Editorial Issue #16: What If? April 30, 2025 Letter from the Editor: Making It Count by Tracy Granzyk recently received a fundraiser request for an old high school friend and her husband, who are each receiving treatment for cancer at the same time. They are parents to three young people, and my friend was one of those people I remember as always having a dimpled smile on her face and a glint in her eyes. ...
Read MoreEditorial Issue #16: Harmony April 30, 2025 Letter from the Poetry Editor: From the Side of A Mountain by Stephen Granzyk hen 2025 comes to a close, it will mark seven years PSM has been up and running, and by then I will have turned 80. Along with the privilege and great rewards of editing poetry for this literary health care journal, I have been navigating aging and its challenges. After reading all the poetry that ...
Read MoreEditorial Issue #15: Harmony October 15, 2024 Letter from the Poetry Editor: More Than A Metaphor by Stephen Granzyk armony as word and concept turns easily into metaphor. Beyond the world of music, for most of us, the word probably connotes inner peace, or the satisfaction derived from the strongest connections we share with others, or with the natural world. We may also associate harmony with an existential belief in an orderly cosmos, whether divinely ordained ...
Read MoreEditorial Issue #15: Harmony October 15, 2024 Letter from the Editor: Navigating the Spaces In Between by Tracy Granzyk ow do you find harmony amidst the chaos of our 21st century lives? How do you coordinate the notes and nodes of your life? What makes your heart sing? Helps you forget or remember? Where do you go to heal? Or when you are hurting? For me going on three years, it has been about horses. Being in ...
Read MoreEditorial Issue #14: Acceptance April 15, 2024 Letter from the Editor: A Call for Peace by Tracy Granzyk s we launch the 14th Issue of Please See Me, our theme of "Acceptance" resonates more deeply than ever, intersecting profoundly with a pressing global need for peace. In these pages, our writers, poets, and artists explore acceptance, and lack of the same, through health-related narratives that touch the lives of vulnerable populations and the caregivers who dedicate ...
Read MorePoetry Issue #14: Acceptance April 15th, 2024 Letter from the Poetry Editor: The Power of Acceptance by Steve Granzyk he poems in this issue include several of the common human conditions that test our emotional resilience, our ability to achieve the peace that acceptance brings. These poets write smartly and sensitively in acknowledging that our suffering can lie beyond the powers of medical science, a result of the debt due our innate mortality. They also show ...
Read MoreEditorial Issue #13: Animals & Health July 24th, 2023 Letter from the Editor: Who Rescues Who? by Tracy Granzyk was having dinner with fellow patient safety advocates recently and the opening phrase from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina came to mind: All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unique in its own way. We were all seated at this same dinner table, now longtime friends and colleagues, because of the death of Michelle Malizzo ...
Read MorePoetry Issue #13: Animals & Health July 17th, 2023 Letter from the Poetry Editor: TBD by Steve Granzyk Deepening our Connections I was well into middle age when I encountered poet Richard Wilbur’s “Advice to a Prophet.” In that remarkably imagined poem, the speaker provides a scene of our planet devastated and destroyed by human ignorance and irrationality, a poetic imagining of a nuclear winter. He longs for a modern version of a biblical prophet who ...
Read MorePoetry Issue #12: Diagnosis December 31st, 2022 Letter from the Poetry Editor: Diagnosis: Bravely Finding A Path Forward by Steve Granzyk ust as all of us eventually become patients, so too do the ways we experience diagnosis share common elements. The poets here have conjured a variety of figures representing how we may proceed from experiencing symptoms, to getting diagnosed, to struggling with various maladies—whether temporary or permanently life altering. Here you will find images of ...
Read MoreEditorial Issue #12: Diagnosis December 31st, 2022 Letter from the Editor: A Hero's Journey by Tracy Granzyk n our twelfth issue, themed Diagnosis, our artists once again come to the rescue of the human spirit when facing illness. Similar to the hero’s journey described by Joseph Campbell in “The Hero With A Thousand Faces,” stories with this structure begin with an ordinary character called to adventure. She or he must face and overcome several challenges along ...
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