Content area
Full Text
THE GOOD DOCTOR by Susan Onthank Mates. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994. 123 pages. $22.95.
As judge of a competition conducted by the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Joy Williams selected this collection of 12 stories by Susan Onthank Mates to win the 1994 John Simmons Short Fiction Award. Mates is a physician and musician who lives in Rhode Island. Her stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, Northwest Review, and other periodicals.
Mates's first published collection of stories, The Good Doctor, regularly reflects her background in health care. The characters often face injuries from accidents or violence, confront death (sometimes by suicide), and experience disease (including AIDS, in "These Days," a story I first encountered in Sharon Oard Warner's fine anthology The Way We Write Now). There is considerable attention to child-rearing, pregnancy, miscarriage-often, in these stories, a crisis for a professional woman nearly pulled...