Running Hot

An interview with Cameron Steele

Cameron and her son Theo, on a hike, with hair.

Here’s the part where I remind readers that an interview like this takes time to conduct, transcribe, and edit, and your continued financial support makes not just these wonderful conversations but all the other all-access material possible. I’m very grateful that my health insurance has more or less covered my medical care over the past ten months (thank you, state of Illinois). But there’s a lot to this recovery business that’s not covered by insurance, so in keeping with the ungainly name of my newsletter, I’m channelling subscription monies towards those bells and whistles: bodywork, acupuncture, personal training to build my strength back, circus classes — which I started up this week, woo! Crew team — which starts up April 23. Help me raise enough money to go to rowing camp this summer! And, if a subscription is beyond your means right now, I completely understand. Thanks!

I first “met” Cameron Steele in October – when I posted something on Twitter about it being my last day of chemo and she responded, “Today’s my first day, ugggh. Congrats to you!” Through that exchange I discovered her Substack newsletter “interruptions,” in which she writes with grace and bite about literature, illness, mothernood, and tarot  – among a sweeping span of other things — and I’ve become a huge fan.

Over the past six months we’ve probably developed one of those parasocial relationships that inches shyly toward the realm of the real, and when she commented on one of my posts relating to Anne Boyer’s cancer memoir The Undying, I jumped at the chance to have an actual conversation. Listening to the recording of that hourlong phone call, I found myself wishing I had the time or the chops to work with audio as well as text. So much of the sustenance I drew from her insightful analysis of the Boyer and so much else is communicated through her voice: vivid, honest, erudite, searching. I’ve edited the transcript as best I can, and I trust that at least some of that comes through!

Based in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Cameron has a PhD from the University of Nebraska, where she currently teaches (remotely) creative writing, literature, and composition. She’s also currently in treatment for what is her second diagnosis of breast cancer, following an initial diagnosis and bilateral mastectomy in 2021. 

So, I don't have a lot of structure for this, but I am interested in however much of your personal story you want to share. And I'm also interested in talking more about memoir and writing about cancer. Specifically we were talking about The Undying, which has apparently become this touchstone for everything I'm thinking about in terms of writing about cancer and memoir, because it obviously touched a nerve with me.

Yes, I’m so interested in this. My focus in grad school was illness memoirs -- even before I got cancer -- and I sort of glommed on to your comment in your interview with Gina Frangello, when you said that the book had struck you wrong, because I read The Undying [for my PhD] and it, like, blew me open. But then I did return to it throughout the experience of cancer and found that I sort of received it a little bit differently.

I think I want to go back and reread it now, because when I read it I was in the middle of chemo and everything was very new to me. I was very raw and there was something about it that I found so inaccessible. I've been kind of really struggling with that ever since, because here's this book that won the Pulitzer Prize, it's very beautifully written on the level of craft and structure -- some of her writing is just exquisite, and it's really thrilling to read as a writer. But at the same time, I felt like it was just missing this emotional core that I needed. So, what was it that blew you away before you had cancer?

I've always been this person who kind of runs hot. My feelings exist on the surface of my body, and yet I'm also weirdly, at the same time, this person who has this attachment to being removed from those feelings. I was an investigative crime reporter before I went to grad school, and I was constantly yo-yo’ing back and forth between being so emotionally attached to the things that I was writing and the circumstances of my life. I was just on the sideline to tragedy after tragedy -- I was a reporter who covered homicides and racism and systemic issues in the Deep South.

You soak up a lot of trauma.

Yeah. And I took a lot of that into my body, which manifested as an eating disorder and drinking way too much and just sort of using whatever substance I could use to take myself out of myself. And so when I came across Anne Boyer's book, I was sort of newly sober-ish, and committed to living life a little less chaotically, and focused on trying to, I don't know,  be a good person with a capital G <laughs>.

No, I can relate!

So, her book, I think I read it in a night. And I was just really taken with the craft, the poetry of the language, but also how unflinching it was in its approach to the way that the medical-industrial complex treats women's bodies as data, as something to profit off of. And she was writing this without the heat that sort of encompasses all of my own writing and all of my own living. So I really appreciated that, and took it on as a challenge. Like: am I able to write about the personal from this remove in a way that perhaps can reach a wider audience? Because what I also found about teaching The Undying was that it's kind of compulsively teachable.

My students loved it because it's a long book, but it's written in these sort of short poetic sections. She's really working with the lyric essay. She's often writing from the first person plural, from the “we,” or the second person, “you.” And so my students could really envision themselves in her place in a way that I found that they struggled with, like Audre Lorde, for example, when I've taught the Cancer Journals or Sister Outsider. And different parts of the book stuck out to me. I've always been an insomniac, and books have always been sort of my first-level best friends. And so I would like fall asleep by thinking about some of the imagery of the book, like her eyelashes falling out as “reverse wishes,” or how she desperately needed the compliments of the nurses always telling her she was the best-dressed chemo patient there. I think that there are these moments of startling intimacy that sort of clung to me because the book was written from this sort of distance that opened me up to thinking about writing and about teaching in a new way.

I was teaching the book to my honors students when I got my diagnosis. And I had been rereading it along with the class, but at that point I ended up giving up the class and giving up teaching the book because I couldn't face any writing about cancer. I sort of hid myself away from it. I didn't go through chemo the first time but I was diagnosed with a recurrence in August of 2022. And I did try to go back to The Undying as I was going through chemo the second time. I was a little bit uneasy. Like, I clammed up at the very things that made me excited to read it at first.

That's fascinating. I know what you mean about the way she extrapolates from her own experience to this "we." And for me, that was what turned me off because I was like, “Oh, really? Like, who's the ‘we’ in this dialogue? You're not talking about me.” Which was maybe my own defensiveness in that freaked-out moment wondering, “How did I get here? What's happening to me, what's happening to my body?” But also there were little tells that didn't ring true. Like, she keeps talking about how much her port hurts. Maybe her port did hurt, but my port doesn't hurt, and it immediately made me not trust her.

Oh, right. Cause you're like, well, that's not MY experience.

She's claiming this universal experience by saying the nurses say it doesn't hurt, but we, the patients, know the truth. And I'm like, but it doesn't hurt! So, weird little things like that. And, wanting to be the best-dressed patient in the chemo pavilion is such an interesting twist on the way people in medical crisis often fixate on being a good patient, who is compliant and does all the things they're supposed to do. She doesn't want be that patient, but she still wants the approval of the nurses.

She has that chapter that begins, "I've always wanted to write the most beautiful book against beauty." But then like, you're right, in this other scene she's specifically dressing up because she wants the nurses to praise some aspect of her aesthetic or outward beauty. But I guess I found those contradictions endearing or like they spoke to some part of myself that I have a hard time voicing out loud, which is this huge desire to be both obedient and antagonistic and disobedient – to be both beautiful and also divest myself of the desire to be beautiful.

That's a really good way of putting it. Because I don't think I was giving her that kind of grace. And it is true, because that's a really complicated dynamic that I think I've been experiencing as well as I go through this process.

I also wonder if I would've disliked the book immensely if I had first come to it as a cancer patient. [When I first read it] I was trying to find ways in which to describe how I felt sick inside my body, as an individual, but also living within this culture that kind of wants women to be sick. But I wasn't, like, really sick! I mean, I was sick, but it was a functioning sickness. I was a mentally ill grad student and here was this memoir of breast cancer that poetically and very viscerally describes the feelings of exhaustion and despair and concerns about death that I was having, but brought them to a fine point. Like, oh, here's a person who's really sick – she has cancer.

it’s funny because then when you become that person, you're like, wait, I'm not that sick. I can't be that sick because otherwise I would be in mortal peril. But, oh no, wait, maybe I am in mortal peril!

Right. I mean, to be crude about it, one of the mindfucks for me of chemotherapy was like, I built it up to be like this huge, terrible monster -- and it was, but it also very much wasn't. Like, I still live.

I know. You're still you and you're still living your life and you're still going about your mostly daily things. I mean, chemo seemed completely overwhelming and terrifying to me too. The first time I went for treatment, every time the nurse came near me to try and access my port I would flinch away. Until she was like, laughing and said you know, every time I come near you, you're crawling into the back of your chair. But then once it happens, it's like, well, this is just another thing that's happening to me, and it becomes normalized in a way that's also pretty fucked up.

Absolutely. My kid – we'd go out to brunch on a Saturday morning and he'd randomly tell our waitress like, “My mommy's hair broke off because she has chemo.” But you know, it was normal to him. We did a lot of the things that we always did, like hiking and going out to breakfast and hanging out with friends and working, of course. ‘Cause you can't not work. But then there were all these things that were just so weird. I also always lurched away from having my port accessed. And that was the other thing that was so weird. It's just like the language of it. I'm like, “accessed?” You're about to shove a huge thumbtack through my skin!

When you were talking earlier, I was making a couple little notes about The Undying, and I wonder if in some ways adopting this kind of removed persona from your experience is about trying to speak in the voice that men or the establishment have always honored, the voice that denies emotion and denies pain and denies suffering and feeling.

I can definitely see how someone could feel that way. But I felt that she wrote really compellingly about pain and about the struggle to articulate pain, to speak of our own pain to another person and have that person truly understand the depths of the sensation, the depths of the anguish. 

In fact, she's actually sort of pushing back against Elaine Scarry's book The Body in Pain, which so many of the white male philosophers love. Scarry's talking about how we actually can't apprehend or understand another person's pain. Pain is always something that destroys language. But there's a section from The Undying that I still actually teach for my comp classes that very much pushes back against this idea that pain is inarticulate and that we can't understand it. Instead she talks about how pain doesn't destroy language so much as it forces language into pure sound or pure sensation. And that our bodies actually do respond to other bodies in pain, and what the medical-industrial complex is doing by rendering pain into pain charts, like on a scale of one to ten, or cataloging all of our symptoms only as data is that doctors then stop understanding patients in this sort of holistic way. Which I found to be really true to my experience with my various contacts with doctors over the years. 

Her book is unrecognizable from other sort of feminist memoir classics, right? Like Prozac Nation or even the Cancer Journals or, um, I don't know, Louise DeSalvo's Vertigo or --

Girl, Interrupted?

Yes, exactly. Because she's decidedly not trying to tell a story about her small little life. And I can understand how we might chafe against that. Like, I chafe against that too in my own writing. At the end of the book, she starts to move into the language of wanting the book itself to be a form of reparative magic, which I'm not sure that I like. But at the same time, I think I found that I could find myself in this book more than I could find myself in other memoirs of illness because of the moves that she was making. 

It's interesting because I worked as a journalist for many years, and I really internalized all the journalism dictates about, you know, not making yourself the center of the story and neutral language and facts and observation being key and all of that. And I have found that for me, having cancer and writing about having cancer has been the really the thing that has cracked me open in the way that I've been trying to crack myself open as a writer for a long time, I think.

Crack you open as in you feel like you felt like you're hitting some sort of creative vein that you've never hit before?

Yeah. I mean, my career has been all over the place, but I have written essays in various forms and was an essays editor at the Rumpus for a little while, and some of it's just boring imposter syndrome, but I just didn't ever feel like a lot of the personal writing that I was doing was all that worthwhile or good. Like, maybe I was trying, and it was fine, but that was as good as it was going to get and I wasn't going to ever level up in a way that seemed like it would be satisfying to me. And I think it probably had something to do with conditioning, both just as a journalist and just general, you know, patriarchy.

Yeah.

And this experience has liberated me from worrying about all of that. I'm so resistant to narratives about the silver linings of cancer, but that has been, for me, the silver lining of cancer. It has, um, got me into some creative flow that I didn't know was possible.

I feel very much in line with that sentiment, even if I feel like all the words that I can use to describe that sentiment seem to fall short or land like cliches. Once I began to have experiences that taught me about the brevity of life, the brevity of pleasure, the brevity of joy -- in some ways it freed me up to write about all those things, but also all the other sort of shit things.

With breast cancer and then with the treatments that go along with it, I feel like you're introduced to this whole new language, like this whole new way of talking about the body and health and the world and what it means to be a woman. And being introduced to new vocabularies has always been very, um, generative for me.

Oh yes,  everything's fascinating and it just feels like you're like taking on this whole new assignment that you're gonna completely excel at.

Yeah.

I'm sure that people struggle with identity issues around, say, a lung cancer diagnosis, but with breast cancer or ovarian cancer, probably, you know, there's definitely this sort of double layer of like, what is, what does this mean to me as a woman, as a, um, or as a human? Like how does it change my identification with myself?

When you were diagnosed, did those questions come up for you immediately or did you have to sort of find your way to them?,

They came up pretty quickly. I got diagnosed right before I got married -- I mean, literally 10 days before my wedding -- so here I am, I got diagnosed with breast cancer. I'm in the middle of this very heady and wonderful moment of my life that is also totally bound up with the questions of femininity and normativity and like, why am I getting married? Why don't we just stay the way we were, as domestic partners or whatever? And instead here I am standing in a park in Wisconsin in a white lace dress.

Oh my gosh.

So, all of that was swirling around and coloring my experience of going into treatment. I started chemo three weeks after my wedding, and that is something that I have not really been exploring so much publicly as a writer, but it's definitely on my mind. It's a lot easier for me to write about my body than it is to write about my heart, but the experience of being married and entering into this new phase of life in a heterosexual partnership with a man, that was not something I ever thought I wanted or needed. I was 54 when I got married and I already knew my life was going to change a lot and then it changed, like, times two! So questions about my identity as a woman and as just an agent in the world have been -- I don't want to say under siege, but they've definitely been very much in flux all year.

Oh, absolutely. Like to go from the high of this wedding and all of the questions that sort of come up around, you know, the choice to get married, and then to have that wrapped up in the diagnosis of a major illness.

It was a lot!

Another thing I wanted to talk to you about was the piece that you wrote about your best friend. One of my best friends was diagnosed two months before me, but we had very different diagnoses and treatment plans, and she has had such a different experience traveling through the medical system and coming to terms with her body and what it all means for her than I have. It's been really fascinating. So the piece that you wrote about Emily really resonated with me. It was so lovely. So, thank you for doing that, because it gave me a vision for how I might be able to do that with my friend.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we joke about it -- like, you know, I wouldn't wish this experience on her ever. And yet at the same time, it's been one of the things that I'm weirdly most grateful for.

Oh my God. It's invaluable.

Yeah. Because in those moments where I couldn't figure out how to even talk to my husband, who's been my best friend for like a decade, about the roiling emotional changes along with the body changes along with the poison in my body, I could just call Emily and there was no worrying about having to provide backstory or having to cushion our language or pad it out with reassurances. We could just sort of say it boldly, like – “I kind of want to die today. This is bad.” So that was incredibly helpful. And in the moments that got really heavy or shadowy or dark, it was a good reminder that I certainly wasn't the only one experiencing this and that I had someone who could deeply identify with the pain of it all, and the grief.

So were you two diagnosed around the same time?

Well, it was kind of similar to you. I had just had this really exciting, joyful experience – Emily and I had finished our PhDs together and I had written a memoir in essays as my dissertation that had been a runner-up for a first book prize. And it was just sort of this exciting moment where we'd finally done it and we both had jobs and we'd had this big celebration. And then a month after our graduation, we had been in and out of the hospital with my son who had issues after getting covid, which was really scary, but we had finally got his health situation under control. And I woke up one morning and I had been dreaming of my breasts leaking blood. Like, granted I was reading the Oresteia at this time, and in the Orestia Clytemnestra had dreams of, like,  a snake sucking blood out of her breast --

Still, it's very goth!

Right? I was having these weird dreams and I was pulling all of these really bad cards -- I pull tarot cards every morning; I'm a tarot reader on the side – and I woke up and I felt this weird pain and I was like, Kiernan, there's pain here. And he felt [my breast] and said, "I think I might feel a lump." And it was breast cancer and I ended up having a double mastectomy in November of 2021.

At that point in time, my doctors had told me that I was cancer free, or NED -- no evidence of disease. And they had told me that I had low-risk cancer.

Emily was diagnosed nine months after me, and had a different kind of cancer and had to do chemo first, and in the course of her doing chemo, I found a lump growing on my skin above my left chest wall where the original cancer had been. And I kept asking my doctors like, is this something to worry about? And they said no, no, it’s a cyst. And then I went to this astrology conference in Seattle in May and I met this like medical astrologer <laughs> -- It's so woo.

That's okay! I'm open to woo. It's fine.

And so there's this famous medical astrologer named Judith Hill, and she stepped into the elevator with me and my roommate. And my roommate was like, “Oh, you have to talk to my friend. She just got through breast cancer but she's not feeling well.” And she took my hand and she goes, “I can tell that something is draining you of vital force.” And, in the moment I rolled my eyes and I sort of bitched about it to my friends. But a month later I got back home and the cyst doubled in size and became painful. And so at that point I was like, “Hello doctors, are you sure you don't want to look into this a little bit more?” And they're like, “No, you're fine.” Then my husband got a new job in Virginia, and the day we moved from Nebraska, one of my surgeons had her secretary call me to say, “Actually you know what, Dr. Maxwell wants to see you in her office, can you be here tomorrow morning?” And I was like, “No, I just moved to Virginia!  can't be in your office tomorrow morning.” So I had to go to the whole rigamarole of finding a new care team here and they did surgery to remove the cyst, all of them swearing that there is no way that this was cancer. And it was cancer.

And not only was it cancer, but they had originally graded it as a grade one tumor and then they decided, oh no, this is actually a grade three tumor and you're actually in a very much higher risk category, so we're going to do chemo. And it was just sort of a mess.

That sounds incredibly awful and I'm so sorry.

Thanks.

How are you doing now? I've picked up on some of the stuff you've been saying in your newsletter about the post-treatment blahs. And I'm very much there as well with that feeling of, “Well now what?” How do I balance what is in my head the absolute certainty that it's going to come back with the idea that it's not, and that I have to move forward with my life with this positivity and this future orientation. Well, at the same time not denying the fact that it could come back.

Yeah, it has completely messed with my ability to look into the future and say what I desire for my life. Which is weird because people are always talking about like, oh, well you should live like you're dying. You should have a bucket list <laugh>. It's like, well ...

I also have a toddler!

Right! And it has completely screwed up my sense of what I desire for myself and what I desire for my child and what I desire out of living each day, each moment of each day, much less sort of like gazing into this sort of murky future.

These months post chemo -- after sort of the initial excitement of my hair coming back --- I wake up and I'm still way more tired than I ever used to be. The fatigue is real. I have really struggled in trying to describe that sense of fatigue, that sense of just utter exhaustion, and Anne Boyer's book does a pretty good job of it. Like there's a sentence where she's like -- and I would just like repeat this to myself in my head in the mornings when I'd wake up and I just would want to pummel myself back into sleep -- "the exhausted are the saints of the wasted life, if a saint is the person who's better than others at suffering." It's this intense, all encompassing dark, bottomless pit, black star of tiredness. So there's been this weird dissonance since chemo has ended where I'm looking better, I'm feeling better, but I also still feel worse than I've ever felt in my adult life. And that scares me and it also depresses me, and it's also incredibly lonely and boring just to sort of be exhausted all day.

Yes, it is. It's lonely and boring and depressing. And then depression is lonely and boring. And ... I have been there and I'm still there to some degree, but I ended chemo in October and it’s been two and a half months since I finished radiation, and I will say I do feel better now. For a while I was really beating myself up, like why don't I feel better? But it does come back, slowly. I definitely don't feel as flattened as I did even a couple weeks ago.

Well, I cling to statements like that. Emily has been done with chemo for a lot longer than me now too, and she also is starting to feel better and I'm just like, okay, maybe I'll get there.

xx