Years and years ago, long before COVID closed down the world, or Holly Whitaker had become a Quit Lit star (Quit Like A Woman) or Laura McKowen had launched The Luckiest Club, or I had gone back to college to become a psychotherapist — yes — that long ago.
Holly and Laura and I decided to save a little money in New York City one weekend and share a hotel room. We were all attending the “She Recovers New York” conference.
The year was 2017, and I remember our squeezing into that room, Holly with her trademark red nails, Laura with her short skirts, me sleeping in one queen bed, and the other two sharing the second.
I had been asked to present a workshop for the 500 sober women in attendance. Title? Writing Your Recovery. It was a hit.
My pal Holly sat in the front row, and I remember delivering the session to a packed room. Holly and Laura and I went out to dinner that night with our mutual friend, Lisa Smith (Girl Walks Out of a Bar), and the four of us took the long walk home in the soft air, grabbing some selfies by the water.
It was a golden evening, and we all had a sense of promise, of what was to come.
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So, here we are in the summer of 2023: Writing Your Recovery is a well-established entity, having graduated more than 100 women from around the globe. Holly is a regular guest, and there have been many more.
This past month we welcomed the brilliant essayist Debra Gwartney (Siri Tells a Joke) to teach a two-hour Master Class on voice and dialogue in memoirs. It was pure magic.
Many WYR enrollees have carried on with Writing Your Discovery, the graduate-level offering that runs year-round.
Close friendships and connections have formed over long distances. Just last month a group of us gathered in Nova Scotia by the ocean, at the home of the gifted writer Wendy McCallum (featured in my first newsletter).
Wendy is now writing fiction, by the way, as are others, sharing it with her Writing Your Discovery group—hers is a brilliantly wise and insightful novel with the working title of Undoing Alice.
Writing Your Recovery is currently on a summer break, restarting in early October. But the Writing Your Discovery classes—all four of them—are year-round and full up. Many members are also private writing clients of mine, working on books.
Who knew that those 30-plus years of editing would evolve into this labour of love for me: working with dozens of talented women, all in recovery from something, be it grief, alcohol, eating issues, or just life.
It is a source of immense joy, and I look forward to sharing the work of some stellar women this summer.
This month, I am featuring the talented UK writer Philippa Kay, who lives with her husband and three children in St Agnes, on the north Cornish coast.
Last year, her young son Wilf was diagnosed with cancer, and much of her writing centers on that difficult passage. At Writing Your Discovery, we have a front-row seat as she unspools her story. If you enjoy her work, please share Philippa’s journey.
Writer Philippa Kay
Ann: You are a busy mother. What inspired you to enroll in Writing Your Recovery, and continue with Writing Your Discovery?
Philippa: Timings just lined up. I was struggling to recover mentally from my child’s cancer diagnosis six months earlier, searching for anything I thought might help me feel better, to function better.
Writing Your Recovery caught my eye in an Instagram post from someone I follow. As it happened a new class started the same day.
WYR gave me structure, and architecture during a very chaotic time.
I never thought I’d be any good at the sharing element; I’m a terrible scaredy-cat at speaking out loud, let alone reading my own material, but the group is so inclusive and supportive – I look forward to every session.
Continuing onto WYD was a treat – although I’m separated from most of the rest of our class by thousands of miles, as a group, we have a very close connection.
It’s a safe space to share, be brave, try out ideas, learn, and listen. As our classes are live, our meetings feel very real-time, there’s no online disconnect: real connections, real learnings, and real friends.
Ann: What was the biggest surprise about making room for writing in your life?
Philippa: Just how much I love to write! By making a bit of space, and giving writing some scheduled time, it’s opened up the floodgates. I’ve started to really see life in all its bright and glorious reality.
The excitement of a new idea is a real buzz. By getting my thoughts onto a page, I’ve found not only do I free up the space for fresh thinking to fill, but it also helps to calm my very busy head. Writing is the most beautiful therapy.
Ann: Can you tell us about your writing habits, dreams, and aspirations?
Philippa: Right now I am furiously trying to make sense of, collect, and curate everything I’ve learned, seen, and lived over this past year, since his diagnosis and during our recovery.
This story, his and ours, is pulsing through me; desperate to get onto a page and be organized into chapters. My dream is that I’m able to unjumble these words into a book that someone else might want to read. I wish there’d been something similar when our journey started; it would have helped me hold onto hope.
I never want to stop jotting them down, writing for me is taking a big, deep breath of fresh air. Writing, I’ve discovered, unsticks my soul.
Ping - When life sends you a text message
By Philippa Kay
We started out as two. My small boy, not quite three, hearing the front door, came downstairs sleepy-eyed, his white-blonde curls already bed-ruffled, wearing green frog print pajamas.
Their eyes met with matching surprise. My boy, on finding a stranger had dropped in way past bedtime, and the man I had been seeing quietly for a few months coming face to face with the reality of my child we’d only talked about. I’d taken great care to ensure their paths were not yet crossing. Neither, I felt, were quite ready to meet the other—ping.
My boyfriend of just a few months became his stepfather three years before becoming my husband.
Swerving the stigma, he slipped with gentle ease into the paternal role, filling the empty father-shaped shoes with kindness, effervescence, and affection.
Together, they learned to be father and son: catching mackerel, riding bikes, building fires, consuming sickly-sweet bakery treats in secret, sticky buns with pink icing that I’d never agree to as an after-school snack. They fell in love.
The fear of becoming a biological father hit him hard and quite by surprise.
My new husband struggled at the first scan, so I carried on quietly by myself in preparing for our second boy’s arrival. It was OK, I told him: take your time.
I lay on the gurney, paralyzed from my breastbone and beyond in a busy delivery suite, watching with anticipation as the midwife passed the towelling-wrapped parcel of our pink-faced baby over to his father in blue hospital scrubs.
His love poured in free flow and without hesitation, spilling and sploshing all over our tiny new boy. The two of them conjoined. It became hard to establish where one stopped and the other started, our plump little boy perma-wedged into the hip of my husband who’d taken to babies as beautifully as he’d stepped into step fathering three years earlier. Three became four.
Heartbreaking losses clocked up consecutively before she made it to us, alive and exquisite, exactly three years later.
My tears and his splashing happily onto her new, naked skin. Our precious girl curled quietly into the crook of my arm as the doctors stitched me together again inches away behind a blue stretch of hospital screen. Ping – four became five. Her brothers took turns holding their tiny sister.
Their huge-hearted father chases tides, waves and rainbows; fearful of his own capacities, but fearless of nature’s playground. He’s a beautiful visionary with the ability to catch hold of the big dreams he believes in: the ones he weaves with love for his children.
He’s as busy as a fidget spinner, and our children love it when he’s spinning.
He says yes to ice creams and flapjacks at the beach cafe, to dog walks in pajamas, to bike rides after bedtime. He loves them tirelessly; it’s never just the one story, its board games played properly, dens built so carefully, wetsuits rolled on and peeled off gently, there’s sandy toes, soothing sunburn and time taken to go rock-pooling at low tides. It’s their favourite songs he sings out of key and with his own, made up, muddled-up words.
There are all sorts of fathers out there. Our children are lucky enough to have one of the very best kinds: the ones that most children only read about in bedtime books. Ours is for real life.
I understood when he couldn’t bear to look at our six-year-old boy as he lay in his recovery cot, medical drains and tubes leaking yellow blood-stewed gloop from the fresh incisions cut into the four corners of his small torso.
I knew he couldn’t hide his heartbreak, so I sent him home.
I stayed stroking our boy’s face as he began to rouse from the appendectomy that wasn’t.
I was told there’d been a mass, that I wasn’t to worry, but I already knew. Five days later, his cancer was confirmed. I heard it first.
I didn’t know how to break the news, and his father’s heart. I couldn’t handle his despair as well as my own.
When you’ve held your limp and lifeless child, dead weight in your arms under general anaesthesia, you get a taste of what the very worst might feel like.
When you watch your small boy stand in front of the towering, adult-sized x-ray machine, or slide in screaming to scanning tubes, you feel real fear.
When you lie awake next to him, night after night, the silent drip, drip, drip of a poison infusion into his tiny veins, machines beeping, fevers raging, appetites failing, you get to taste the darkest times.
The five of us were dispersed, our children displaced by many hundreds of miles during his treatment. Sometimes we’d almost be together, separated only by the glass panel of the door to his ward.
He’d wave brightly through this window at them; smiling and shouting playground-level loudly at each other through the thickness of the fire door, his siblings unfazed by his IV lines or the funny wisps of blonde hair he’d yet to lose.
Loving your children through cancer can push a parent's capacity for pain beyond what they ever believed possible.
Learning to bravely face the fear of maybe losing your child is immeasurably hard.
A year ago last night, I saw a double rainbow. My boy was just well enough to get out of bed, wheeling his chemo lines across to the window where we both watched the double arcs curve over the scorching city skyline, a magnificent midsummer sunset of pinks; both of us silently holding onto the hope of something. I took a photo. It was the day before handfuls of his hair started coming away.
Last night, a year later, we danced in a field flanked by the Atlantic, singing shanty songs as the sun set once more, this time falling into the horizon line and sinking into the sea. Strings of festoon lighting danced like fireflies across the darkening blue sky as the warm evening rolled into a warm night.
Our daughter squeals in delight as he throws her up and into the air, again and again, catching her bare legs, her little pink sandals dusty from dancing.
Our boy, strong once more, sings with all of his huge heart; a homecoming, a celebration of life, of survival, of love, of the five of us again.
For our family every day together is now an occasion to celebrate, to relish, to enjoy, to nurture, to treasure. Ping.
Thank you Phillipa for sharing such an intimate and heartfelt piece.
The next round of Writing Your Recovery starts this October, and spots are limited - so if you are interested, sign up soon.
If you have any questions for me about Writing Your Recovery, the eight-session memoir-writing course, please don’t hesitate to reach out at adjohnston@summerhill.tv
Have a delicious summer and happy writing. - ADJ
To my cherished subscribers: if you have a certain topic you’d like me to address, or a writer you’d like me to interview, please reach out.
Thank you for sharing those beautiful pictures! Holly and Laura’s Home Podcast saved me and reading your book Anne.....such an inspiration! You truly started Quit Lit!!
2015, 2016, 2017 and now fast forward to today. I love Holly and Laura and subscribe to their Substack! I am part of The Luckiest Club and just over 2 yrs sober.
I moved from Toronto to Victoria in 2020 to literally save my life. I just wish I could have met you in person Anne! 💜
I started The New Social - a sober community with the intention to build connection and to be of service. I really could not have done it without you, Holly and Laura! Thank you Anne! 💜
oh WOW that picture. I remember it all so well, and that little hotel room. I love you so much and I cannot wait to see where this course goes. It is such a gift and so are you. A TREASURE.