{"product_id":"the-long-way-home-stories-9781947504127","title":"The Long Way Home: Stories","description":"Ron Lands writes beautiful stories about the messy life of sickness, death, loss, confusion, and compassion. In his work, his two worlds of doctor and writer seamlessly overlap. Most of the men and women who populate these stories are facing the end--either their own, or someone else's-- and the medical, practical, emotional, and spiritual complexities that develop in the final hours and days intertwine to create moving and memorable conflicts between, and within, the characters. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThese stories take place in the homes, doctor's offices, and hospital rooms of a small Tennessee town, where doctors intimately know their patients, and patients exist in a generational no-mans' land between house calls and contemporary medicine. As doctor and writer Lands' ability to explore their humanity as his characters navigate the unfamiliar makes these stories shimmer. Beautifully rendered sentence after sentence, THE LONG WAY HOMEThe is the work of an expert in his fields. --Susan Perabo \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eLands, Ron:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e - Ron Lands grew up in a small East Tennessee town with a five generation Appalachian pedigree containing a host of farmers and preachers, but no writers or physicians. As he states, \"The first indication that I might break that mold was the day after President Kennedy's assassination when, in an attempt to process that tragedy, I wrote a very bad poem and gave it to my second-grade teacher. The teasing I endured from my peers after she read it to my class squelched any desire to share work for the next twenty-five years.\" \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eHis earliest interest in the medical profession occurred a year later after he developed appendicitis. As he recalls, \"A small-town general practitioner performed emergency surgery late one night without a specialist's consultation, abdominal CT scan or anything else considered standard today. I was enchanted by the whole process, the doctor who visited me at random times, the nurse who changed my bandage daily, and cleaned my fingertips with alcohol so I could feel the thick silk sutures.\" \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eOver five decades later, now a retired cancer doctor in Knoxville, Tennessee, he confides how he was drawn to that specialty because \"the art of medicine has remained relevant even as the science has unfolded in breathtaking waves.\" He still works part-time because he enjoys learning new things from his young, smart colleagues, and he still enjoys clinical medicine. \"I still find myself writing to find clarity about my patients. Writing and medicine are my vocation and avocation, impossible to do one without the other.\" \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eHe lives and writes near his hometown, still married to the nursing student he met while in medical school. He is the proud father of a son and daughter, and delighted father-in-law to the mother of his two granddaughters. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eHe is an MFA alumnus of Queens University of Charlotte. His short stories have been published in several small literary journals. His clinical vignettes and poems have been published in the humanities sections of medical journals. His first chapbook, Final Path, was published in the spring of 2020. A second poetry collection, A Gathering of Friends, is forthcoming in the fall of 2021.","brand":"Bottom Dog Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":52179097354514,"sku":"9781947504127","price":16.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_68c12c8c-a3bf-4060-bd5a-4562def65781.jpg?v=1775635666","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/the-long-way-home-stories-9781947504127","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}