A HEART reading list: the journals, newsletters, and books we return to — and think you will love too.

Every publication has its kin. HEART began from a simple conviction — that stories belong near the centre of medicine, not at its margins — and we have never held it alone. Some of the publications below have been doing this work for years, a few for decades. They shaped the field we now write into, and on the weeks when the clinic empties us out, they are the ones that fill the tank again.

So here is what we read. Some are grand old journals; some are one clinician writing quietly on a Sunday. We have kept the list to the pieces we honestly return to, with a line on why. Read them, subscribe to the ones that move you, and if you write, treat this as a map of good homes for your work.

Journals and magazines

Pulse — voices from the heart of medicine. Since 2008, Pulse has sent one first-person story or poem into readers' inboxes every Friday, each paired with an image or a haiku, written by patients, clinicians, students, and caregivers. It reaches more than ten thousand people a week. If you want proof of what a single well-chosen piece can do to an ordinary Friday, start here. Free to read and to receive.

Bellevue Literary Review. Founded at NYU's Bellevue Hospital and now past its twenty-fifth year, BLR publishes fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry on health, healing, illness, the mind, and the body. It has won a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize and reads through roughly five thousand submissions a year. This is the high-water mark for literary writing in our field. Read a few issues closely before you submit anywhere.

The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. A literary journal built on the idea that narrative is the intimate meeting point between clinician and patient — poetry, prose, field notes, and reflection, gathered in themed issues. Of everyone here, The Intima's readers are closest to ours.

Hektoen International. A free quarterly from the Hektoen Institute in Chicago, running since 2008 and read by a very large international audience. Its range is wide: history, art, ethics, literature, philosophy, all brought to bear on medicine. The editors think of the journal as a museum and its articles as the collection, shown again and again rather than filed away and forgotten.

Inside the medical journals. The big clinical journals keep small rooms for the personal essay, and they are worth knowing. JAMA's A Piece of My Mind, the On Being a Doctor and On Being a Patient columns in Annals of Internal Medicine, and the occasional reflective piece in The Lancet all put a single human page in front of an enormous clinical readership. Space is scarce and the bar is high, which is rather the point.

Newsletters worth following

Wild and Precious Lives (Narrative Medicine Australia). Written by Dr Mariam Tokhi and Dr Fiona Reilly, who started the narrative medicine programme at the University of Melbourne and have since launched the Australian Centre for Narrative Medicine. Generous, warm, full of poetry and five-minute writing prompts you can answer in the comments. The closest thing to a sibling publication we have found in our own part of the world.

Panacea: Writing for Health. A newsletter for and by patients, providers, and caregivers, supported by the Stanford Medical Humanities and Arts Program. Columns, features, opinion, and creative work from a community that looks a great deal like ours — an institutional home publishing real human writing.

For a wider view of the field, two more: Inside Medicine, by the emergency physician Jeremy Faust, for the news-and-data end of things, and Are you ok, by Dr Lucy McBride, for essays and interviews on patient-centred care.

On the shelf

If the newsletters are the weekly bread, these are the books we keep within reach of the desk.

Rita Charon's Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness is the one that named the field; Charon directs Columbia University's Program in Narrative Medicine, where much of this began. Arthur Kleinman's The Illness Narratives remains the classic account of what suffering means to the person doing the suffering. Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor is the sharp corrective every writer on sickness should read once and argue with forever. Arthur Frank's The Wounded Storyteller gives you the vocabulary — restitution, chaos, quest — for the shapes an illness story can take. And for something closer to the bedside and the writing life at once, Suzanne Koven's Letter to a Young Female Physician, written during her years as writer-in-residence at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Columbia's Program in Narrative Medicine also runs courses and workshops, several of them online, if reading turns into wanting to practise. We will also be running workshops locally, so please keep a look out for those!

That is our shelf. Now we would like to see yours.

What are you reading that we have missed — the journal you always open first, the essay you have sent to five people, the book you press on every junior colleague? Tell us in the comments. We read every one, and the best of them will find their way into a future list.

And if reading these stirs something you want to write: our own pages — Stories, From the Other Side, Verse, The Things We Carry, Close Looks, and Scribbles — are open. We would be glad to be the good home for what you make next.

Write to us at narrativesmedicineheart@gmail.com.