When I was forty-seven, I was busy writing a one-woman show about a woman who gets lost on a country road on her way to do a vision quest. But one fateful late winter day, I schlepped down to Greenwich Village to have my annual mammogram. I wasn't a bit worried. My breasts were barely AA. Where would cancer have room to grow? Unfortunately the mammogram of my left breast showed "suspicious micro-calcifications," and soon thereafter I had a mastectomy for early-stage breast cancer. That was the end of my treatment. I felt alone and very vulnerable as a survivor. I looked and looked, in vain, for a memoir of another woman's experiences after treatment, when she was on her own again. At the same time, I couldn't get back to writing my one-woman show. The words wouldn't come. Actually, I felt afraid of writing, afraid that if I wrote anything negative, this might somehow stimulate more cancer cells. But then one day, I plunked myself and a notebook down at a Greek coffee shop on Second Avenue, and what would become "Balance," the fourth chapter of Adventures of a One-Breasted Woman, poured out of me. Eventually I wrote the memoir I had sought. The book chronicles my adventures during my first six years after treatment. I am now a 20-year survivor. I hope the book will lighten the way--provide a little trail mix, a slightly twisted walking stick--for other cancer survivors as well as survivors of other serious illnesses and those dealing with body image issues. I got hooked on the written word when as a child I first read James Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks. Later I majored in English as the Univeristy of Colorado, flew over to Egypt to teach English at the American University in Cairo and then became a newspaper reporter. I detoured slightly thereafter, spending years as an environmental licensing engineer (wherein I analyzed environmental laws without a law degree), but in the evenings I wrote songs, performed them in cabarets, wrote some plays and began to act. Along the way, I've been published in a number of literary journals.After living in New York City most of my adult life, I am now happily settled in western Massachusetts. In my spare time, I am a gardener of entirely too many plants.