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WORK TITLE: November Storm
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.robertoldshue.com/
CITY: Boston
STATE: MA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.robertoldshue.com/#menu-section * https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/2016-spring/november-storm.htm * https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/people/robert-oldshue * http://www.pressherald.com/2016/10/16/robert-oldshues-writing-life-blends-opposing-forces-in-medicine-writing/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; children: two.
EDUCATION:Warren Wilson College, M.F.A.; graduated from Williams College and Case Western Reserve University Medical School.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Medical doctor, lecturer, and writer. Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital in Medicine and Pediatrics, Cleveland, OH, medical residency; Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, MA, instructor. Also works at a community health center near Boston, MA.
AWARDS:Iowa Short Fiction Award, in 2016, for November Storm.
WRITINGS
Contributor to numerous publications, including the Bellevue Literary Review, the Gettysburg Review, and the New England Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Robert Oldshue is a medical doctor, lecturer, and writer. He works as a family medicine practitioner at a Boston-based health center and additionally as an instructor at Harvard Medical School. Oldshue has had his work appear in numerous publications, including the Bellevue Literary Review, the Gettysburg Review, and the New England Review.
In an interview in the Press Herald, Oldshue talked with Joan Silverman about writing while trying to balance his career in medicine. Oldshue explained the difference between the two fields as such: “My job as a doctor is to take the particulars and generalize about them—to make sure that whatever treatment I give would be the same treatment a patient would get in Omaha or Portland, Oregon. Fiction-writing is about specifics and potent details. Those two processes are opposite to each other, and it’s taken me many years to understand that.”
In the same interview, Oldshue discussed what he most enjoyed about writing. “My favorite thing is the moment when you take a complex idea that isn’t fully formed, and you nail it! You’ve had many themes that you didn’t really understand and they’re coming along, and finally you can bring them all together in a resonant ring at the end. It’s a wonderful feeling.” Oldshue also mentioned that while he dislikes self-promotion, “the part that gives me real pain is when I’m on a roll, and I just have to quit anyway.”
Oldshue published the short story collection November Storm in 2016. Winning the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the collection features stories that offer a look at intimate relationships, often centering on a doctor. Oldshue’s stories range from a doctor’s sexual experience with men to a psychiatrist’s feelings toward his many patients.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly reasoned that “Oldshue’s sturdy prose and potent, understated endings will satisfy fans of the classic short story.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor concluded that “Oldshue writes a loose, relaxed prose, that of an unhurried natural storyteller with a wry affection for many of his characters and a wide range of human interest.” In a review in the Gazette, Rob Cline observed that “Oldshue is adept at embodying various perspectives.” Cline later stated: “What has to be said about November Storm is that it is exceptional work, which I commend to you.” In a separate article in the Gazette, Cline said that the book contains “excellent stories,” adding that “much of their success derives from Oldshue’s ability to seemingly inhabit a wide variety of individuals faced with crises of various kinds.” Cline found that “Oldshue’s imagination is fertile, and his ability to sympathize with his characters is immense. He believes part of that ability involves getting out of the way.’ Cline then wrote that “November Storm demonstrates that Oldshue’s undeniable skill at finding and relating the right details makes his stories fresh and fascinating.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2016, review of November Storm.
Press Herald, October 16, 2016, Joan Silverman, “Author Q&A: Robert Oldshue’s Writing Life Blends Opposing Forces in Medicine, Writing.”
Publishers Weekly, August 29, 2016, review of November Storm, p. 60.
ONLINE
Gazette, http://www.thegazette.com/ (September 18, 2016), Rob Cline, “Practicing Sympathy: Doctor, Author Humbled by Iowa Short Fiction Award Based on Debut Collection,” and review of November Storm.
Robert Oldshue Website, http://www.robertoldshue.com (June 11, 2017).*
Posted October 16, 2016 INCREASE FONT SIZEResize Font
Author Q&A: Robert Oldshue’s writing life blends opposing forces in medicine, writing
His debut story collection, 'November Storm,' recently won the Iowa Short Fiction award.
BY JOAN SILVERMAN
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Like many 20-somethings, Robert Oldshue graduated from college unsure of his future path. So he backpacked for a year, traveling far and wide, all the while keeping a journal of his adventures. At year’s end, he arrived at the obvious conclusion: He was meant to be the next Ernest Hemingway. Or so he briefly thought.
Fast-forward to a different trek, this time to South Africa, where the would-be author, still in his 20s, worked for a doctor. Oldshue was awakened in the middle of one night to help the doctor deliver a baby who would be born into poverty. And something clicked. He knew this was his calling.
“That made sense for what a human being should do,” he says. “To me, that was it – that’s a man.”
Years later, those disparate paths would merge into an accomplished double life. In one, Oldshue is a family-care doctor in Boston, where he also teaches at Harvard Medical School. In the other, he’s an author whose debut story collection, “November Storm,” recently won the prestigious Iowa Short Fiction Award.
Oldshue spoke recently from his Boston office about empathy, courting his wife and nailing the perfect phrase. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: How strange is this whole process of the book’s publication, given that your daily life is so different?
A: I’ve been thinking about that balance – about how my writing relates to my medical practice. I teach interviewing and history-taking over at Harvard Medical School. Today we were talking about empathy and sympathy.
Empathy, at least as we teach it to students, is an act of professionalism, a disciplined concern for others in which you consider their needs and you meet them. Sympathy is “Oh, my Gosh! I can’t believe what you’re going through.”
At the office, I’m required to show empathy. I may personally like or dislike you, but I have to show disciplined brotherly feeling anyway. There’s a distance, a role, a duty. In my short stories, I put down that role. I think I write out of sympathy. This is the place where I can explore freely ideas, or characters, or people who have moved me.
Q: That seems to suggest that writing somehow requires less discipline than medicine. Yet it takes great discipline to get characters on the page in a way that makes sense.
A: My job as a doctor is to take the particulars and generalize about them – to make sure that whatever treatment I give would be the same treatment a patient would get in Omaha or Portland, Oregon. Fiction-writing is about specifics and potent details. Those two processes are opposite to each other, and it’s taken me many years to understand that.
Q: You must find writing incredibly liberating since you can let the characters go, without intervening.
A: Yes, that’s true. It’s also an opportunity to explore their motives, or mine, and to reveal myself in ways that are not appropriate in the office.
A lot of us are worried about our fallibility and the fact that we could badly hurt somebody. The way I look at it, there are doctors who have hurt people and know it, and there are doctors who have hurt people, and don’t know it. And unfortunately, there aren’t any other doctors. There are enormous burdens of guilt, and we all put them somewhere.
Q: After your medical residency, you took two years off to get an master of fine arts in writing. Clearly you had decided that writing was more than a hobby.
A: It was a big risk, and I wasn’t sure what was going to come of it. I came out knowing how to write better, but it turns out there wasn’t a line of agents waiting to turn my stories into huge collections. I got kind of down and depressed about things. But thankfully, I had not burned any bridges, so I could go back to medicine. Then I found a new balance in my work life.
I’m here in the office every day. I take Monday and Friday mornings to write, and weekends. So I’ve tried to integrate those two people.
Q: How does it feel to finally have a collection of your stories published?
A: It may not seem like much of a life to creep away from your office and go up to your attic to type out a few more sentences with action verbs, and get rid of your adverbs and buff up your concrete nouns. But it is a life! The fact that there is some editor or contest judge across the country who will read your essays and stories, and give them a shot – that keeps many of us going.
Q: Tell me what you like most about writing.
A: My favorite thing is the moment when you take a complex idea that isn’t fully formed, and you nail it! You’ve had many themes that you didn’t really understand and they’re coming along, and finally you can bring them all together in a resonant ring at the end. It’s a wonderful feeling.
Q: And what do you like least about writing?
A: The self-promotion. But the part that gives me real pain is when I’m on a roll, and I just have to quit anyway. I have to do rounds at the hospital, or deal with some fevers and I’m just right on the edge of making connections in a story. That hurts.
Q: You’ve just defined frustration.
A: On the other hand, I can’t tell you how many times that’s kept me from writing too fast. I have to sit. Things have to deepen a little bit. I think James Baldwin said that there is no perfect writing life; every life is imperfect in its own ways. So the blemishes in the writing life become part of the beauty.
Q: Have you written in other forms besides the short story?
A: I just finished the first draft of a novel. And my wife loves it. I’ve got to tell you, I showed my little stories-with-a-staple-in-the-corner to her 25 years ago. We had gone out a couple of times, and I said, “There’s something I really have to tell you about myself.” And she sort of blanched, waiting to hear some horrendous secret. I said, “I write.”
Q: Of all the confessions people make, that’s pretty low on the list of crimes.
A: Well, maybe. I think I showed her a talking dog story, or something. But she said, “There’s a voice here.” And she just has never let me stop.
Q: Have you figured out which form of writing you prefer?
A: Even as a doctor, I still can’t decide whether I prefer working with adults or kids. I go back and forth. So I can’t decide. At the moment, I have several ideas for short stories that I want to be working on. I’ll probably pick some compromise as I go on.
Q: Now that you have this book and you’ve won an award, I’m wondering whether your thoughts on retirement include much more writing.
A: I do think about that. I do want to write. On the other hand, I get so much charge out of my patients. I love them – they’re my crew! I live across the street from my clinic. I get to be the mayor! I get to walk down the street and see my patients, say hello, meet their kids. In a world of increasing specialization, it is just such a gift to be part of people’s lives as a family doctor. And I see the writing as an extension of that. My stories reflect that I take their issues seriously. The writing is an opportunity to sit down and say, “Well, who are these families?” In my writing life, I don’t see the big divide between my issues and theirs. It really recharges me to go back into the office and try again.
Joan Silverman writes op-eds, essays and book reviews. Her work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune and Dallas Morning News.
Robert Oldshue
When he isn’t writing, Robert Oldshue practices family medicine at a community health center in Boston. He holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College, and his work has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, the Gettysburg Review, and New England Review. He is married and has two children.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Oldshue was raised in a suburb of Rochester N.Y., attended Williams College and then went to Case Western Reserve University Medical School. He did his residency training at The Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital in Medicine and Pediatrics and is board certified in both. He has lived in Boston since the early 90s. He cares for adults, children and families 5 days a week at the community health center around the corner from his house. He is an Instructor at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Oldshue began writing fiction when he completed his residency in 1990. After 12 years he published his first story in The Bellevue Literary Review. In 2005 he obtained an MFA from Warren Wilson College. His first collection of stories was awarded the Iowa Short Fiction Award in 2016. His work has also appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Ars Medica and New England Review. He is married and has two children.
Practicing sympathy: Doctor, author humbled by Iowa Short Fiction award based on debut collection
Reuters Robert Oldshue uses Boston as the setting for all of his short stories in his story collection “November Storm.” Oldshue lives and works in Boston as a physician.
By By Rob Cline, correspondent
Sep 18, 2016 at 1:00 am | Print View
Though Robert Oldshue would be quick to tell you his knowledge of Iowa is limited at best, he is well-versed in the writing of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop faculty. Indeed, he’s feeling a little concerned about how he’ll react if he meets any of them when he’s in town for the Iowa City Book Festival in early October. In particular, he’s nervous about meeting Ethan Canin (author, most recently of “A Doubter’s Almanac”).
“I hope he knows CPR,” Oldshue quipped during a phone interview from his Boston home. Oldshue, like Canin, is a physician, practicing family medicine at a community health center in Boston and teaching every other week at Harvard. So, he and Canin would no doubt have much to talk about were they to meet — assuming Oldshue could keep his wits about him.
He is certainly in full position of his faculties when putting pen to paper. Oldshue’s debut collection, “November Storm,” is filled with excellent stories, and much of their success derives from Oldshue’s ability to seemingly inhabit a wide variety of individuals faced with crises of various kinds. The book is the 2016 winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, selected for the honor by Bennett Sims, author of “A Curious Shape.”
SEE ALSO — Review: ‘November Storm’
“I still haven’t gotten over the phone call,” Oldshue says of winning the award. The feeling, he says, is like being outside himself just a bit. “It’s like this person standing next to me won this prize.”
Asked about his ability to portray such an array of characters with compassion and care, Oldshue speaks of the difference between empathy and sympathy. While empathy, he says, is driven by the humane values that are the underpinning of his work as a doctor, sympathy allows him to wonder who his patients really are.
“Sympathy allows you to be curious in an unstructured way — a way you can’t be in the office.”
Oldshue says each story in “November Storm” has its origin in a medical situation he was either involved with or privy to. In each case, “I wondered what it really meant, and I could explore it in the privacy of my home.”
That doesn’t mean all of the stories take place in hospitals and doctors’ offices. For Oldshue, finding just the right way to get to the heart of a story is key. For example, the story “Receiving Line,” which explores a gay community in the late 1970s with AIDS on the horizon, found its footing when Oldshue realized he needed to insert himself — or at least a version of himself at 24, a straight man working as a waiter in a gay neighborhood — into the story.
“Once I got the perspective right, and got out of my medical skin (the story came together),” Oldshue explained.
Oldshue admits that “Being a doctor is both a help and a hindrance to writing.” On the one hand, he has access to conversations and dramatic situation he otherwise would not. On the other, his interactions with patients and families leave a lot out, a situation he compares to being on a tour bus. “It’s like driving by and looking out the windows and claiming to have learned something.”
It’s clear, however, that Oldshue’s imagination is fertile, and his ability to sympathize with his characters is immense. He believes part of that ability involves getting out of the way.
“I tend to shrink down myself and then watch what the characters do. And then when that happens, I choose the narrative form ... I’m very much following what these people are telling me ... I just don’t know that much about how to do this. I’ve got to reinvent it each time.”
That last idea might be false modesty, though Oldshue certainly sounds sincere. Either way, he has clearly given a great deal of thought to the underlying mechanisms of fiction writing.
“The process of writing fiction and the process of diagnosis are opposites,” he says. The latter involves looking at specifics and then generalizing.
The latter, says Oldshue, “is populating a generality with details.”
“November Storm” demonstrates that Oldshue’s undeniable skill at finding and relating the right details makes his stories fresh and fascinating.
November Storm
Publishers Weekly. 263.35 (Aug. 29, 2016): p60.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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* November Storm
Robert Oldshue. Univ. of Iowa, $16 trade paper (140p) ISBN 978-1-60938-451-7
Oldshue's debut collection, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, finds consistent success in its depictions of intimate relationships. In the title story, inclement weather throws an elderly couple's frailty and isolation into sharp relief, rekindling their appreciation for each other. The narrator of the "The Receiving Line" describes the men he sleeps with--some of whom pay him for it--and concentrates on a client trying to sort out his sexuality. "Mass Mental" explores psychiatrist William Welker's feelings toward his colleagues, his patients, his romantic partners, and, of course, himself. "Summer Friend," a standout, follows the pedigreed Alice Link and the plucky Louise Screery from their girlhood meeting at the fishing spot their families frequent to the brink of old age, revealing their complex, deep affection through their bond with the bright but unfocused Barney McAlister. Alice, Lou, and Barney, like all of Oldshue's characters, immediately engage the reader's empathy as they navigate "the awkward facts people of long acquaintance have to step around." Most of the stories take place in and around Boston, though three of the nine are set on the same street in Irondequoit, N. Y. Oldshue's sturdy prose and potent, understated endings will satisfy fans of the classic short story. (Oct.)
NOVEMBER STORM
by Robert Oldshue
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KIRKUS REVIEW
The characters in this debut story collection confront minor crises and sudden shocks, the sort of narrative spectrum one might expect from an author who's also a medical doctor.
The elderly upstate New York couple hit by bad weather in the title story are also facing a neighborhood nearly emptied of its “first families,” a fact brought jarringly home when they crash into a car driven by one of the last (no one is hurt). Threats and loss recur in “Fergus B. Fergus” when a boy caring for a vacationing neighbor’s cats feels the “heart-pounding” terrors of a vacant house at night and then another sort of anxiety when one cat disappears on his watch. These two stories, which touch on people of the same rural New York community, and another concerning a troubled pregnancy and a Home Depot shopping trip, all bring to mind familiar Richard Russo territory. Oldshue also wields a dry humor that is especially effective in a story about an elderly woman disappearing from her nursing home. But Oldshue is better when he’s a bit unconventional. The psychiatrist in the long, meandering “Mass Mental” finds that a from-the-hip analysis for a couple he’s seeing may have caused the husband to murder his wife. An elderly Lithuanian relative whose wartime prison experience furnishes a project for a girl’s bat mitzvah offers an unusual angle on the Holocaust. A story about a gay male prostitute in 1978 and a confused married man ends with an unexplained death and a wife facing the new disease called AIDS.
Oldshue writes a loose, relaxed prose, that of an unhurried natural storyteller with a wry affection for many of his characters and a wide range of human interest.
Pub Date: Oct. 1st, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60938-451-7
Page count: 140pp
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1st, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15th, 2016
Review: 'November Storm'
Short story collection deserves award
By By Rob Cline, correspondent
Sep 18, 2016 at 12:15 am | Print View
Robert Oldshue’s debut short story collection, “November Storm,” is the 2016 winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and deservedly so. Oldshue, who is a practicing physician in Boston and an instructor at Harvard, has produced an impressive set of stories filled with distinct, vivid characters.
Each story has its foundation in a medical situation, but Oldshue is adept at embodying various perspectives, fully considering the emotional weight of a given scenario, and crafting convincing, individual voices.
Generally, when I review story collections, this is the spot where I identify my favorites in the book. But with each subsequent story read, I found myself thinking that the most recent story was my new favorite.
So instead of naming the story or stories I found most resonant (for that would be all of them), I’ll share an example of the author’s ability to capture the voice of a character. Here, the narrator of “Home Depot” is wrestling with the news that her grandchild might be born with abnormalities.
“So I tell her the rest, and she’s the oldest, so she tells me what to do. There’s all kinds of retards, she says. There’s bad retards and not so bad and there’s retards you wouldn’t know were retards if you didn’t ask. These days they got retards doing everything, she says. My sister isn’t Shakespeare but she’s a good f-ing sister.”
The narrator follows this up with, “Excuse me. But you say what you have to say.”
What has to be said about “November Storm” is that it is exceptional work, which I commend to you.