This Writing Professor Also Has a Medical Degree

Rivka Galchen’s path embraces the interdisciplinary, arts-science cornerstone of Columbia’s mission and pedagogy. A graduate of the School of the Arts’ Writing Program, where she now teaches, Galchen is also a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction books, as well as a staff writer for The New Yorker.

She has received numerous prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Fellowship, the Berlin Prize, and the William J. Saroyan International Prize in Fiction. Galchen also holds an MD from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Columbia News caught up with Galchen to discuss the career choices she has made, and how her medical background informs her writing and teaching.

Why did you pursue an MFA in writing after graduating from medical school?

I often experience my younger self as a perplexing stranger, and have trouble knowing what she was thinking. But in retrospect, what I value most about my MFA was the community.

Having ended up as a writer, why did you go to medical school in the first place? 

I went to respect my parents’ wishes. And now that I myself am a parent, I understand their wishes better than I did at the time. They are totally reasonable wishes—medicine is meaningful work, and also reliable work.

Have you been able to put all the time and effort you expended in medical school into your writing?

I’m so glad to have spent years being trained in thinking systematically, and also in respecting what a patient actually presents with as opposed to what you think—based on whatever world or scientific view you have—they ought to be presenting with. It's practice in seeing and thinking as accurately as you can, and protection from the delusions of Big Thoughts. Also, being in hospital settings where you meet most every kind of person, you get a felt sense of how each person is their own center of gravity—and that de-centering is itself an excellent education.

How does your medical knowledge inform your writing?

A sense of mystery, of the unassimilable detail, and of life as something that one day ends? That sounds spookier than I mean for it to, but that’s the light medical knowledge casts for me.

You often write about science and medicine for The New Yorker. Do those subjects attract you because of your knowledge?

Probably! Though they are inherently very interesting.

What do you think of doctor writers like, at Columbia, Siddhartha Mukherjee and Azra Raza?

I think: Wow!

What are you working on now?

An eccentric biography of scientific imagination. It thinks about people like Edgar Allan Poe and Louis Pasteur, about crash test dummies and microscopes...I think I'll be better at describing it when I’ve finished it!

What are you teaching this semester?

A fiction writing workshop and a seminar, Not Exactly Science Fiction.

How does the intersection of your own writing and teaching affect you?

Putting together a syllabus means assembling a list of preoccupations that I then get to think about collectively with students—pretty nice! So the writing and the teaching are bickering companions, usually in a good way.

What do you like to write more—fiction or nonfiction?

I love to write things that are about 5,000 words long, so that they can be read all in one sitting: That’s a nice unity to have, and it doesn't much matter to me whether it's fiction or nonfiction, though with fiction, I only ever write what I feel most compelled to write, and with nonfiction, that isn't always the case, though I try to make it be the case.

Any advice for students interested in pursuing a career similar to yours?

Try to travel in a less than straight line.

What is the best part about teaching at School of the Arts?

There used to be free cookies in the office, but now that that’s gone, I would say it’s the students. Also, the reading lists of others.