Sonya Lea's Blog - Posts Tagged "cancer"
Roxane Gay Selects This Essay for The Butter!
One morning on Facebook, my friend Laurie Wagner of Wild Writing posted an illuminating string of Twitter remarks by Roxane Gay. These were about what makes a good essay.
Since I was teaching at Seattle's Hugo House, I made them into writing prompts, and my class and I worked each of those questions for the purposes of revising our essays.
The next day, reading back through my journal, I realized that my own essay might be improved. Following Gay's guidelines, I connected the personal story to the universal. In this case, how being vulnerable in the public realm might help others. The essay was submitted, and within a week or so, was picked up by Gay at The Butter.
You can read the piece here: http://the-toast.net/2015/04/14/the-g...
Reading the comments at the site has been eye-opening, and a wonderful way to get to know other communities, people who have experienced ambiguous loss in their lives. You write alone in a room, and then you get a chance to be with others, often silently holding their questions. It's precious, all of this holding of each other we get to do through language.
Since I was teaching at Seattle's Hugo House, I made them into writing prompts, and my class and I worked each of those questions for the purposes of revising our essays.
The next day, reading back through my journal, I realized that my own essay might be improved. Following Gay's guidelines, I connected the personal story to the universal. In this case, how being vulnerable in the public realm might help others. The essay was submitted, and within a week or so, was picked up by Gay at The Butter.
You can read the piece here: http://the-toast.net/2015/04/14/the-g...
Reading the comments at the site has been eye-opening, and a wonderful way to get to know other communities, people who have experienced ambiguous loss in their lives. You write alone in a room, and then you get a chance to be with others, often silently holding their questions. It's precious, all of this holding of each other we get to do through language.
Excerpt From The Memoir
I'm so proud to be included in Guernica Magazine with a chapter from Wondering Who You Are.
https://www.guernicamag.com/features/...
Wondering Who You Are
https://www.guernicamag.com/features/...
Wondering Who You Are
BBC Names Wondering Top Ten Book in July
As her husband of 23 years goes in for an experimental treatment survivors call MOAS – ‘Mother of All Surgeries’ – for a rare cancer of the appendix, Lea prepares for a tough recovery. In addition to a lengthy physical recovery, complications leave Richard with a brain injury that leaves him with profound memory loss. “The man we knew as Richard died to us,” Lea writes. “And with his former self, any notion of an ‘us’”. Lea’s account of her loss, and her adjustment to the new man her husband has become, is unflinching, as is her detailed account of their life together as she remembers it. The gradual evolution of their new life together becomes, in the end, a love story. “My husband shows me that the fundamental nature of being here – on earth, in love, within the sexual experience – is joyful.”
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/2015...
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/2015...
