I should probably admit this up front: I’m a world-class ignorer of appeals. I hate them. Just ask my diocese or my undergrad alumni association. Ask my National Public Radio affiliate.

So what I’m doing here, I know, is hypocritical. I’m posting an appeal. But it’s not for me. It’s for an author who needs some help right now.

Let me present Porochista Khakpour. She is a novelist, and a former instructor at my MFA program.*
Porochista has been ill for quite some time. I don’t know all the details, but she’s recently been diagnosed with late-stage Lyme Disease.  As you well know, writers don’t generally have health insurance (unless they’ve got another job that provides it) and except for the most successful of us (King, Patterson and Rowling, I’m looking at you),  writers also don’t make a lot of money, even when their work is recognized and well-received and even when they sell a lot of books.

Porochista needs help paying her medical bills, and as a fellow writer I feel the need to pass her appeal along to other people in the writing community.

You can read more, in her own words,  here. You can also donate at that site, if you’re so moved.**
That’s it really. I’ll be posting more about writing and revision soon. I just wanted to get this out there quickly.  I’d want someone to do the same for me.

*Full disclosure: I never studied with Porochista. We’re almost the exact same age and as a staunch ageist, I might have had a hard time studying under someone born in the same year. Call me weird, but I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on any of the nuggets of wisdom she dropped on  me because  my mind would keep wandering to the shared experiences we might have had – an interest in grunge in sophomore year of high school, maybe, or a love of Clarissa Explains It All, or memories of that Romeo + Juliet movie that Claire Danes was in during the first year of college, or perhaps a shared dorkiness in middle school that happened at the exact same time. I get obsessed with these timeline things. It would have all been too much for me.

** I should also mention that I’m not just making an appeal here. I did put my money where my mouth is. I have more mouth than money, but I did donate. I don’t ask people to do things I wouldn’t do myself, because I adhere to the Aragorn School of Management. But that’s a whole other nerdy ball of wax.