For Jennifer Pien, clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, “storytelling didn’t come naturally,” she said. Instead, Pien is drawn to the “landscape of words and their beauty and how they connect together to create a mood, an emotion, an atmosphere.”
Pien’s journey into storytelling started when she was young. “I enjoyed a little bit of the writing when I was in my childhood, but I kind of set it aside,” Pien, who intended to pursue a career in medicine, said.
But when Pien started applying for medical school, her interviewers asked why she was interested in medicine. She answered: “I was really interested in the individual stories of patients and really wanting to help support them in their well-being and care.”
However, it wasn’t until Pien reached a midpoint in her career practicing psychiatry that she — facing burnout — decided to take a poetry class.
“I was sort of forced to write, and I think it reminded me of the joy of the writing process itself,” Pien said.
After taking the class, Pien “embarked on a process of novel writing.” One of her first stories was inspired by her brother, an artist who came of age during the 1980s, and geopolitical events in Hong Kong and China.
When Amy Collins, Pien’s nonfiction literary agent, first met Pien, she said she “fell in love” with Pien’s stories and “wanted to represent her speculative novel so badly.”
“Her prose was rich and evocative,” Collins wrote to The Daily. “Jenn somehow reaches into what we feel and fear and draws it out of us. Her writing is both comforting and compelling.”
Pien’s other literary agent is Connor Smith, with whom she co-founded Hesperides Literary, a literary agency. According to Smith, Pien is “a writer who, when she gains full access to the creative sanctuary in her mind, pours beauty and song onto the page at a pace so freakish that it makes me question whether she has made an infernal pact with some authority of the underworld.”
“She plays adeptly with language and mythology and history and beauty and horror, conjuring scenes that are as surreal and dreamlike as they are meticulously substantiated with cultural and historical research,” Smith said.
Beyond her own pieces, writing led Pien to seek out other resources, including the Pegasus Physician Writers at Stanford, a community of current and aspiring physicians dedicated to creative storytelling in medicine. The program is housed under the Medical Humanities and the Arts branch of the School of Medicine. Pien is now its director.
Through monthly meetings and workshops, Pegasus’ mission is to “foster emerging voices — whether that’s in our younger student cohort or an emeritus faculty member who’s never written a book who now dreams of doing so — and providing a community with skills, resources and support for a path towards publication,” Pien said.
Pegasus supports writers in finding literary representation through editors and agencies, as well as in launching books to a wider audience. In addition to physicians, Pegasus supports undergraduate and graduate students interested in creative writing.
“There’s a strong interest in learning about physicians, learning about their experiences with patient care, peeking behind the curtain of what it’s like to be a medical professional,” Pien said.
To cater to its wide-ranging community, Pegasus supports journals, symposiums, readings, workshops, seminars and collaborations with other institutions. Among its journals, Pien is the editor in chief and a founding member of The Pegasus Review, a medical literary journal launched in 2018 for the 10th anniversary of Pegasus.
Moving forward, Pien hopes to emphasize opportunities within Pegasus for undergraduate and medical students. For example, the organization started a student-only group, Pien said.
“We were worried that some of the hierarchical elements that can sometimes be part of the medical care system would infiltrate into the group,” Pien said. To address this, the student-only group offered intimate writers’ workshops and retreats.
Pegasus is also collaborating with the Oxford Review of Books, a student publication published in the U.K. and now in association with Stanford, Pien said.
Since joining Pegasus, Pien has appreciated its community of students, trainees, residents, professors, published authors and new writers.
“It was just really a wonderful way to meet a fun, rich, diversified sectional view of the medical community,” Pien said. “I’ve developed lifelong friendships as a consequence of these communities.”
Pien’s personal goals include “continuing to enjoy the creative writing process, finding time for it and creating long-form novels that I would be proud to bring to the world,” she said.
Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, a psychologist, adjunct professor at Stanford and member of Pegasus, wrote to The Daily that “Dr. Pien has an amazing sense of seeing and appreciating the beauty and wonder of each person.”
“She understands how the process of co-creating illness narratives helps health care providers to recognize the individuality of patients, ” Murphy-Shigematsu wrote. “And she believes that honoring the stories that grow out of our patients’ lived experiences benefits not only them but also us as professionals.”