What’s the connection? For me, irony is the connection.
I’m preparing to head to residency for my third semester of my MFA. It was nearly a year ago that I was last in Louisville for residency. I had submitted for workshop a bit from the novel that I’m working on in which a thirtysomething woman deals with a lot of crap, not the least of which is her mother dying of cancer. At the time I workshopped the couple of chapters I was thinking to myself that I needed to do some research on cancer and treatment to really understand what the mother character was going through and what the family would be going through. While I hadn’t named the type of cancer in the piece, in my heart I felt it was breast cancer.
Here’s the irony. The day after I returned home from residency last year I felt a lump in my right breast. A month later, I was diagnosed with stage IIa breast cancer. Life imitating art? Needless to say, I’ve spent the last year immersed in research on breast cancer treatment, not that I’d recommend researching it the way I did, but now I know how to make my story authentic. I was reminded of all of this today when my radiation oncology techs were asking me what kind of writing I did. I only have two more days of radiation treatment and I’m done with the major part of treatment. Woot, woot!
For reasons that might seem obvious, I’ve set the novel aside. I’m working on some short stories and I’m always working on poems. Right now, however, I’m reading through pieces for the residency workshop, and that’s what I’ll be doing with most of writing time until I leave for Louisville in November.
