Writing and Remission
Total immersion mastery, reaching for the words to begin again
Mastery is extending the hand, over and over, after starting, after stopping, after uncertainty, after success, after doubt. Reaching out to begin again.
Welcome to Writer In The World, a curated collection of essays on the writing life by acclaimed MFA faculty and alumni. This is the Wednesday section of MFA Lore.
Other sections include Metaphortography, a quick dose of visual and literary inspiration that posts each Monday to launch your writing week. Writers in Conversation and other MFA Lore essays on the craft and business of creative writing drop each Saturday.
You can join our community and subscribe to some or all of these sections for 90 days FREE with this special WITW offer:
High Five*
by
I’ve always liked the number five. It brings up an early memory of sitting at the kitchen table with my parents. Dad was showing me how to draw the number on a piece of paper. “See, there’s this guy, and he leaves his house and goes straight down the street,” he explained while moving the pencil down the page, “curves around the corner, but then he remembers his hat,” he lifted the pencil and brought it back to the top, “so he goes back to put that on his head, see, you get a number five!” My early fives looked more like that guy stumbling home after last call, but still: my own number five, very thrilling.
Five years ago in May I played a solo piano recital. It went very well. The venue was nice, the piano was in tune and responsive, my Dad was in the audience, and at the end, fellow pianist Hao came up and joined me for Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite: beautiful music. Several days later, I had surgery to remove half my thyroid. It was all planned, no big deal, one overnight at the hospital, then home to take it easy.
I’m not much of a “take it easy” kind of person. I spent the time reading about and then watching instructional videos on total immersion swimming. I wanted to try that next, and had mapped out the bike route to the pool — I just needed a green light from the surgeon to return to my normal activities. I thought he might not go for me totally immersing my neck as it was healing, but what about kayaking? I was willing to negotiate down to kayaking.
The follow-up visit was the usual poking and prodding while the doctor read a list of technical jargon about what he had accomplished. I perched at the edge of my seat waiting for the moment I could interrupt. Great! Now what about swimming? But then he mentioned the cancer.
Um, what? Cancer?
His drone turned to white noise and I heard nothing more of what he was saying. Instead, childhood memories were filling my mind: the trips to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the sharp finger prick to draw enough blood to check for leukemia, the most likely cancer to develop next, the other kids in the waiting room. The thunk of the x-ray machine.
Swimming had been taken off the table, but I no longer had my negotiating hat on. “What do I do next?” I asked at the end of the visit.
“Oh, don’t worry, I got it all. You’ll just get follow up scans for the next five years,” he concluded.
I was not happy as I walked to work after the appointment. I already did cancer as a child and had the t-shirt to prove it. Well, four of them actually: I had ridden in four Pan Mass Challenges as a cancer survivor. I didn’t have time to sit home and be sick. I had stuff to do. Did these doctors understand my timeline? I had recitals to play, pianos to tune, fiction to write, then bike all over Boston, kayak down the Charles River, and learn this open water swim technique. By the time I got to my office, I’d accepted that I was going to have to trust these medical people and just hope that they could keep up with me.
In the middle of these yearly scans, I was still looking for a total immersion experience and found it in Goddard College’s MFAW program. Completely submerged, I sank beneath the smooth façade of the novel, dodged the whirring gears beneath, and continued down until my feet hit bottom and I could look up and see the great engine of fiction spinning above.
Annotations slowed me down: I couldn’t just crash through a book in standard frenetic mode, I had to read and reread until I laid enough of the parts on my workbench to understand how the wheels turned. I learned how to take things apart and tried my best to put everything back together. What is so interesting about writing is the scale of things. Having spent years looking at Stephen Hawking’s universe spread across my sky, I now look at the beauty of small things: a well-told story, a balanced sentence, how a comma adds air.
This fall, I both crossed the five year mark and finished work on my Master’s degree. In cancerspeak, five years of clean scans is complete remission, it’s “cured” but-don’t-sue-me-if-it-comes-back, it’s resetting the clock to zero.
What does it mean to earn a Master’s degree? True mastery is not about hitting a magic number of years or even a magic number of annotations. Everything I write is certainly not a shining gem of perfection. Every scene is not well balanced and concise. There are too many words and most of them are in the wrong place. The mastery is not the end, the mastery is not the process, not the starting and certainly not the giving up. Mastery is extending the hand, over and over, after starting, after stopping, after uncertainty, after success, after doubt. Reaching out to begin again. Reaching out. The moment of decision to try. The breath. The brief moment of stillness in the body before inhalation. When your mind is already there, and you reach for the pen to follow.
Cate Gallivan was born in Massachusetts in the late 20th Century. After formal studies in film scoring, classical piano, and piano technology, she earned her MFAW from Goddard College in 2019. Through both sound and the written word, she seeks to tell stories. Her works have appeared in The Phoenix, Corner Bar Magazine, Nunum, and Bewildering Stories. Her StoryBurst Project is Gallimor Inc. | Explore Stories Today
Coming Live Attractions @ MFA Lore:
1. Well Published: LitMags!
Live with Creative Director , Thursday, July 24, 4pm PDT:
2. Authors Unfiltered !
Traditional publishing insights from the trenches Live with and :
August 12, 2025 (Tues), 4:00 pm PT: Authors Unfiltered on Niche Writing
September 23, 2025 (Tues), 3:00 pm PT: Authors Unfiltered on Media Platforms
Loreate Salons for Paid Subscribers are now bimonthly!
By popular demand of our Zoom Loreates, we’re now going to gather online every two months on the third Saturday. This day and time seem to work for everyone from Hawaii to Switzerland, so…
Our next gathering is Saturday, July 19 at 10amPT!
All paid subscribers are welcome. As we get to know each other, these gatherings will be less meet-and-greet and more discussion of the thorny issues bedeviling our collective writing life. Consider this online space our Loreate Salon!
Would you like an MFA-level response to your work?
Becoming a Premium Member of the MFA Lore community will entitle you to Aimee’s written feedback on your query and up to 5 pages (1250 words) of your creative work. Your “Take 5 Packet Letter” will highlight both the Strengths and the Opportunities in your work, helping you determine whether it’s time to “press send” to agents or reorient your revision. Price will go up next month, so subscribe or upgrade today!
*Originally published in The Writer in the World Jan 7, 2019
 | A guest post by
|