Georgia pew with more questions than the sermon had answers for. The through-line is 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 fixing 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. I left the PhD program to become a nurse, and clinical practice eventually led me back to research.

I earned my nursing degree from Emory and took a job in an emergency department. I worked a COVID ICU in 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 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: one who endures. Compassion means to suffer with. Nursing bridges the two. So does writing.

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.

These days I teach nursing as an assistant professor in Atlanta, where I live with my wife and two dogs. We train together in weightlifting and yoga and argue about whose turn it is to pick the YouTube video.