CONTACT: Email Donna at donnatrussell at gmail dot com.
In 2008 Helicon Nine published Donna Trussell’s collection of poetry, What’s Right About What’s Wrong. The book was named by slate.com as one of the best books of 2008, and the following year it won the Thorpe Menn Award.
From slate.com:
“Each [poem] is a compact little rock of Texas Gothic, thrown hard. Think Flannery O’Connor in verse, with less God and more rodeo,” wrote reviewer Melinda Henneberger.
Even before Trussell was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2001 — she got the call telling her to report for surgery while watching the Twin Towers fall — her work, as she says, “tended toward death, death, pet death, sex, love, death.”
But fierce or yearning, I love these ghosts — like Miss Candace Mayes, who surrendered her place in the last lifeboat off the Titanic to a mother who died years later of guilt, in an asylum where “Her hands would climb the trellis. Her feet were never still.” Of a daughter never conceived who calls, “[G]ive me your darkest winter, it will be spring to me.” And of a poet read posthumously, who can’t help asking: Who are you? What do you do? Tell me, is the sun out?
Trussell’s fiction and poetry have appeared in North American Review, Poetry, Chicago Review and other journals. Her short story “Fishbone,” first published in TriQuarterly in 1989, has been widely anthologized and performed as a play in Seattle and Dallas.
In 2006 Trussell’s outspoken essay Remember Me as a Writer, Not a Survivor on her struggle to regain ground lost to the trauma of illness was published in Newsweek. After her diagnosis, she had assumed her abysmal survival statistics would make emotional adjustment unnecessary. But, as luck would have it, her remission held and she began to write again.
A fifth-generation Texan, Trussell now lives in Kansas City, where her husband works as a theater critic for The Kansas City Star. In the past Trussell has worked as an editor, film critic and teacher. Currently she co-writes, with her husband a political cartoon column named Chaos Theory for AOL’s Politics Daily. She also blogs for the Politics Daily column Woman Up.
Site design by WordPress & Jake Trussell
This page has the following sub pages.
Hey Donna, I was trying to track you down and found this website. Beautiful! You know, things happen, people get lost in daily trivialities, and then one day they wake up and realize too much time has passed. I hope this little note finds you and we reconnect–if not, I’ll keep trying.
Hi Donna
Just wanted to say hello from the Midwest- from one clear cell ovarian cancer survivor to another! (Yes, it is quite lonely out there, but I’ve met 3 of us in person.)
I’ve read your posts on ACOR and your essay published in Newsweek. Now I look forward to reading your poems.
When I get my website up again, I’ll let you know. It has been on my to do list. Your blog is inspiring.
BTW: I want to be remembered as a photographer.
Hi Julianne. Thank you for your kind words. Do let me know when your photos are up.
WordPress has software for photo-bloggers. It’s called Cutline. If you click on Tabbie’s Garden on my bookmarks to the right, you can see an example. The format is nice and simple.
Re remembered as a writer: And irony of ironies, if I’m remembered at all, it will probably be as a “cancer writer.” Ha!
But I’m just thrilled to be alive. To the uninitiated: Clear cell is supposedly the most aggressive and most chemo-resistant of the roughly 35 subtypes of ovarian cancer.
For the record, my oncologist never did agree with the experts on clear cell’s mean reputation. And today I am seven years out and, as far as we know, cancer free.
Dear Donna Trussel
We have read your story Fishbone in our english classes and we would like to know where you got your inspiration from?
also we thought about why Wanda gives her baby such special names? (Fishbone, Logarithm and so)
We have talked about for instance which “images”, symbols you have used and what they mean.
At last we want you to know that it was a good and interesting text with a good message.
We hope the hear from you
Friendly regards
- Mie, Kristine, Luna and Carina
Hello students! Thank you for writing to me. See my blog post Looking for America:
http://donnatrussell.com/2008/11/07/looking-for-america/
A great resource for a young writer with cancer- thank you!
why u iterested in Iran?
Re Iran: My heart goes out to the protesters. They want good government, and good relations with the rest of the world, and many are willing to die for that cause. What’s not to like?