The Vineyard Haven library will welcome Donna Bulseco, editor of “Where It Hurts: Dispatches from the Emotional Frontlines of Medicine,” and Ryn Gluckman, emergency department nursing director at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital, for a conversation about this newly released collection of essays, short stories, and poems.
Healthcare workers are heroes, healers, and confidants, but they’re also human beings who struggle with burnout, doubt, frustration, fear, loneliness, shame, and anger. “Where It Hurts” shares the stories of more than 60 medical professionals, offering a window into the daily highlights and difficulties of the healthcare industry. From funny stories to heartrending and heart-mending tales of connection between doctors and patients, “Where It Hurts” shows us what it means to truly be human.
Donna Bulseco is a journalist and editor who holds a graduate degree in English from Brown University and in narrative medicine from Columbia University. Through the years, she has published work in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, InStyle, Self, and the Purist. As editor in chief of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, a literary journal recognized as a leader in the medical humanities world, Bulseco works with an editorial board of clinicians, educators, and writers, who review and select from more than 1,000 submissions a year to produce the journal. She edited “Where It Hurts: Dispatches from the Emotional Frontlines of Medicine,” this year.
Ryn Gluckman, BSN, RN, has been an emergency nurse for more than 18 years, and is currently the nurse director of the emergency department at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. She received a nursing degree at the University of Massachusetts in 2008, and earned a BA in pre-law and sociology from Hampshire College in 2001. In addition to working as a frontline and nursing leader, Gluckman has served as an educator at the University of Vermont and faculty member in the Allied Health Program for the Community College of Vermont. Throughout her career, Gluckman has been committed to amplifying nursing voices and ethics, elevating nursing practice as a powerful tool for social change, and centralizing the principles of justice, inclusion, and equity in nursing culture. She is currently a candidate for a master’s degree in the Disaster Resilience Leadership Program at Tulane University, with a focus on alternative models of healthcare delivery.
Tuesday, August 25, at 6 pm. Vineyard Haven library, 200 Main St., Vineyard Haven. Free and open to the public, no registration required. For more information, email vhpl_programs@clamsnet.org or call 508-696-4211.
