“Parenting With Cancer” Healing Writing Workshop
This one-day writing workshop will take place remotely (via Zoom) and is designed specifically to explore feelings & stories through writing related to parenting young children while also managing your own cancer diagnosis. This workshop will be a soothing and healing reprieve from your day-to-day with writing prompts, poetry and discussion — all in the comfort of your home — specifically in a community that understands where you're coming from.
Facilitated by April Stearns of Wildfire Magazine (Santa Cruz) and author Mary Ladd (San Francisco), who both experienced breast cancer diagnoses and years of treatment while parenting their small children. The goal of the workshop is to give you space, time and inspiration to begin to write your unique cancer / parenting story. Whether you want to publish your story on a blog, in a newspaper, share it with friends and family, tuck it away for your child to read one day, or just use as a journaling exercise, this workshop is designed to help you experience the healing that comes from letting your story out. This workshop will focus on writing that heals, which is writing that accepts our story and makes sense of it, explores honest feelings, uses words to heal, embraces a positive outlook.
15 participants limit
Come with paper and pencil or laptop available.
About the Workshop Facilitators
Mary Ladd Bio
I was 39 when my gynecologist told me a breast lump was “probably nothing.” Insurance costs, bureaucratic headaches plus apathy meant I put off getting a second opinion. However, I soon felt haunted when Angelina Jolie told the world about her decision to get a prophylactic double mastectomy after finding out she carried the BRCA1 gene mutation.
My aggressive triple negative breast cancer and BRCA1 gene mutation led to eight infections, 69 blood tests, one surgeon crush, 22 chemotherapy rounds, one DIEP mastectomy and a hysterectomy, which brought on insta-menopause. Connecting with other cancer patients tapped into how absurd, sad, funny and tiring cancer and its aftermath—withered sexuality, memory loss, dry eyes, depression—can be.
I collaborated with Anthony Bourdain on No Reservations and my writing has appeared in anthologies including one from BAYS (Bay Area Young Survivors) as well as Wildfire Magazine, Playboy, Time, and Healthline. Together with San Francisco Chronicle illustrator Don Asmussen, I created The Wig Diaries, an irreverent collection of sometimes profane cancer-themed essays with a portion of the proceeds going to Breast Cancer Action and Metavivor. The book was blurbed by Mary Roach and was featured in W Magazine, Lithub, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Humor Beats Cancer. I am also the author of a pandemic writing prompts book.
I live in San Francisco and love helping others use writing to understand and process grief, illness, family dynamics, death and genetic mutations.
April Johnson Stearns, Founder, Editor-in-Chief, WILDFIRE Magazine
A lifelong writer, April was diagnosed at 35 years old with Stage 3 breast cancer that she found while breastfeeding her daughter. Four years later, while struggling to “go back to normal” and find other young women in similar circumstances, April launched WILDFIRE Magazine as a way for younger women to tell and read breast cancer stories. April grew up on a 43-acre Christmas tree farm with horses, chickens, dogs, cats, and a couple of co-conspirators in the form of younger brothers. The closest neighbor was a half-mile away. Like most who don't know what they have till it's gone, she spent her teen years desperate to be “normal” and live in a town. Now she lives with her husband and young daughter on the coast of California in a real-life town where she can see and hear her neighbors almost all the time, but she can also ride her bike down to the beach at a moment's notice to watch the sunset. Although she does love town life, she also likes to get away from all the hustle and bustle whenever she can to hike in the woods, but writing remains her purest escape.