We were lucky to catch up with Renee Nicholson recently and have shared our conversation below.
Renee , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.
When I was offered the position of Humanities Center Director at West Virginia University, I believed it would be the job I retired from. What I would find out is that the job wasn’t even the one I’d interviewed for. I was offered the directorship in the late spring of 2020, and officially started in July 2020. Immediately, the pandemic would challenge what the Center was, or could be. I also naively accepted two directorships at the same time, which I thought I could manage–an academic program and the Center. The academic work always took more time away from the Center, which had to be re-imagined for a remote role. To compensate, I worked more and more hours.
While I had people I reported to, I didn’t really have a clear idea of this reporting and how it affected me. The vice provost, who I originally reported to for the Center, had bumped me to an associate provost, who I’d worked for before. We had a good relationship in the previous situation that was well defined. Now, it was fluid in a way that always made me uneasy. In the end, I was to be “re-homed” during a painful process known in our university community as “academic transformation.” I would eventually leave the academic directorship, feeling more drawn to the humanities work of the Center. Even as this shift took place, it would be unclear what small percentage I still owed that previous unit, and I would chart a new course under the Libraries. This may be confusing for those outside academia, but it was also confusing for me. The sum was much change in a very short span.
What I learned from that is that at our institution, Libraries function very differently from the rest of the academic colleges, departments, and programs, which were units I was more accustomed to working in. To add to this, the disruptive Academic Transformation process continued, and longtime faculty and staff were let go in a mass layoff called “Reduction in Force” or “RIF.” The humanities disciplines took a particularly hard hit. I often found myself questioning why we even had a Humanities Center as programs and departments were decimated. At the same time, I continued my workaholic ways. I had to ask myself a tough question: Is this who I wanted to be?
I had always felt myself to be a writer and creator first and foremost, but my other work was taking over. I wonder how many other creative people find themselves in this bind–outwardly “successful” but feeling they are failing their art.
Along with this larger frame, my work expectations were in a constant state of flux. Even when I did good work, it felt hollow. And constructive criticism was either about things outside my control or strangely personal. I often got feedback that was of the “you are this kind of person” kind. Rather than seeing people as an ongoing work-in-progress, with helpful discussions, I found the feedback to be limiting. For instance, if I was “creative” I could not also be “logical” or “organized.” The statements began with “You are…” but never “The way I see you,” so they often felt like indictments of my abilities and character. And what was interesting in a peculiar way was these characterizations didn’t align with how I saw myself, or how those closest to me saw me. I wondered if I had a very different way of being “in the office” as opposed to “off the clock.”
But “off the clock” was such a small amount of time. Because over the four years I directed the Center, my “off the clock” time dwindled to nearly nothing. There was no time for my creative work, especially writing that wasn’t expressly for my job. My health suffered. I have been a rheumatoid arthritis patient most of my life, but some new and concerning symptoms that arose sent me to a specialist at a renowned health system out of state. That should have been a sign to me. Overall, in so many ways my world got very small, as I watched as colleagues and friends were either let go or found other positions elsewhere. It felt like a mass exodus.
And then, I became part of it.
It was my choice to leave the Humanities Center, and my faculty position. I wasn’t cut. I simply left. I see it as recommitting myself as a writer, and refocusing my efforts in narrative medicine. For those who might not be familiar with narrative medicine, it is a practice that centers story as part of healthcare: patient stories, provider stories, caregiver stories, and so on. Having worked in narrative medicine since 2014, it completely changed the way I wrote and approached writing. And even as I looked for ways to incorporate narrative medicine into my directorship and faculty roles, it waned, and my writing all but ground to a halt.
In short, I had lost who I was. I like to think I started the process of finding what I lost. A new journey.
What I have come to realize is that people will impress upon you who they want you to be, rather than seeing who you actually are. My choice would integrate how people saw me and how I saw myself. I left without a clear idea of what was next. I left knowing my health had suffered and my psyche was worn, and I would need to put those things to rights. The one thing I knew was that I needed to get back in touch with that woman who was a writer, for whom the written word was an artistic journey, that could keenly experience and feel the physical world again.
I have written almost every day since May 31, 2024, my last day in those old roles. I wrote with a blind faith that all the writing would lead somewhere.
One thing I did to mitigate this risk was to save up funds that I specifically put away to have time to incubate ideas and figure out what “next” looked like. Not an impressive sum of money, but enough. And then the most extraordinary thing happened to me: next revealed itself. In fact, I’d hardly left when I found partners who have hired me in consulting roles, writing, editing, and working in health humanities contexts. I found ways to continue narrative medicine work. And now I find that while I don’t make the salary I once did, I also work much less for others, and when I do its work grounded in shared meaningfulness. I have what I need: I work on my creative work and work creatively on projects with others who appreciate what I have to offer. Leaving was scary, and the gift these collaborators gave to me was proof of my faith that I could contribute and support myself in other ways.
During this time, my collection of poems, Postscripts, was published. And to my delight, it’s made its way in the world in surprising ways, too. The publisher, Wild Ink, nurtured this book in a way that was also part of my healing process, and probably inspired me to keep at writing new poems. Grounded in my belief in narrative medicine, this book also serves to honor my late brother, Nate, who succumbed to metastatic colon cancer not even a year before the events I’ve described. One of my cherished artistic colleagues, Sar Rudy, designed the cover, which is so bright and beautiful and perfectly represents this collection.
I also collaborated with a longtime friend and colleague, the visual artist Sally Jane Brown on a beautiful book of art and poetry based on the West Virginia cryptids of our home state–monsters like the Mothman. I’d never seen my individual poems brought to life the way that Sally did, and collaborating with other artists made me even more committed to the arts writ large.
Over these months, my health has improved dramatically. When I see in my charts, the change in my bloodwork, and the markers my doctors and other health professionals track to see my progress, the graphs tell me something I knew: I was not well, and making this change helped me to become well again. In regular samples, my own blood revealed to me I was becoming healthier.
The work is healthy, too. I’ve finished a memoir, which I’m sending out; I’m writing a new book of poems and just finished a draft of a novel. I continue working in narrative medicine and health humanities, and am even editing a new series dedicated to these practices called Connective Tissue. The writer Robert Gipe gives the advice to “touch your writing every day.” Simple to say and difficult to do, I’ve found myself not just touching this writing, but immersed in it.
But I don’t work all the time. I have other interests that nurture me. I have more time for my friends and loved ones. I appreciate things like nature, cooking, listening to music, seeing art exhibits and so on. The world opened up to me and revealed joy.
I’ll be coming up on a year on making this big change. I still don’t see it as quitting, but choosing a different, more creative, more balanced way forward. But even as I write this, other colleges and universities have started closing programs, departments, even whole institutions. I know there will be heartache and difficult times ahead for my friends in academia. And that is a sadness I still carry.
Yet I wake each morning not dreading the day ahead. I don’t expect any of it to be easy. I’m not even sure what the future will bring. I only ask from it that it be meaningful. That’s the risk I took, and so far, the life I’m forging. I have no great titles or positions anymore. It’s just me and those things closest to my heart, and that, I think, is enough.
Renee , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
When I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis early in my adulthood, I made a switch in artistic careers from ballet to creative writing, going on to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees in creative writing.
I am the author of Fierce and Delicate: Essays on Dance and Illness, and two volumes of poetry, Postscripts and Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center. I have published creative and scholarly works in over a hundred venues, including Poets & Writers, The Millions, Electric Literature, The Gettysburg Review, Leadership and the Humanities, Bellevue Literary Review, and many others. I am a past recipient of the Prize for Prose from The Nassau Review.
Along with a BA in English/Creative Writing and an MFA, I also hold a Certificate of Professional Achievement in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University and am known for my scholarship in the interdisciplinary fields of narrative medicine, health humanities, and art in medicine.
Winner of the Susan S. Landis Prize from the West Virginia Division of Culture, History and the Arts for my work writing life stories with patients with cancer, my narrative medicine projects have received funding from the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, the West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute, and the West Virginia Humanities Council. She has also received funding from the West Virginia Commission on the arts.
As well, my ongoing scholarship can be found at Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, where she is a contributing writer. I am first author on a chapter, “The Interdisciplinarity of the Health Humanities” in the Handbook of Interdisciplinary Teaching and Administration, and co-editor of the award-winning anthology Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives of Illness, Disability, and Medicine (with Dinty W. Moore and Erin Murphy). I served as a consulting writer on Off Belay: One Last Great Adventure by Jamie Shumway, the Associate Dean Emeritus for Medical Education at WVU School of Medicine. And I am a creative partner in the storytelling project, Healthcare Is Human, in Martinsburg, WV.
One of my newest professional adventures is as the Series Editor of Connective Tissue, an innovative and interdisciplinary book series that explores the human condition and its intersection with health, illness, and healing through the lens of the humanities and its methodologies, as well as through expressive creative works that illuminate people’s lived experience with health, illness, and medicine. This series seeks to publish books that cover innovative approaches to healthcare, integrating expressive arts and humanities practices into health settings, as well as books of creative writing that artfully render stories of illness, disability and healthcare.
For more personal writings, many about culture and the arts, I write a monthly Substack called “I’d like to comment…”
I am faculty emerita at West Virginia University, where I directed the Programs in Multidisciplinary Studies and directed the Humanities Center.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
In today’s society, the word “innovation” has displaced “creative” and as such, technology has come to usurp the place formerly held by artists. While I think technology can be innovative, it can also be destructive, whereas art can be difficult, it can also be reparative. The two could have more in common, but are generally cleaved. Whereas technology often disrupts our attention, art fosters our abilities to deeply concentrate and appreciate.
Having more artists-in-residence within companies and corporations of all sizes, in non profits, and in spaces like libraries and other public spaces could counteract many of the more deleterious effects of innovation–often for innovation’s sake–to both bring to our consciousness difficult topics and conversations, as well as to be sites of restoration and repair. Art can start meaningful if difficult conversations.
As well, communities should embrace their artists and creatives. Venues to support local artists and artisans is a good place to start, but these organizations and spaces also should be fortified with resources that can help artists financially. Instead of a few national and/or international superstars, we can and should find ways to have thriving artists in communities of all sizes.
As I have seen in healthcare, the arts have much to teach us about other industries and disciplines. But only when those worlds are available to each other can there be a transformative effect.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
At one point, I started to lament all the books I might never write. Now, however, I feel invigorated by how many and how may different types of books I might produce.
On December 30, 2024, I finished the first draft of a novel. I had given up on fiction writing some time ago, and had not written fiction of any kind in over a decade. But this summer, I wrote some short stories and returned to an idea for a novel that I had in the early 2000s.
The idea for the novel is based around the early life of the fashion designer Coco Chanel. There are gaps in what we know about her early life, and she was so guarded about her story and her legacy that she never had an authorized biographer (although she has had many biographers). What we do know starts with being left at an orphanage run by nuns in the late 1800s. But in her retelling, Chanel said she was raised by her “aunts.” Having been inspired by Paula McClain’s book, The Paris Wife, about the first wife of Ernest Hemingway, I started researching Coco’s early story, asking the question when the known information stopped, “what if?” I realized that this was a woman who literally invented who she was, and that it had great resonance to our current day. For all her genius, she wasn’t flawless, and that also made me interested in her. And, at some point, I had to craft a compelling voice and make a character from what I did know, and how I imagined the strands of research about her came together. The unknowns and complexities tickled my imagination. Thus, this early draft of a novel came into being. Now for the hard work of revision.
I use this example, because I think it illustrates what drives me creatively–“what if?” It’s such as simple yet impossible question. I look for ideas that spark my curiosity, and then I think about the best way to investigate it. I looked at the place I live, West Virginia, through its lore around cryptids in a book of poetry (with art by Sally Jane Brown) called What We Do in the Hollows. I made sense of my early training as a dancer and my life after with rheumatoid arthritis in episodic essays that formed my book Fierce and Delicate. I twined journeys around the world with the journey of grief over the loss of my brother to cancer in Postscripts.
I always want to be writing a book, and I never want to write the same kind of book twice. “What if?” isn’t just the drive in my renewed interest in fiction. It is the guiding question in my artistic pursuits.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.reneenicholson.com
- Instagram: @reneekwrites
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renee-k-nicholson-6526b/
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/ryan-mccarthy-967040210
- Other: Substack: https://substack.com/@reneeknicholson
Bluesky: @reneeknicholson.bsky.social
Image Credits
Headshot photo credit: Molly Humphreys, Piccadilly Posh Photography