Kathleen E. Watt

Bone cancer in my face ended my career as a New York opera singer, bringing me face to face with disfigurement, mortality, the meaning and uses of beauty—and a rediscovery of life worth living, transposed.

I became unexpectedly intimate with a small corps of medical elites, who assembled first to extirpate my disease, and then to restore me to myself—first with excoriating surgical wizardry and lethal toxins, and then, through a brutal alchemy of kindness and titanium screws.

REARRANGED is my new memoir about leaving the wings of the Metropolitan Opera for center stage in a parallel universe; about unlikely arrangements emerging to make sense of it all—of the Big C, of letting go to hold on, of putting on a good face to get by in a selfie world.

And yes, of course there's a blog. Every couple of weeks at REARRANGED—The Blog I post a mash-up of personal notes on news, arts and cultural issues related to the themes in REARRANGED, plus commentary on news in bone cancer research and facial reconstruction.

Sign up to weigh in! Suggest blog topics, share the lessons of a cancer experience or disfigurement, or resources that may be helpful to others facing similar challenges.

I also tweet about all this, and other stuff that helps to explain how things are or seem and how they got to be this way. Reach out to me on Twitter @kewatt.

As a writer primarily of features and creative nonfiction, my essays, articles and notes appear in Stagebill, Playbill, the publications of New York City Opera, Washington Opera, Deutsche Grammaphon, NY Newsday and others. To see more of all that visit www.KathleenWatt.com