Tiny Things with Lorie Kolak
Tiny Things
What can tiny things hold when everything else feels too big?
In her essay “Tiny Things,” Lori Kolak writes about chemo brain, lost words, a miniature garden, and the complicated reality of living through a cancer experience that refuses to give you the story you want to tell.
When the future felt too big, she turned to something small: paper leaves, tiny flowers, tweezers, glue, and the deliberate work of making something beautiful.
In our conversation on The Burn, Lori says:
“You don't want the wide lens, right? You want... right now, what's this moment like?”
And that's what the tiny things gave her: a way to stay with the moment when the bigger picture was too uncertain to hold.
She also reflects on the resistance that came with wanting cancer to be different, to somehow not change her, not take anything from her, not to be true—and what happened when she began to open her hands to the experience.
“I can say imperfect and mean whole. I can say healthy and mean a thousand complicated versions of my body that others might call sick.”
Sometimes finding our way through cancer means finding a new language for what we’ve lived. Sometimes it means making something tiny enough to hold.
Lorie was diagnosed at 41 with Stage II, ER+, PR+ breast cancer and the pK71+ genetic mutation. She is a stay-at-home mom and lives in Riverside, Illinois, with her family. Lori has had her short stories published in Bellevue Literary Review, Bear Deluxe, and Hemingway Shorts. She’s worked in university libraries, book sales and distribution, copywriting, and copy-editing. When not writing or reading, she enjoys arts and crafts, camping, baking, and gardening.
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Writing Prompts Inspired by Today’s Episode
Set your timer for eight minutes, write without stopping or editing yourself. There is magic in leaning into that time. The prompt is:
What my hands held together when everything else felt like it was coming apart…
I invite you to write cancer-y for this, or you can take other moments in your life when things felt like they were coming unglued. What did you make? What did you tend to? What did you build? Maybe it was a project, a garden, a meal or even a small ritual your hands could do when your mind couldn't.
Describe it in detail. Bring in the texture, the smell, the scale of it. Write into what that thing was doing for you—what it was holding, tending, or making possible when you couldn’t quite do those things for yourself yet.
If you find that you write best with a good prompt, check out our free prompts and learn about our writing workshops.
Happy writing! Until next time, take good care.
Episode Links
Read a transcript of this episode.
Purchase the 2025 “Metamorphosis” issue of Wildfire Journal.
Find Lorie on Instagram.
More about our episode sponsors: Temple of Kinship and Paxman Cooling
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