Alumna Tana Jean Welch finds ways to interconnect her humanities background with a focus on medicine and healing

By Molly DeKraai

In her faculty office on Florida State University’s campus, Tana Jean Welch has polished rocks on her desk, scattered papers surround her, and numerous photographs fill the space.

She is a California native who loves to travel and explore art history. She wanted to be a writer since she was in elementary school. She is learning how to play the ukelele.

Those are snippets of Welch’s personal life.

The vast scope of her career life is impossible to cover during a profile interview, even though Welch sat down to talk holding a few pages of notes she jotted down in preparation.

First and foremost, Welch is associate professor of medical humanities in Florida State University’s College of Medicine. An interview with her should also explore her teaching, her membership in various organizations, and her service work for the university. Of course, Welch’s doctoral degree in English from FSU should be discussed, as well as her accomplishments as a published author.

“My work is all interconnected,” Welch says, in a way, simplifying her multidisciplinary career.

Before her time at FSU, Welch earned her Bachelor of Arts in English in 1999 and her Master of Fine Arts in Poetry in 2006 from San Diego State University. Welch moved to Tallahassee in 2006 to pursue her doctorate at FSU in Creative Writing. She had never been to Florida before, but the English department’s Creative Writing Program seemed like a good fit for her, so she exchanged the West Coast for the Panhandle.

She eventually earned her doctorate from FSU in August 2013, switching her major of specialization to 20th-century American literature, with a minor in feminist science studies. Welch’s dissertation is titled “The Posthuman Turn in 21st-Century American Poetry.”

The importance of storytelling from a humanities perspective heavily informs her dedication to writing.

“If I were to describe myself, or what is really important to me, I really am driven by story and the act of creating stories, reading other people’s stories,” Welch says. “I’ve always had this passion for humanities. The different modes that humans use to make sense of who we are.”

FSU English Professor Andrew Epstein has worked with Welch for 15 years, in the English department when she was a doctoral student and since she earned her doctorate.

“It has been such a pleasure to work with Tana and to watch her writing develop and evolve,” Epstein says. “As her dissertation advisor, I was happy to support her when she decided to make the shift from Creative Writing to a doctorate in Literature, Media, and Culture because I knew she was such a talented scholar and literary critic— one whose study of literary history and cultural theory informed and deepened her creative work, and vice versa.

“But it’s been especially wonderful to see that she has managed to continue to produce terrific creative work alongside her critical writing.”

Following her childhood dream of becoming a writer, Welch has published multiple works that range in content from peer-reviewed articles for literary and medical journals to an academic monograph and poetry collections.

Her most recent book, released in January 2024, is  In Parachutes Descending, which comprises 38 connected poems. The narrative follows the end of a relationship and the beginning of a new one, all while keeping the entanglements between humans and the world we live in at the forefront.

Entanglements, Welch says, encompass “everything we’ve come in contact with—past, present, and future. Human, non-human, cultures; anything that’s shaped who we are.”

“We’re all entangled,” she continues. “And we keep moving. And whoever I’m going to become is always changing by having contact with others.”

Author Lauren Russell, who is on the faculty of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in a review that “[t]he poems of In Parachutes Descending float between fact and possibility, destruction and passion, introspection and challenge, between the bodies we create together—lovingly, disastrously, rupturingly, rapturously—and the bodies we dwell in alone.”

Welch’s first book of poetry, Latest Volcano, was published in 2016. In early February 2024, the Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine series published her monograph Advancing Medical Posthumanism Through Twenty-First Century American Poetry.

“It is pretty rare these days to see someone excel simultaneously as both a poet and a scholar, so it is particularly exciting that Tana has just published a new book of poems and an important scholarly study at the same time,” Epstein says. “Her new critical book, which grew out of the dissertation she completed at FSU, draws on recent developments in ecocriticism and the medical humanities to explore why recent American poetry questions deep-seated assumptions about the “human” by challenging blurring the boundaries between human, machine, animal, and the natural world. Not surprisingly, these are themes that drive her poetry as well, and they lie at the heart of her wonderful new book In Parachutes Descending.

“For instance, the book opens with an ominously titled poem—“Boston Under Water by 2100”—which reflects Tana’s ecocritical concerns, as it imagines a near future of environmental apocalypse: ‘Soon the sea / will claim this reclaimed land, / sending these few fragments forever // to the drink.’”

Welch’s draw to study the humanities and to write about topics in the context of the body and healing perhaps aided an unexpected career path for Welch.

She discovered during her first year of college in California that she wanted to teach, but she was not sure how or where she would reach that goal. That journey to teach began at FSU in 2011, when she was completing her doctorate in English.

Like most graduate students, Welch was a teaching assistant for the department. An administrator in the College of Medicine contacted the English chair and asked if a teaching assistant in that department could work for the COM, and Welch was chosen for the position.

“So, that’s sort of how I got here,” she says. “I was never thinking about medicine.”

At the time, Welch used her literary skills to work as an editor with  HEAL: Humanism Evolving through Arts and Literature, which began in July 2009 and was published in newsletter form for several years. Now, with Welch as managing editor, HEAL has the look of a literary magazine, with full-color covers and pages.

Additionally, Welch helped to create one of the courses she now teaches, Literature in Medicine, which was developed as a literature and medicine distance learning elective for fourth-year medical students. The COM offered the four-week course five times per academic year from 2012 to 2014, and the course objectives included “analyze and articulate personal experiences in clinical medicine through the discussion of select novels, short stories, poems, and nonfiction medical narratives” and “discuss and articulate various values and societal roles for physicians as depicted in works of literature.”

Welch worked in this capacity for the COM until her graduation from FSU in 2013. After a few years living in Wisconsin, she returned to FSU and to the COM as an assistant professor of medical humanities for the college’s Department of Family Medicine and Rural Health.

Welch’s return to FSU is when her career path truly started to take form.

“The job grew into a full-time professorship, and I had to grow with it as well,” she says. “It was a lot of learning via on-the-job experience. It was kind of like getting a second degree in medical education.”

Using her experience, Welch has since solidified two undergraduate courses and a creative writing course for COM students. She has come to realize that although this position is new territory, it has given her an additional outlook on her chosen discipline.

“I love writing and reading literature and studying it,” she says. “But literature seems like it’s in a bubble almost. These medical humanities courses have a practical application. I feel like my teaching is doing something good for the world, and I definitely appreciate that.”

Welch introduces students in her Literature in Medicine class to a new element of caregiving, one that is informed through literary work.

“We read fictional novels and apply it to patient care, ethics, doctoring, issues like those,” she says. “The students don't always realize this is happening, but they’re learning a different sort of critical thinking skill than they would in their science classes.”

This well-rounded approach to healthcare gives these students more tools to use as healthcare providers, she adds, and, in turn, making them more dynamic professionals.

In addition to the courses she teaches, Welch is involved with multiple initiatives in FSU’s community, including her role as managing editor for HEAL. The literary magazine seeks to provide a platform for medical students, faculty and staff, and community members to creatively express the impact that health and healing have on their own lives.

A medical doctor with little background in the humanities started HEAL, but Welch’s input as an English doctoral student and creative writer helped establish the magazine as it now appears. HEAL transformed from an idea on Microsoft Publisher to a quarterly journal that features submissions of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, music, and art of any kind from individuals worldwide.

“It’s grown so much, and I’m really proud of it,” Welch says, beaming as she talks about the publication’s evolution.

In addition to those ventures with literary publishing, Welch serves as the director of the Chapman Humanities and Arts in Medicine Program. Shortened to CHAMP, this program aims to enrich the community of the COM through programming and extracurricular activities based on humanities and arts.

Because Welch is the sole arts and humanities scholar in the COM, administrators asked her to chair the program about a year after she became a full-time professor. The Jules B. Chapman and Annie Lou Chapman Private Foundation established CHAMP through its funding; as a nurse and wife of a physician, Annie Lou Chapman was devoted to humanism in healthcare.

CHAMP comprises multiple initiatives within the COM, including HEAL, the student organization Humanities and Medicine, and Arts in Medicine, a student-led community outreach program. These programs aim to blend the medical disciplines with the humanities, Welch explains, creating a more enriched community of students and faculty while also giving back.

CHAMP organizations hold events that range in content: guest speakers, creative stress relievers, and graphic medicine workshops, among others. Welch only recently became involved in the graphic medicine facet of humanities in healthcare.

“I partnered with Arizona State University, and we did a workshop where students got to make their own comics and discuss graphic medicine,” she shares. “The process uses comics to educate both healthcare professionals and patients, and it brings a visual element.”

Welch combined her motivation for teaching with her love for travel in the 2024 Summer B session when she taught for International Programs at its FSU campus in Valencia, Spain. She taught her Narrative Medicine course as well as introduced a new one, Comics in Medicine, revisiting her newfound interest for the intersection of comic art and healthcare.

Throughout all her work, though, lies the same goal for Welch.

“I want to communicate an openness to alterity, to change, the need to do things differently,” she says. “I think as a human species and planet and ecosystem, we’re constantly changing, so if we can accept that, then we might be better off as a society.”

She notes that “we’re all susceptible to the touch of others,” and her educational efforts reflect this sentiment. For her, the aim is to imbue a more holistic approach into the healthcare atmosphere, which can sometimes carry a stigma. Welch aspires to take her humanities studies into account to spark empathetic change.

Although Welch never planned on this career, one that merges arts and medicine, she has gracefully and gratefully stepped into a role as the first person at FSU COM to hold this position.

“It was just one of those random life things that happened, things happen to you that aren’t planned,” she says. “And I have actually really enjoyed it.”

Welch is bringing to light an aspect of healthcare that is often underreasearched, underfunded, and underappeciated. Given her approach to the environments that have most influenced her, it is not surprising that Welch has successfully blended the disciplines of medicine and humanities.

In fact, her comments about the narrative structure for In Parachutes Descending ring true here as well.

“Entanglements are very important to medicine because our health is so dictated by cultural values, the environment, environmental damage, the food that’s available; everything goes back to our health,” she says. “There’s so many factors at play.”

Through Welch’s creativity, her teaching, and her service work, and as her efforts continue to grow and inspire, the connections she hopes to make among humanities, art, and healthcare can continue to become more realized and esteemed.

Molly DeKraai graduated at the end of Spring 2024 with a double major in English-Editing, Writing, and Media and in Media Communication Studies.

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