The Secret Life of This Life Now #9
The 9th in a series of brief essays about the life cycle of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems
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The Secret Life of This Life Now is the backstory of This Life Now, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry (so I have the distinction of saying I lost to Danez Smith). It’s a belated tenth-anniversary gift to the book that put me on some tiny corner of the poetry map. It’s also the story of how we can suffer as much when we succeed as when we fail.
In each Secret Life, I share a bit of my journey and give you a peek at the sequentially next poem in This Life Now. This is post #9 in the series, and the ninth poem in the book is “Another Tony Poem” (see TSLTLN #3 for an introduction to Tony). It’s a 19-line poem, and the excerpt below includes the first half.
But tonight, if I went down
under the boardwalk, would I find you there,
leaning against a pillar or a chain-link fence,
like when you were 13, getting your
grown-up size cock sucked by a hungry boy?
Nope. Next to your grandparents, maybe;
and I wonder what it looks like,
what your stone says after name and dates—
Lived in fear? Died of complications?Tony died in 1994, “with” AIDS but “of” alcoholism. That’s all I’m going to say about this poem. And if you want to read the rest of the poem, I urge you to buy the book.
On to the life journey stuff. In TSLTLN #8, I told you how my journalism career spawned my medical communications career and my medical communications career ultimately ended my journalism career. As I told you then, the editorial director at World Health Communications (WHC), my client for my first freelance medical writing gig, liked my work, and asked me if I would join the WHC team at the Ninth International AIDS Conference in Berlin in June of 1993. Of course I said yes. At the time, that little tête-à-tête in the editorial director’s office rated as one of the most thrilling moments of my life.
WHC produced continuing medical education (CME) activities that were funded through educational grants from pharmaceutical companies. Like most of you reading this, I had never heard of such a thing before getting embroiled in the field myself. What I quickly learned was that most drug brands—a pain med, a diabetes med, a cancer med, what have you—have three distinct agencies that serve their marketing needs: an advertising agency, a public relations firm, and a medical communications firm. The ad agency is responsible for anything and everything that uses the brand name of the drug. The PR firm writes press releases, and that’s all I know about PR.
The medical communications company uses a grab bag of tactics—that are not advertising—to get doctors and other medical providers to understand a particular drug so they can use it appropriately and effectively with their patients. So the first assignment I had as a freelancer in that industry was to write an educational monograph based on slides and transcripts from expert presentations at a two-day speaker training event. The expert presentations given at that speaker training event also became the basis of a slide-lecture kit that the speakers who attended the speaker training would later use to give educational presentations of their own in various settings, like a hospital grand rounds lecture, or a lunchtime talk at a private practice office, or a dinner meeting at a local restaurant.
Now, you might be saying, Hmm…that sounds a lot like marketing dressed up in educational garb to avoid the scrutiny of the FDA and other regulatory agencies. At you might well be right, as a general rule. But general rules do have their exceptions, and in 1993, one humongous exception was pharma-sponsored physician education around HIV and AIDS. Ten, twelve years into the AIDS epidemic, medical schools had not yet sufficiently integrated HIV and AIDS into their curricula. What’s more, they could not possibly do so, because the scientific research, the clinical research, and the drug development was only just then happening. How could medical knowledge that was just barely making its way into medical journals possibly be integrated into the knowledge base of doctors, nurses, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, HIV counselors, social workers, and others who needed to know?
There was one way: The drug companies had to pay for it, and agencies like the one I was starting to work for had to develop and produce the educational materials and modalities, and distribute and communicate that knowledge to healthcare providers in meaningful and accessible ways.
So that’s what I was doing for a living starting in 1993.
Okay, you know I don’t like these things to go past 1200 words or so. So I will stop here à la prochaine. Until next time. But first I will repeat what I wrote last Thursday about where this series of brief essays is leading me—
In the course of writing these installment of TSLTLN, I have come to realize that this series is is a “tryout” of sorts for the memoir I have long wanted to write. And as of right now I want to call that memoir But Oh, How the Cool Sand Calls. Those are the climactic final words of “Secret,” the poem in This Life Now that includes the title phrase, “this life now.” You will learn more about that poem, and the significance of that phrase, in TSLTLN #21. I am grateful to you, Reader, for being the second-person addressee who brought me to this momentous realization.
Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes SHIPPING in the US. If you are elsewhere, I will probably need to reach out and ask you for some additional funds for shipping.
Scheduling Note: I am going to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:45am eastern time. Other new sections of Beachcomber Mike may be starting soon. I’ll keep you posted.
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