Writing My Way Through Cancer

Rating:
Summary: Overcoming Cancer and All its Fears
Review: REVIEW: WRITING MY WAY THROUGH CANCER by Myra Schneider

This short book by Myra Schneider will soon be regarded as a classic in the literature concerned with surviving traumatic medical experiences, here that of breast cancer tellingly evoked with all the attendant feelings with which a victim and survivor must cope. This is accomplishment enough, but there are two other strands of equal substance here. One is Schneider's instinctive, creative effort to transmute suffering and the fear of death into something transformative, and positive. Inevitably that leads to the insights she offers to non-poets and poets about the formative processes by which a work of art slips into existence.

Schneider's narration of losing her breast benefits by her background as one of England's distinguished poets. She is able to evoke longer and larger facets of the experience with a telling image or charged choice of incident. I am reminded of F. Robert Rodman's "Not Dying" that powerfully relates his struggle to cope with his wife's death from cancer, but needs a greater length to be expressed. Both are fine books, but the differing backgrounds of poet and analyst are revealing.

The writing techniques Schneider relies on to help her through her experience are open to everyone, however, and require no special writing ability. They are varied, and include 'Letting Go in Lists', 'Flow-Writing', 'Visualizations', or 'Writing About Memories'. An appendix gives a useful review of these techniques and others, and samples of other breast cancer sufferers use of them. All allow a person to pour feelings into specific containers to objectify them, feel the relief of getting something off one's chest and, crucially, experience the mastery that comes through coherent self-expression even in the face of appalling experience.

Schneider at one point in 'Writing About Memories' evokes a caricature of her judgmental father only to allow herself to realize she has moved beyond the "one/breasted, hardly a woman" figure he berates her for becoming into a "...deeper me" able to confront illness and transcend loss. She notices some snowdrops growing and begins a piece of flow-writing: "Drop of life on this distressed afternoon. ... Very small, they bend but do not give way, they refuse winter, silently they remind me it can end." The simple flowers enduring winter cold come to stand for life's ability to defy death: defiantly she turns them into a poem in which they become "fiercer than the swimming/open-mouthed fear that wants/to devour me..." On another occasion she contains her anger by letting loose in a list that contains causes for anger ranging from chemotherapy to being too hot or too cold.

If just these self-help exercises were all, Writing My Way Through Cancer would be a useful book. But added to Schneider's moving narration of her journey is the revelation of her seeking genuine creative release in the face of some form of death, whether physical or metaphysical. That puts her book on a par with Marion Milner's classic "On Not Being Able To Paint", and with Henry Miller's writing on watercolor, particularly "The Angel Is My Watermark". Milner famously comes from an analytic perspective and struggles to find a way to release her creativity from the captivity of controlling, overly rational strictures. Milner's challenge is to loosen the deadly hand of convention that embodies her own dread of release into a fuller life, a release her fear equates with madness, in order to paint (read: live) with freshness and integrity.

Miller, on the other hand, celebrates a demonic, Dionysian release that trusts his intuition wherever it leads him, structured only by paper and watercolor. He is not under the threat of immediate death that Schneider confronts and has escaped the repression that Milner embodies. But he needs to find a living form, like Milner ... Schneider's creative response falls between these figures. She is nothing if not as disciplined as Milner, having one technique after another to summon to her aid, while she is as open to her feelings as Miller. Here the multitude of techniques she offers for anyone become in her hands means to create an evolutionary shaping that transforms destructive waves of anger or fear into independent, free-standing affirmations of life, for at its root that is what creativity quintessentially affirms.

That brings us inevitably to Schneider's ability as a poet, which shines through these pages. The observations on snowdrops we saw turn into a short, powerful poem for which we have her first observations, the poem, revisions, and its professional outcome to reflect on. To celebrate the end of treatment she imagines in notes an extravagant poem of release, of climbing back to strength "word by word." The mundane note becomes a poem that ends:

When it's finally over I'm going to gather these fantasies,
fling them into my dented and long lost college trunk,
dump it in the unused cellar
climb back to strength
up my rope of words.

Even as she recovers from the fog and confusion of her operation we are treated to a series of reflections, notes and drafts that culminate in:

TODAY THERE IS TIME

to touch the silken stillness
of myself, map its landscape,
the missing left breast, to lay
my nervous palm softly
as a bird's wing across
the new plain, allow
tears to fall yet rejoice
that the surgeon scraped
away the cancer cells.

Today there is time
to contemplate the way life
opens, clams, parts, savour
its remembered rosemaries,
spreading purples, tight
white edges of hope, to travel
the meanings of repair, tug
words that open parachutes.

Schneider remarks she actually exceeded her normal yearly poetic output under these incredibly difficult conditions. It may be, as she writes in her essay on Henry Vaughn, such a creative response to extreme experience irradiates the dark of death and suffering, making the darkness paradoxically brilliant. Perhaps that's all that could be said if she had not survived, but only left, at the end, these 14 poems and the conclusion of her long poem, "Voicebox". But she survived, and the light finally thrown by "Writing My Way Through Cancer" has at once the sober but warm brilliance of someone who has danced on the lip of the grave and lived to tell the tale.

Rating:
Summary: Overcoming Cancer and All its Fears
Review: REVIEW: WRITING MY WAY THROUGH CANCER by Myra Schneider

This short book by Myra Schneider will soon be regarded as a classic in the literature concerned with surviving traumatic medical experiences, here that of breast cancer tellingly evoked with all the attendant feelings with which a victim and survivor must cope. This is accomplishment enough, but there are two other strands of equal substance here. One is Schneider's instinctive, creative effort to transmute suffering and the fear of death into something transformative, and positive. Inevitably that leads to the insights she offers to non-poets and poets about the formative processes by which a work of art slips into existence.

Schneider's narration of losing her breast benefits by her background as one of England's distinguished poets. She is able to evoke longer and larger facets of the experience with a telling image or charged choice of incident. I am reminded of F. Robert Rodman's "Not Dying" that powerfully relates his struggle to cope with his wife's death from cancer, but needs a greater length to be expressed. Both are fine books, but the differing backgrounds of poet and analyst are revealing.

The writing techniques Schneider relies on to help her through her experience are open to everyone, however, and require no special writing ability. They are varied, and include 'Letting Go in Lists', 'Flow-Writing', 'Visualizations', or 'Writing About Memories'. An appendix gives a useful review of these techniques and others, and samples of other breast cancer sufferers use of them. All allow a person to pour feelings into specific containers to objectify them, feel the relief of getting something off one's chest and, crucially, experience the mastery that comes through coherent self-expression even in the face of appalling experience.

Schneider at one point in 'Writing About Memories' evokes a caricature of her judgmental father only to allow herself to realize she has moved beyond the "one/breasted, hardly a woman" figure he berates her for becoming into a "...deeper me" able to confront illness and transcend loss. She notices some snowdrops growing and begins a piece of flow-writing: "Drop of life on this distressed afternoon. ... Very small, they bend but do not give way, they refuse winter, silently they remind me it can end." The simple flowers enduring winter cold come to stand for life's ability to defy death: defiantly she turns them into a poem in which they become "fiercer than the swimming/open-mouthed fear that wants/to devour me..." On another occasion she contains her anger by letting loose in a list that contains causes for anger ranging from chemotherapy to being too hot or too cold.

If just these self-help exercises were all, Writing My Way Through Cancer would be a useful book. But added to Schneider's moving narration of her journey is the revelation of her seeking genuine creative release in the face of some form of death, whether physical or metaphysical. That puts her book on a par with Marion Milner's classic "On Not Being Able To Paint", and with Henry Miller's writing on watercolor, particularly "The Angel Is My Watermark". Milner famously comes from an analytic perspective and struggles to find a way to release her creativity from the captivity of controlling, overly rational strictures. Milner's challenge is to loosen the deadly hand of convention that embodies her own dread of release into a fuller life, a release her fear equates with madness, in order to paint (read: live) with freshness and integrity.

Miller, on the other hand, celebrates a demonic, Dionysian release that trusts his intuition wherever it leads him, structured only by paper and watercolor. He is not under the threat of immediate death that Schneider confronts and has escaped the repression that Milner embodies. But he needs to find a living form, like Milner ... Schneider's creative response falls between these figures. She is nothing if not as disciplined as Milner, having one technique after another to summon to her aid, while she is as open to her feelings as Miller. Here the multitude of techniques she offers for anyone become in her hands means to create an evolutionary shaping that transforms destructive waves of anger or fear into independent, free-standing affirmations of life, for at its root that is what creativity quintessentially affirms.

That brings us inevitably to Schneider's ability as a poet, which shines through these pages. The observations on snowdrops we saw turn into a short, powerful poem for which we have her first observations, the poem, revisions, and its professional outcome to reflect on. To celebrate the end of treatment she imagines in notes an extravagant poem of release, of climbing back to strength "word by word." The mundane note becomes a poem that ends:

When it's finally over I'm going to gather these fantasies,
fling them into my dented and long lost college trunk,
dump it in the unused cellar
climb back to strength
up my rope of words.

Even as she recovers from the fog and confusion of her operation we are treated to a series of reflections, notes and drafts that culminate in:

TODAY THERE IS TIME

to touch the silken stillness
of myself, map its landscape,
the missing left breast, to lay
my nervous palm softly
as a bird's wing across
the new plain, allow
tears to fall yet rejoice
that the surgeon scraped
away the cancer cells.

Today there is time
to contemplate the way life
opens, clams, parts, savour
its remembered rosemaries,
spreading purples, tight
white edges of hope, to travel
the meanings of repair, tug
words that open parachutes.

Schneider remarks she actually exceeded her normal yearly poetic output under these incredibly difficult conditions. It may be, as she writes in her essay on Henry Vaughn, such a creative response to extreme experience irradiates the dark of death and suffering, making the darkness paradoxically brilliant. Perhaps that's all that could be said if she had not survived, but only left, at the end, these 14 poems and the conclusion of her long poem, "Voicebox". But she survived, and the light finally thrown by "Writing My Way Through Cancer" has at once the sober but warm brilliance of someone who has danced on the lip of the grave and lived to tell the tale.