Ideas are always in the air. A piano has 88 keys — and yet from those 88 keys spring millions of combinations, millions of pieces of music, each one entirely its own. Writing is the same. The raw materials are finite. The stories are not.
The short story that first planted the seed of our collaborative writing life was born from standing witness to Hurricane Gloria battering the Newport coast — the wind, the chaos, the strange stillness that followed. The novel that launched our career grew out of Jim's doctoral dissertation. And every novel since has grown from a single moment of ‘what if?’ — an event, an occasion, a crack in ordinary life that let the light in.
This past week gave us a new kind of ‘what if?’.
We traveled east — first to Connecticut to visit family and Jim's mom who turns 100 this year, then south to Philadelphia for the Living Beyond Breast Cancer (LBBC) Annual Conference, one of the country's most powerful gatherings of patients, thrivers, survivors, caregivers, and advocates.
Walking among hundreds of people who are navigating the same disease — some newly diagnosed, some years into survivorship, some walking alongside someone they love — was humbling in a way that's hard to put into words. You felt the weight of every story in every room. And the courage.
I was honored to sit on a panel for ‘Tending the Inner Self, a writing workshop’, exploring how the creative act — journaling, storytelling, putting words to the unspeakable — can be part of healing. We talked about writing not as performance, but as witness. As a way of making meaning when life asks hard questions.
But what moved me most was something simpler. Throughout the conference, people kept being asked the same question — asked to pause, look up, and answer:
"What's your story?"
Not your diagnosis. Not your prognosis. Not your treatment timeline. Your story. What brought you here. What you carry. What you hope for. It's such a small question, and such a vast one.
It reminded me and Jim why we write. Every book we've made began because someone — or something — had a story that needed to be told. A storm. A dissertation. A grief. A joy too large for silence. The form changes. The impulse never does.
So we want to ask you — our readers, our community, the people who have walked with us through all these pages. Those living with the early stage and metastatic breast cancer, navigating treatment that doesn't end, finding meaning in the in-between. And those walking beside them — caregivers, family, friends who love someone through the hardest chapters:
What's your story?
We'd love to hear it. Hit reply and tell us — one line, one paragraph, or one page. What moment made you say, ‘what if?’ What event cracked your life open, or closed a chapter, or began one you didn't see coming?
Every great piece of fiction starts somewhere true. Maybe yours starts here.
