I did it by submitting an essay called Two Green Notebooks to Read650, a partner in Carnegie Hall’s Voices of Hope Festival. I couldn’t have been prouder when it was selected to be one of the 30 essays featured on the Read650 website during the April 16-30 online festival.

Mine is about the notebooks that I kept while I was being treated for cancer in 2004, and even though they were nothing like the polished memoirs that many others have written about their cancer experience, they still helped me get through the ordeal.

None of what I wrote would mean anything to anyone but me, I say in one passage. It’s like the scratches that people leave on the walls of their prison cells, simply a device to mark the passage of time.

You can read my whole essay and all the others in the Read650 anthology Voices of Hope: True Stories of Resilience, Recovery, and Renewal, available for purchase here.

And thank you for reading my first-ever blog post!