It's Almost Go Time
March 20th. That’s the day this labor of love will be available for purchase. It has been a long journey. If you’re new here, here’s the short version. In fall of 2011, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I was a single mom of four children. Two were young adults and two were still at home. I was also 2 years sober after struggling with alcoholism for nearly 2 decades. I embarked on a journey through surgery and chemotherapy, and all that encompasses as I continued to work as a high school English teacher and to parent two young teens.
Flash forward to 2022. I retired from teaching after 28 years. Most of my identity was wrapped up in my role as a teacher. If you don’t understand that, ask a teacher. Teaching is not what we do; it is who we are. I had no idea who I was now or what I would do with myself. Then my friend started a writing group at the library she works at. I thought that would be fun, and so I went to the first meeting.
I wasn’t sure what I would write, but my experience with cancer kept knocking on the door. I decided I would write a fiction novel based loosely around my experience, but something just didn’t feel right. What I wanted to write was a memoir, but there are so many cancer memoirs already in the world.
For a couple months, I grappled with the question of what makes my story different. I wanted to write a story that is real but is also uplifting, a story that provided the hope at the end of the journey. Then it occurred to me, what I wanted to write was a book about what I learned from my experience with cancer.
It still sounded like a story that would blend in with the landscape, though, until one day when I was sitting at an AA meeting, and I had an epiphany. What if I blended these two worlds — surviving cancer and alcoholism recovery? So that is what I did. That is what I think makes this original foray into memoir writing different from what I have read before.
The day the proof copy came in the mail, I was amazed. It was one of the coolest days in my life when I got to hold 2 years of work in my hands, in the form of a book. Books have been my friends since I was 4 years old and I wrote this one!
So, here we are. My book will be available on Amazon on March 20th. If you are actively boycotting Amazon, you can also special order it through your local independent book store. If you live in Eau Claire or La Crosse, Wisconsin, I will also be working to get the book in Dotter’s Book Store and Pearl Street Books, but I am waiting to reach out to them until I actually have copies of the book in my hands. There may be other opportunities to purchase and to attend a book reading as well. You can find those updates here or posted on my website and other author social media pages.