Shannon Gottesman was diagnosed at age 40 with hormone positive, Stage III breast cancer. She is the Vice Chancellor at the University of Pittsburgh, a traveler, an advocate, and mom of two boys. In this episode, Shannon reads her essay “On This Mat” from the 2024 “Body” issue of Wildfire Journal. Her piece is about learning to breathe through discomfort while finding balance in chaos and to honor a body that has fought so hard to endure. April and Shannon will discuss the complexities of cancerversaries, bridging the mind and body through yoga, mantras, and taking pause in life.
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Today’s storyteller reflects on receiving a breast cancer diagnosis at 28 and the lasting emotional imprint of survivorship more than a decade later. Moving between past and present, she explores the survival mindset that carried her through treatment and the gradual return of feeling after years spent simply trying to stay alive.
This conversation explores memory, identity, inner resilience, and the relationship between who we were before cancer and who we become afterward — revealing how pain and love can coexist in the same story.
Today’s storyteller reflects on her relationship with her grandmother against the backdrop of a family deeply marked by cancer. As relatives fall ill and pass away, truths are hidden and grief moves quietly through generations.
This conversation explores memory, cultural silence, substitution and survival, what it means to be mistaken for someone who is gone, and how presence itself can become an act of love. It’s a meditation on mortality — and on what it means to remain.
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This conversation explores body image after cancer, surgical loss, motherhood, scars as story, and what it means to define boldness, beauty, and confidence on your own terms — not society’s.
