The Long Way Home

Ron Lands grew up in a small East Tennessee town with a five generation Appalachian pedigree containing a host of farmers and preachers, but no writers or physicians. As he states, "The first indication that I might break that mold was the day after President Kennedy's assassination when, in an attempt to process that tragedy, I wrote a very bad poem and gave it to my second-grade teacher. The teasing I endured from my peers after she read it to my class squelched any desire to share work for the next twenty-five years."

His earliest interest in the medical profession occurred a year later after he developed appendicitis. As he recalls, "A small-town general practitioner performed emergency surgery late one night without a specialist's consultation, abdominal CT scan or anything else considered standard today. I was enchanted by the whole process, the doctor who visited me at random times, the nurse who changed my bandage daily, and cleaned my fingertips with alcohol so I could feel the thick silk sutures."

Over five decades later, now a retired cancer doctor in Knoxville, Tennessee, he confides how he was drawn to that specialty because "the art of medicine has remained relevant even as the science has unfolded in breathtaking waves." He still works part-time because he enjoys learning new things from his young, smart colleagues, and he still enjoys clinical medicine. "I still find myself writing to find clarity about my patients. Writing and medicine are my vocation and avocation, impossible to do one without the other."

He lives and writes near his hometown, still married to the nursing student he met while in medical school. He is the proud father of a son and daughter, and delighted father-in-law to the mother of his two granddaughters.

He is an MFA alumnus of Queens University of Charlotte. His short stories have been published in several small literary journals. His clinical vignettes and poems have been published in the humanities sections of medical journals. His first chapbook, Final Path, was published in the spring of 2020. A second poetry collection, A Gathering of Friends, is forthcoming in the fall of 2021.