By LaShaune Johnson, Certified Listener Poet, Cohort 2
In October 2025, I participated in a panel celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Medieval/Renaissance major at Wellesley College, in Wellesley, Massachusetts. As a student at Wellesley, I was a double major, majoring in Sociology and Medieval / Renaissance Studies; my focus for the Med/Ren major was literature.
The panel was titled: “The Art of a Career: Alumnae Stories of Life, Work, and Success After a Humanities Major at Wellesley,” and the panelists were asked to think about the role that a humanities major played in their career trajectory, regardless of what kind of career chosen. As a social scientist in a college of medicine, the answer for me was easy: being a part of an interdisciplinary major meant that, early in my academic career, I became adept at perspective-taking (we were required to take classes in many of the disciplines of the major), working on interdisciplinary teams (most of our classes had students with different majors), and appreciating the power of oral storytelling. In spite of how infrequently the medical students have read The Canterbury Tales or how few of them know the difference between Renaissance and Baroque paintings, the skills I developed as a Humanities major have helped me navigate new spaces and relationships.
During the panel, I was asked a question I’ve gotten a lot: How did a girl who grew up listening to hip hop end up as a Med/Ren major? It’s actually connected to the reasons why I love the Certified Listener Poet community so much! During high school, I was diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma, around the time I was reading The Canterbury Tales; I was fascinated by the parallels I witnessed between the pilgrims in the Tales, and the patients sitting in circles in the chemotherapy room. In the room, we carried with us the weight of our biography, and the hopes of those who loved us. What we carried with us was different, but we all were guided by the same North Star – survivorship.
“Before there were Listener Poets, there was Hildegard and her community transcribing their illness experiences into poems and music, seeking healing by sharing those stories with others.”
Buoyed by the sometimes inappropriate, always raucous, adventure stories shared by the older patients in the room, I zipped through seven months of chemotherapy. Our stories, our shared journeys, were sustaining us; and even when we lost a member of our group, their stories lived in us. After that experience, I was hungry to read more from this time period; and the Medieval/Renaissance major offered me an excellent opportunity to explore the literature of this time period. And it was: I spent the first year or so being wooed by the words of Dante, Milton, Chaucer and Boccaccio; I didn’t think it could get any better than what I was learning. And, then it happened: I was introduced to the lesser known works of women like Marie de France, Margery Kempe and Christine de Pizan. Huzzah! There was a place for women’s voices in this work.
Yes, there were feminist writings (re)telling the stories of women during the Middle Ages, but how does this connect to the CLP community? I did a senior thesis about Hildegard of Bingen, a nun who wrote about early folk medicine, wrote religious theses, and – most exciting to me – was inspired by her illnesses (visions induced by her migraines, among other things) to compose music and poems.
Before there were Listener Poets, there was Hildegard and her community transcribing their illness experiences into poems and music, seeking healing by sharing those stories with others. Separated by thousands of miles and several centuries, I felt intimately connected to this twelfth-century nun. Women speaking poems to recover from their suffering and creating songs to show others the way to freedom? Well, that was everyday in the Baptist churches of my childhood, and in the poetry slams of my college years. The chemo room chair stories that were a balm to my wounds during my childhood cancer gave a name to a truth I had always felt, and, today, being a poet in The Good Listening Project community has allowed me to participate in the many healing traditions that I have been inspired by. My fellow CLP alums and I all come from different backgrounds, but when we journey together, we all leave healed.
P.S. Also in October 2025, I became one of the co-directors of the Inprint Fellowships in Narrative and Lyric Health: A Partnership between Inprint, the Creative Writing Program and the Tilman J. Fertitta Family College of Medicine. Excited to put my stamp on this unique program in our college!
LaShaune Johnson, Ph.D.