Dancing Myself Back to Life with Judith Cookis Rubens
In this episode, today’s storyteller, Alyssa Tsagong, reflects on a decades-long friendship that grew into something she now calls kinship: a relationship rooted in truth, curiosity, and shared tending of body and spirit. After a metastatic diagnosis, that friendship became a place where fear could be spoken out loud and held without being fixed or minimized.
We talk about friendship as sacred work, building capacity for grief and joy at the same time, and how supportive relationships can be intentionally cultivated — not just relied upon — through practice, ritual, and presence.
In celebration of Pride Month, each Friday in June we’re re-sharing our favorite episodes featuring LGBTQ+ voices from the Wildfire community.
Emily Rau is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and the editor of the Willa Cather Archive. In this episode Emily reads her essay “I Might Be in Love with All My Friends” from the 2023 “Love & Intimacy” issue of Wildfire. Emily’s story is about sensuality mixed in with a lot of milestones and steps in a breast cancer experience that we haven’t really heard before at Wildfire.
April and Emily will talk about why it was important to share a cancer story that folds into Emily’s queer and polyamorous life, honoring her grief in cancer, the role the polyamorous community played in Emily’s cancer journey and the fear of overtaxing people with our burdens. They will also discuss the prairie, and hear Emily beautifully explain the comfort and metaphor this particular landscape provided her in cancer. This episode contains explicit content about drugs and sex.
In this episode, today’s storyteller, Caitlan Killian, reflects on friendship formed during treatment, the parallel journeys of two young women with breast cancer, and the paradox of celebrating healing while mourning loss. This conversation explores metastatic survivorship, community, grief, faith, and what it means to hold hope and heartache hand in hand.
