Tendon Magazine

Tendon Magazine: We're Recruiting Editors, Readers, Interns Volunteer, remote compatible, 1-5 hours/week Deadline August 15, 2025 Questions? Don't hesitate to reach out to tendonmag@gmail.com

Come work with us!

Tendon is currently looking for a Fiction editor, a media and event intern, and readers for Fiction, Poetry, and Visual Art.

hopkinsmedicalhumanities.org/join-tendon/

Pre-call, Elizabeth Koch The doctor who is a mother knows that she is one of the lucky ones. On most nights, except the one or two or three a week when she is on call, she is able to frown at the canvas bag of produce that she picked up from the CSA she’d signed them up for, conjure up a recipe that both her husband and children will eat, and fill the small house with steam and sizzle and the ticking of the oven warming itself. She is able, on most nights, to squint into her children’s crocodile mouths and scrub their little molars with an electric brush, careful not to mix up their separate toothpastes. Then she is able to read to them, alternating nights in each one’s bed, Jane Eyre for her precocious third grader, and, for her five-year-old, the one about the boy and his hunting hounds that always makes her cry.

Read all of Elizabeth Koch's pithy meditation on balancing the work of mothering with the work of doctoring in our latest issue on Rest, out now:

hopkinsmedicalhumanities.org/tendon-magaz...

Oh no... if you're using letterhead it might help to replace it with a smaller logo. Doing that bought be an extra couple of lines, I think.

Read more about Dyne's work in our new issue here: hopkinsmedicalhumanities.org/tendon-magaz...

A painting of people gathered by the bank of the Han River, painted in the style of Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

"A Hangang Sunday Afternoon" by artist Dyne Kim, riffing on the French Impressionist Georges Seurat

No, and it was actually recommended to me to alter the default margins as well down to a trimmer 1" uniform

"Every twelve hours, our lives hung together, lines entangled (antibiotics, chemo, antibiotics), as we invited illness to sit among us, drip feed, slowly walk away."

From Karin Eli's poem Maypole, hopkinsmedicalhumanities.org/tendon-magaz...

Doctor frankenshteen

Humanity only survives if it matches every advancement in technology with a deepening of the soul. Without clarity about ethics, without sensitivity to truth and beauty, we will quickly lose ourselves in a heartless hellscape of digital minds.

Teach the humanities and the arts.

I'm so proud of this new issue we put together, and positively chuffed that I finally managed to Trojan horse my favorite bit of Mencius into a piece weaving clinical, ethnographic, and historical reflections I wrote specifically for it. I hope it offers some fun and fruitful food for thought.

Happy to have this essay,"On Fatigue," published at @tendonmag.bsky.social @jhu.edu #chronicillness #writing #medicalhumanities #narrativemedicine #Rilke #fatigue hopkinsmedicalhumanities.org/tendon-magaz...

A woman melts into a bed, daily objects floating around her, and a blue forest of vines lurking in the background

Rest is rarely just rest. It’s a desire, a demand, a question of who gets to pause—and who must keep going.

In honor of May Day, an international workers holiday, we're proud to launch our 7th issue, on Rest: hopkinsmedicalhumanities.org/tendon-magaz...

Levinia Fontana, Portrait of Bianca degli Utili Maselli and Her Children. a noblewoman poses with five children and a dog. they all have ruffled collars and ostentatious, intricately patterned clothing.

you know those family portraits where everyone wears denim

This is just to say

I have fucked with
the trolls
that were in
my mentions

and which
I was probably
not
supposed to feed

Forgive me
they were entertaining
so simple
and so mad

Bellchimes jangle, freakish wind whistles icy out of desert lands over the mountains. Janus, Lord of winter and beginnings, riven and shaken, with two faces, watcher at the gates of winds and cities, god of the wakeful: keep me from coldhanded envy and petty anger. Open my soul to the vast dark places. Say to me, say again, nothing is taken. only given

Open
my soul to the vast
dark places. Say to me, say again,
nothing is taken, only given.

-Ursula K. Le Guin, January Night Prayer

Properly elegiac, and the penultimate poem in her collection, “Finding My Elegy.” Le Guin passed away seven years ago, in January.
#everynightapoem

"But also, as a scholar, there’s this long lineage of Black women using form that feels like a necessary disruption of a canon; a subversion of what form used to be." This time last year, we published Ashia Ajani's interview with @taylorbyas.bsky.social : https://buff.ly/3u4MRxN

"Oh no, good fortune. I can’t take your bribe / My world is not what these walls circumscribe //
Just hear the gunfire! Death is roaring, reaving / Silent night, how could you keep my heart from heaving?"

- Wen Yiduo, translated by A.Z. Foreman

And check put the lower left and upper right corners. These are personal items from the sitter, a friend from her community. And audio of interviews played near the piece.

bsky.app/profile/prop...

To Be of Use by Marge Piercy The people I love best jump into work head first without dallying in the shadows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls. Ilove people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again. I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.

You take a deep breath and then you do the work. What else is there?

Marge Piercy:

For landscape painting practice yesterday, I painted Qingtiangang 擎天崗 which I finally made it to the other day. It is a popular chill hike in Yangmingshan here in Taipei because you get grassy plains (which means views) and also lots of wild water buffalo around!

Tendon (@tendonmag.bsky.social) is extending our submission deadline to 12/20! You can submit your work on “rest” here:

tendonmag.submittable.com/submit

I hope this letter finds you, in your changes.

Sorry, but if you are trying to use GenAI to create comics for #GraphicMedicine purposes, you have missed the entire point so badly that I'm not sure you even know what you are talking about.

I don’t have a title for this one yet. It’s about a therapy session I had with an Australian Jungian therapist in Thailand, who liked to hypnotize me and tell me stories.

30” x 40”
Oil on canvas

#oilpainting #portrait #selfie #selfportrait #Therapy #Jung #Babel

I’d especially like to take care of the peonies because they are so fragile. Please be careful that I don’t cough in your face. How trying I am to all of you; it’s crazy. Fear again and again. The trouble is that I cannot drink a single glass of water, though the craving itself is some satisfaction. The lilac—dying, it drinks. Put your hand on my forehead a moment to give me courage.

When Kafka was dying and unable to speak, he wrote little notes for his doctors and friends who visited him. Here are seven of them.

Writers, poets, and artists: we're closing in on the final days to submit work on the theme of "Rest."

Call for submissions closes on 2024.11.20 at 11:59pm EST.

How do you determine your line breaks / lengths?

So much of craft is instinctual for me.

Writers, poets, and artists: we're closing in on the final days to submit work on the theme of "Rest."

Call for submissions closes on 2024.11.20 at 11:59pm EST.

a park bench with into a boulder embedded into the middle of it

me: having a really hard time figuring out what to remove from this poem

the poem:

Just finished "Sea of Tranquility" by Emily St. John Mandel. Was my first foray into speculative fiction (and I loved it!) - opinion by @plantmaize.bsky.social, one of our creative non-fiction editors