We had the pleasure of chatting to Dr. Gayle Woodson about her upcoming novel, After Kilimanjaro, including its inspiration and challenges, along with book recommendations, writing advice, and more!
Dr. Gayle Woodson is a world-renowned throat surgeon. As one of the first few women to be trained in the Johns Hopkins Surgical program, she began her career at a time when female surgeons were regarded as oddities. She has lectured on six continents and done medical outreach in Central America, the Middle East, and Africa. Recently semi-retired, she and her husband divide their time between Florida, Newfoundland, and Tanzania. They have four children, four grandchildren, and a Springer spaniel.
Now you were one of the first few women to be trained in the Johns Hopkins Surgical program and you’ve had quite the medical career. What made you want to write books?
I was a bookworm as a child—the kind of kid who read under the covers with a flashlight when I was supposed to be sleeping. I was also a writer from an early age. When I was six years old, I made lots of little books bound with pink yarn and “published” a “newspaper” about our family news. Recently, I found a yellowed copy of an edition with the headline “Midnight the Cat Has Kittens.” I started college in the late ‘60’s, when nice girls were not supposed to have a career. We needed college education to be prepared, lest heaven forfend, anything ever happened to our husbands. I figured a housewife could still write books, so I majored in English. But the ‘70’s brought “Women’s Liberation,” and medical schools opened up to women, so I chose to take that route. I never gave up on writing—more than 100 scientific papers and three textbooks. Raising a family, being a surgeon, and keeping those priorities precisely in that order left no time to finish a novel. But my children have all flown the nest, and the work my husband and I do in Africa compelled me to write AFTER KILIMANJARO.
Your new novel, After Kilimanjaro, publishes on October 8th. If you could only use five words to describe it, what would they be?
Sobering, compassionate, action-filled, romantic, hopeful.
Let’s hear a little more! What can readers expect?
If you have dreamed of visiting Africa, but never had the chance, this book will transport you there with vivid and detailed accounts of the land and its peoples. You will also see the challenges of health care on the front lines in developing countries and gain respect for the dedicated doctors and nurses who do “much with little.” The medical cases and patient experiences accounts are authentic and compelling. This is also a love story.
Where did the inspiration for your new novel come from?
My husband and I spend two months each year teaching at a hospital in Tanzania. When people hear about our work, they usually ask if we are with Doctors without Borders or if we are going on medical missions. When we explain that we teach surgery, they say “how nice,” but their eyes tell us they are wondering why we do this. I wanted this novel to show the rich rewards of helping people realize their potential. We teach doctors to teach others, essentially starting a chain reaction that helps more and more people every day.
The story is not a memoir. It is my fantasy of what could be done to address the dire shortage of physicians and the high rate of maternal mortality. There is evidence that traditional birth attendants can be trained and integrated into the system as community health care workers.
Do you have a favourite line or scene from After Kilimanjaro?
My favorite scene is Sarah’s first class for traditional birth attendants in a remote village. She tries to convey the importance of hand-washing in preventing infections. One of my favorite characters is a a woman named Nasila. She is skeptical of the concept of germs and refuses to look through the microscope for fear of getting sick. But at the end of class, she is awed by steam coming out of the autoclaves and declares that this is “good magic.” Nasila emblemizes the concept that lay people can be tremendous community health workers without real medical training. Sarah muses, that after all, she herself uses her laptop computer quite effectively, despite having no idea how its circuitry functions.
Were there any particular parts that challenged you while writing?
At first, I struggled with descriptions of daily life in the remote village. I had visited such places, but not actually lived there. Then I reached out to my sister, who had spent a year and a half doing anthropology research in Liberia and went through construction of a house. She was very helpful in fleshing out that part of the story.
Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?
I don’t have many unique insights. But I can share what I have learned from others in the writing community—advice that has proven to be valuable and true.
Write a lot. Write every day, if you can. Do not write alone—forge relationships with other writers for critiquing and moral support. Remember what Hemmingway said, “The first draft of anything is shit.” After you write something, file it away for a while and then take a fresh look. It is often amazing to learn that what you wrote is not exactly what you meant to say. An important step in editing is to progressively reduce the word count. I gained a lot of experience by editing scientific abstracts, which always have a strict word limit. The writing gains clarity and strength as the ideas are condensed into smaller and more efficient word packages. A bit of advice that I did not believe at first is to read your work out loud to hear how it sounds. But it is very informative.
I keep seeing essays on how you must believe in yourself and that if you keep working you will succeed. But the truth is that we do not always realize our dreams. I have learned that writing a good story is not enough. In today’s literary world, with billions of books, it is difficult to get a toe in the door. But keep knocking. If at first you don’t succeed, revise, resubmit, or start on another project. Attend writers’ conferences to learn, to network, and to interview agents. And learn all you can about marketing and building a platform.
Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for us?
My favorite recent book is THE BOAT PEOPLE by Sharon Bala, a story of Sri Lankan refugees seeking asylum in Canada. It is a timely and thought-provoking novel which is relevant to the current immigration issues at the southern US Border.
THE RIVER BY STARLIGHT is a historical novel set in the American west at the turn of the century, that chronicles the life of a woman with recurring post-partum psychosis. It is a fascinating fictionalized account of real events.
My favorite medical novel is CUTTING FOR STONE by Abraham Verghese. Set in Ethiopia, it is the tale of twin boys whose mother died in childbirth and their quest to follow in the footsteps of the father, a surgeon, who deserted them.
You can find Gayle on Twitter and Facebook, along with at her website.
