“Canterbury Hollow” by Chris Lawson will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. Jennifer Konieczny interviews Lawson on the story.

How does your work as a family physician impact your writing?

For one thing, I’m much more familiar with biomedicine than other branches of science. Some of the stories I’ve written would never have occurred to me if I had no background in medicine. At least two of my stories were triggered by reading specific papers and wanting to explore the ideas raised (“Screening Test” and “Empathy” if anyone’s interested).

What a career in medicine gives a writer is an understanding of how people react to major life events. Not only have I seen people deal with terrible situations, I’ve seen lots of people do so with a wide range of responses. Much of the daily work of medicine is as mundane as any other job, of course. I have yet to see a trolley burst through the doors of an Emergency Department with a phalanx of people in blue scrubs yelling “STAT!”, although according to television it’s an hourly event. The real drama in medicine is slow, unfolding over months or years.

MORE: Read the whole story here!