Now I Lay Me Down to Fight: A Poet Writes Her Way Through Cancer

In stirring verse and essays, Katy Bowser Hutson chronicles her battle with breast cancer and the complications of faith amid such a fight. Accentuated by the art of Jodi Hays, Katy's words lead us through the realization of cancer, the experience of chemotherapy and a mastectomy, relentless rounds of radiation, the uncertainty of ongoing treatment, and what comes after survival. She writes in resistance to sickness, of wrestling toward beauty:

Cancer is an overgrowth, a kudzu:Tangling and strangling legitimate life.
Chemo is a killing, a burning out:
Burning down to ashy carbon, indiscriminately
But cancer, did you know that I am a poet?

Through it all, she shows what it means to struggle in a battered body and to pray to a God who is near to the broken. Join her in this consideration of mortality and witness her persisting trust in God's unseen ways.

Katy Bowser Hutson is a forming member of the children's band Rain for Roots. She is the coauthor with Tish Harrison Warren and Flo Paris Oakes of Little Prayers for Ordinary Days, and a contributing author to It Was Good: Making Music to the Glory of God and Wild Things and Castles in the Sky. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband, Kenny, and their two children.

Tish Harrison Warren is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America. She writes a weekly newsletter for the New York Times and is a columnist for Christianity Today. She is also the author of Prayer in the Night andLiturgy of the Ordinary. She lives with her husband, Jonathan, and their three children in the Austin, Texas, area.