The creative arc of Edmonton poet Shirley Serviss extends from Edmonton Transit ads displaying her Alberta centennial poem “Our Promised Land” to the more traditional rounds of litfest readings. But it also extends to the University of Alberta Hospitals, where she is poet-in-residence.

The hospital program that has hosted Serviss for the past six years is called Artists on the Wards, and is Canada’s only literary residency that encourages writers to interact with terminal and chronic patients.

“I could never have imagined working as a poet in a hospital,” says Serviss, the program’s first writer, who took up residence in January 2000. “I had explored the idea of hospital chaplaincy when I was working on my master’s in theological studies, but had discovered that writing and teaching writing was still my true calling. I had no idea I’d find myself at the bedside responding to people’s concerns about life and death by reading them poetry, or writing a poem for them, or encouraging them to keep a journal.”

Artists on the Wards was conceived in 1999 by the volunteer organization Friends of University Hospitals as a pilot program focusing on visual arts in clinical treatment. When a literary position was added, Serviss applied for the job. “When I was with my father as he was dying, I decided to pursue hospital chaplaincy, so it fulfills that initial desire,” she says. “It has always been important to me to make poetry accessible, and that was the basis on which Alice Major and I started a small press [which has since shut down] years ago. I take great pleasure in sharing poetry with patients and having them discover that they do understand it and it speaks to their experience.”

The job goes beyond bedside readings and, in fact, beyond the patients. “Poetic medicine” – poems rolled up and
packaged in prescription bottles – finds its way to patients and staff alike. Serviss will write on demand for particular patients “based on things they’ve told me and on my own intuition about how they are feeling.” She’ll also encourage them to write poetry or to keep a journal, going so far as to offer them notebooks and pens. She also writes transitional poems on walls or whiteboards in hospital rooms and waiting areas.

Inevitably, the work affects her. These are patients who are often in the last stages of life. “The job has changed my approach to poetry in that I used to let an idea knock around in my head for awhile before ever getting a poem out of it,” Serviss says. “Deadline has taken on a whole new meaning for me. A patient may actually die before I see him again, or be transferred to another facility or sent home, so if I’m going to write a poem for a patient, I have to do it immediately.”

This work has spawned her third poetry collection, Hitchhiking in the Hospital, published by Inkling Press, a low-profile, non-profit Edmonton house established five years ago by a sextet of University of Alberta professors, including Governor General’s Award-winning poet E.D. Blodgett.

Inkling is a division of Magpie Productions, which has released CDs of tanka poetry and choreographed poetry. The press publishes two poetry collections per year, with small press runs of 120 copies. The Serviss volume, launched last June, is its bestselling book at 500 copies, which, as Inkling board member and poet Gerald St. Maur says, “is very good for a book of poetry in this country.”

“We started as a niche press operating on a shoestring,” adds Blodgett, Inkling’s literary editor. “In Shirley’s case, I was aware that she was already working with this book, and so we approached her.”

A book of hospital poetry clearly occupies a niche, and indeed, Inkling’s marketing has successfully focused on venues that highlight Serviss’s unique status as a poet on the ward. The 2005 conference for the Washington, D.C.-based Society of the Arts in Healthcare was held in Edmonton in June, and Serviss appeared there to read from Hitchhiking in the Hospital. The following month, she travelled to New York to read and offer a presentation of her hospital work for the Writing the Medical Experience Conference at Sarah Lawrence College. “Reaction to the book has been great,” she says. “I’ve had positive comments from physicians and nurses both here and in the U.S.”

Ironically, though, Serviss’s first audience – the patients at the hospital – seldom realizes that her regular artistic leanings over the years have earned her recognition from the Alberta literary community. Her 1992 collection Model Families was shortlisted for the Alberta Book of the Year, she is a contributor to Dropped Threads 2, and she co-edited Study in Grey: Women Writing About Depression (Rowan Books).

“I am not known at the hospital as Shirley Serviss, a published poet, but as ‘the story lady’ or ‘the lady with the million-dollar smile and the colourful cart,’” she says. “The interaction is always about the needs of the patient or staff or visitor, not about me.”