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My first attempt at a video blog. I thought something new and exciting would be an appropriate way to announce that my novel, The Other Side of Silence, is coming out on Kindle!

Pregnancy began as a strange phenomena in a body I understood very well. I could tell what was happening, what was changing, because I was very familiar with the functions and feelings of this body I live in. We’ve become good friends over the years, and lived in a wonderful harmony until recently.

As the pregnancy has progressed, my understanding of my body has blurred and now feels completely lost. I looked at myself in the mirror the other day and recognized nothing. The way my body aches and moans is completely incomprehensible to me. My body wants foods I don’t like, refuses things I love, tires without warning, hurts without discernible reason. My vision is literally blurred, requiring me to wear glasses all day, making my own reflection even less familiar. My legs, once so muscular and capable, now flatly refuse to carry me with any grace. But mostly, my hips are bent out of their natural shape and no longer perform their intended function. The pain this causes makes a major obstacle of tasks like walking and sleeping.

Since I really don’t want to live like that for three more months, I sought the help of a chiropractor. I do not love doctors, but I love this woman. She slid her hands over my bent bones and swollen muscles and made sense of them. When I’d given up on my body, planned to just wait this alien period out and hope it snapped back into place later, this doctor categorized and defined what was happening with each joint and bone.

The pain and swelling is not entirely gone after her first session of ministrations, but it is much improved. More than that though, I have a little hope that my body is still in here somewhere. I might understand her again, at least a little bit. And really, I want to understand her, especially now. Now when she is completing her most magnificent work.

For people like me, who tend to get angry and say really mean things before thinking them through, my highest goal at a family gathering is usually to just keep my mouth shut. Since the times when I get myself in trouble and hurt people I love always happen when I’m talking, not talking seems like a logical solution.

Too often, I spend days visiting family over the holidays, holding in all my snarky, mean comments. Just before we’re about to leave, the top pops off and I say something truly cruel about a very minor annoyance.

Even if I don’t eventually explode, not talking still doesn’t work. It is quite obvious through facial expression and body language when I’m angry or annoyed. When I just don’t say anything, the person I’m interacting with is left knowing they’ve done something I don’t like, but not knowing what it was. This causes a silent tension between us, which really doesn’t make for a peaceful, harmonious holiday.

When I want to say something and don’t, that thing is still sitting in my mouth, unsaid. This almost inevitably leads me to say that thing to someone else. I tend to put together a quippy little anecdote about the incident and share it with several people. This is not a kind way to treat my loved ones.

Not saying anything is really tempting, even if I know it doesn’t work. No one can accuse me if I haven’t said anything. My facial expressions and body language are very hard to pin down, and I can always say they’re being misinterpreted or deny them completely. Most of the time, the person I’m angry at just has to take all the discomfort of the conflict. Later, I get to feel superior to that person, while I tell funny anecdotes about how unreasonable or silly they are.

I believe the third option here, the challenge, is to say something well. To stand up for myself without getting defensive, to be honest without being cruel, to admit my own hurt feelings without accusing. This is no simple task. The phrases are often simple, but arriving at them takes a great deal of thoughtful prayer, and an enormous amount of self-control and courage to deliver on the spot. Saying those small, kind, hard things out loud to a family member of friend is also an extremely risky proposition.

When I say those things, I’m stepping out of the binary of effector and effected. When I explode or silently fume, I’m only trying to turn the binary in my favor. When I address the conflict, I enter into an interaction where we are equals, both with feelings and opinions. This requires a higher level of engagement, both of me and my loved one. It means we’re in real relationship with each other, actually trying to mash our sharp edges together and make a tighter, stronger connection. It means that we have to do more than just put up with each other once a year. It means that we have to grow, have to talk and listen to each other. It is terrifying and exhilarating and full of hope. It isn’t polite holiday behavior, and might result in tears or accusations sent my way. I’ll try it anyway, though, because polite holiday behavior was never what my soul longed for.

I recently finished reading A Yellow Raft in Blue Water by Michael Dorris, a really intriguing story that covers three generations of women, moving backwards in time. Lots of great stuff there. But probably the most impacting part of that book for me was a couple of secondary characters. They are a happily married couple who work in the service industry, live in a trailer, and drive around in a car that’s held together with rubber bands. They don’t have a lot, and a lot of what they do have isn’t in great shape. But they make do, or they do without.

I remembered as I read about this couple, that I used to do that too. At a time in my life when I’m very anxious about money and having enough for all the things we “need,” it was great to remember that a lot of things can be made to do or done without. Even basic things, like leaky winter boots. I think I need new boots because my socks get wet in these boots. But honestly, are wet socks the end of the world? If I went one more winter with occasionally wet socks, would I die? Sure, it would be nice to have new boots, but I can make do without them. I find this a really freeing state of mind. I feel less penned in, less a victim of my circumstances, more in control of my money and my life. All that from a couple secondary characters in a novel.

Right now I’m reading The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. There are so many really earth-shattering themes and words in that book, it’s hard to believe I was able to find a spot that wasn’t super important. But I did, and it could really change my life. The main character, who is a novelist, mentions in one paragraph that he averages writing 500 words a day, five days a week. He writes 500 words in the morning, then reads over the 500 words before bed and sleeps on it. By writing 500 words a day, he finishes a novel every year or two, which still allows time for re-writes and edits. I did the math, and 500 words 5 days a week for 52 weeks is 130,000 words. Which is just to say, the math works out.

To me a good writing day has to be over 2,000 words, and a great writing day is 5,000 words. That said, I don’t think I write more than 130,000 words a year. The writing days that are “good” don’t happen as often as I want, and great writing days are a rare and wonderful thing. But I can write 500 words in a couple hours or less, that’s nothing. I could write 500 words before Ben leaves for work in the morning. I could write 500 words while my child is napping. I could, right now, write 500 words even on days when I nanny. This totally blows my mind. It could seriously revolutionize the way I look at my craft. It could be a lifeline through my upcoming life changes. And honestly, it really doesn’t have that great an impact on the plot of The End of the Affair.

Not only do I learn a lot about my craft by reading fiction, some elements I find in stories can actually change the way I live my life. I think sometimes God speaks to me through novels, picks out something that really isn’t super relevant to the main point of the book (or is, you never know), and uses it to teach me something, to open my mind, to make things a little better. I love that God speaks through art, that he touches me through the medium I love most. I love that I find wisdom in the cracks of good stories.

Pregnancy has done strange things to my creative life. Despite my writing days still sitting all in a row, it’s a herculean effort to sit down and actually write things. There are the typical creative excuses, that I’m still half-editing my last project (due to come out soon on the ebook market!), that I’m working on a first draft which is always difficult. Then there is the obvious, my shiny new novel is about achieving a harmonious relationship between consciousness and physical self, and throwing a second physical self into the mix is a major wrench to the project. I can blame pregnancy hormones for destroying my ability to focus, or bemoan my new need for an afternoon nap.

All that is true. It is also true that when I find myself with usable work time, I spend it on mommy-like things. Some mommy-like activities can’t be avoided; I see the doctor quite a bit more than I used to, and clothes shopping is now an ongoing activity. But then I can spend hours updating my baby registry on amazon.com, and even more time culling the articles and replies to articles on The Mommy Playbook, a forum for moms-to-be. I make coffee appointments with friends who are moms just to grill them about their birth experiences and advice for those frightening first few months of parenthood. I go to the mommy group at my church, I research schools in my neighborhood, I read endless reviews and consumer reports on various baby products. I obsess, you might say. I swim in the pool of ideas for the upcoming change in my life.

Being a writer is such a core part of my identity, more than a lot of things you might think. A few years ago when I was battling (and sometimes losing to) depression, it was when I found I couldn’t write anymore than I knew I absolutely had to do something about it, even if it felt drastic. The poor cute husband just shook his head and said, “Not because of me, or God, but because of your writing.” Although it sounds a little sad, I was a writer for over a decade when I met my husband. While I have doubted or turned away from God at several points, the pen and paper have always come with me. Certainly if it came to some weird cosmic twist and I had to pick between my husband and writing or God and writing, the writing would go away. Only the person left over for my husband or God would be an essentially different person than me.

Is it possible that motherhood could change me at such a fundamental level that I could somehow cease to be a writer? Who would that person be? And honestly, is it happening already? Early in my pregnancy, I noticed that Google Chrome guessed that I wanted to visit The Mommy Playbook before it guessed that I wanted a thesaurus. That was such a strange event, because of course, the thesaurus is where I spend such a great amount of my time. The endless search for the perfect word is my private safari, my personal collection of hunted treasures.

While I fear that the writing part of my being will disappear, in a back corner of my soul, I know better. I know I will find a way, even if I can’t fit it onto a physical calendar. It may look different, and it may be short and choppy for a period when there aren’t several hours tacked together for concentrated composition. Yet, I will find a way to scribble down some phrases that capture pieces of my life, of my spirit, of the world as I observe it. I will find a way, if not because I hold a gritty commitment to my vocation, then only because I simply can’t help myself.

I have thyroid cancer. It is not life threatening. I am really sorry if you are a friend or family member who is hearing this news for the first time. If you are interested in the particulars, see my FAQ below. I’m happy to answer any other questions you have.

My Cancer FAQ

How serious is it?

Not serious at all. My life is not in danger, and I don’t have any physical symptoms at this point. There is reason to hope, possibly even expect, that one small surgery should fix the problem entirely.

What kind of cancer is it?

It’s papillary thyroid cancer, which is one of the most benign forms of the disease. There is only a 1% chance that any cancer will spread outside the “thyroid capsule,” and mine was caught early.

What is the treatment plan?

On July 5th, I will have surgery to remove my thyroid. I’ll have to stay in the hospital overnight, and I should be fully recovered in 1-2 weeks. After that I’ll have to be on hormone replacement for the rest of my life, since you do kind of need a thyroid to live. If the cancer hasn’t spread, then the surgery will cure it. If there is any spreading or other reasons to be concerned, I’ll need a radioactive iodine treatment about six weeks after the surgery.

Is radioactive iodine like radiation or chemo therapy?

No. Thyroid cells are the only cells in the body that can absorb iodine, so the treatment will have no effect on any other part of my body. I will have to be in isolation for a few days (they mean it when they say “radioactive”), but I shouldn’t have any symptoms.

How was it found?

I’d gone to a general practitioner to get some antibiotics for a lingering cold. She examined my throat and found a small nodule on my thyroid. Three doctors and four tests later, they think I have cancer.

Wait, they think you have cancer?

Yep. Depending on which doctor is speaking, they are 50-80% sure that it’s cancer. I have heard from other thyroid cancer patients and a few nurses that doctors always say that. They are covering their butts in case they remove a necessary gland and it turns out there isn’t any cancer in it.

Isn’t it great that you might not have cancer?

No. I do not take comfort in uncertain doctors. Furthermore, whether it is actually cancer or not doesn’t change the treatment plan at all. I am a pragmatist, so since we are acting like I have cancer I prefer to call it that.

If you are the praying kind, I would very much appreciate prayers for quick recovery, that no cancer has spread, and that I won’t need radioactive iodine treatment.

Hopefully very soon we will return to our regular programming with a cool, artsy, reflective piece on something profound.

I wish I was one of those people who handle things well. I wish when I got bad news, my first reaction was one of trust and serenity. I wish when I’m ill, I would have confidence that things are going to be better, that I had a positive outlook even when the facts look bad. I am not one of those people. I will get to a good place eventually, but I go dark first. First I get sad, angry, and frightened.

It is helpful to be reminded of who I am, so I don’t worry so much for who I am not. The other day, my father was kind of enough to remind me that I am brave. I do feel the fear, and even dare to say that I feel it, but the fear does not hold me back. I act courageously. Dad reminded me that on our first trip to the beach, I walked straight into the ocean. I went to Europe by myself when I was thirteen, to hike the Alps. He reminded me that I used to sing for special events at church, and the congregation was so proud of a little girl who would march onstage and take the microphone in hand. I am not a positive thinker, but I am brave. I do not wink at demons. I seize demons by the horns and wrestle them to the ground.

There are a few special days in the course of a year when everything is half priced at the thrift store named Savers. I buy almost all my clothes second-hand, in large part because fair trade (non child or slave labor produced) clothing is so hard to come by. Half off everything sales at Savers are where most of my wardrobe comes from. The sale days are busy and crowded, but I can elbow in with the best of them to get a good deal on a dress or shirt or pair of shoes that are super cute, inexpensive, and don’t benefit any slave traders. Memorial day is one of those magic days, but this time instead of going to my local Savers, off Lake Street in the heart of Minneapolis, I visited a suburban location in Maplewood.

The major hang up at Savers is the dressing rooms. Since thrift shopping is mostly a numbers game, I’m not the only shopper who arrives at the dressing rooms with a shopping cart heaped over with potential fashion gems. To prevent impossibly long waits, and I assume a lot of shoplifting, Savers has a three-item limit on the dressing rooms. If one obeys the rules, one waits in line many, many times. It’s fairly common practice to take four or even five items into the dressing rooms, but the spirit of the rule is obeyed for the convenience of others. No one wants to stand around for an hour while four people try on eighty different outfits, even if you only have to stand in line once. The rule creates a flow, a movement of people going in and out, and helps out those rare shoppers just looking for one red, button-up blouse. It creates a kind of community, because you stand in line with the same people over and over, and get to see them in some goofy outfits as they model them for their friends. As in any community system, there are free-riders. People who pull their heaping cart up to the dressing room door and just grab four more items without bothering to wait in line again. People who think they can short-circuit the system by having a spouse or friend hand them all their clothes, three items at a time.

At the Lake Street store, there is a loud black woman who prevents this kind of behavior. She scares the crap out of me, but I respect and appreciate her. There’s a little adrenaline rush in sneaking five items into a dressing room under her careful eye, and no one gets away with any of those free-riding shenanigans on her watch. At the Maplewood Savers, there is no scary black lady. People are really kind, and will even tell you it’s your turn instead of sneaking into the empty dressing room that just opened up, which is nice. But in Maplewood, a total blind eye is turned to the free-riders. So despite the presence of a teenage girl blatantly taking up a dressing room for over an hour, nothing was said. Her parents asked her periodically if she was done, and she would shrug and say “not really. I’ve still got lots of stuff.”

I imagine that scary black lady transported to the Maplewood Savers, and I can see that she would be interpreted by the shoppers there as hostile, a bad employee because she’s not treating the customers with respect. But I missed her. I missed the order she brings to the operation, the clear-cut justice she enforces, the sense of fairness that was missing from the more peaceful scene in the suburbs.

I’ve had a few conversations lately about artists and elitism. Mostly because in a few weeks I’m going to be hosting a small group (a mid-week Bible study from my church) that’s specifically targeted for artists. There was some debate about how to phrase the description so we’d attract the right kind of people. This is a problem. On the one hand, we don’t want the group to feel exclusive to our fellow church-goers. On the other hand, a small group about being an artist is going to kind of suck if it’s populated by non-artists. Furthermore, if the description doesn’t make it clear that it’s focused on artists, the actual artists at the church won’t be interested in it. What serious painter wants to sit around and discuss some really pretty knitting?

Um, well…me. I’m not a serious painter, but I am a serious writer, and I would be very interested in hearing about the knitting. Here’s what I’ve learned from my creativity events. Almost everyone does something creative, it’s like we can’t help it. My friend Rena makes knitted objects inspired by geometric shapes. She puts them into coasters and coffee cup sleeves and they are amazing. I arranged a bunch of them on a pedestal at my birthday art festival. My friend Angel, who has never described herself as an artist in my presence, has a secret darkroom in her house where she hand-develops black-and-white photographs she takes of nature scenes, and they are fantastic. Maybe it’s a matter of perspective, but I have so very rarely run into people who call themselves artists who don’t make things. But almost everyone I know makes things, even if they don’t call themselves artists.

I do tend to judge people in my own field a little more harshly than someone who does great knitting, and maybe that’s the rub.

I have fellow writers categorized in my mind. There are people who write things, all the time, and those are people I identify with. I’m a writer because I write things, all the time. Publication and success aside, I will call you a colleague if you write things. Then there are people who write one thing. The people who’ve been working on their novel for the last twelve years, and are either constantly on the cusp of finishing or see no end in sight. The effect is roughly the same. They are people who say “everyone has a book inside them.” Maybe everyone does have one book inside them. I have several books in me, and that makes me different. Finally, there are people who don’t write anything. Seriously. People who answer the question, “what do you write?” with “not much” or “nothing yet.” These are the people who irk me. You have no business calling yourself a writer if you don’t actually write things.

In that last paragraph, you won’t find any mention of quality. Certainly, I have been trained in the fine art of literary analysis, and I even have a shiny piece of paper to prove it. If pressed, I might be able to give a cursory opinion of the relative quality of one piece of writing compared to another. I have thoughts on these kind of things. However, you can write one really gorgeous and elegant novel, and I will have less in common with you than someone who’s hammering away at their keyboard day after day, trying to make their mediocre prose more meaningful.

My amazing friend Alice told me last summer that she’d gone through The Artist’s Way, a twelve-week DIY course by Julia Cameron, and it was really helpful to her. Alice is a musician, and I’ve known her for many years, but that visit was the first time she was willing to play some of her original music for me. The cute husband gave me The Artist’s Way book for my birthday, and I started going through it with two of my very best friends this April. Among the various exercises and tasks assigned during the course, one piece of advice stuck out to me in last week’s reading. It said, “every day look to the Great Creator and say, “You take care of the quality, I will take care of the quantity.”

This is amazingly profound to me. I’ve said such things before – I will do the work and God will take care of the results. But there was something about that idea being put into such specific terms that clicked in my brain.

Normally, at the end of a first draft, I have a totally readable, coherent approximation of what I’d like to end up with. That makes the first draft really difficult to write, because I’m acting as if I know the characters and the main thrust of the book before I’ve started writing it. That isn’t how I work; I figure out what I want to write as I’m writing it. So, with my shiny new book project, I’m just writing everything that I might want to use in the actual book, creating a kind of pool of ideas and phrases that, in the second draft, I will mix and match and connect into a cohesive whole. But for now, I’m just writing with wild abandon anything that occurs to me that relates to the project. It is the most freeing exercise I’ve ever attempted. It makes so much more sense for the way I process and create.

I don’t know if The Artist’s Way is for everyone, but I will say this. The joy of being an artist, for me, is sitting down and making things. When I decide that I’m going to stop being concerned about whether the work is “important” or “profound” or “good,” I am free to just sit down and make things. Lots of things. So many things that I can’t help making a few beautiful things.