I always wrote, even when working as a full-time physician. Coming home from the hospital in the middle of the night to a quiet house, husband and children sleeping, writing was my way of decompressing—that and playing classic Doom (more modern ones make me motion sick!) I had a few short stories and essays published, including an essay that was awarded honorable mention in Best American Essays. But that period of my life didn’t give me time for full-length manuscripts. We moved from across the country, step by step, and I continued to write. In 2010, I worked a full but abnormally exhausting day, went home for the weekend, and on Monday was in the ER as a patient and found to have stage IV lymphoma. What followed was massive chemotherapy and then a stem-cell transplant. It took a decade to come back from the treatment and the resultant profound fatigue, not to mention the years of decreased mental functioning. After a while, I began writing again, now with all the time in the world. My writing steadily improved as my brain fog lessened, until, I moved back East during the pandemic to find the house that had been lovingly photographed, thoroughly inspected, to be a near-unlivable dump with a duckweed-covered, muck-bottom, broken-pump pond in the back. Under Water is the novel that pond inspired.
There are a lot of similarities between myself and the protagonist, Iris, in my book Under Water, and there are also a lot of differences. We’re both married for a long time. Both bought a house sight unseen across the country during the pandemic, moving an unwilling spouse and a German shepherd. We both had trauma in our lives, but there the similarities end. Iris’s story, the renovation of her house and marriage, along with the intertwined tale of Aoife and Thomas, is certainly the best thing I’ll ever write.
BIOGRAPHY:
Rachel Callaghan, novelist, award-winning essayist, and ex-short story writer, author of Under Water, and former editor of In Posse on WebDelSol, learned a thing or two about traumatic circumstances and the emotional and psychological damage they cause. Starting Hahnemann Medical College (now part of Drexel University) when only 1/11 students in her class were women, she startled the administration by choosing to have a child her senior year. Even the teaching physicians were put off-balance: one ordered Dr. Callaghan from rounds for being visibly pregnant, as that might scare the patients. Post medical school, she had Internal Medicine, OB-GYN, and ER training and experience, working until her career was cut short when she was diagnosed with stage IV lymphoma. A stem-cell transplant was the cure. What followed was a decade of profound fatigue which left her mourning the loss of patients she loved as friends. The treatment for that was writing about people and making them come alive on the page. Besides writing, she is now a wife, mother, serial home renovator, dog and cat owner, and former traveler who circled the globe at age 21. Dr. Callaghan’s rich life has been instrumental in shaping her fiction.