When I was at Duke, I was able, with the help of English Department Dean Ellen Wittig, to combine English Literature, Creative Writing, Women's Studies and Public Policy into an interdisciplinary degree. At the time, I had no idea what my plan was -- I just knew these were courses -- taught by Jim Applewhite, Reynolds Price, Deborah Pope, Bruce Payne, Alex Harris - that made me keenly aware of the greater challenges in world around me, and changed how I saw my place in it. I became compelled to use my voice to change the world for the better in some small way. James Applewhite's careful mentorship gave me faith that I might be a writer, and my work as a co-editor of The Archive, helped whet my taste for publishing. The Public Policy professors Alex Harris and Bruce Payne encouraged me to turn my pen to journalism -- and I spent much of my senior year in Durham doing my senior project as a photojournalist telling the stories of abused and disenfranchised girls in a local halfway house. My English professors fully supported my explorations into all aspects of writing, including journalism.
Reynolds Price encouraged my fiction writing (though in his inimitable, only half-joking fashion warned me that I'd have nothing important to say for a good ten years), and he encouraged me to go to The Radcliffe Publishing Program (now at Columbia). Deborah Pope, whose lectures are still etched into my mind to this day, turned me onto the work of Adrienne Rich, Louise Bogan, Carolyn Forche, and so many other fierce female poets. I became a feminist in her classroom, and have remained one to this day. One afternoon when I confessed to her that I didn't know what I was going to do when I graduated, Professor Pope told me, "I think you'd make a very good editor, have you thought of that?" I had not.
Nevertheless as graduation loomed and I waited for a letter of acceptance to the Radcliffe program, where I'd applied for a scholarship, I had no idea how to turn everything I'd so passionately pursued at Duke into a job, much less a career. I panicked. Grad school without a scholarship was not an option: my mother was widowed with four children. So I applied for a job as a department store sales manager as a back up, and was astonished when they told me I wasn't right for the job, despite the fashionable suit I'd bought for the interview.
As luck would have it, with recommendations from my English professors, I did end up on a scholarship at Radcliffe's publishing program, and from there landed in the world of New York magazines -- smack in what we used to call "The Pink Collar Ghetto;" the one place a woman could be assured of a job in publishing, editing women's magazines. I helped to launch a feminist minded magazine called New Woman, and then realized after a decade as a senior editor, and later, as editor at large, that I still wasnäó»t using my own voice, that small still voice I'd begun to hear within, so long ago at Duke; the voice my professors had seemed to hear within me, long before I heard it myself.
I left to write. I began writing magazine articles, but I wanted to delve deeper in exploring pressing social issues for groups who needed a champion with a pen. So I started writing books. My first book, How to Make the World a Better Place for Women, was published by Hyperion exactly ten years after I graduated from Duke (thanks Reynolds Price äóñ you were right). After marrying and having multiracial children, I wrote a book called Does Anybody Else Look Like Me? A Parent's Guide to Raising Multiracial Children, and talked at schools around the country about supporting the development of mixed race children in an overtly race conscious world. After that, I took on how poorly our medical system serves the chronically ill, and my public policy background came into play. In 2008 the Simon and Schuster imprint, Touchstone, published my book The Autoimmune Epidemic, which investigates the causes of a growing environmental health crisis (it won the 2012 AESKU award, given to those whoäó»ve made a lifetime contribution in the field of autoimmune disease). In 2013, the Penguin imprint, Hudson Street Press, published The Last Best Cure, a memoir of healing. My most recent book, Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, published by Simon and Schuster/Atria, examines the lifelong consequencesäóîboth emotional and physicaläóîof adverse childhood experiences, and offers readers suffering from chronic conditions a window to healing -- and has just been nominated for a Books for a Better Life Award.
So many times in my years since I was at Duke, I have thought back with gratitude about those professors who took the time to mentor me. James Applewhite spent long hours over coffee with me in a kind of unspoken, ongoing independent study, and had me over to dinner with his wonderful wife Jan, to talk poetry äóñ and the interest he showed in my work gave me a kernel of hope that I might have something to contribute to the world through the written word. Through all of my later rejections as a writer, of which there were many, one of the many things that kept me going was the faith that teachers and professors had shown in me along the way.
It took time to build a solid book writing career, but today I'm writing books full time, exploring social health-science issues, especially as they affect women's well-being, the deepest inner workings of the human heart, human suffering, and healing.
As a journalist, I've had to learn to be less of an introvert and speak to crowds -- I've keynoted events including the International Congress on Autoimmunity; given plenary talks at the Johns Hopkins Women's Health Conference, "A Woman's Journey"; and spoken at the To Your Health Lecture Series, hosted by the 92nd Street Y in New York, as well as moderated panels for national health symposiums, including the American Association of Autoimmune Related Diseases (AARDA) Summit, advocacy groups, and medical schools nationwide.
This fall, I'll be giving a talk for the Baltimore Duke Women's Forum.
During book tours, I've discussed my work on The Today Show, National Public Radio, and ABC News, and my work has been highlighted on the cover of Parade, as well as in Time, USA Today Weekend, Parenting, and Psychology Today. I've published in The Washington Post, written for the medical journal Health Affairs, have been a regular contributor to More Magazine, and have authored health science articles for a host of magazines, in addition to blogging for Psychology Today. Along the way I've won a few awards, and when on crunch deadlines, I've disappeared to do writing-in-residence fellowships at the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Today, I'm working on my sixth book, and often find myself conflicted by the fact that being a writer today necessitates being savvy with social media -- something that just wasn't the case when I began this career. I'm not terribly good at that -- but at least I've learned that I do, in fact, have something to contribute to the social discourse (even if it isn't short enough to tweet). And I've learned that even though, back at Duke, I thought I had no idea what I was doing when I pursued so many disciplines of study, that some part of me knew exactly what I was doing. And moreover, I suspect my English professors did too. I credit the English department with encouraging me to explore, to pursue both my love of writing and my love of advocacy, and in the process, help me to discover that my voice as a young woman did matter.
So wherever you are, Dean Ellen Wittig, Professors James Applewhite, Deborah Pope, Bruce Payne and Alex Harris, thank you. I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing today if I hadn't met such extraordinary mentors at Duke. My only regret is that I didn't write this thank you to the Duke English Department years and years and years ago. But it's often only as we get older and understand how challenging life can be, and how much it means for one human being to take the time to mentor another, that we come to recognize, with gratitude, those who have influenced us most in our lives -- even if we never understood it well enough to tell them at the time.
English Department
