In her first year of medical school, Margaret Nowaczyk, author of this year’s Sarton Award winner for Memoir, was taught to always consider common diseases before the rare. “‘If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras’ is the adage,” she explained. But Margaret went on to become a pediatric clinical geneticist who spent her career chasing those rare zebras; hence the title of her memoir: Chasing Zebras: A Memoir of Genetics, Mental Health and Writing.
Born in Poland, Margaret emigrated to Canada with her family in 1981, which the author says involved six months as a stateless person in Austria and then many years of adjusting to a new world, a new language, and a new reality. “Being functionally mute for over a year, being alone and very lonely, I became a doctor in 1990 and then qualified as a pediatrician in 1994 and a geneticist in 1996.” Along the way, Margaret married, had two children, and suffered from recurrent depression, finally being diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1999.
Margaret says she always thought “writers sojourned on a higher, rarefied stratum and that mere mortals could not join them.” But in 2006, when she was hospitalized for depression, she signed up for her first writing course. “It took getting accepted into an MFA to strengthen my writing resolve and determination.… And I realized how much writing and sharing one particular story of my life helped with my mental well-being.” She says the breakthrough came during a narrative medicine workshop in 2011, when she read a story she had written about a very difficult patient. After that encounter, she decided she needed to share stories and tell people how beneficial to mental health writing and sharing one’s stories can be. “That’s Zebras’ message,” says Margaret. “It’s the story of growth, tragedy, and triumph, from leaving Poland to dealing with the demands of medical school, and to living with mental illness.”
Margaret trained in pediatrics and genetics at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, with elective training at Boston Children’s Hospital in pediatric neurology and at Hôspital Enfants Malades in Paris for six years. In 1997, she was offered a university faculty position as a clinical geneticist at McMaster Children’s Hospital in Ontario, Canada. Since then, she has been caring for children with genetic disorders and providing prenatal diagnosis and genetic counseling for adults. She authored 120 peer-reviewed papers in genetic journals and rose to the rank of professor in 2014. Margaret is a great advocate of the narrative approach to medical care.
According to Margaret, the best writing advice she received was simply to keep writing. “Keep writing, even if it is for your desk drawer, never to see the light of day. But a story shared is that much more powerful, so try to share your stories. Because somewhere out there is that one person just waiting to hear or read it, and it will change the world for them. Write for that person.”
Currently, Margaret is finishing the edits on a collection of essays that will be published in the spring of 2024. She has also finished writing the first draft of a thriller—genetic medical, of course—and a collection of short stories that she says she is constantly tinkering with.
Winning the Sarton, she says, “is a great honor, which goes without saying. But it also means that my story will reach the membership of Story Circle and that my message of writing as a balm for hurting souls will continue to spread to more and more people. Thank you so much for this opportunity.”
