I  have lived on this Massachusetts river for most of my adult life, and I feel lucky to have landed on such a restorative shore at an early age. As a young mother caring for a baby born with a complicated, life-threatening illness (cystic fibrosis), I filled a lot of spiral-bound notebooks with a lot of angst while gazing out at the river. By my early thirties, in a full-fledged — (and thankfully early) — mid-life crisis, I sent myself to the MFA program at Emerson College, where I met many of the wonderful people who continue to enrich and encourage my writing life to this day.

After I earned my MFA, I taught creative writing at Emerson and at Clark University. I also spent many years as the Associate Fiction Editor for Ploughshares, the award-winning Boston literary journal. In the late 1990s, I began to write and publish short stories, just as I dreamed of doing during my notebook-filling days.  My growing story collection was a finalist for awards, including the Iowa Short Fiction Awards and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Some of the stories were anthologized, and I won grants in Massachusetts (thank you St. Botolph Club and Massachusetts Cultural Council, you legitimized my aspirations and provided funds for some necessary, do-it-yourself writing retreats). I also began to research and write a novel.

Viking Penguin published CASCADE in 2012. It’s a novel about an artist who is trying to figure out what’s important in life, and it takes place in the 1930s in a town slated to be destroyed for a reservoir, and in the art world of pre-war New York City. It was the Boston Globe Book Club’s inaugural pick, a People magazine pick of the week, and a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. Currently, it is the Massachusetts pick for the East Coast Centers for the Book “Route 1 Reads” program.  

Soon after CASCADE’s paperback released, we found ourselves in another medical crisis when our daughter’s respiratory health rapidly worsened. She needed oxygen 24/7 and a lung transplant. For three years, we lived in twilit limbo as she waited — far too long — for the call that seemed like it would never come. I wrote about this, briefly and occasionally, on our blog at www.9LivesNotes.com

Caitlin got her transplant, finally, but it was too late. She’d had to wait too long. We lost her in December of 2016. She was 33.

Life without her has been excruciating and heightened, and there has been great confusion and also great clarity. When you lose what’s most important to you, pretty much everything else falls away, and you’re left with the fact of yourself, still existing in a world that must make sense if you’re to continue living in it.

I temporarily put away the novel I had been writing and began work on a memoir. I also became certified by the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine as an end-of-life doula, so that I might better speak to the state of end-of-life care in our culture

LITTLE MATCHES will be published by HarperOne in April 2021.

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