Building an Opera in the Waiting Room
The following comic first appeared in the Chicago Reader in June 2022.
The Healing Circle
Winner of the 2020 Women’s Prose Prize + forthcoming from Red Hen Press in August 2022
A mother abandons her family in California to pursue a miracle cure in Munich. Once she gets there however, she wonders if she might have already died. Bedridden with a terminal diagnosis, memories, nurses, immoral doctors, foreign television broadcasts, and phone calls from children intrude upon her consciousness. An aloe plant called Madame Blavatsky is her primary companion.
The Healing Circle is a far-reaching, honest, and funny novel about dying and living, a kind of pilgrimage to wholeness through uncertainty and disorientation. Full of resonance, it asks what it means to heal, to be in pain, to be a person.
The Healing Circle is wry, subtle, and daring. Coco Picard has written a vivid novel about living, dying, and remembering.
