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.