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Awesome Women, Blogging, Bullying, Coming Home, Culture of breast cancer, Facebook, Feminism, Health, Health Activist Writer's Challenge 2013, Memoir, Movies, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Social Media, Soundtracks of our Lives, Teaching, Toxic Workplaces, Twitter, Women in Politics, Workplace Bullying, Workplace Mobbing, Writing
Follow you. Follow me. Richie Havens R.I.P.
In the summer of 1968, a young Richie Havens told Rolling Stone magazine that the direction for his music was heaven. Until his death at 72 last week, Richie Havens embodied the notion of music as a transcendent medium for connection: Music is the major form of communication. It’s the commonest vibration, the people’s news broadcast … I think I’m ready to be everybody’s friend, and to do anything for anybody. It’s heavy. Richie Havens wasn’t supposed to be the first act at Woodstock. He just happened to be in the right place at the right time, having arrived by helicopter. Who could have predicted that half a million people would…
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Family, grandmother, Health Activist Writer's Challenge 2013, Memoir, Memoir, Memory, Mother Daughter Relationship, Northern Ireland, Soundtracks of our Lives, television, Writing
this is your life in a big red book
Can biography evolve to meet our current demands? Has the internet killed off the demand for the authoritative? In an age of best-selling celebrity memoir, does anyone still care what Shakespeare had for breakfast? asks Guardian columnist Kathryn Holeywell as she ponders the state of the art of biography. For the record, I care what Shakespeare had for breakfast and many of the quotidian moments that make up a life which brings me to the 27th day of the 2013 WEGO Health Writing Challenge prompting us to create five working titles for the book of our lives. If I were to write my life, I would first have to devise a way to cull…
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Awesome Women, Blogging, Breast Cancer Treatment, Health Activist Writer's Challenge 2013, Language matters, Memory, Ordinary Things, Social Media
a day without pain or pity
A creature of habit, I count on certain rituals to know that all is well in my world. Breakfast, always the same, is a poached egg, toast, berries of some sort, an orange, and coffee from a favorite cup. When I wave goodbye to my love, in return he will blow a kiss, flash a peace sign, and watch from the window until I disappear from view. Predictably perfect. Let the day begin. Phoenix is beautiful in April with hot days and cool nights. Already, I am thinking of vacation and our annual escape to another place, where one set of routines is temporarily traded for another. Long days, devoid of…
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Bullying, Cancer Language, Health Activist Writer's Challenge 2013, Language matters, Mastectomy, Memoir, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Shirley Jackson, Short Stories, Tamoxifen, Writing
breast cancer: she brought it upon herself
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. ~ SUSAN SONTAG If you were diagnosed with breast cancer today, I can almost guarantee that within the week, you will be blamed for having done something to cause it. Just as we have heard people respond to news of a mugging, “What was he doing in that…
