Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Goosebumps
How the poet Andrea Gibson has colored my post-cancer, early fatherhood days
Hi, hello, how are you? I HOPE THIS NOTE FINDS YOU WELL. The arrival of this missive in your inbox officially marks the conclusion of my hiatus, which lasted longer than predicted because it turns out being a new parent is hard. Who knew? You probably knew. You knew and you didn’t tell me. How dare you! Anyway. At long last and without further ado: Here we are now. Entertain us.
So much has happened these last few months that it’s hard to know where to start, and in fact I’ve already scrapped several choice grafs about the majesty of homebirth, the limbo that attended going 10 days past our due date, the video games I played during said limbo, and some stuff about Pema Chödrön (hopefully some of which we’ll revisit over the next few weeks). But where we’ll start is with Andrea Gibson — who I initially stumbled upon last fall, through their newsletter, Things That Don’t Suck — and this idea that’s been rattling around my head since a day or three after our daughter was born in early December. The idea was simply to draft a quick post and send it out, and the post would just be a drawing of R. and a link to Gibson’s poem, “Acceptance Speech after Setting the World Record in Goosebumps.” Trust me, it would have been cool.
But now the time has flown by. My experience of newborn care is that the days have a way of just evaporating, so I never got around to doing that, and here we are and it’s late in February, and me and my wife have already gone through several different phases of new parenthood—the euphoric haze of those first few days, the sleepless slog that follows, the minor fall, the major lift, etc. Through all that, though, Gibson and their work has loomed large, has stayed relevant, and remains a good place to start things off, providing as it does a nice bridge between where I was a few months ago, where I’ve been, and where I hope to go. And so first thought, best thought; the poem is below. For best results, click it and imagine yourself listening in the context of what would have effectively been a birth announcement, and this is me handing out cigars.
Did you listen? Ha, of course you didn’t. This is the internet and no one pauses one thing to go listen to a six-minute other thing and then comes back to the first thing. That’s crazy! So lemme take a shot at summarizing: It’s about pursuing awe the way Steph Curry pursued the record for most three-pointers, and how the reward of this pursuit reflects not just your level of commitment but also a sincere love of the game. The game of goosebumps, that is.
It would be a swell poem even if you didn’t know Gibson’s story, but it takes on new dimensions if you do: In 2021, they were diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and after their initial treatment and subsequent remission, the cancer recurred, and their doctors have since informed them that it is incurable. Since learning this news, Gibson has been making the rounds on podcasts, sharing a perspective on life that is itself goosebump-inducing, as well as the occasional poetry reading. For a more time-sensitive taste of how they’re processing all of this, might I suggest “Maga Hat in the Chemo Room,” which we’ll return to shortly.
Now it turns out Andrea Gibson is the poet laureate of Colorado and a performer of no small renown on the spoken word poetry scene (think Mary Oliver if she grew up listening to Bikini Kill). According to an artsy-fartsy lesbian friend of mine, they’re “very big in my circles,” but this was all news to me. I discovered their work because of our (somewhat) shared experience with cancer, and since then I’ve found that whenever my heart starts to numb up again, when I find my soul contracting after too much scrolling, I can listen to Gibson and feel both engaged with and stupefied by the world, while at the same time unafraid of its darkness.
And so I guess my hope/goal with this first post back was to try to recreate or at least share some of Andrea Gibson’s outlook/worldview/magic, because there have been several moments in the last few months when I’ve listened to one of their poems or heard them say something during an interview and found myself struck by an all-consuming warmth, a feeling of pre-verbal bliss that I imagine is not unlike the one that comes over our infant daughter’s face when the late-morning sun hits it during the little backyard strolls we take. Because of course a baby doesn’t know what the sun is, what a backyard is, has no words, no concepts—there’s just this sudden experience of brightness and warmth, the different texture of the air between outside and in, new smells, strange sounds, the raw experience of which you can see expressed on R.’s face. When she’s fussy I can take her outside and if I’m lucky the sun’s rays will short-circuit her crying, prompt this little flinch of recognition, sometimes accompanied by a small coo, and she will reset completely, and relax.
I keep getting little tastes of something like this experience from Gibson’s poetry these last few months. It started in the waning days of my wife’s pregnancy, as the dominant narrative of our lives was shifting from Battling Cancer to Having a Baby—it was amidst that shift and all the emotional turbulence that attended it that I first stumbled upon “Goosebumps,” which brought me to tears the first time I heard it in the car, driving to meet a friend for lunch. And so my impulse here is to try to capture that energy and bottle it, share samples like those people at Costco: Here, try this tiny serving of wonder, of stupefaction. Spread this flavorful mix of what it’s like to be gobsmacked by life on your favorite cracker. “Started training morning to night,” Gibson writes, “crowbar swinging like a pendulum at the wall/ of my chest. Tore the caution tape off/ my life and let everything touch it.”
I said we’d come back to “Maga Hat in the Chemo Room,” because we have to. It’s 2024 and the election-year wave is building, the swell of dread, the surging anxiety, the frothing of move-to-Canada type thoughts, all of it presaging some massive crash, or at least that’s how it feels. There’s the actual day-to-day ickiness—the news, the news, the news—and then there’s the larger context for it all, the ever-growing antipathy toward the other side, that sense of a monolithic antagonist attacking on every front. I won’t try to convince you or anyone that this antagonist isn’t real, least of all because I feel its encroachment constantly. But I’m with Gibson that it’s maybe worth at least trying to imagine an alternative, even if that only feels possible from the vantage of somewhere like a chemo chair, which of course I have some direct experience with.
As you may have guessed, the poem is about Gibson’s encounter with a Trump supporter while they’re both hooked up to their chemo rigs. I’m tempted to quote it here at length, but I think that would flatten the impact. I said I wanted to hand this stuff out like samples, but here I’ll encourage you to sit down for the full meal.
This concludes our first post back, but stay tuned for updates on format, publishing schedules, lofty intentions, and all the other stuff, coming soon. Fow now, here’s Andrea:
This is the Healings Newsletter. We thank you for reading.
Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Today’s installment is illustrated by Ayana H. Muwwakkil.
Healings is about illness, recovery and related topics, and began in the summer of 2023 as a chronicle of Garrett’s battle with cancer. We make no guarantees that it will hold together, thematically speaking, in the months to come.
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"The Real Work" by Wendell Berry
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
Pleased to meet you, Garrett, and thank you for sharing the work of Andrea Gibson. I watched both videos, and I have 1111 goosebumps. I became acquainted with them when Glennon Doyle said Andrea basically saved her life, so I picked up all of their books to read on a trip to Denver last year. Congratulations on your baby, condolences for the last good night of sleep you will ever have, which was sometime before the wee one's arrival, and best wishes for the happiest and longest of futures.
Thanks for sharing Andrea; I have goosebumps.