Write for Yourself

Write for Yourself

Warning: This post is too long but I can't help it.

About 5 years ago, I watched a PBS "American Experience" episode about a man named Vivien Thomas. Thomas was an African-American man working as a surgical tech at Vanderbilt and then at Johns Hopkins who developed a procedure used to treat a fatal heart condition in children called "Blue Baby Syndrome". Having planned on going to college, Vivien Thomas lost his savings with a bank failure during the Depression. Instead, this brilliant man was self-taught through his work in the lab and his voracious appetite for books and research. Enduring poverty and overt and ever-present racism, Thomas did not get the recognition he deserved until later in his life. He became a cardiac surgery pioneer, and trained some of the world's most renowned surgeons.

After watching this story, I felt sure that I was supposed to write a biography for middle schoolers on the life of Vivien Thomas. So without any knowledge of how to write a biography, and with no idea if any publisher would even be interested, I took on the project. To this day, I think that the driving force was gratitude. Our youngest son was born with congenital heart defects and I remember some scary early days with him. But I knew that help-- real help, was only a visit away in Iowa City or Rochester. As I read the stories of how utterly helpless parents of blue babies felt, watching their babies and toddlers gasp for breath, faint, and even die in their arms-- with no treatment available, and none on the horizon--the magnitude of what Vivien Thomas actually did hit me. He saved countless babies and toddlers destined to die and he trained generations of doctors who would go on to tackle even more mysteries of the heart.

So I started researching the story. I traveled to Baltimore to interview doctors who had known him well. I had coffee in the apartment of a sweet old soul who worked side-by-side with Dr. Thomas in the lab. I read scores of articles in the Johns Hopkins medical library, and asked his son-in-law as many questions as time would allow. I studied Dr. Thomas' autobiography, which was technical and under-stated and at many times, WAY over my head. I wrote. I rewrote. I tried very hard to communicate to middle schoolers what Dr. Thomas was up against during the time of Jim Crow, and beyond. I tried to tell his story truthfully, without embellishment or edge-smoothing. We're all complicated on the inside, and Vivien Thomas was no different.

Today, the manuscript sits in a small rubbermaid tub completed. The feedback on it has not been what I'd hoped, and it looks like it will remain with me. That's a edge-smoothing way of saying it was rejected. However, having some distance from it these last couple years, I can honestly say I would do it all over again even knowing the outcome. I would invest the time, energy and money into writing his story. It was an honor and a privilege to get to know a man I so admire, and to talk to others who were inspired and moved by his story. I learned some big things as I wrote, too, about the mechanics of the heart, along with the tenacity and sacrifice of the spirit.

A good friend of mine has a quote on her blog today that I must share because it's what prompted me to write this post:

“My suggestion is that you start with the love and then work very hard and try to let go of the results. Cast out your will, and then cut the line. Please try, also, not to go totally freaking insane in the process. Insanity is a very tempting path for artists, but we don’t need any more of that in the world at the moment, so please resist your call to insanity. We need more creation, not more destruction. We need our artists more than ever, and we need them to be stable, steadfast, honorable and brave – they are our soldiers, our hope. If you decide to write, then you must do it, as Balzac said, “like a miner buried under a fallen roof.” Become a knight, a force of diligence and faith. I don’t know how else to do it except that way. As the great poet Jack Gilbert said once to young writer, when she asked him for advice about her own poems: “Do you have the courage to bring forth this work? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say YES.”
– Elizabeth Gilbert, “Some Thoughts on Writing” (via theuproar)