Francis Fesmire

Francis Fesmire (born 16 November 1959) is an emergency physician and nationally recognized expert on issues relating to heart attacks. He currently is Professor and Research Director for the Emergency Medicine Residency of the University Of Tennessee College Of Medicine. He resides with his wife and two sons in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

His interest in the Civil War began at age 5 when his parents built a house on Stones River in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, right in the midst of the battlefield and continued after he moved to Chattanooga at age 12 where he found himself surrounded by the battlefields of Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain, and Missionary Ridge. His passion for Southern literature developed while he attended Baylor High School in Chattanooga. Inspired by literature teacher Bill Cushman, he fell in love with the great Southern writers such as William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Walker Percy, and the like. While studying under Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Coles at Harvard during his junior year of college, Francis Fesmire realized then that someday he wished to be a physician-writer in the tradition of Walker Percy, William Carlos Williams, and Ferrol Sams -- but he knew that day would be in the distant future.

The first 18 chapters of Nashville Skyline were written over a 3 month period in 1989 when Francis Fesmire was reeling from the pain of divorce and still trying to come to terms with his father's suicide, which occurred when he was 17. At the same time, his research career was blossoming and his desire to become an author of classical Southern Literature was put on hold as he published numerous scientific investigations over the ensuing 20 years. He became a nationally recognized expert on cardiovascular disease in emergency medicine and serves on numerous committees of the American College of Cardiology, American Heart Association, and the American College of Emergency Physicians. The task of these committees is to develop guidelines regarding the care of patients with heart attack symptoms. Two years ago, Francis Fesmire had a chance encounter with an old friend whom he had not seen in many years. That friend asked him if he still had a dream of writing a novel. Immediately he was reminded of his novel that lay buried at the bottom of an old safe. Retrieving the forgotten novel, he read it with a fresh mind and realized that Nashville Skyline had to see the light of day. He subtitled the original 18 chapters "The Past" and wrote a new section called "The Present." Nashville Skyline is an inspirational novel which deals with the pain of loss, one's search for self, and the never-ending question, "Does God Exist?" Nashville Skyline received a 5 out of 5 star rating from Clarion ForeWord Review and currently is available in hardback and paperback on lulu.com. Now Francis Fesmire can lay claim to being a novelist. He has an outline for a new novel entitled Memphis Blues, but like Nashville Skyline, that novel may be many years in the making.

Walker Percy, whom Francis Fesmire was fortunate enough to have befriended after medical school, once told him: "I'm a physician who became distracted by my writing." Francis Fesmire can now say: "I'm a writer who became distracted by being a physician."