New Series: "Memoir & Motif."

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AS I GO ABOUT MY DAYS, I PERPETUALLY THINK ON THESE WRITINGS. Often these meditations take me into experiential territories that, at first, seem to the casual outsider as peripheral to one’s day-to-day experience of cancer. The more I outline, draft, edit and revise the writing, the more an intricate web of correlative factors and influences forms in my mind. Ever in awareness is the question of origins; how did I get cancer? How much of it is genetics? How much of it epigenetic? How much of it is environmental?

I’m particularly drawn to Urie Bronfenbrenner’s theory of the “mecosystem” brought forth in the 1970s. Bronfenbrenner proposed five environmental systems that made up the substratum of a human being’s development: microsystem (immediate environment i.e. family, school, immediate social environment and peer relationships), mesosystem (interaction between any two microsystems, the results affect children directly), exosystem (indirect but prominent influences such as socioeconomic status and the costs therein i.e. parents' degree of job prestige, and the school system), macrosystem (cultural heritage, customs, beliefs, and government), and chronosystem (transitional influences that play out over the lifespan, e.g. fighting in World War I, growing up during The Great Depression, exposure to mass media during The Cold War).

I’ve decided to do a concurrent series of short pieces exploring the motifs and through-lines that permeate these posts—especially the memoir, with a slightly more analytical and critical framework. I can’t be as academic as I would like In 2,500 7,500 words or less (not including bibliography), but I’m hoping they will serve as a sort of “author’s notes,” making themes clear and leading to new avenues to explore. If others battling major illness can find similarities and patterns in their own personal histories to what’s shared here, then perhaps cycles can be broken and lives reclaimed? Let’s find out.

“Memoir & Motif: Falling into the Mirror” will be out this week. Also the next part of the memoir, “IV: Anima / Animus,” is coming along well and will be out soon. Thanks to all of my repeat readers (and new ones). You are helping me stay motivated during a tough time.

More to come.