Smith Center for Healing and the Arts - community. creativity. support

This program is being offered in a hybrid format (both in-person and virtual). In order to participate, register by clicking the RSVP button above or by emailing olivia@smithcenter.org. If you plan to attend in-person, please let us know.

with Elizabeth McGowan

Welcome to “Pop-Up Book Club,” a community of book lovers diving into current and relevant book material.

We will read Outpedaling “The Big C:” My Healing Cycle Across America by Pulitzer Prize Winner Elizabeth McGowan and on April 9th, she will lead us in a lively discussion about the book. Please join us no matter how much or little of the book you have read. You are welcome to join even if you have not read the book. Please read below for a description of the book.

Pop-Up Book Club will be held from 12:00-1:00pm ET.

Elizabeth McGowan lost her father to melanoma when he was forty-four and she was fifteen. She rediscovered him during a bike ride across the US, following her battle with the same disease. Joyful, introspective, terrifying, and sobering, her memoir is about reconciling her mortality with her father’s.

In the spring of 2000, McGowan marked five years of remission. Her intensive, eleven-year battle with cancer began just after she graduated from college. Her cross-country ride was undertaken, most often, alone; she sent journal entries home from local libraries and mailed home rolls of film. While riding, she made casual, unexpected connections with other survivors; some gave her checks, a bed for the night, a new story, or a tip for the road.

Transitions between the bike trip and McGowan’s childhood are seamless. She recalls her explosive and complex father, as well as her own health challenges. She experiences hospitality and kindness via little gestures that magnify human connections. As she moves through the Grand Tetons and across Yellowstone, American authors, including William Least Heat-Moon, William Stegner, and Edward Abbey, move with her; and American history informs the way she sees and understands the landscape and its people.

McGowan digs into the past to make sense of her present, and her reflections are frank and unsentimental. She sees both herself and her father with brilliant clarity, acknowledging the traits that both impeded their progress and made progress possible. She argues against the rhetoric of war that surrounds cancer and acknowledges her own fears and reluctance to engage in further testing.

Outpedaling “The Big C“ journeys through illness and America, viewing the ability to put one foot in front of the other as a gift. McGowan makes sense of her circumstances and develops strength across her powerful, 4,250-mile bicycle trip. (“Oupedaling” review by Camille-Yvette Welsch)

Get Outpedaling “The Big C” <HERE>

About Elizabeth McGowan

Elizabeth H. McGowan is an award-winning energy and environment reporter based in Washington, D.C. since 2001. Now a freelancer, her main gig since 2019 has been covering Virginia’s transition to clean energy for the Energy News Network. As a staff writer for startup InsideClimate News, her groundbreaking dispatches from Kalamazoo, Michigan, “The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You Never Heard Of” earned her team a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2013. An e-book version of the narrative won the Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists. McGowan’s freelance articles have appeared in Grist, Blue Ridge Outdoors Magazine, Yale Environment 360, A.T. Journeys (Appalachian Trail magazine) and multiple other publications. For the last year, she has written reviews of nature and health books for the Washington Independent Review of Books. McGowan began her journalism career at daily newspapers in Vermont and Wisconsin.

Her adventure memoir, “Outpedaling ‘The Big C’: My Healing Cycle Across America” was just released by Bancroft Press. She takes readers on the rollicking, introspective and sobering 4,250-mile ride she organized as a hospital fundraiser after surviving an 11-year saga with melanoma. That journey helped her rediscover her father, who had died of the same type of cancer at age 44, when McGowan was 15. Learn more: @ehmcgowanNEWS and https://elizabethmcgowan-author.com/