John Walker Pattison speaks with Write My Memoirs
Always up for an interview with a memoir author, over Zoom recently I met with John Walker Pattison, author of Me and My Shadow: Memoirs of a Cancer Survivor. You can watch our exchange on my YouTube channel. John wrote about beating his own cancer when he was still a young man and then watching his daughter survive hers when she was just four years old. Motivated to help the next patient, John became an oncology nurse and participated hands-on in many cancer battles. Although British, Pattison found spirituality through visits to the Lakota Sioux in Montana. All of this felt unique enough to warrant a memoir.
Memoir Writing to Inspire Others
Non-famous people who decide to write a memoir tend to have lives that they see as out of the ordinary, often because of the unusual challenges they’ve faced. Many also hope to share lessons they learned from overcoming those challenges and, in that way, inspire readers or at least let them know they’re not alone.
John Pattison falls into this pattern of aiming to help readers with cancer feel less alone. It gives them hope, because not only did John survive against the odds, but his daughter Donna baffled the medical teams with her triumph over leukemia. At one point, the doctors doubted that Donna would survive the night. Decades later, she is still bringing joy to her dad.
An Individual Process
In my conversation with John, once we established his reasons for writing a memoir, I was interested in his process. I hear a lot about people who write in fits and starts, making great progress for a few months only to get stuck at a hurdle and languish until they realize one day that they haven’t looked at their work in more than a year.
Sometimes the roadblock has something to do with the writing itself, such as having second thoughts about revealing the author’s truth when that can be hurtful to family members, or maybe they need to research some facts before they can continue. But it also can just be a time constriction. If you get busy at work or your spouse becomes ill or a new grandchild monopolizes your focus, you may have trouble finding the time to finish your memoir.
John had none of those issues. He began writing after he retired, with time on his hands, and he finished his first draft in just six months. Then he wrote and rewrote many subsequent drafts after asking a lot of friends to read his manuscript and give him candid feedback.
Publishing a Memoir
When John felt satisfied that his draft was ready, he sent it to both agents and publishers with a specialty in memoir. Like many manuscripts from first-time authors, his did not find a home with any of them. But a hybrid publisher accepted the book and published it in 2022. Hybrid publishers charge authors a fee, and John says that his book sales have not yet matched what he spent, but he’s hopeful and patient.
Writing Changes a Life
John has mixed feelings about how writing his story affected him. While it was cathartic to have it written and see it in book form, he found it extremely painful to relive his ordeal, especially the experience of watching his daughter suffer from cancer treatment.
Still, once he wrote one book he was hooked. Since then John has published several children’s books, with one of his upcoming books accepted by a standard publisher. For a first-time memoir author to become a working writer is quite an achievement, and I wish John all the best in this post-retirement writing career.