I grew up almost exactly one mile away from the library. The library happened to be on the same campus as my high school. The school bus passed it every morning. We never went there for English class. Those library visits for research, group projects, or learning the Dewey Decimal System (this was before the invasion of computers) all took place at the relatively tiny school library. I could look wistfully through the window and see the library library, where I spent hours every weekend, and some week nights. It was for the best we didn’t go there—I would have gotten distracted. Those finely typewritten old card catalogues were not my thing. I lived for the serendipitous stroll, the impulse-grab of a title that spoke to me from a past life.

            On weekends and summer weekdays, I used to bike that mile to the library, standing up on the pedals to churn up the steep hill. There was something very meaningful in that “ascent of Parnassus” last quarter mile that makes the memory a metaphor. The street itself was “Miner Road,” and wasn’t that exactly what I was back then? A miner, extracting rare and rich ores? That specific branch, Mayfield Regional, used to be the repository for the county-wide system’s entire collection of Classics. Who knows what kind of writer I would have become if it had possessed a disproportionate share of the Science Fiction/Fantasy collection, or Mystery, or Romance, or something else? But I had half a dozen translations of Ovid to compare, the obscurer plays of Goethe, innumerable red and green Loebs.

I should have gone into the humanities for a living. As early as age fifteen, I had abandoned spy thrillers (my first love) for old tomes from bygone eras, and I was already writing poetry and prose very obsessively. I was just as interested in the religions of the world; I have never quite distinguished the two thirsts. My love of history wasn’t as intense yet, but these days I read more history than fiction. In fact a gradually-more-cynical sense of historiography makes me today classify most (all?) history as a species of fiction, or even mythology. There were a lot of university departments where I would have loved to spend the rest of my life.

            Anyway, I became a doctor. No doubt that was because both of my parents were doctors. It was all I knew, growing up. Sometimes I would write snippets of lines on pads, and those pads used to have pharmaceutical names across the top. Even the pens advertised hypertension drugs or new types of insulin. Doctoring was just what grown-ups did. To this day, I have no idea what a “consultant” does, or how a lawyer can bill clients for more hours than there are in a day (and does a defense attorney really defend, without a pang of conscience, someone he himself thinks is guilty?), or what corporate employees actually do inside their cubicles.

            I knew that creative writing professor was a job, but I avoided it for a few reasons. I knew, even before I married an English teacher, that society wronged teachers at every level; no profession in teaching pays the way it ought to. But the work of a creative writing professor repulsed me. I could not bear the thought of reading hundreds of draft pages of unpublished work a year, then, regardless of whether it was to my taste or not, regardless of whether I thought the student had any talent or not, trying to help improve it. I despised contemporary poetry back then, confronting all free verse with a ferocious, indignant scowl, but more importantly, I myself never revised my own work. I simply tossed it out and forgot about it. “Oh, this is no good, just pitch it and write something else” is not, to my knowledge, an acceptable workshop response. But that’s what I shrug and tell myself dozens of times a year. 

            I selected an accelerated MD program that whisked me through undergraduate work (almost all science classes) in two years and shunted me straight into medical school, where I had a reserved seat as long as I met some requirements. My sister, who likewise knew nothing else, had chosen the same program four years earlier.

            It turns out I have a poem about precisely this decision that I wrote at age sixteen or seventeen, collected in my first book, Entrance, self-published in 1997, while I was still in high school. Here is “On Entering Medicine”:

Chains and a lock to close

The loyal factory: my energies must switch

And all endeavors passionate

Be laid off now, like laborers too costly,

To rove ragged. In paying poetry

My hours and intelligence

I spend my promise, my ability.

It must not starve away, but neither must

It eat of me.—The bullish market of

My inspiration might yet crash; if not,

I’ll have to pen the public preference

For an unconscionable gain. Think on

My melancholy paradox: I am

A patriot either heroed by a foreign government

Of shot by his own.

            That same volume has a whole second poem on a similar theme. I seem to have thought I was going to give up literature entirely? Here’s “In Quietest Formality,” written at the same age:

            In quietest formality

The poet in me dies, as solemn down

The height as pilgrims, ecstasies performed,

Who lower by the step.

From life in excess and not time

Imagination ages past the oldest,

Stutters and fumes with unknown clot.

O I marvel at the machine

By itself broken down: panting asweat

With light affairs, the night can nothing fit

But rest, a dreamless rest; and there at bedside,

In lamentation for a death,

A cold pen, and a few papers.

 

            I never took my own doomsaying seriously. I showed up at the University of Akron, did a beeline for Bierce Library, and found an even greater variety of fragrant old books to feed my habit. Friends would urge me to go out clubbing or partying, and I never said yes, not even when girls giggled into my dorm room and invited me. Eventually they stopped asking. “Amit? Oh, he doesn’t go out.” Or even hang out. Much less drink or get drunk. I didn’t (and don’t) because I always had more stuff to write, and the rest of the time went to studying. I never gave up that read-everything, write-everything bookishness.

            Those years of college, medical school, residency all served as wildly productive, wildly experimental years. I never self-published another book, and not just because I hesitated to ask my dad to fund such a project. He had generously paid a printer to produce a dozen boxes of Entrance, and he had footed the fee for me to register my own publishing company, too—Ohm Publishing, a double entendre between the sacred Sanskrit syllable and the physics term for “resistance.” It meant electrical resistance, but I was resisting—as you can tell from my blank verse, and the two verse plays in the collection—contemporary tastes in poetry.

            A side note on my family’s attitude toward literature: There was none of it in the home growing up. Only medical journals and the Physician’s Desk Reference. I never saw my parents reading for pleasure. My sister isn’t into fiction or poetry, either. Nor was ours a particularly devout religious household. No one knows why I ended up fixated on these niche interests, least of all myself. It is just a mystery. My wife, who knows me best and can contrast my nature and my upbringing, remains baffled. It is a mystery to myself as well, to be honest. But my parents and sister are very proud of the poet in the family, even though my actual poems are inscrutable to them. So my dad, who has never read my poetry, still wanted his teenaged son to hold his own poems in book form. He assumed, as I assumed, that I would never get published any other way.

            None of my family members reads my poetry, by the way, not even my wife. They avoid that sector of my work entirely. My wife and teenaged sons only access the fiction, and that too only after it gets published, and not in all cases. In recent years, my mom has been making an effort; mine are literally the only novels she has ever read. Literally the first person who reads my poems is the editor accepting or rejecting them.

            I accumulated poetry publications in journals over the decade of my medical training. In 2009, exactly at age thirty, I published my first collection, with a university publisher. After that, the floodgates opened, and fifteen years later, I’m closing in on two dozen books of poetry, translation, fiction, and nonfiction, some published in America, some in India, some in both places. My books appeal to a handful of kindred spirits, but usually don’t sell well. I guess that makes sense, seeing as I haven’t exactly hidden away my more esoteric streak(s) when it comes to, say, poetic forms, or religious content, or literary play. Being a doctor has kept me from having to “pen the public preference,” which I’m not sure (in spite of all my omnivorous reading) I know how to do anyway.

            Whenever I do interviews or make appearances, I get the same question. How do I manage two careers? Where does the doctor intersect with the poet? I’ve given a variety of answers to this over the years. I’m sure my scientific training has altered how I think in irrevocable, imperceptible ways. Yet from the poet’s perspective, the doctor is really just the poet’s patron at this point. You slog away at reading that CT scan so I can reread Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso without having to worry about putting these three kids through college.

            I picked a not-particularly-poetic field within medicine. I don’t deliver babies or work with cancer patients or fix hearts with a needle and thread. No, I picked what many consider the dryest, most boring field of all, the technology-dependent field of Radiology. It does involve a lot of writing, I guess. I dictate over sixteen thousand technically detailed reports or so a year. Don’t mistake those pages for anything worth your time. To give you a sense how robotic the day job is, my field was the first medical field that AI researchers targeted for usurpation.

            I picked Radiology because it was conducive to my writing career: It’s shift work, there’s no patient interaction (so no need to “perform”—I can do this job in a T-shirt, scrub bottoms, and three days’ scruff), and there’s a certain aesthetic distance: Both poetry and radiology turn human suffering into beautiful images. Suffering without the smells of suffering: Sawed bones, yeast-infected groins, gangrenous feet, curdled fecal blood.

            I don’t think productivity is a virtue in a writer. Abundance drives down value. Nor is versatility an unalloyed good. You end up confusing readers, since a fan base builds as more and more people come to know and like that thing you do. You can’t have your name get associated with a question mark, indicating nothing in particular. Unfortunately, productivity and versatility are the two traits I possess in excess. Hence my gaullimaufry of a bibliography. I myself don’t know what I’m going to blurt out next. Last year, it was a cycle of short stories about Hanuman, a book of 108 meditations on yoga, part of a translation of the 15th century Avadhi poet Tulsidasa, and a fat novel about the American Civil War. Only the last of those works was something I had premeditated writing beforehand, and even with that work, I knew in advance neither the characters nor the plot, just that I wanted to write something set during that period. For the past few weeks, it’s been poems in meter and rhyme. Right now, it’s an essay about being a doctor and a writer, which is actually a redo of last week’s piece on the same theme that took the form of an odd allusive philosophical dialogue, modeled on Plato and Lucian, between the two roles I play in my life. Just pitch it and write something else....

            Don’t ask me what’s next. I have about four different ideas for books. I could go chasing after any one of those unwritten chimeras. I love not knowing, though. I love feeling like a coiled spring, like a loaded catapult of undifferentiated firestuff. All I have to do is aim myself.

            This brings up a point that relates to my day-to-day life: I produce more work, both poetry and prose, than full-time writers without kids. How is that possible? My productivity is no mystery to me. I am simply reconciled to waste motion and rejection in a way that most other writers aren’t. They may say they are (“You have to have a thick skin in this business! Persevere!”), but they don’t mean it. That’s why they try to engage their throttling mechanism at the same time as their generative mechanism. Sometimes the former exceeds the latter, and they get “writer’s block.” They don’t want to write poorly, or to write things that other people don’t want to read. In other words, fear of failure. The ego protects itself because it would rather not write at all than launch dud after dud.

            By contrast, I have entire novels on my hard drive my own literary agent won’t even try to sell. I hoard literally hundreds of unpublished poems in a variety of styles and forms that I’ve never sent out to journals. I assume no one wants to read my stuff even after it’s published, and that assumption has usually proven shrewd. (I feel bad for my own publishers sometimes.) I attribute rejection or indifference to limitations in other people’s receptivity, not necessarily the weakness of a given piece. I attribute my lack of much of a reputation (in spite of so many publications) to a lack of self-promotion, and to a lack of identitarian and aesthetic kinship with the audience for poetry and fiction. So it’s not that I don’t protect my literary sense of self-worth. I do—just not in a way that chokes off my creativity. I end up with the opposite of writer’s block: a blithe willingness to chase any chimerical project or style that occurs to me, and so what if twenty-first century Americans are cold to it.

            Having said that, time management underpins everything I do in literature and radiology. I don’t have enough time. Three kids, the day job, and a terror of dying early before I’ve read and written all my books books books that drives me to work out for at least an hour almost every day.... I have streamlined my life. I still don’t go out or drink, but now I can count the number of things I do on the fingers of one hand, if you exclude eating and sleeping. I don’t sleep nearly enough, sometimes just a few hours, an unhealthy habit incentivized by the fact that my poems come out weirdly better when I’m sleep deprived, since the logical, muggle-moiety of my brain is weaker. I read radiology studies, hang out with the family, work out, and do literary stuff. That’s it. No binge watching shows on Netflix, no following sports, no hanging out with my friends (I have only one really close one, a non-literary fellow radiologist who lives in Austin), and (almost) no social gatherings where you stand around with a styrofoam cup half-full of Sprite Zero and talk about work.

            So that’s the nitty-gritty of how I do the two careers. Just the essentials, just the important stuff: Making sure the family thrives materially and has a present, loving husband and dad in the home; staving off time, that devourer of memory and muscle; and seeking the approval of Saraswati, Goddess of the arts, with my art. That is my dharma. That is my happiness. That is my secret.

            About ten years ago, Mayfield Regional library moved from my old high school’s campus to a new building ten minutes away. It’s a typical contemporary library, mostly glass, full of screens. No chiaroscuro lighting or looming shelves. In fact all the shelves are chest high, no higher. There is no looking up in awe.

            Before the move, unaware of the county’s decision, I visited the old library, as I always did when visiting my parents. I went up to the second floor and found the Classics shelves completely gutted. I sought out the librarian and discovered the horrific truth. Not only was the library relocating, the Classics had been done away with. They were aging books, she explained, that hadn’t been checked out in a decade or more. (Not since a gangly Indian-American teenager used to emerge from those aisles with both arms full.) Was there any way I could buy them from the library? And these shelves—could I buy these exact blessed shelves? I tried to explain to her how much those books and these shelves meant to me. I said I was a writer now, and those books were why. I remembered the details of the wear on their covers, even the stains on their pages, the patterns of Date Due stamps on their back pages....

            She nodded and smiled at me, and I realized I was coming off as a kind of madman. She was polite about it. No luck. That hardcover edition of Ciardi’s Dante, along with all the other Classics, had been donated to used book sales around the area. They were dispersed, irretrievable. They had gone out just a week before. There was no getting them back.

            Those weekends and summers when I biked to the library, I would pause at the top of the Miner Road hill and adjust my newly reloaded backpack. I would scan the driveways to my left and make sure no one was pulling out so I could pedal downhill at top speed without having to stop. The wind roared in my ears as I approached escape velocity, and the sweat under the helmet went cool at my temples. That backpack full of books was my jet pack. I took flight.