Transcription of Susan Conley for the show Health / Wealth #21
Lisa: We’ve just spoken with Tom Shepard from Shepard Financial about the relationship between health and wealth. We now have an individual who’s slightly different perspective but also very strong on the health and wealth side of things. She will be speaking with GenevieveMorgan, the wellness editor for Maine Magazine as part of our Maine Magazine Minutes.
Genevieve: Thanks Lisa. Today in the studio on the Maine Magazine Minutes we have Susan Conley an intrepid traveler in life and geographically whose written a book called the Foremost Good Fortune, a memoir about her experience moving her family to China in 2009 and the adventures of many different sorts that occurred there. Welcome Susan.
Susan: It’s great to be here.
Genevieve: Why did you name your book your Memoir the Foremost Good Fortune?
Susan: The book is a memoir about moving to China with my family. We’ve lived in Beijing for close to 3 years and the extended metaphor of the story is moving through China and moving through cancer. I really equated cancer with the foreign land. If read you the poem that goes with the title of the book it might make more sense. Should I do that?
Genevieve: I would love that. That would be great.
Susan: This is from Dhammapada number 15.
Hunger the foremost illness. Fabrications: the foremost pain. For 1 knowing this truth as it actually is, unbinding is the foremost ease. Freedom from illness, the foremost good fortune.
I think when I read that at the start of many of my book talks around the country, I get this light that goes on in people’s eyes and the whole story begins to make sense on many different levels.
Genevieve: Certainly when you’re young and relatively healthy, you don’t think about your health as a fortune, as a reserve but then when you become ill it becomes so clear.
Susan: Yes. I think when you become a mother as well the elixir of good health becomes even more magical and sacred. Its only when illness really came knocking at my door that I’ve realized all these other wonderful good fortunes that I had in my life. This story of mine it’s a story about tracing disease through motherhood as well and how it resonates through a family and how a family learns to put cancer in its place and make room for disease and all of its different permutations
Genevieve: Which I think is very important because when you were describing in your book moving to China you were talking about your boys being relatively young and very active. I remember quite vividly 1 of the opening paragraphs how you didn’t have the boys that would go off and play scrabble or something. They were the boys who were jumping on beds and were always with you. You really needed to make room for this in your life.
Susan: We brought young boys to Beijing. They were 4 and 6. They were doing ski jumps off the sidewalks and running up the stairs at the Great Wall and they were fearless travelers. They were game for it all. Then when mommy got cancer, we had to find a language for that and a place to put that so that it didn’t take over our family, didn’t take over our time in China and we really learned to do that through a whole lot of honesty.
Genevieve: Let’s talk about your move a little bit because you were born and raised in Maine though you lived in other places in Boston and San Francisco. You’ve always been a writer. Do you want to take us a through a little bit of your background?
Susan: I was the girl in 6th grade here in Maine who was always scribbling poetry and reading the lyrics to the Jackson Browne songs on the album sleeve. Poetry was were language really came alive for me so I studied it for years and years. I got undergraduate and graduate degrees and then I became a teacher of poetry. It’s always been that distillation of language that attracts me to poetry and still does that kind of crystallization of that thing that can be said any other way. I brought that keen interest in that economy of language to China.
I had a real intention that I set to write a story about my family moving to China and I did that for about 100 pages before I found my own cancer. Then in the end the book became a love letter to the boys. It was really written for them and to them and it’s something that I hope they will read with great pride and delight when they’re maybe in their 20s.
Genevieve: It didn’t start out as a book about cancer?
Susan: No. It was a day in the life book. A book about what happens when you watch your children learn a new language. What happens when you go figure out how to weigh Chinese apples at the market and then it had to become a book about cancer or it was never going to be finished and that really was my revelation. That there had to be a way to connect that carefree mother with that new mother who had cancer and was she the same and was that voice the same. This breakthrough was when I went back over some rather scribbled notes I taken during the cancer treatment and realized “I have a book here. It’s actually the second half of that first book and it’s the same mother. I’m the same woman. I’m changed but not necessarily for the worst.”
I think I had to get really open to the material. I had to come to terms with it and find my own language for it. I hear that a lot with cancer survivors this needing to assimilate it, decipher it in whatever way works internally for them. A painter will pain. A dancer will dance. I needed to write. I wrote my way through the cancer. I know that we all hear that it can be incredibly cathartic to have some artistic expression around disease. I have to say I couldn’t agree more with that. It was actually one of the greatest surprises of my life, how freeing it was to write through the cancer.
When I found my cancer in Beijing, I went through early phase of denial which I think is now quite common. I had a on the spot lumpectomy in a Beijing hospital because I had come head to head with a patriarchal old school Chinese doctor who really was dismissive of these lumps that we had found. He wanted me to go far, far away for many months but I was stubborn and I called my wonderful woman doctor back here in the states. She has some lines that I quote in the book that go like this, “We never wait Susan. We always go back in and found out. You can’t wait.”
Then I called that Beijing hospital and I said, “Hi it’s Susan that American with the breast lumps and we can’t wait.” As things go in China things move really quickly and I had the surgery I think the next day. Then things got zoo-ey little crazy because it was clear we had malignancy and then they wanted to do an on the spot mastectomy and we said wait and we put the brakes on. We actually came back to the states for the mastectomy.
Genevieve: You used the western model for the emergent surgical care that you needed and you came back to America for that but then you went back to China post-radiation. That was when the book started to change and when your perception about how to heal started to change. I’m interested in that because that’s a real sea change for you.
Susan: Cancer caused me to give up the reigns so to speak and to begin to let go of that powerful control mechanism that I was driven by I think here in the states. Cancer is so humbling that there really wasn’t much left to do but give up control. When we got back to Beijing and what I did was I found a fantastic yoga teacher. A Chinese woman who worked with me to get my strength back in my arms. She also worked with me on all kinds of mantras and things that were incredibly helpful and grounding.
Through her I was introduced to 5 element acupuncture. I began to really open up to the language around the disease and to be able to say “Yes I have cancer and I’m incredibly hopeful. I think this has a happy ending. I’ve made room for it. I can find words to talk to my kids about it.” Once I became that open, it all got very simple and it was all about honesty and about living very much in the moment as much as I could.
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Genevieve: I also love the part in your book where your dear friend Lily King says to you, “Suze you can’t think your way through this.” It seems to me that some of what was happening for you at least in reading your book was this opening to feeling your way.
Susan; For those of us who want to live in our heads, cancer really challenges that assumption. I think Lily was right that it was time to try to live more in my body, in my heart. Acupuncture really helped that. I found this wonderful man in Beijing who did a lot of acupuncture and acupressure. I remember going to him for the first time. He knew very little about me. He spoke limited English. It was a very special place, very quiet, very spiritual and it was all intuition and touch. There wasn’t a lot of verbal. He began working on me and he said, “Okay we need to tell your body that it’s okay to let go now.”
Genevieve: Do you have a sense for what you were holding on to or do you have a sense for what it was that you needed to open up to?
Susan: It’s really interesting question because I think my answer has changed over time. The obvious answer is that big C control word that I think can inform a lot of what we do here in the west. I also think that what I was holding on to was more primal than that. I think as a mother when I was diagnosed with cancer I felt this incredibly intrinsic urge to survive for my kids. It was very simple. It was if I can control this, if I can hold on to it and if I can solve this then I can live. If I can live, then my children will have a better life. It was really all about mortality for a while and then I began to work through that and that was a big turning point for me was “Hey you don’t have to hold on to the whole disease and think it inside out. You can let go. You can trust.”
Genevieve: Well you came back to Maine a year and half ago?
Susan: yeah.
Genevieve: How have you taken some of the lesson that you learned in China and that opening and translated it back to your life here in the US? What have you learned?
Susan: There’s a certain chaotic wonderful wild energy on any street in China and that sense of potential that anything can happen on a given day is something that I try to draw on while I’m here in Maine. Then I would say yoga, yoga,yoga, meditation, living much more in the body. For someone who sits at a desk and writes a lot, I could live in my head all the time and for those of us who need to get that release, for me yoga is the perfect thing.
Genevieve: You’re working on a novel and …
Susan: Yes.
Genevieve: When will that be coming out?
Susan: I just finished the novel. It’s called The Woman who cooked on the roof and it’s about an Indian teenager who ends up in Paris in the late 80s. She’s befriended by an American teacher there who comes and helps her at her asylum center and that teacher’s brother is dying actually of a disease. I had written a draft of this novel before I wrote the memoir. I think the fascinating thing here for me and for all of us who are trying to write the stories of our lives is that these stories weave together. The work I did in the memoir and the work I did around getting honest with myself about cancer then came to the novel and informed the novel. I was able to write I think much more honestly and authentically about disease.
The novel will come out in about a year and it’s with the same publishing house Knopf and the same editor as the memoir so that’s really nice because there’s continuity there.
Genevieve: Then, what else are you doing? I know you’re very active in the literary world in Portland.
Susan: The Telling Room has always been very dear to my heart. It’s the creative writing center here in Portland that I cofounded with 2 wonderful writer friends coming on about 7 years ago. I’m always trying to do all things Telling Room, trying to teach there as often as I can and watch that organization grow and all these incredible ways. I’m also teaching for the Stonecoast Writers’ conference summer actually at the Stonehouse in Freeport. I’ll be doing some memoir intensives.
Genevieve: That is one thing we didn’t talk about. You are a wonderful teacher.
Susan: Thank you so much. I love teaching and I can wear many different hats when I teach. I have been teaching various workshops up and down the coast. Actually I was teaching some in Beijing back in June and I’m always amazed by the power of the story and about how when you gather a group of men and women together in a room and you ask them to get really honest with themselves they will take great risks and they will really show you how much story can transform human experience. I’ve been deeply moved by that. I love teaching.
Lisa: Do you think that that struggle, the power of the story, potentially the illness do you think that that also is a part of the wealth that you’re describing not only health as being wealth but also struggle?
Susan: I’m happy to say in hindsight yes. It’s a hard earned wealth and you don’t wish it upon people necessarily. I remember being asked at a reading by a cancer survivor if I would give up the knowledge that I gained through having my cancer to not have my cancer and I was pretty floored by that question. She had a quick answer. She said she would not give up here knowledge but she didn’t have children and there’s the rub. I didn’t answer her. I think it’s a complicated question and it comes back to some of those primal survival mother bear things that we were talking about.
I’ve learned so much and I’ve learned that that struggle was not about being happy but that happy doesn’t necessarily mean growth, doesn’t mean change. As I said earlier, I’m definitely changed by the cancer and I really do not think it’s for the worst.
Genevieve: How can people who have heard you today learn more about you and read more of your work?
Susan: We did a website when we launched the Foremost Good Fortune and it’s for me more than just a here’s my book and here’s where I’m reading. I put a lot of content on there around so what do you do if you find yourself with a cancer diagnosis? What might you look for in your provider? I also did where to get the best dumplings in Beijing. Where to find the most crazy flea market in the world. That website was fun. I did a blog on that website where I took on a lot of the topics that we’ve talked about today in various essay form.
Genevieve: That’s great. We’re so thrilled that you could come in today and I am hoping that you don’t get any more surprises and that you continue to add to your health and your wealth. Thank you for coming in today.
Lisa: We will link through to your website off of the Dr. Lisa website but do you want to tell people what your website actually is?
Susan: It’s susanconley.com and I also pull together a fairly detailed Facebook page which is an ancillary to the website but that has a lot of stuff on it too.
Lisa: Thank you Susan.
Susan: Thanks so much. It’s been a treat.
Genevieve: Susan Conley’s work can be found online. It has appeared in the New York Times magazine, Plowshares, the Harvard Review and the Paris Review among other literary magazines. She was profiled in the March 2010 issue of Maine Magazine and was the recipient of The Greatest Women in Maine award in 2011. To read more about writers like Susan Conley go online at the mainemag.com or pick up the latest issue in a local newsstand near you.