Ask any group of authors about what their writing means to them, and many will share how stories have shaped their lives, often from early childhood, when they fell in love with reading or found comfort in books. 

Some will share how stories have changed their lives—how writing has helped them step away from an old career or altered their daily routine for the better. 

For Theresa Goodrich, writing has done both of these things. And in one of the most challenging parts of her story—which came amid a difficult period for people across the world—though writing didn’t save her life directly, it gave her hope in the midst of it. 

She hadn’t expected it would become such a source of hope for other people too. 

Today, Theresa writes nonfiction travel books under the name Theresa L. Goodrich and fictional Cozy Travel Mysteries under the pen name Theresa L. Carter. Before that, she studied journalism, though she opted for a less traditional route with her career once she graduated.

“My dad's an artist, so I grew up with him creating. He created his own schedule, and he created what he wanted to create, and that was the kind of lifestyle that I wanted, and I just couldn't see going through the obits and city beats and all that,” Theresa says. 

Rather than working for a paper, she instead began waiting tables and writing on the side. After moving to Chicago in 2001, she started sharing the stories of her new home on her blog, The Local Tourist, hoping to expand later into writing about other towns and cities across the Midwest. That opportunity came in 2016, when a cross-country road trip with her husband inspired a memoir about the journey. She published her second book in 2018 and had a launch party planned for her third book in March 2020. 

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. Her book launch event was canceled; Theresa continued writing the book from a new angle. 

A few months later, a routine mammogram revealed Theresa had breast cancer. 

Finding Joy

Theresa had celebrated her fiftieth birthday in May 2020, and she’d scheduled her first routine mammogram for August of that year. 

“It did its job,” she says. 

After the mammogram and a follow-up biopsy came back abnormal, Theresa and her husband, Jim, took a weekend camping trip to unplug while they waited for further results. On the final day of the trip, Theresa received the news of her diagnosis. 

“I remember all that was left in the campsite was we had this blue tarp that was under our tent, and there was a little baby frog on the tarp, and it was the cutest little thing,” she says. “We were just about to wrap that up, and then I got the call from the doctor.”

After the couple returned home “and had a chance to breathe a little bit,” Theresa says, she and her husband told their parents. Soon after, Theresa posted an update on Facebook. 

“It was obviously the toughest time of my life. And it was the hardest time in my husband's life. And … it's also one of the best things that's ever happened to me."
—Theresa Goodrich

“From that point on, I was very public about the entire experience because we were all so isolated,” she says. “And then once I began chemo, we became even more isolated.” At the start of the pandemic, Theresa had started writing about her thoughts and experiences through lockdown on her blog. As she began chemotherapy, she continued writing and posting, detailing everything from the isolation of lockdown to smoking marijuana with a friend for the first time to ease the nausea from the chemotherapy drugs. “There's not a whole lot that I hid,” she says with a laugh.

When Theresa shaved her head a few days after her first chemotherapy appointment—her husband shaved his, too, in solidarity—a friend porch-dropped a collection of fun wigs she had amassed from her annual New Year’s Eve parties. “I mean, one is, like, this big,” Theresa says, holding her hands up on either side of her head, “and it's white, and one had blue tips, and there was a red one.” The couple saw an opportunity to turn the wigs into a source of joy around the holidays. Starting on Christmas, the couple would try on a new wig and costume and hold a photoshoot, then post the results on Facebook. They continued for twelve days and called it “The Twelve Wigs of Christmas.” 

“People would just—they just loved it,” Theresa says. “I went to a friend's birthday party, and someone was there I hadn't seen in probably a decade … and she came up and she just hugged me. And she started crying, and she's like, ‘I cannot tell you how much that meant to see you and Jim doing this.’” 

She continues, “It was obviously the toughest time of my life. And it was the hardest time in my husband's life. And to be able to do something fun and bring some levity to all of it, and to have people also just having fun with it—yes, it's hard, and it sucked. And it's also one of the best things that's ever happened to me.”

No More Waiting

As Theresa was sharing her own story online, she was also writing a different story. She continued writing her third nonfiction book, Living Landmarks of Chicago, while undergoing chemotherapy. The book gave her “something to look forward to,” she says.

“I would bring my computer and work on it while I was doing chemo because when you're undergoing chemo, you're pretty much there for most of the day. It could be anywhere from four to eight hours, sometimes even longer,” she says. Her nurses became her cheerleaders; at her appointments each week, they would ask about her progress over the past week and the chapter she was working on. 

“I was just so thrilled that they have so many patients and they actually wanted to know how I was doing,” she says. “It just was really motivating.”

She finished writing the book April 21, five days before she finished chemo. The book had been a passion project, and it had kept her going. But the end of treatment gave Theresa a new perspective on life, and a new direction for her fourth solo book.

“I realized I'd always wanted to write novels,” she says. “I mean, my grandma would give me her books. I remember reading Clan of the Cave Bear because Grandma had given it to me, and I was like, ‘I want to do this when I grow up.’ And finally, at fifty-one, I finished treatment, and I was just like, ‘I'm not waiting anymore.’”

Theresa finished the book in March 2022 and published it in August. She had to work up the courage to publish it. Although she’d been writing and publishing for years, she had only ever published nonfiction. ”I was terrified,” she says. “It's a lot more vulnerable and a lot more raw when you're writing fiction.”

The protagonist of that book, Alex Paige, was a travel writer and breast cancer survivor, just like Theresa. But her story, like her author’s, was only getting started. Today, Theresa has published seven Alex Paige Travel Mysteries, with more still to come. Alongside the Mysteries, Theresa has also continued writing nonfiction travel guides and even branched into Fantasy for a five-book series. 

And later this month, she’s launching a Kickstarter for her first memoir. The book, Diary of a Cockeyed Optimist, explores how receiving an unexpected cancer diagnosis changed her outlook on life and inspired her to finally pursue her dream career. 

Lessons from the Journey

Theresa is compiling her memoir from the posts and journal entries she wrote during her cancer treatment as well as her reflections from today. The process has been an emotional one—but it was also a chance to reflect on the brighter moments she experienced. 

“God, the kindness,” she says. “I've always believed that people are kind, and that's actually why I wrote my first book because it was in 2017 and tensions were really, really high. … I wanted to write that book to show that people are kind and we're more alike than we are different. And that came back to me in spades when I put myself out there.

“[When writing about my cancer diagnosis] I was definitely not ‘Rah, rah, this is fine. I'm strong. I'm a warrior,’” she continues. “That is not how I approached it. It was like, ‘This sucks. And I also have a lot of hope, and I'm going to be fine, and look at all you amazing people who are lifting me up.’” 

“At fifty-one, I finished treatment, and I was just like, ‘I'm not waiting anymore.’”
—Theresa Goodrich

Theresa hopes her writing—whether fiction or nonfiction—offers people a glimpse of the same kindness. She doesn’t always write with that theme in mind, she clarifies; it just comes naturally with the stories she likes to tell. When writing blog posts about places to visit or compiling one of her travel guides, she opts to focus on places she would recommend versus the places she wouldn’t. In her Alex Paige novels, even though there’s drama—“I'm writing Murder Mysteries,” she says. “People die. People commit murder.”—she makes sure each character always gets a satisfying ending.

“When they read ‘The End,’ I want them to feel like I've given them a hug,” she says. “I've got readers who will say, when the book comes, ‘I'm saving this until Sunday,’ and they just spend the day reading it, and that is the best feeling in the world—to know that I'm their self-care Sunday.”

In her life post-treatment, Theresa has tried to show herself the same kindness. She says no to the projects and opportunities that she isn’t truly excited about—as she puts it, “things that I realize don’t align with my soul.” She gives herself permission to create what fills her, and to decorate her planner with stickers and highlighters rather than saving them. She’s trying to find more outlets for creativity, such as knitting and cooking.

And she’s allowing herself the chance to see herself as more than one thing—at least, she’s working on it.  

“I feel like you don't have to pigeonhole yourself and say, ‘This is what I am. This is what I do,’” she says. “For many, many years, I defined myself. ‘I am the Local Tourist.’ That's who I was. And that was another transition after going through cancer is realizing, ‘I'm not one thing. I'm not just a travel writer. I am a storyteller, and I'm a creative.’”

The Road Ahead

The lessons Theresa has learned are the same ones she hopes to pass along to others who hear her story. “You don't have to wait for that gut punch,” she says. “You don't have to wait for that devastating diagnosis or to look your mortality in the face.” 

The leap doesn’t have to happen all at once; she encourages authors—and others—to start small. Instead of learning to travel solo by taking a monthlong adventure through Europe, she says, plan a weekend trip close to home. Instead of clearing your schedule to write for hours each day, block out thirty minutes. “I think anything that calls to you and fills your soul, you just take one step,” she says. 

She encourages authors to make writing time “sacrosanct” and to read as much as they can, and to remember, “You are worth being happy,” she says. 

“I think we get so caught up in, ‘We should do that, this, and we should do that,’ and doing something that brings you joy feels like an indulgence,” she says. “Something that I've learned since diagnosis and treatment is that, no, your life should bring you joy.” 

For Theresa, that means dedicating time to her writing. The Kickstarter for her memoir launches July 14, ending August 4—the anniversary of her first mammogram. She has another Kickstarter planned for her Fantasy series after that. In the meantime, she’s still travel writing, still “saying yes more to the things that fill me,” she says. 

On the pre-launch page for her Kickstarter, she writes that her latest mammogram was benign; her cancer markers are clear. She also clarifies that her new book is not a cancer memoir. “Cancer is the canvas, not the picture,” it reads. “This is a book about surviving with your whole self intact, about the gifts hidden inside the worst moments, and about the permission we forget to give ourselves: to feel what we feel, to want what we want, and to stop waiting for our lives to begin.” 

She hopes she can be an example to those around her of exactly that. 

“I'm going to be fifty-six in May, and I plan to live another fifty-four, fifty-five, fifty-six years,” she says. “I'm not going to wait for something to say, ‘You may not have that much time’ to do what brings me joy and what brings me love.”