I am participating in the American Cancer Society Read Every Day challenge. This is an easy one for me, as I read every day anyway! So I am blogging my reading this month in the hopes that you might enjoy my literary journeys, and that you might consider supporting my fundraiser to fight cancer and support cancer patients through Relay for Life. Go to main.acsevents.org/goto/elizabethdonald to read my essay and donate.
Well, I pretty much dropped the ball on blogging this. I suppose that was predictable. There are classes to teach, and words to be written as well as read. I hope you’ll all forgive me for being a slacker.
As the month of reading comes to an end, I can tell you that I am finishing “The Answer Is No” by Fredrik Bachman, with Paradise by Toni Morrison waiting in the wings. Yes, I spent a semester studying Morrison and managed not to read Paradise or Beloved, two of her best-known works.
On the nonfiction side, I’m mostly done with Why We Can’t Sleep, and while I’m still wending through Nasty Women, I am lining up The Anti-Racist Workshop for professional reading. I get to teach a creative writing workshop in the fall, and I’m hunting for ideas.
However, sometime in the near future I need to read something light and fluffy.
On a serious note, the fact is that all I did this month was the kind of reading I always do: dozens of news and magazine articles per day, in addition to the constant doomscroll that is the life of a journalist. Double that reading when you’re a college professor who needs to keep up with your profession and the state of education, not to mention reading all those freshman essays.
But I participated in this effort because of how important this cause is to me. If you followed me for any time at all, you know that I’ve had a disproportionate number of people in my life suffer or die from cancer. I’ve written about them before, and I will write about them again. Unfortunately, every few years I seem to add another, and it makes me angry. Particularly with current events, while funding and research are practically at a standstill, it’s more important than ever that we support the causes we want to see thrive.
There is no evil so great it cannot be overturned by love and steadfast commitment to the betterment of our fellow human. No, not even that one. Stand firm, and if you have the capability, donate to the causes you care about. Like stopping cancer before it takes any more of our friends.
Thank you for walking this journey with me.
