Between the Lines: Writing Through Cancer

by Zinta Aistars

for WMUK 102.1 FM
Southwest Michigan's NPR affiliate



Between the Lines is my weekly radio show about books and writers with a Michigan connection. It airs every Tuesday at 7:50 a.m., 11:55 a.m., and 4:20 p.m. (or listen anytime online), on WMUK 102.1 FM, Southwest Michigan's NPR affiliate. I am the host of Between the Lines.

This week's guest: Fleda Brown

Fleda Brown

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Fleda Brown is a cancer survivor. Being a writer, she wrote her way through her illness and found that doing so gave her the strength and courage to get her through the journey back to wellness. Her book is called My Wobbly Bicycle: Meditations on Cancer and the Creative Life (Mission Point Press, 2016).

Brown’s tenth book, a collection of poetry called The Woods are on Fire: New and Selected Poems (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), is due out in March, and most of Brown’s published work is poetry. She was Delaware's poet laureate from 2001 to 2007. But Brown's ordeal with cancer turned her toward prose.

Brown says writing about her cancer treatment as it happened, “Was a pretty darn important part of the treatment. I write all the time anyway, and I had a blog that I had started almost a year before the diagnosis. It had been mostly about writing. I didn’t write about the cancer at first, but after surgery, I decided it was so much the center of my life then that I might as well.”

The blog gained many followers and Brown turned her posts there into the memoir, My Wobbly Bicycle. She found that writing about her treatment helped her cope. She described her experiences with chemotherapy and radiation therapy; dealing with hair loss; and the fears and hopes that rose along with a new realization of her own mortality. And she described her recovery.

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“This became my most important writing,” Brown says. “I would lie in bed at night thinking about how I wanted to word something.”

As a part of her experience as a cancer survivor, Brown says she ...

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Between the Lines: Joseph Gross, Poet

by Zinta Aistars

for WMUK 102.1 FM
Southwest Michigan's NPR affiliate



Between the Lines is my weekly radio show about books and writers with a Michigan connection. It airs every Tuesday at 7:50 a.m., 11:55 a.m., and 4:20 p.m. (or listen anytime online), on WMUK 102.1 FM, Southwest Michigan's NPR affiliate. I am the host of Between the Lines.

This week's guest: Joseph Gross

Joseph Gross

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Joseph Gross is the director of the Ransom District Library in Plainwell, where the kids call him “Mr. Joe.” But he’s also a poet and his first poetry collection, Everything at Rest is Waiting to Move, was recently published by Celery City Chapbooks.

“These are poems culled from the last five years or so,” Gross says. “As I put them together, I found a theme of change…Many of them were inspired by a class I took at Western for my MFA, with Bill Olsen."

Gross says Olsen helped him focus on poetry as he studied creative nonfiction at Loyola University with Dean Young before coming to Western Michigan University. Gross's stories, essays, and poems have appeared in a variety of national journals, including the Alaska Quarterly Review, Fourth Genre, the Mid-American Review, and Redivider.

Gross worked as editor-in-chief at Atticus Review for some years. His approach to poetry then was not necessarily how well he understood a particular poem as to how deeply it moved him.

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“There are poems that I’ve admired without necessarily being moved,” Gross says. “I tend to like poetry in which I can find my bearing rather than something that is so abstract that it’s difficult to find an entry point. That can be almost embarrassing to admit, but I can also say that I’ve been moved by poems that I can’t say I totally understood.”

Gross acknowledges that many people are intimidated by poetry, especially those more abstract and dense works that can be challenging to understand.

“Sometimes you have to ..."

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Between the Lines: Kalamazoo Coloring Book

by Zinta Aistars

for WMUK 102.1 FM
Southwest Michigan's NPR affiliate



Between the Lines is my weekly radio show about books and writers with a Michigan connection. It airs every Tuesday at 7:50 a.m., 11:55 a.m., and 4:20 p.m. (or listen anytime online), on WMUK 102.1 FM, Southwest Michigan's NPR affiliate. I am the host of Between the Lines.

This week's guest: Simon Kalil Borst

You’ve seen his work. It's in the online Kalamazoo magazine Southwest Michigan's Second Wave. You might also have spotted it in the People’s Food Co-op's newsletter. Or maybe you've seen his work on the walls of Brakeman Design during an Art Hop. Simon Kalil Borst’s comics and graphic designs are popping up all over Kalamazoo, and they are all about Kalamazoo.

The latest addition to Borst’s portfolio is The Kalamazoo Coloring Book, published by Bookbug and released in November 2016. This coloring book is for adults and is a collection of iconic Kalamazoo images.

"Bookbug contacted me and said they were interested in doing a coloring book,” Borst says. “I’ve been doing comics in and about the Kalamazoo area, so they thought I was the right person to do it. They contracted me and gave me creative control over the project.

The book includes 31 drawings of Kalamazoo, mostly of the downtown area. Borst says he started out from a list of about 50 places provided by Bookbug, then pared it down to what appealed most to his artistic sense.

“A lot of those images came from ..."

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