In The Headlines: Late poet Andrea Werblin Reid’s husband talks about publishing her final collection about dying from ovarian cancer

In the last three years of her life, Andrea Werblin Reid wrote 150 poems on living with ovarian cancer and end of life. Werblin Reid died of ovarian cancer in 2022. Her third collection of poetry, “To See Yourself As You Vanish,” will be published Sept. 9.

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In this episode of In the Headlines, Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor with The Cancer Letter, talks to Werblin Reid’s husband, Angus (Gus) Reid, and Werblin Reid’s friend, Sarah K. Sawyer. The two co-authored a story in last week’s issue of The Cancer Letter, “Andrea Werblin Reid’s unflinching poetry documents the realities of cancer care, clinical trials, and loss—Her collection, “To See Yourself As You Vanish,” will be published three years after her death.”

In the podcast, Reid and Sawyer talk about the challenge of putting together Werblin Reid’s poetry collection after her death.

“What she left us with was a large stack of work, certainly the pages number in the hundreds,” Reid said. “I had 150 in my head, I think, but maybe 170 of various levels of completion with a lot of overlap between them. She’d been writing in fragments and creating poems out of those. So, part of the work of producing the book and turning that into a book was what they call ‘sequencing and selection,’ in the industry, which is kind of a brutal process.”

Werblin Reid had “started on some sequencing before she was so rudely interrupted,” Reid said, but Reid and Sawyer and Werblin Reid’s other colleagues had to cut a collection of over 150 poems in half before the editing process was complete.

Reid left a lot of the writing decisions to experts. His role in the process was making sure that the poems stayed true to the essence of his late wife.

“It is a cancer book. It’s a very unforgiving, unsentimental book, but she was funny,” Reid said. “I really didn’t want a book that came out like she was just suffering and miserable all the time while she was writing it, or that she’d lost that sense of humor, because she hadn’t. She was always mad as hell about it. She wasn’t happy. But also, she was still Andi.”

Reid ends the podcast with a reading of Werblin Reid’s poem, Clinical Trial.

CLINICAL TRIAL

Andrea Werblin Reid

In exchange for a public chance at a longer private life, you give them,

not your body, but your body’s one error in calculation. the swerve,

detour, blunder unique to your system. you give them the soft scribble

of your consent. in exchange for a future where you might run

among penguins, or consider the altitude of a lark, his small brown body

racing vertically into the sky, you agree to be watched like a hawk.

Asked hundreds of times if you’re ok, if there’s anything they can get you.

longer life most people think. glass of water most people say,

since there is often some small thing lodged in the throat.

you remember that larks sing when they fly, unlike any other bird.

Her collection of poetry is available for preorder wherever you buy books.

Other stories mentioned in this podcast include:

This episode was transcribed using AI transcription services. It has been reviewed by our editorial staff, but the transcript may be imperfect.

The following is a transcript of this week’s In the Headlines, a weekly series on The Cancer Letter podcast:

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Hey everybody. We are now on our August publication break, but not to worry, we have an incredibly special episode to tide you over. Plus, since last week was our summer reading issue, we have plenty of content in The Cancer Letter proper to keep everyone engaged for the month we’re gone and it’s all completely free. Last week, our cover story was about a new episode of The Directors, a segment of the Cancer Letter Podcast.

This time we welcomed Mary Beckerle, CEO of the Huntsman Cancer Institute, Cornelia Ulrich, chief scientific officer and executive director at the Huntsman and Karen Knudsen, CEO of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.

Lou Weiner, director of Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, wrote about his mother’s world as a hidden child of the Holocaust and his family’s exploration of her journey through poetry and art. This year we had our annual summer reading list, but with a twist, we asked former federal employees what they’re reading after their public service was cut short.

Featured on this year’s list is former director Kimryn Rathmell and former director of NCI’s [Office] of Communication and Public Liaison, Peter Garrett.

Finally, we have the story that we’ll be focusing on in this week’s podcast. Andrea Werblin Reid wrote her third collection of poetry as she was dying from ovarian cancer. That collection is being published in September, three years after her death. Angus (Gus) Reid, Andi’s husband, and Sarah K. Sawyer, Andi’s friend, join me on this podcast to talk about what Andi was like and the process of putting together the collection of her poetry after her death without her input. At the end of the podcast, Gus does a very powerful reading of Andi’s poem, Clinical Trial. Let’s take a listen.

Thank you both so much for taking the time to meet with me. I’m really, really excited to have you guys on the podcast. I think it’s going to be really a unique and exciting, interesting one to have for our listeners. Before we dive in, I’d love for both of you to just introduce yourselves. Maybe Gus, you can just introduce yourself and then Sarah, you can explain sort of how the story came to The Cancer Letter.

Gus Reid:

Hi, my name is Gus Reid. My late wife, Andrea Werblin, was a poet. Published a couple of volumes during her lifetime, and she passed away a few years ago from ovarian cancer. And the last couple of years of her life she spent writing a very large collection of poetry about her experiences living with very aggressive cancer. And we have turned that collection into a book, which is being published next month. So I’m here to promote a book. The royalties are going to charity. It will be an ovarian cancer charity yet to be decided. Yeah, so that’s the basics of it. She had mostly been writing these poems for other patients with cancer, but there are a number in there that we’ve heard from oncologists and other people in the cancer industry have been quite meaningful to them, so that seems like a good reason to push it on the podcast.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Yeah. Definitely, definitely. Sarah, do you want to add anything?

Sarah Sawyer:

Sure. I can introduce myself a little bit. I’m Sarah Sawyer. I was a friend and a colleague of Andi’s, and I was an early reader of the poems along with a poetry group that she was working with when she wrote them. And we talked at the time about getting these poems out into the world after her death, which is what I’ve been doing with a collection of friends, and it’s been very much a group project. One of the things that I really love about these poems is that she resists the urge to make everyone else feel better in them. She is really talking about her own experience, and her own grief, and her own anger.

And where a lot of us, and maybe women especially, will sometimes default to, I want everyone else to feel good, or I want everyone else to feel comfortable. She doesn’t do that, and I think that’s especially useful maybe for Cancer Letter readers because you’re seeing some of the things that went unsaid during her treatment. There are things that, if you were her nurse, her doctor or her hospice worker, you would not have heard these things from her. She was very fun and very conscious of other people’s feelings, even when she was sicker. And so I think this book is a great resource for anyone doing any kind of work related to cancer, to be a spokesperson for the internal life of some of the people with the illness that you’re dealing with.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Absolutely, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for bringing it to us. I am thrilled to have this piece in our publication. I think it is incredibly powerful, both just to give readers or listeners a sneak peek at what the editorial looks like. Gus, you wrote it with Sarah’s help is what I understand, and interspersed throughout the poems that Andi wrote, and it’s just together it’s a really, really powerful story, so we are thrilled to have it. We’re thrilled to help promote it, and we’re really happy to have you here as well. So yeah, I think I’d love to start with just, and I think you guys started touching on this, but I’d love to hear a little bit about what Andi was like as a person. Just characterize her, get to know her a little bit, because obviously, I think her cancer experience has taken center stage as it must in this situation, but I’d love to just know who she was, what she was like.

Gus Reid:

The word that comes to mind for me with Andi was adventurous. She loved an adventure. Through her life she lived in different states, different countries. She loved a big landscape of mountains, and skies, and deserts and extreme things like that, and that stayed with her to very deep into the treatment. When she was recovering from surgery we took the train across America from Chicago to Oregon. That was pretty amazing.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Yeah, I can imagine that’s amazing. That’s crazy. That’s like four days; right?

Gus Reid:

Yeah, it’s a three-day trip.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Three days.

Gus Reid:

Yeah. That’s a really great memory to have. We’d met at a wedding in Puerto Rico of some friends. She knew them from when she lived in Barcelona for a while. I knew them from London. With English speakers and Spanish speakers, they decided to meet in the middle, and she was reading one of her poems at their wedding the first time I saw her, which was a really fun piece as well.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And forgive me if I’m getting the details wrong, but you moved from Edinburgh to Boston to be with her?

Gus Reid:

That’s right.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Yeah?

Gus Reid:

I did.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

So, that must’ve been a crazy transition for you and also, I mean, a testament to how strong your relationship was.

Gus Reid:

Yeah, it was a big step. It seemed like that was the only way for us to be together. We’ve been friends for a few years after we met, at some point that turned into trans-Atlantic dating, which we did for I think three years.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Wow.

Gus Reid:

And I finally just decided to propose, because there wasn’t really another way to do it, and I loved her. I mean, don’t get me wrong.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Yeah, of course.

Gus Reid:

But it did seem like that’s how the stars were aligning.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you have had your own success in the states, right? You talk about that a little bit in the piece as well about what you do. What you did, I guess.

Gus Reid:

Yeah. I’ve been a software engineer for a long time. I’ve never worked in the medical industry until I moved to the US. Obviously, Massachusetts has a lot of medical technology companies here, and I happened to get hired by a really interesting and exciting one. Radio medical systems. We make particle accelerators for ion therapy, protons specifically, for radiation treatment of cancer.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

And I mean you, I don’t mean to make you sort of repeat what you wrote, and no pressure to get it right, but the ending of the guest editorial was incredibly powerful, and I mean, it must’ve been incredibly challenging to be around talking about cancer and cancer treatment and things like that as your wife is going through this—and after. Is there anything you want to touch on with that? Again, I know it’s a little bit in the piece, but…

Gus Reid:

Right. Yeah. When Sarah let me know that The Cancer Letter wanted to take some poems and were interested in maybe an editorial piece, I realized that I had some things to say that could be of more wider interest. The piece itself really didn’t come together until the last few days because, and that was mostly Sarah’s influence; she’s the professional writer. Until then, it was really a series of just vignettes of the early parts of our relationship, the diagnosis, trying to keep it together while she was in treatment, and coming to work every day. And then, as you say, coming back to work after she died.

And the specifics of what the team was working on that week when I came back was very close to the bone. It was difficult. I certainly touch on it more in the essay, but the way that she died and then the focus on patient weight coming back meant that was some difficult conversations. You do get very good at compartmentalizing things, I think, just as a consequence of going through something like that, which sometimes I think can seem callous to some people, but to me there was no other way to deal with it.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Yeah.

Gus Reid:

You just kind of have to keep your head down and not think about all of this other stuff that’s going on.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Absolutely.

Gus Reid:

If nothing else, you needed the health insurance.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, just to give the conversation a little bit of a break from the heaviness, because I know it’s incredibly challenging, I would love to hear about her career as a poet even before her diagnosis. Obviously, I think a big chunk of it is after as well, but how did she get into writing? It seems like she’s always loved words, but yeah, just a little bit about that.

Gus Reid:

Yes, she very much had always loved words. She really became a poet while she was doing her, I believe, undergraduate degree. That’s really where she found that she had the right kind of writing ability that worked well for poetry. I know that she pretty much been told by one of her professors, you are a poet.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Wow.

Gus Reid:

That’s the kind of writer you are.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Wow.

Gus Reid:

And yeah, I think after that she’d moved states to do her MFA, I think that was in Arizona, and her first book was published around about, well, shortly after that. Came out of her experiences there and traveling from there. That’s also a period of her life, she moved out to Barcelona.

So, that book, “Lullaby for One Fist” is, it’s quite an academic work. It’s quite, it’s kind of playful in its use of language and kind of really aimed at the more academic side of poetry, I think. It explores a kind of bad relationship she was in at the time, and yeah, it’s quite that kind of young poet finding what her voice is. I think after that experience, she continued writing, but she was a bit distant from academic poetry for many years after that.

So, her second book, which is “Sunday with the Sound Turned Off,” was an independent press who took that book. She consciously decided she didn’t want to be published, or didn’t want to be published by a larger press and academic press because she wanted that book to be less of that kind of writing.

It’s a much more accessible book. She was in a much happier place in her life, some of which might have been due to me. I don’t know. So yeah, that book, it’s wide-ranging, it’s political, it’s funny, it’s a good entry point into Andi’s oeuvre, I think.

Then her third book, which is this one, “To See Yourself as You Vanish.” She never wanted to be a cancer poet. For the first year or so after her diagnosis, she flatly refused to do it. She had things to say, but she didn’t want to say them. It wasn’t really until COVID happened, and she was in chemo at the time, so we were obviously in super hard lockdown. A good friend of hers, another poet, invited her to join a group of poets, like an online Zoom thing, and they were working on poems, and she found herself writing again.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Wow.

Gus Reid:

The dam broke. So, that was the beginnings of this book. A lot of the development was really after she started reading about support groups and was hearing back from other patients, a lot of very encouraging thoughts from them.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, and there’s what, 170 poems in her last book? Is that correct?

Gus Reid:

In the book, no.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Oh, okay. Sorry, where did I get that number?

Gus Reid:

The book is a selection, a selection from—

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Got it.

Gus Reid:

… What she left us with was a large stack of work, certainly the pages number in the hundreds.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Got it.

Gus Reid:

I had 150 in my head, I think, but maybe 170 of various levels of completion with a lot of overlap between them. She’d been writing in fragments and creating poems out of those. So, part of the work of producing the book and turning that into a book was they call sequencing and selection, I guess, in the industry, which is kind of a brutal process where I guess writers say things like, you’ve got to kill your darlings and stuff like the bits of work that you really love, but don’t really fit in the book and find the things that belong there, and then hopefully at the end of the process you get a book out. Really, I had not too much to do with that process. Sarah was very much instrumental in that. I could probably speak to more of that process.

My involvement was trying to be a voice for Andi a little bit when there were decisions to be made. Trying to think what, I guess I knew her the best. I was married to her for 10 years. It’s weird. You don’t want to be speaking for someone, but also when they’re gone, there isn’t really anybody else to speak for them, so.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Absolutely.

Gus Reid:

So, that was a pretty tough process to go through. I think the last thing that I advocated really for was keeping some of her sense of humor in the book.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Yeah.

Gus Reid:

It is a cancer book. It’s a very unforgiving, unsentimental book, but she was funny. I really didn’t want a book that came out like she was just suffering and miserable all the time while she was writing it, or that she’d lost that sense of humor because she hadn’t. She was always mad as hell about it. She wasn’t happy, but also, she was still Andi.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I didn’t really think too much about that process, especially, and maybe Sarah, you can speak to this a little bit as well, and this might be getting a little too mundane and in the details, but you mentioned that some of them weren’t, are at varying levels of completion. How did you know that a poem was Andi approved for publication? Did she let you know, or did you have to make some of those decisions? I can’t imagine how challenging that must be.

Gus Reid:

Yeah, there wasn’t really too much. She had started on some sequencing before she was so rudely interrupted, but yeah, the first few passes through there were, we had a lot of her friends involved in this process. She was friends with writers and they were helpful. Certainly Sarah did a lot of work on that. She had a good friend who provided an independent voice on that, whose name is escaping me right now, shamefully. She’s acknowledged in the acknowledgement section in the book there, so.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Got it.

Gus Reid:

Sorry about that. And it was a process. But yeah, there wasn’t a ton of information besides the poems about what Andi wanted. Other than that, she was working towards sending it out to publishers and pulling it together and making it a book.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Got it.

Gus Reid:

And she did want to publish it, and what she’d said about that was mostly because of the feedback from other cancer patients, like other people had found this work meaningful to them and maybe a little helpful at a time in your life when really nothing helps a lot, but sometimes maybe some things can help a little bit. So that was really always the goal for this book, and provided that kind of guiding star to the direction when there were decisions to make. What’s a finished poem? What’s a useful poem?

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Yeah, that makes total sense. Yeah. It looks like we maybe have Sarah back. Do you want to add anything to this part of the conversation?

Sarah Sawyer:

I would echo what Gus says. It was a bit of a brutal process. We had a stack of poems and we didn’t have much that was Andi approved or not approved. There were some she’d done for readings, and so we felt like those were good to send out, but there were also poems that just had, they had a sense of completion. There were themes that were revisited, and so we picked the strongest poems. We also had a lot of outside help. We have an agent Rob McQuilken from MMQ who is brilliant and has a heart for this work and a heart for poetry and very informed instincts, and so he was a great help in selecting and sequencing.

We also have an editor, Susanna Teneman, who had been the editor of Andi’s first book, and so she knew Andi and knew her voice and her writing, so she was able to bring a really informed view to sequencing and selection both, so that was a big help. She also has a really strong heart for the work. She’s studying to be a chaplain and working with end of life folks, and so she has some special compassion and insight there that she brings to the work.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I am happy that you guys had sort of a village when it came to that, but like you said, both of you said was a brutal process, so. The last thing I’d love to do is offer Gus to do a reading, but before we get there, is there anything that we missed? I know there’s probably hours worth of things that could be said, but is there anything that either of you really want to say before we sign off?

Gus Reid:

Publication date is September 9th, available in all good bookstores or order it for your local library. That’s also helpful. That’s also a good way to get it. The book is “To See Yourself As You Vanish,” and it’s being published by Wesleyan.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Wonderful. Well, Gus, I’ll hand it over to you. Are you okay with doing a reading?

Gus Reid:

Yeah.

Jacquelyn Cobb:

Awesome. All right, well, go ahead.

Gus Reid:

I’m going to read one of the pieces that’s being published in The Cancer Letter that I think is relevant to the readership, I hope anyway. This is “Clinical Trial.”