New Art

First, a correction. Several people have noted that a couple of weeks ago I wrote that my "next" CT scan would be March 21. That was a mistake. It's Friday, April 4, and I will report the results in my post the following Monday, April 7.

And now about that art! My living room has a new piece, a beautifully calligraphed tunic, conceived and executed by my college friend, Chris Emerson. Chris (with assistance from another college friend, Deborah Young) emailed a bunch of family and friends, asking them to contribute words for the project. Chris chose the words she wanted to write--they include "grasshopper" (a family joke), "Judy" (written upside down, so I know who I am, if I'm wearing the tunic), "cousin," "antelope" (my totem animal), and quite a lot more. And then she wrote them, artfully dispersed, on the unbleached cotton tunic.

I imagined the tunic displayed on a dressmaker's dummy (also known as a "dress form") and last week I found one on the web and ordered it. It arrived on Thursday, and Jed (who arrived for another visit Friday morning) hauled the big box inside and helped me set up the dummy, which is surprisingly elegant. Now clothed in the tunic, it stands in front of the fireplace (which is never used), ready for viewing. I plan to have a viewing party in the relatively near future for the contributors-of-words, but anyone who'd like to see it can just come by! It's really wonderful, and very meaningful, and I'm both touched and delighted to have received this gift.

In other "art" news: the manuscript I wrote while I was on chemo three years ago during the first attempt to treat my stomach cancer has been accepted for publication! Borderland Books, an imprint distributed and marketed by University of Wisconsin Press, will bring out the book, tentatively titled Facing Fear, at a date yet to be determined. First I have some revisions to do--and since it's been two years since I finished the manuscript, and I haven't read it since then, I don't have the slightest idea, yet, what will be involved in the revision.

I decided to write a book about fear right after the 2004 Presidential election. I was thinking about a new project, and I decided that if Kerry won, I could try to revise the very bad draft of a novel I'd written the previous year. But if Bush won, I was going to find a way to write about the long-term consequences of the political manipulation of fear. I'd been thinking about this since 1986, when a right-wing nut murdered my college friend Chuck Goldmark, his wife, and two young sons. The murderer apparently confused Chuck, a liberal attorney, with his father, a respected Washington State legislator who had been red-baited and voted out of the legislature during the McCarthy era. In a sense, I believe, Joseph McCarthy and the politics of fear were responsible for these deaths.

I went to Seattle to do research for the book in January 2005, coincidentally the month my cancer was diagnosed. The book quickly morphed into a much larger meditation on fear--where it comes from, and how to cope with it. Even as I was writing, I realized that I was trying to get a grip on my own fears of cancer and death. And when I finished the manuscript, I knew that in some ways it didn't matter whether it was published: I had written it for myself, and it had served a really important purpose, teaching me how to live my life with joy and hope, despite a truly awful diagnosis.

Still, as you blog-readers might have noticed, I do want other people to read what I write! So I'm absolutely delighted that the book will actually see the light of day. Borderland publishes gorgeous books, and I'll also put at least part of the text on the web, to try to maximize readership. Keep reading the blog, and you'll be among the first to hear when Facing Fear is available.

But that won't be for a while. First--those revisions!