Poet, biographer, feminist Diane Middlebrook dies of cancer at 68

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(12-15) 15:42 Pacific Time San Francisco --
Diane Middlebrook, the award-winning poet, biographer, teacher, feminist and salonnière, died of malignant neoplastic disease Saturday in San Francisco, her household said. She was 68.

A professor of English Language at Leland Stanford University for 35 years, Middlebrook made a graceful and unusual leaping from instruction poesy to authorship biography.

She is perhaps best known for "Anne Sexton: A Biography," the controversial 1991 bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award, and for "Her Husband: Teddy Boy Ted Hughes and Plath, a Marriage," the bestselling 2003 life about the troubled labor union of the poets Sylvia Sylvia Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. She also wrote "Suits Me: The Double Life of Truncheon Tipton," the 1998 life of a female wind instrumentalist who lived as a man.

At the clip of her death, she was at work on a 4th life - "Young Ovid" - which will be published soon by Viking Penguin, to cooccur with the 2,000th day of remembrance of the birth of the Roman poet.

Middlebrook was born in Pocatello, Idaho, in 1939, one of three girls of Seth Thomas and Helen Of Troy Wood, a druggist and a nurse, and grew up in Spokane, Wash.

As a child, she was always writing. "I had a verse form in the Spokane Daily History on the sketch page when I was 8 old age old," she told an interviewer in 2002. "It remains in my head as a very electrifying experience."

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1961 from the University of Washington, Seattle, she went on to Yale University University, where she earned a master's grade in 1962 and a doctor's degree in 1968. She was one of the first women to learn in the English section at Leland Stanford University, where she was hired as an helper professor while still in alumnus school.

During the course of study of a eminent career, Middlebrook received many honors, including a Solomon Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanistic Discipline Fellowship, and a Pew Foundation research grant. She was a 1990 chap at the John D. Rockefeller Survey Center in Bellagio, Italy, and have been a chap of the Royal Society of Literature in Greater London since 2004.

She also created a series of literary salons for women, inspired by her numerous friendly relationships and professional confederations with female authors and artists.

"Diane have a certain glow that ranges out and pulls people," said writer and Leland Stanford senior research scholarly person Marilyn Yalom, who have been co-host of the San Francisco salon. Middlebrook went on to establish a 2nd salon for her co-workers in London; in New York, writers Kamy Wicoff and Nancy Glenn Miller co-host a salon based on Middlebrook's model.

"Often poets and academicians are really more than interested in books and writing," said Rena Rosenwasser, co-founder of Kelsey Street Press in Berkeley. "But Diane was interested in people, especially in women and what they were encountering in their professional lives."

Middlebrook said the salons served as an extension of her life as a professor. "Women have got a different sort of conversation," she said in a recent interview with The Chronicle. "Everybody who take parts is there on an equal basis."

In 1963, she married Jonathan Middlebrook, a chap alumnus pupil in literature. Their daughter, Leah, was born in 1966, and Jonathan Middlebrook was hired as a professor of English Language at San Francisco State University, where he have continued to teach. The matrimony ended in 1972. (A little early matrimony ended in 1961.)

In 1985, Diane Middlebrook married Carl Djerassi, emeritus professor of chemical science at Leland Stanford University, who is best known for contributing to the development of the first unwritten preventive pill, an innovation that brought him a fortune. In recent years, Djerassi turned to authorship novels and plays.

"They each met their match," Dale Djerassi said of his father's matrimony to Middlebrook. "She was clearly his literary counselor, critic and muse."

Their Russian Hill apartment, where the couple hosted many assemblages of intellects and artists, have dramatic 360-degree positions of the San Francisco Bay and an equally dramatic fine art collection, with plant by Alice Paul Klee. They also lived portion of the twelvemonth in London, where they spent summertimes and the autumn theatre season.

The two collaborated on many enterprises including the creative activity of the Djerassi Residence Artists Program in the Santa Cruz mountains, an people settlement founded in award of Djerassi's girl Pamela, an creative person who took her life in 1978.

Middlebrook liked to see creative, talented people thrive. "Diane was fabulous at drawing us out, making an environment where women could speak about their dreams, about things they wanted to contrive and do," said San Francisco creative person Squeak Carnwath. "And then, they would happen."

At one salon, Carnwath posed a question: Is it possible, without money, to begin a foundation to profit artists? "That was 5 or 6 old age ago, and now the Artist Bequest Foundation just gave away its first grant this year," she said.

"Diane is not just a great mind and a Godhead and a gracious human being," said writer Kate Moses, with whom Middlebrook shared research when they were both workings on books about Sylvia Plath and Hughes. "Diane also have this great well of womanlike and nurturing." From 1977 to 1979, she was manager of Stanford's Center for Research on Women, where she worked closely with Yalom.

"Those were the old age in which feminist scholarship was taking root in the public imagination, but in universities it happened much more than slowly," Yalom recalled. "When Diane and I would sit down down at the mental faculty baseball club in the late '70s, it wasn't unusual for some male professor to come up over and say, 'What are you two misses plotting now?' "

These were formative times, but Yalom believes it is as a biographer that Middlebrook "came into her own. The Anne Anne Sexton life really set her on the map," Yalom said.

She began working on the Anne Sexton book in 1982, while instruction portion time. When it was published 10 old age later, the book stirred argument over disclosures of incest by Sexton. The poet's psychoanalyst - believing he owned the rights to audiotapes of his Sessions with Anne Anne Sexton - had given them to Sexton's daughter, who passed them to Middlebrook.

In authorship the book, Middlebrook was determined to avoid academic language. "I had to learn myself how to write, which was very liberating," she said. To compose biography, "you have got to fill up yourself with the writer's imagination. It was a pleasance to see that I could make it."

In 2004, Middlebrook resigned from teaching, with programs to concentrate on her authorship and on the salons. But a routine physical medical checkup discovered a return of a rare word form of liposarcoma, a slow-growing cancer for which she had surgery previously.

"What is so extraordinary is that when she got ill, she was so committed to keeping herself graphic and alive - which meant continuing on her adjacent project," Rosenwasser said. "As long as she had an troy ounce of energy, Diane was going to work on Ovid."

Kate Moses - who have been helping Nancy Miller, Middlebrook's literary executor, set up the ms - pointed out, "With the new book, Diane have created a life of a individual for whom there is no biographical information, doing it by using her accomplishment as a poet to make fully fleshed-out, imagined scenes of cardinal minutes in Ovid's life."

Since her diagnosis, Middlebrook had additional surgeries and respective types of chemotherapy, and traveled to Federal Republic Of Germany for option dendritic-cell treatments. By early autumn of this year, docs predicted small hope of recovery, and she and Djerassi returned to San Francisco.

"Diane have influenced many people, not only as a professor and a writer, but as a human beingness lucidly and courageously facing death," Yalom said.

It is affecting that Publius Ovidius Naso - who was banished from Roma but continued to believe in the eternity of his poesy - is the topic of what would be Middlebrook's last book, Moses believes. "Ovid said, 'They've taken everything from me but my talent, and my endowment is what's going to dwell on.' "

In a 2002 interview, Middlebrook compared William Shakespeare and Ovid: "Both allude to the thought that 'If you can read this, I am still alive - because I am in my language.' "

Middlebrook is survived by her husband, Carl Djerassi, professor emeritus at Stanford; daughter, Leah Middlebrook, an writer and professor of comparative literature at the University of Oregon; son-in-law, Norio Sugano, an entrepreneur; ses Michole Nicholson of Arroyo Grande (San Luis Obispo County) and Colleen Dea of Spokane, Wash.; stepson, film maker Dale Djerassi of Woodside; and stepgrandson, Alexanders Djerassi of Washington, D.C.

A commemoration for friends and co-workers of Diane Middlebrook is planned for 2 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 27, at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside.

The household petitions that contributions be made to the Building Fund for the Diane Middlebrook Residence for Writers at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program ( ), A tax-exempt organization.

E-mail Heidi Benson at .

Woman's Healing From Cancer

Somewhere at the dorsum of my mind, I had felt it coming for some time. A lingering doubt, a faint premonition, whisperings of a tragedy. Then it came. It wasn't the familiar voice deep within, the physical exhaustion, or the collapsing calling and human relationships that got my attention. No, for me it was an ultimatum: Live or die. Facing my ain mortality, I woke up. I establish myself again, and I establish life.

Eleven old age ago I was diagnosed with cancer. Phase four melanoma, the deadliest word form of tegument cancer, invaded my body. In an instant, my life changed forever. My three immature children stared in horror as their female parent collapsed in fear. The hurting in their eyes almost paralyzed me. Through inconsolable sobs, my bosom ached for their pain. They needed me, their mother, to assist usher and learn them, to share their lives.

Although Iodine was in daze at the minute of crisis, a piece of me could see the chance being offered to me. My duties as wife, mother, calling woman, socialite and friend had consumed me. I had been whirling out of control for a long time, and the struggle within had surfaced now in disease. I knew this was my chance to transform my life.

I made a decision. I chose to live. My pressing desire to learn my children about life and decease sent me searching in multiple directions. I was searching for the reply to salvage my life, but also to salvage my children from life a life of fear.

Doctors, diagnostic tests and surgeries became my manner of life. The medical community had small to offer for treatment or preventive care. My bodily hurting was unbearable, but more than than that, my spirit was disguised beyond recognition. I felt confused, as if walking through an ageless nightmare. With so many inquiries and very few answers, I was determined to happen another way.

Then came a glance of the solution. For a minute the whole human race stopped - no sound, no movement, complete stillness. A message filled my full being, "Heal the Whole, Body, Mind and Spirit!" A sense of peace and awareness followed, so profound no words can depict it. It was then that my journeying into ego began. I realized that my interior voice hadn't been listened to for a long clip and was now screaming to be heard. Little did I cognize at that minute that I would happen my spirit once again.

Learn more than of what I did to mend travel to my web land site or give me a call. I would love to chat!

Confessions of a devoted squirrel lover / The little charmers are smart and fast but benefit from rescue, rehab efforts

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Ihave it bad. I am over the moon, infatuated, even a shade obsessed. I got a hint how serious this whole crushed leather thing is, one evening, as I waited for my girl outside her Yoga class. There I was, squatting in the dark, sifting through clay illuminated by the lame radio beam of a flashlight, searching for acorns. Of course, disbursement the former fall twenty-four hours rattling tree subdivisions and hunting walnuts in earth-colored hemorrhoid of leaves of absence should've been a hint.

I am nuts for squirrels!

It definitely wasn't love at first sight. They have got run the wires, and scampered over the fencing in my pace for years. For decades, I ignored them. As so often happens, though, my bosom stirred and opened to these small critters thanks to a matcher of extraordinary ability. Lila Travis, manager of Ygdrasil Urban Wildlife Rescue, gently, irresistibly introduced me to the delectation of fox squirrels. She did it in a topographic point well suited to love affair - her cosy life room in the Oakland hills, the first halt for orphaned babe squirrels delivered to the organisation for rehab and ultimate release into their natural environment.

Looking back, I am surprised Cupid's pointer did not hit me immediately.

After all, how could the squirming package of guiltless squirrel babies nestling in Lila's lap, or the minute mammal, warmed by stopping point skin-to-skin contact, snuggling her, neglect to enchant me? How could my emotions not swell as my daughter, who accompanied me on this warm afternoon, took her bend eating a sweet foundling with a bantam bottle of specialised formula? Sure, they were cute, but still I felt neutral, overall, immune to their charms.

Then came Lila's absorbing facts. You know, those "did you know" choice morsels of information that inevitably corded your interest? Like the fact that squirrels are natural gardeners. During their nut and seed gathering, squirrels works 70 percentage of the world's deciduous forests. And they are picky. They can odor through 3 ins of soil to observe icky nuts, and icky in the shell just won't do. They also make a heck of a occupation as composters. You cognize when you happen a partially eaten apple at the alkali of the tree? There is a ground for that. Squirrels instinctively munch and mulch, leaving adequate fruit behind to nourish seeds that, hopefully, will take root.

And speech production of trees, I now cognize how of import it is to program tree pruning around squirrel coupling and lying-in seasons. Christmastide Marks the start of tribunal and trip time, babes arriving 45 years later. Mid-February to April, babe squirrel baby's rooms are full, definitely not the clip to be lopping off tree subdivisions and destroying Byzantine nests. The 1 to three babes usually born nurse for four calendar months - a long, legal tender mother-child relationship. Mothered babe squirrels are unagitated and cuddly; but, according to Lila, their physical, and emotional, wellness endures when they are orphaned - upon rescue, they can exhibit the undeniable symptoms of depression.

Healthy, happy, unafraid squirrels, on the other hand, can be existent teases. Oh, be quiet the whipping of my heart. They are fast, and they are smart. Smart enough to cognize that true cats do great marks for territorial vocal effusions and brazen shows of catch-me-if-you-can taunts. I witnessed this in my backyard as our occupant squirrel dashed and danced before Brenda, our cat, who followed in speedy pursuit, only to inevitably lose the race to the fencing - over and over and over again. Somehow, squirrels cognize true cats are easy fodder for playful stunts. Fast, but not quite fast enough.

Dogs are another story. Dogs killing squirrels. Just a mouthful of squirrel tail in an aggressive dog's mouth, can turn out fatal to the "de-gloved" mammal. Squirrels depend on their dress suit for survival. Dress Suit protect squirrels from rainfall and supply shade. Squirrels usage their dress suit to communicate, warn of marauders and for high-wire reconciliation acts. They conceal behind their dress suit when they are feeling tentative, like a yearling behind Mommy's skirt.

And their dress suit don't turn back.

Perhaps this explicates why I recently establish myself chasing a domestic dog that was chasing a squirrel - while directing not very ladylike linguistic communication at the owner, who sat on a bench across the park, laughing as his out-of-control beast hurled itself at the low tree where the miserable squirrel took refuge. My ferocious defence confirmed my undeniable passionateness for these singular animals.

But I believe my love matter with squirrels really started to flower calendar months earlier, shortly after my personal introduction on Lila's couch. It happened on a summertime afternoon spent in contemplative meditation, sharing the blissfulness of a lazy, sun-dappled minute with my squirrelly companion. There he was, sprawled full length on the curved subdivision of the Chinese Hackberry tree in my presence yard. His caput lolled as he rested his cheek on his barky pillow, his presence legs hung limply over each side of his woody bed, his hind legs stretched behind. I sat on my presence stairway and we gazed at each other for 10 proceedings or more. I don't cognize about him, but I felt a complete sense of surrender, contentment and serenity.

Knowing what I knew about squirrels, thanks to Lila, I was full of wonderment and appreciation. I was, I bloom to state it, thoroughly smitten, with this smart, helpful, sleepy-eyed (with one oculus open) small cat who shares my yard. Squirrels have got made a tidy small nest in my heart; I am harvest home nuts for them (donated to YUWR), defending them, spreading the word and spreading the love. How to assist

By law, rehabilitated squirrels must be released within 3 statute miles of where they were rescued. Ygdrasil Urban Wildlife Rescue is always seeking foster-family paces for squirrels. The paces should be free of domestic dogs and as far as possible from busy streets. Stephen Foster households must be willing to have got little wooden release army huts attached to trees, and, duplicating natural conditions, supply nutrient for foraging at the alkali of the trees during the little passage time period between rehab to the wild.

Rehab centre military volunteers and contributions are also welcome.

Call (510) 421-9897 or travel to

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Large Study Links Red, Processed Meat to Certain Cancers

People who eat a batch of reddish and processed meats have got a higher hazard of developing respective types of cancer, including lung malignant neoplastic disease and colorectal cancer, according to a new survey from the National Cancer Institute.

For the study, research workers examined information from a big U.S. diet and wellness study, which began in 1995 and involved 500,000 work force and women ages 50-71.

The research was conducted by Amanda Cross and co-workers at the National Cancer Institute and is published in the up-to-the-minute issue of PLoS Medicine.

This is what the survey found.

People who ate the most reddish were 25 percentage more likely to be diagnosed with bowel, liver, lung and esophageal malignant neoplastic disease during the eight-year study, compared to those who consumed little amounts of this type of meat.

The research workers also establish that people who ate the most processed meats, including bacon, jambon and luncheon meat, had a 20 percentage higher hazard of colorectal malignant neoplastic disease and a 16 percentage higher hazard of lung cancer.

Researchers state 1 in 10 colorectal and 1 in 10 lung malignant neoplastic diseases could be avoided if people reduced their reddish and processed meat consumption to very low amounts.

Most of the survey participants were non-Hispanic achromatic males and females, so these determinations may not use to people with different familial backgrounds, the writers said. But the determinations add to the grounds that proposes that decreased ingestion of reddish and processed meats could cut down the relative incidence of respective types of cancer. The American Cancer Society, for example, have warned for more than than a decennary of a connexion between reddish meat and colon cancer.

Mesothelioma Cases with Minnesota Miners

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[Best Syndication] The Gopher State Department of Health released more than information concerning 58 lawsuits of mesothelioma that occurred in their state.

The wellness federal agency said that they now cognize that a one-fourth of the workers were employed in ours for less than a year. Also there was over a one-fourth of the workers that worked in the mine for over 30 years. Most of the lawsuits of mesothelioma occurred with the mineworkers that worked more than than 30 years. There was a smattering of lawsuits of workers that developed the lung status after 60 years.

The mesothelioma lawsuits showed up with workers that were employed at six of the seven active mines. The lone exclusion was Inland Steel which is now called Minorca.

There was only three lawsuits of mesothelioma at the Conwed works located in Cloquet. This mill used to fabricate asbestos ceiling tiles.

All of the mesothelioma lawsuits were fatal, and all were in men. There have got been approxiametely 72,000 mineworkers from 1930 â€" 1980 that have worked in the mines.

The information collected will be used in three different wellness surveys of the Iron Scope miners. The surveys are being conducted by the University of Gopher State in concurrence with the wellness department.

By Mark Barone
Best Syndication News Health Writer

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How to Get Rid of Your Psoriasis and Eczema Skin Problem

Psoriasis is a tegument status identified by the happening of reddish itchy thick lepidote spots of skin. There are certain types of psoriasis and each 1 occurring in different badness and tegument discolouration. It is a complex medical status and there is no existent definite reply as to what do it, but certain factors can lend to the possibility of developing psoriasis. A household history of psoriasis, or peculiar pharmaceutical drugs, solvents, chemicals and emotional emphasis have got been known to trip the dislocation of the tegument that Pbs to psoriasis in some people.

Guttate psoriasis can look on the limbs tree trunk and scalp and the virus is often activated within the organic structure after a pharynx infection. It looks on the tegument as rupture shaped drops, scaly and pinkish in colour.

Pustular psoriasis emerges as Pus filled bullas or bumps that green goods a glutinous clear fluid. In phases the pustules construct up in to brownish coloring material round lepidote splodges which then flake off. Inverse psoriasis although it is not generally considered to be a terrible word form of psoriasis, is still irritating,and commonly happens on the articulations of the skin, armpits, inguen country and creases of the skin.

Erythrodermic psoriasis is a reddish lepidote often fidgety tegument over big country of the tegument and certain types of medicine such as as Li have got been established in causing volcanic eruptions on the skin.

Various treatments for psoriasis using coal pitch based lotions are commonly prescribed but apart from it being messy and staining clothes, and the other more than serious side consequence is that it can do the tegument more sensitive to tegument exposure.

Extreme Celebrity Giving

Come the vacation season, we all put option a few other vaulting horses in the aggregation plate or driblet some alteration in the Redemption Army bucket. If you're a celebrity, you can just drop your pants.

That's right. When Hollywood's hottest aid a cause they've got wealthiness and celebrity in their favor. And that open ups doors to some very originative giving.

This year, Queen Victoria Beckham will deprive for charity. London's Daily Mirror studies Beckham, 33, will look in the fan on T-shirts for interior designer Marc Jacobs, the return going to a tegument malignant neoplastic disease charity. Stars such as as Julianne Moore, Dita Von Teese and Noemi Joseph Campbell all got bare for his shirts in 2006, raising 30,000 pounds.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have got been wise to this for old age with their long-running "I'd Rather Travel Bare Than Wear Fur" campaign, featuring musca volitans by Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington and Pamela Anderson.

Supermodel Noemi Joseph Campbell cognizes the value of celebrity and glamor too. She enlisted people on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean for her "Fashion For Relief" demoes in New House Of York and Greater London to profit victims of Hurricane Katrina and this year's U.K. floods, respectively. Beyoncé, Wyclef Jean, Faye Dunaway and British association football star Rio De Janeiro Ferdinand were among the models.

If you're fabulously rich, opportunities are you can afford to portion with some of the material in your closet. Earlier this year, U2 guitar player Edge donated one of his guitars for an auction bridge benefiting Hurricane Katrina victims. The Price Is Right host British Shilling Barker donated one of his mikes for an eBay
(nasdaq:
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) auction bridge to profit an animate being rights group.

Another option not readily available to the remainder of us: moviemaking. Former Frailty President Aluminum Al Gore raised consciousness about planetary heating with An Inconvenient Truth. Bonus: Well-executed movies with a cause often make well during awarding season. An Inconvenient Truth, the Uncle Tom Tom Hanks 1994 acquired immune deficiency syndrome play City Of Brotherly Love and the 2000 Julia Richard J. Roberts legal play Erin Brockovich all South Korean won Oscars.

Getting busted by the bulls is another attention-grabber. Nothing serious, head you, just acquire arrested for disorderly behavior or trespassing to bring forth news insurance for a cause. Just inquire Danny Glover, who was arrested in 2004 during a protestation against the race murder in the Darfur part of Sudan, or Heroes star Hayden Panettiere, who was reportedly issued an apprehension warrant last calendar month by Nipponese police force after she paddled out on a surfboard in southwesterly Japanese Islands with other militants to forestall a dolphinfish hunt.

Paulette Maehara, president and main executive director of the Association of Fundraising Professionals in Arlington, Va., have long worked with people on charitable causes. She admonishes there are risks. They might make something foolish or irresponsible that could reflect badly on an organization. Or they could simply flake out and not demo up for an visual aspect at a widely publicized charity event.

But the possible benefits are difficult to ignore, such as as a celebrity's name acknowledgment and his or her connexions to other entertainers and flush would-be donors.

"There's greater consciousness for the charity,'' Maehara says. "There's a batch of exposure."