Jul 30, 2012 | CaringBridge, Karr, Mary, Lit: A Memoir, Miller, Kerri, Uncategorized
As a professor I write a lot. Until recently, however, I’ve never felt like a real writer. I attended conferences and listened to others talk about how they have all these books in them but not enough time to write them. I’d leave those conferences thinking about how I didn’t have any books in me waiting to be written.
After being diagnosed with stage IV cancer, I wrote updates on my condition for family and friends on a Caring Bridge site. Many readers of my site urged me to write about my experience in venues beyond Caring Bridge. Once again, I wasn’t sure I had a book in me; I often had a hard time putting into words what living with cancer felt like, looked like, tasted like. I wrote for academic venues; I was dubious about whether I could write in a more personal way. But I had taken my first few steps of writing in the first person on Caring Bridge, and encouragement from others to keep writing stayed with me.
Almost a year after my diagnosis, I heard conversation that changed my perspective on writing. I was listening to Mary Karr talk about her new book, Lit: A Memoir, on NPR. The interviewer, Kerri Miller, asked how Karr avoids offending others who appear in her writings. Karr said that those who show up in her memoirs get to read the scenes in which they appear before the book is published. Miller wondered what Karr does when she is asked to change what she’s written about her ex-husband or her mother. Karr told Miller that so far, she’d never been asked to change anything. Not buying this response, Miller pushed Karr. Really? How could that be?
Karr told Miller that she thought she hadn’t yet been asked to make changes in her depictions of others because it was she—and not the others in the story—who came out looking the worst in the end.
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Jul 21, 2012 | Breast Cancer, Christianity, God, Grace, Uncategorized
Welcome to Grace blog, a new forum on issues related to my new book, Hoping for More: Having Cancer, Talking Faith, and Accepting Grace, and the conversations the book has generated. Since being diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer three years ago, I’ve been learning to talk about life with cancer and how it sits alongside experiences of grace. As a religion professor, I work on talking about faith and cancer beyond the predictable—and often inadequate—claims that cancer is part of God’s plan or that the hard times make us strong. To be sure, I’m a Christian (of the Lutheran variety) and I get paid to talk about God for a living. But becoming a cancer patient (which I’m not paid to be) has pushed me to go deeper, to describe a world where God is loving and compassionate even in the midst of an ocean of pain. This is no easy task. But I keep at it, attempting to make meaning in the wake of the chaos cancer creates in our lives.
Even as the vocabulary of grace I draw upon is rooted in Christian tradition and practice, my wrestling with the whys of human suffering in light of divine love has not thus far been simply an in-house Christian discussion. My neighbors, friends, co-workers and even family members of other religions (and even no religion at all) have deepened and enhanced my experiences of grace, particularly since the diagnosis. I hope that this blog will dialogue among any and all who contemplate the grief and grace embedded in our lives.
That this blog is entitled “Grace” and not “Cancer” or “Life Sucks” is critical. What the title indicates is that even as I live with cancer, the moments I want to focus on are the ones that show me life is bigger than any diagnosis, larger than the uncertainties that accompany a life-threatening illness, and inclusive of more than what cancer or other awful circumstances can ultimately steal from any of us. It’s simply the case that even when life is heavy with grief, it also often reflects glimpses of grace. And those glimpses are worth talking about.
So in the coming weeks and months, this blog will include excerpts from my memoir, Hoping for More, as well entries that go beyond the book to other sightings of grace not just in my life but also in the lives of others as well as in the wider world we inhabit together.
