Healing in the Fault Zone: Talking to Eleni Stecopoulos on Illness, Poetics, and Collective Impasse

by Mandy Quan and Diego Martinez Mendiola

It’s a strange time to be training as a physician in San Francisco — a city defined as much by its fault lines as its history of resistance. Here, tectonic shifts mirror the crises above ground: labor strikes, homelessness, an opioid epidemic, and escalating inequities. Market Street fractures neighborhoods into an uneasy city plan — Finance District high-tech hubs shadowed by homelessness in the bordering Tenderloin neighbourhood. 

To practice care for patients at this juncture is to grapple with remnants of a pandemic that laid bare the unequal vulnerabilities of bodies and a techno-capitalist present that dreams of disembodiment. Driverless Waymo cars and AI diagnostic tools promise frictionless futures, but at what costs? 

Amid this landscape, we sit down with poet and scholar Eleni Stecopoulos at a Berkeley café to discuss Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing (Nightboat Books, 2024). Her book is a hybrid of essays and poems that reframes healing not as triumph over suffering but as dwelling in impasse; she confronts the tension between cure and care. In our conversation, we explore how Stecopoulos activates poetics, shaped by personal encounters with chronic illness and her curation of a public forum, to reimagine healing as a “collective orchestration.” Her work invites us to view fault lines — not as sites of geological rupture, but as beginnings. 

Fault lines are central to your work, both as physical sites and as metaphors for contact, tension, and transformation. How did this journey into fault zones — geographic and linguistic — begin for you? 

Twenty-plus years ago, I began to think about embodiment and healing at an ecological level. This was personal — I had chemical sensitivities — as well as a research interest. I became interested in how ancient Greeks built healing clinics on active faults, in volatile landscapes. My own grandfather had come from such a place, renowned for its geothermal springs. My father told stories about playing by the springs and creating things out of the calcium carbonate that hardened on objects dipped in the water. These personal anecdotes drew me to the power of the earth — geothermal, linguistic, spiritual, even political. In writing about energy, I wanted to bring in the material as well as mystical or esoteric energy that comes from the earth. I also became intrigued by the discovery of ethylene gases at Delphi, a related landscape, where ancient priestesses spoke while inhaling vapors rising from fissures in the ground.

A dominant idea in the 19th century was that the oracle, the pronouncements of the Pythia, was purely invented, esoteric or spiritual — that it had no physical analogue. Yet the physical reality of the “possession” underscored a duality. Some priestesses died from intoxication. Apollo, after all, is a god who brings the sickness and also heals it; he brings both the poison and the remedy. That kind of double edge interests me — a sensitivity that means power in various cultures and contexts, but also a liability and disability.

In your book, healing resists easy resolution; it dwells in tension. How does poetic practice hold space for this impasse, and what is its relationship to the body, language, and healing?

If you were to go to the Princeton Encyclopedia [of Poetry and Poetics], poetics means the theory and art of poetry. But we can peel that back. In ancient Greek, the poiitís (ποιητής) was the creator of the universe. So poiesis, in a basic sense, means creating, making. Early on, it means the creation of something out of nothing. Then it starts to be associated with how you do something, how you process it and practice it.

Language may not only be words. It may be sounds, morphemes, song, images; how something is composed, how things are connected. Poetics is the art of composition as relation — going beyond the idea of a static text to dynamic interaction. It’s about how you do things with language, how a song cures.

I was a violinist until my mid-20s. Playing violin had been a world that was not about words but a different kind of communication and visceral work. Years later, dealing with a health crisis, I realized that the violin had been a therapeutic practice for me, a kind of language channeled through the body, based in listening with and playing with others. This was a revelation that seemed relevant to the clinical encounter.

The poetics of healing is a phrase I borrow from anthropology for my purposes as a poet and scholar of language. If language can be medicine, if literature has visceral effects, material effects, then you can extend its effects to actually change health.

You describe inquiry not as excavation but as a kind of tunneling or “the thread the poet follows no matter where it leads.” In clinical training, we mine stories for diagnosis but often miss their felt dimensions. How can attention to the poetic rather than referential function of language reshape the clinical encounter? 

I’m thinking about Neil Marcus [a performance artist, dancer, and writer who celebrated disability as art], a friend I write about in my book. He asked me to speak the way he spoke. He had dystonia. He wanted me to feel, to imitate and to act, to perform what it feels like to put your whole body into the effort of articulating words.

I think that’s where I would begin. Sometimes both the patient and the doctor speak. But are they monologues, with no one really listening?

The emphasis in the medical humanities tends to be on stories or patient narratives, “autopathographies,” or physician narratives. Those are important, but they’re not the only way of thinking about the role of language in medicine. The linguist Roman Jakobson wrote about the poetic function of language, which calls attention to how a message is expressed, including rhetorical devices, prosody, sound. I’m thinking about tone and cadence, not just the words, but the quality of the voice, the quality of listening, the gestures in a clinical encounter between patient and practitioner.

Is there a way for the practitioner to take all of that into account? Is there something in there that gives them insight, or can inform not only the diagnosis, but become the treatment [itself]?

Your description of the mountain peaks behind the Theater of Epidaurus as a convergence is a form of material exchange and of dialogue. What is lost, then, in a techno future that promises to transcend these fissures and in AI-driven healthcare where touch and presence are sidelined? 

You lose that sense of interpretation, something that is fundamental to human dialogue and to the possibility of aesthetics. The act of interpretation has to involve feeling. As a writer and a scholar of poetics and aesthetics, I worry that automation is going to result in more thinking that the machine’s capacity will always supersede what you can do as a human being, a capitulation to thinking that the machine’s knowledge is always greater. And that aesthetics and words and prosody don’t matter.

I’m worried about the larger trend, where the physical body becomes superfluous: you don’t need to be there in presence, nobody needs to touch your body or listen to it, or have that kind of sensitivity where you’re taking everything in. It’s like when [the physician and author Abraham] Verghese says the “real” patient becomes the person in the electronic record, rather than the person who’s there before you.

You bring together healers and other figures across geographic lines: ancient Greek physician-diviners, Balinese dancers, Chinese acupuncturists, K’iche’ wellness seekers, contemporary disability activists. What do you hope for readers to learn from this chorus? 

The Greek word for mountain summit has the same root as the word for the head of the chorus. The aesthetics of the chorus is sensing and appealing to how we connect to each other, whether it's organizing on the street together, agitating at the local level or larger scale, being together and being at each other's side. I imagine being in a line — for some people, the front line; for others, a more quiet line, like sitting with somebody in hospice. 

That’s how the book exists — because of all these people I was thinking with, my fellow poets, artists, activists — and what we learned and tried together, feeling together into movement, into constellation. 

This book is not a history per se. I do write about some ancient medicine, but I also look at practices and ideas of the present, and some that are continuous and adapted and reinvented and translated. I like the idea of [a reader] being invited to entertain that long view, to think both diachronically and synchronically at once — invited to think across time, across practices, and many different kinds of presence.

I imagine that in different directions, movement, or travel, there can be a sense of going deep, of tunneling into the fault. I'm hoping that people might feel invited to step in.

This is a corrected version of an article that first appeared in the ORB’s Spring 2025 print edition.

MANDY QUAN is chaos without the cleanup.

DIEGO MARTINEZ MENDIOLA is a medical student who dreams of prose but wakes up to flashcards.

Art by Mandy Yang