Dr. Stewart’s short stories have since been published in Pulse–voices from the heart of medicine, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The Placebo Journal, and The Journal of Irreproducible Results, where he is listed as honorary Art Editor. For four years he served as Contributing Editor to Informal Rounds, the newsletter of the University of Alabama Medical Alumni Association.
For the past quarter century he has made his living as a self-styled Visual Humorist, hammering words and pictures together at the DS Art Studio Gallery in Birmingham: www.DSArt.com. You can also find him at www.PastMedicalHistoryBook.com.
His latest book is the autobiography, Past Medical History.
Can you tell us
what your book is about?
Past Medical History is
the story of a young surgeon-in-training, who left the hospital just in time to
avoid a successful career in medicine.
Why did you write
your book?
I always knew I would one day write a
book called Past Medical History. The
title is a medical term, part of the interview process when a doctor meets a new
patient: a list of illnesses and treatments that the patient has had in the
past. When applied to my life, it makes for an unavoidable pun, and a pretty
good story.
I guess you could say
writing the book was a bucket list sort of thing, too. After all, there aren't
many who leave the medical profession prematurely, and far fewer who do so to
pursue a life of comic art.
Over the years, my art
customers have asked me why I made such an unusual career change. This book
seemed the best way to answer that question - for them, and in retrospect, for
me as well.
What kind of
message is your book trying to tell your readers?
Past Medical History is a
collection of autobiographical short stories. Arranged in chronological order,
they act like chapters in a storybook that tells a larger tale. Hopefully that
larger story reveals why this particular personality was at first drawn to
medicine, then distracted by more creative pursuits.
In the process, the book
also reveals some of the pitfalls of medical education, a bit of the unpleasant
behind-the-scenes stuff that the general public isn't familiar with. Hopefully
that will be of interest to readers, especially students considering a career
in medicine.
Who influenced you
to write your book?
I wrote my first stories
to entertain myself, and my kids. After that, it sort of became a habit – and a
sometime obsessive endeavor that my wife was kind and patient enough to
encourage.
Michael Crichton was an
early hero, who showed me there were options to life after medical school. Tim
O'Brien’s The Things They Carried showed me that I didn't have to re-work my
short stories into a conventional narrative to make them into a book. Steven
Pressfield, whom I had met in the course of promoting my military drawings,
encouraged me (and many others) to stop waiting around, and get on with it.
Is it hard to
publish a nonfiction book?
I tried for several months
to gain the attention of either an agent or a publisher, but the longer I
investigated, the more I understood that it would be quicker, easier and more
cost-effective to do it myself. If the book succeeded on its own, then it might
one day be more attractive to a mainstream publisher. If not, we would still
have books that we were proud of to sell along with the artwork in our studio.
Either way, I would have learned a great deal of valuable information about the
book business.
Of course we already knew
how to market our art, and we had been successful producing (and selling out,
and reprinting) an earlier book of drawings. So the idea of self-publishing
wasn’t all that daunting. Once you have a good product – in this case, a good
story in a well-designed package – you need capital, a marketing plan, and a
distribution network. Through our studio, we had everything in place except the
capital to print the books, and we were able to raise that through our
Indiegogo campaign.
Which author(s) do
you admire?
Pressfield, Crichton,
O’Brien, all mentioned previously. Robert Heinlein. Daniel Pink. Inman Majors.
E.O. Wilson. Clifton Meador. Tim
Dorsey. Thomas Ricks. Andre Codrescu. I have pretty eclectic tastes.
Have you suffered from writer’s block and what do you do to get back on
track?
Creative blocks of any
sort are temporary. If I’m not writing, I’m drawing, or researching my next art
project. If the art isn't going so well, I write. If neither is moving along,
I’ll work on a new marketing plan for the books or the pictures, or whatever
else we’re involved in at the moment. Or I go and play in the garden.
What would you do with an extra hour today if you could do anything you
wanted?
Whatever I’ve been doing
for the preceding ten or twelve. Or go home early and cook something fun for
dinner.
If we were to meet for lunch to talk books, where would we go?
Any place with good coffee
and cheap dessert.
What do you like to do for fun?
Read & draw, both
exercises in banging images and words together until something sticks. Cook.
Play in the garden. Sit for hours in bed watching TV.
Can you tell us about your family?
I am giddily married to
Sue Ellen Brown, an artist from a medical family who was smart enough to go
straight to art school, talented enough to work for Hallmark, and bold enough
to establish her own studio long before I met her. She occupies the colorful
side of the studio. I have two grown sons from an earlier marriage.
As the book tells in
greater detail, my mother died when I was very young. I have long been aware
that her illness and premature death were a huge influence in my decision to
become a doctor. What I did not fully realize before this book was written, is
that she was also responsible for my artistic inclinations as well.
What do you like the most about being an author?
I’m not sure I’m
comfortable with the title ‘author’. I’m an artist who happens to write.
What I like most about
words is that they offer me another medium for self-expression. If this book
does well, I’ll be encouraged to keep at it.
What kind of advice would you give other non-fiction
authors?
Write.