Woman at the Crossing: In conversation with Susan Okie

"Eventually, I wrote a poem about this internal debate, the kind that we often play out when asking ourselves about what we owe to others."

Susan Okie is a poet, doctor, and former medical reporter and science editor for the Washington Post. In 2023, her first full-length collection, Woman at The Crossing, was selected by Garrett Hongo as the winner of our annual poetry prize. For more than a decade, the Off the Grid Poetry Prize has been awarded annually to one poet over sixty, whose writing practice is ongoing and whose vision is fresh, while drawing from six or more decades of lived experience. Susan’s poems draw upon her lived experience, sometimes in intimate and even harrowing detail. Her poetry is open and generous, sharing difficult truths about the limitations of our bodies, as well as her own internal struggles—the difficult decisions that doctors, and others in the medical profession, must inevitably make.

We’d be hard pressed to think of a poet who better represents the mission of our annual prize, so with the 2026 contest set to open in just a few weeks, we’re happy to share her reflections on the relationship between her professional life and her poetry, on the importance of listening, and on “what we owe to others.”

A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA program, Susan Okie’s poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, The Bellevue Literary Review, Journal of the American Medical Association, Cider Press Review, Little Patuxent Review, Delmarva Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and other journals. She is also the author of the chapbook Let You Fly (2018), and she is currently working on a memoir.

Elizabeth Murphy: When did you begin writing poems? Has poetry always been part of your writing life, or did you turn to it later, following your career in journalism?

Susan Okie: I always loved rhyme—my father used to compose and sing silly rhyming songs for me when I was plagued by ear infections as a child. I didn’t try to write poems until high school. I gravitated toward writing in general, but found that writing poems about my own experiences and feelings was satisfying, even if the poems were flawed. During high school, I regularly had poems published in the school literary magazine.

Once I entered college, and later, in medical school, I couldn’t find time to write poetry. I rediscovered the pleasure of writing poetry one summer when I spent a week at Chautauqua and opted to take a poetry class there. When the instructor learned I that I lived in Maryland, he urged me to seek out the community classes offered by Stanley Plumly, a wonderful poet who taught at the University of Maryland. Plumly could be a devastating critic of a bad poem, but he wouldn’t let us give up. I studied with him for years. Later, at a workshop, I met poet Heather McHugh, a faculty member at the Warren Wilson Program for Writers who advised me to apply to Warren Wilson’s Poetry MFA program. I spent two years in its low-residency program, and worked individually with excellent poet teachers, who taught me about craft and made me read and analyze the work of great poets. It was that training that gave me some self-confidence and persistence as a poet.

EM: Tell me more about your work as a journalist. Where did it take you? What areas of medical reporting did you focus on?

SO: When I was a young mother we went to Africa as a family because my husband, Walter, whom I met when we were in med school, had adapted his career to become trained in malaria research at the NIH, then to work as a malaria researcher in the Navy, which he had joined in order to pursue his desire to do that kind of research. Our kids were five and eight, and we moved to Kisumu, Kenya, which had a small international school where they could go.

I was on leave from my job as a medical reporter at the Washington Post, and was encouraged by the head of the paper’s foreign desk to look for medical and science stories that I could report and write from there. That is what I did. The major papers never did those kinds of stories from Africa—the Post had an Africa bureau chief while I was there who was completely occupied by the war going on in Somalia, which the U.S. was involved in. I did a little bit of traveling as a reporter in order to write about the devastating AIDS epidemic going on in Kenya and neighboring African countries, and also sought out and looked for science stories that I could write.

I wrote about the environmental damage occurring in Lake Victoria’s native fish population (an important food source for nearby communities) and the danger it posed to the great lake’s rare fish. I wrote about the lack of medicines for HIV in Kenya, and visited the western side of Lake Victoria in Uganda, where the disease was also rampant. While I was there, the first rape crisis center in Africa was founded in a neighboring country, and that too became a news story for the Post. I went to the first meeting in Kenya of African women who were beginning to be opposed to genital mutilation of young girls (which for a long time had been traditional among Kenya’s Masai, as well as some other tribes).

I saw more of my kids than I typically did when in D.C., and our whole family grew enormously from our stay there. Walter loved doing the research. We had a wonderful housekeeper with five kids of her own whom she was supporting through school, and we all loved her. Like so many people we met or got to know while in Kenya, she died—about a year after we had gone home. The situation regarding HIV was terrible in that whole region, and it didn’t get much better until an international effort finally began to work toward improving AIDS drug availability and treatment on the continent.

EM: The subjects of your poems are both deeply personal—often touching on themes of motherhood and parenting—and also reflective of, and grounded in, your professional life, your work as a journalist and a physician. I’d love to know more about how these parts of your life interact in your writing.

SO: I initially went to medical school partly because I enjoyed science and was inspired by a beloved high school teacher. But I found that medical training features both remarkable human encounters and many moments of utter terror. I discovered, the first time I was sent to interview a patient in a Boston hospital, that I loved listening to people’s stories. That first patient, a pianist, described how she had been sent with her family to Auschwitz early in World War II, and had survived the camp, partly by mentally practicing music on a nonexistent piano. She had lost family members at Auschwitz, but once rescued when the war ended, she was able, by giving concerts, to locate, and be reunited with, a beloved brother who had also survived.

Being a good listener is key to being a good doctor, and it was my favorite part of the job. In contrast, common manual procedures in medicine—such as, for instance, drawing a blood sample or inserting an intravenous line—made me anxious, and I wasn’t particularly good at performing them. Although I did successfully complete a residency in family medicine, I opted to become a medical journalist rather than join a practice. Later, as a volunteer doctor at a clinic for uninsured adults in Maryland, I was able to work weekly for about twenty years, to enjoy listening to my patients’ (stories, often in Spanish), and to provide routine medical care to people with diabetes, arthritis, and other common health problems. For many years, I also taught patient interviewing to first-year medical students at Georgetown University, and had the privilege of introducing them to the art of listening to their patients.

When I mentor medical students, I always try to encourage them to keep a journal or a record of some of their experiences during their training, if they can find the time. Medical school is demanding and stressful, but it can be therapeutic to write about the emotionally intense or disturbing events that physicians inevitably encounter.

My memory of dissecting a cadaver as a first-year student, titled “In the Anatomy Lab,” was probably the first poem I wrote about being a doctor, although it was written years after my anatomy class was over. Writing about real experiences with patients is complicated, because the medical code of ethics requires us not to disclose a patient’s private information. A poet/doctor whom I met at my MFA program told me that he believed doctors should never write about their patients. But I have spoken with other physician writers who have done so by including their patients in such projects, showing the patient the work in progress, and obtaining their permission. Some others argue that if a patient encounter happened in the far distant past, and the patient would not be identifiable to a reader, it is permissible to write about it.

Dr. Rita Charon, one of my medical school classmates, founded the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University, which brings medical professionals together in groups specifically to write about their patients and to share some of their own challenging experiences. Charon created the program because she believes that hearing each patient’s story is key to effectively treating that patient, and that health care professionals can benefit from working together to process their emotional reactions to difficult encounters.

My poetry collection contains “Thy Bed of Crimson Joy,” a poem about a man with end-stage liver disease who suffered a sudden, terrifying hemorrhage. As a young first-year resident, I ran to this man’s room to try to help, then to the nurses’ station to ask for help, only to be told that there was nothing we could do to save him. Having witnessed this death is still a searing memory for me.

The habit of writing has helped me to endure losses in life, such as the deaths of my parents and of friends we knew during our years in Kenya. It also helps me to handle health challenges of my own. Meanwhile, participating in poetry groups has given me a wonderful, supportive circle of poet friends. Recently, working on a memoir, at my sons’ urging, has brought me closer to my entire family. I continue to write new poems, and doing so gives me enormous joy.

EM: Your title poem points to another important theme in your work, that of “crossings” or crossroads, moments of decision-making, and ultimately, their consequences. I want to also acknowledge how the poems in this collection underscore the ways in which circumstances outside of our control can lead to meaningful and sometimes painful consequences. I wonder if you see these moments, and their outcomes, as a fundamental concern for healthcare workers, as they certainly are for poets.

To take the question a step further, could you say more about the relationship between your work in healthcare—be it as a journalist on this topic, or as a doctor—and your work as a poet?

SO: “Woman at the Crossing” was a title I first came up with when writing a poem about a woman who often stood on a curb near the clinic where I volunteered. She was panhandling for cash, and carried a sign that read “hungry, lost my job, three kids.” I was always driving into my clinic’s parking lot, and had never spoken with her the way I routinely did with my patients, but I kept wondering whether to cross the street to do so. Eventually, I wrote a poem about this internal debate, the kind that we often play out when asking ourselves about what we owe to others.

David Keplinger, a poet and friend who had kindly read my book in process, pointed out that the title also applied to many life experiences—including decisions like becoming a doctor or a poet—and suggested that it would make an apt title for my collection. Sure enough, as I grow older and experience the changes that come with aging, I feel as if the title refers to almost every aspect of my life.

Listen to Susan Okie reading her poem “In the Anatomy Lab,” from her prizewinning collection Woman at the Crossing: