When I began writing this newspaper column about cancer, I wondered how long it could last. After all, how many story ideas about cancer could there be? Seven years later, the ideas keep coming and I’m still writing. I’ve decided that writing about cancer is writing about life. Cancer is a lens that makes life appear in greater focus with added intensity. (From: “Writing About Cancer,” by Bob Riter, Ithaca Journal, Sept. 6, 2014)
In the coming week, I’ll begin a new eight-week series of the “Writing Through Cancer” workshops I’ve been leading for many years in the U.S. and Canada. I’m preparing for the first session, when a group of men and women will come together to write and share their stories of cancer. Some of them may have written long before their illness began; others might offer an apologetic, “I’m not a writer but I thought this looked interesting,” and I’ll gently remind them of poet William Stafford’s definition of a writer: “A writer is someone who writes.” We’ll begin at the beginning, the moment that they first heard the words, “I’m sorry, but …you have cancer.”
By the second meeting, any prompt or suggestion I offer to the group will result in writing that is powerful, descriptive, even beautiful. Some in the group will be surprised at how moved their listeners are when they share what they have written. By the third week, any prompt will result in the sound of pens racing across the page or the rapid click of a laptop keyboard, as if each person has more to write about their cancer experience than time will allow. A diagnosis of cancer often triggers intense and abundant writing.
“The knowledge you’re ill is one of the momentous experiences of life” (Anatole Broyard, Intoxicated by My Illness, 1993).
Like any unexpected hardship, a life-threatening illness thrusts you into new and unfamiliar territory, into a different chapter of life than the one you thought you were living. So momentous, in fact, it sometimes overshadows everything that came before it. Yet one thing is certain: cancer changes you. Arthur Frank, sociologist and cancer survivor, put it this way: “Being ill is just another way of living…but by the time we have lived through it, we are living differently.” (At the Will of the Body, 2002). At the end of the writing series, I encourage the group to look back over what they have written. As they do, they discover that their words, their stories and poems are testament to their changes. Each person is clearer about the things that truly matter; they appreciate life in ways they never did before, and no one wants to take life for granted again.
That’s the way writing often starts, a disaster or a catastrophe…by writing I rescue myself under all sorts of conditions…it relieves the feeling of distress. –William Carlos Williams
During those periods of life when you experience hardship, serious illness or suffering, writing can be an important way to express and make sense of difficult emotions. It’s a way to make sense of your life. Often, that’s where writing begins. While you may begin by writing for yourself in a period of upheaval, one that often leads to something greater. As Louise DeSalvo noted in her book, Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives (2000), crisis, suffering and are the inspiration behind many of our greatest cultural creations, including art, poetry and literature. Novelists and poets alike have described their writing as a form of therapy, helping them to heal and articulate traumatic events in their lives. Writers such as Paul Theroux referred to his writing as something like digging a deep hole and not knowing what he would find. Famous novelists like Graham Greene wrote of his manic depression A Sort of Life; F. Scott Fitzgerald described his battle with alcohol in The Crackup, and William Styron examined his suicidal depression in Darkness Visible. Creativity, as many great writers have shown us, is often fueled by life crises, trauma and suffering, and there is no shortage of contemporary poets and writers’ whose personal struggles have inspired fiction, nonfiction or poetry. Literature is, after all, about the human experience, and in reading the work of others, we often discover insights, even ways to articulate own experiences.
An insightful, experienced oncologist told me that cancer need not be a person’s whole book, only a chapter. (Alice Hoffman, New York Times, August 14, 2000).
Cancer may be where you begin when you first start writing after a diagnosis, but it is rare that cancer is the only thing expressed when you begin writing. Old wounds, memories of earlier times, and the experience cancer all make up the landscape of “writing through cancer.” In my workshops, a gradual shift in what is written and shared in the group occurs over the eight weeks we write together. The first weeks are usually focused on one’s cancer experience, but as the weeks pass, everyone’s writing begins to shift. Other life stories surface and are written; themes of gratitude and hope begin to emerge. And the writing doesn’t stop at the end of the workshop series. More than a few people continue to write after the group experience ends, but not only about cancer. Other memories, stories from their lives, themes of gratitude and hope emerge. Several of my former workshop writers have gone on continue writing in groups or enroll in writing classes. Some have published poetry, memoir and narratives originally birthed in the writing workshops.
Cancer can wallop you and brings you to tears, but it also can help you see life more clearly and with greater appreciation. Ultimately, it’s important to remember that cancer is not your only story. It may be one that drives you to write, but as you do, you begin to remember r and appreciate the life you’ve lived , the one you are living now, and how many stories or poems are contained in your life that are waiting to be expressed.
You don’t need a “big” event or big idea to write. Cancer might get you writing, but inspiration doesn’t need a crisis to keep you writing. Rather, it awakens you, makes you more observant to life, and grateful for it. Inspiration does not arrive with a big “aha!” It is quieter, waiting, because it comes from living, noticing, and paying attention.
Remember the commonplace, the wooden chair on the white planked deck,
trees kneeling in the rain and deer prints
leading into elegant rushes. A kinder place
cannot be found…
(From: “Directive,” by Ann E., former writing group member, personal communication)
I recall listening to poet Billy Collins several years ago, as he described how he found the inspiration to write volume after volume of poetry. His inspiration, he told the audience, came simply from looking out the window and noticing the world around him. The most ordinary thing, he reminded us, may contain the seed of a poem (or for that matter, any kind of writing).
…Cancer need not be a person’s whole book, only a chapter. You each have many more stories to write than cancer. All that’s required is the desire to write and learning to pay attention and notice what’s just outside your window, waiting to be discovered.
…poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them…
Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us
we find poems.
(“Valentine for Ernest Mann,’ By Naomi Shihab-Nye, in: Red Suitcase, 1994)
Writing Suggestions:
- Just starting to write? Begin remembering the moment you first heard you had cancer. Before you write, take a moment to close your eyes and visualize that day, that moment–where you were, the quality of light in the room, the facial expression of the doctor or nurse, what you were feeling seconds before he/she spoke and then afterward. Then setting the timer for no more than 15 minutes, write, describing in as much detail as you can, the moment you first heard the word “cancer.”
- Tess Gallagher, poet, described the telling of an act of by her husband, washing his dying mother in the poem, “Each Bird Walking.” Her poem includes the narrator’s words to her husband: “Tell me,” I said, “something I can’t forget.” Use Gallagher’s words, “tell me something I can’t forget” as your prompt, and begin writing. Again, set your timer for 15 minutes and keep the pen moving.
- Find a quiet time and place near a window–or, if your weather allows, find a similarly quiet place to sit outdoors. Spend a few minutes simply noticing what is around you: sights, sounds, colors, objects, life. Take one thing you observe and let it become the trigger for your writing. Write for 15 minutes.
