Carol Shields is one of the writers I most admire. She authored ten novels, including The Stone Diaries, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General’s Award as well as four collections of short stories, a number of plays, several books of poetry, some literary criticism, and a biography of Jane Austen.

In a post on my personal blog,¹ I wrote

Carol Shields CBC Interview

I recently happened onto an interview Shields gave to the CBC which the network’s guide describes thusly: In February 2000, she [Carol Shields] spoke candidly to Writers & Company host Eleanor Wachtel about her illness and how it changed her writing.

It is a poignant, gracious, unsentimental dialog that addresses living with cancer, pursuing ones passion despite the deadly diagnosis, writing with ones head and heart, and being human.

I include it here for the especially well articulated insight it provides into what it means to deal with a chronic, deadly disorder every day and the consequent impact on adherence to treatment.

The interview can be found at CBC Interview: Carol Shields on living with cancer

Footnotes

1. Other posts on my personal blog also include Carol Shields, including Carol Shields and Neruda at the Heck Of A Guy Internet Sunday Salon and Carol Shields On Living, Writing, Cancer, and Julie [back]
2. Julie was my much-beloved, fiercely smart, extraordinarily sexy wife, who died in 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. She was also a prize-winning writer. This blog includes many other posts about her and the unlikely but true story of our romance (See Julie FAQ) as well as several of her short stories and other pieces (at Julie’s Writings and Unpublished Julie. [back]

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