Jane Roper's Blog, page 13

When you assume…

A couple of weeks ago I was buying a bottle of wine at a big, not-fancy liquor store—the kind with everything from $50 bottles of bordeaux to vats full of $2 flavored vodka nips. This was shortly after the walkouts for gun violence, and shortly after I made the mistake of getting into one of […]

Liminality

I was an anthropology major in college. I guess because I was interested in what makes people as a species tick—what common traits and tendencies we all share across cultures and around the world. I also had a hankering for travel and exploration, and figured that by studying anthro in college, at least I could […]

Vulnerable

When I was in my MFA program at Iowa way back when, a friend said to me, “One of the things I like about you is that you’re so willing to make yourself vulnerable.” Because my self-esteem as a writer was at its lowest ebb while I was at Iowa, part of me thought,  Do […]

Escaping, Retreating, Dangling

  1.  Escaping. I got back a few weeks ago from another  sojourn at VCCA — I’m on the home stretch of my novel revision, and damn it feels good. It also felt damned good, as it always does, to escape from the demands of everyday life, go to this gorgeous, tranquil place, immerse myself […]

Fun kids activity: Cursing white supremacists!

Yesterday in the car, on our way to buy school supplies, I talked with the girls about what had happened in Charlottesville. There’s a house we pass on our way to Route 1, where we do a lot of our household shopping, that has a Trump flag on their flagpole, under their American flag. The […]

The Last Five Years

A little over a week ago officially marked five years that Clio has been in remission: no perceptible cancer cells in her body.  After two years of intense treatment and three years without any signs of relapse (occasional parental freak-outs notwithstanding), it’s very, very, very, extremely, extremely likely at this point  that her cancer — the same […]

Of Novels, Monks, and Fetal Kangaroos

For the past three-and-a-half (my God, has it been that long?) years, I’ve been working on a novel.  It’s about things like class dynamics and gentrification and motherhood and addiction and, oh yeah, childhood cancer. I’ve mentioned this all here before, but sort of in a muttering-under-my-breath-and-adding-a-fake-cough kind of way, because let’s face it: It […]

Pretty soon they won’t

Every since my girls were babies, these four words have periodically — well, often, actually — popped into my head, paired with the things the girls do or love or need at any given time. Things that are so routine I hardly notice them, until I do. Because I realize that even as they’re here, they’re on the […]

The Old Country

I confess: I’m not feeling super-compelled to write a blog post. But I really really wanted to get that post-Trump-grief post off the front of my website, because enough already. I mean, not enough with the fury and dismay over our national disaster in chief. I’m still mad as hell about that, and still working hard to fight for […]

Grieving, committing, hoping

When Clio was diagnosed with cancer, my body felt it : Dread and fear that clutched my stomach and weighted my limbs and hampered my breath on the way up out of my lungs. Grief that forced tears up through the hollows of my face and cave of my throat and made my heart feel like something bloated and raw. A narcissistic, possibly unhinged man […]