9: On Death and Choosing – An Interview with Kathryn Trueblood

Kathryn Trueblood is a novelist, essayist, memoirist, short story writer, Professor of English at Western Washington University, and faculty member of The Red Badge Project, which serves active-duty soldiers and veterans in Washington through storytelling. Her work is firmly situated in the medical humanities and has won the Rico Award in Prose, the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, and the Red Hen Press Short Story Award. Her most recent novel, Take Daily As Needed (University of New Mexico Press, 2019), deals with parenting while chronically ill with the desperado humor that the subject deserves.  In this episode, we discuss the economic and cultural challenges faced by 21st-century academics and professionals, which form a backdrop for Kathryn’s complicated experience, documented in a forthcoming memoir, of helping her mother transition out of this world.