"No Matter the Distance" by Cindy Baldwin

I'm Cindy Baldwin, an author livinge in the suburbs of Portland, OR. I have cystic fibrosis as well as a number of other conditions including ehlers-danlos syndrome, fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue.

What drew you to the calling of writing?

 I have always loved reading and writing, for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories are of falling asleep to the audiobook of Anne of Green Gables. I loved the way books could take me to new worlds and let me experience things I couldn't do in my regular life! Reading was also the way I occupied my time doing breathing treatments as a preteen. As I got older, I started writing more and more (also often during treatment time!), and by about halfway through high school I knew I wanted to be a published novelist someday. Even though my road to publication has been tough (as most are), and there are a lot of hard things about book publishing as a career, I can't quit writing! It is a huge part of how I process the world, my feelings, and my experiences.

How has writing been instrumental to your life?

Like I mentioned, reading and writing were both very tied to doing treatments growing up! I also have always used writing—in the form of private journaling, public social media or blogging, and fiction or poetry writing—as a way to explore and understand the things that happen to me. Some of the most grueling experiences in my life, I've managed to come to terms with through writing about it. After I gave birth to my daughter in 2013 in a deeply traumatic birth experience—the kind that leaves you with PTSD—I spent several days writing a 10,000-word birth story and by the end of it, I was able to see those traumatic experiences in a completely different light. Even when I'm writing fiction, even when I'm writing something that doesn't feel that similar to my life at all, I'm always shocked to get to the end of a book and realize how much of the story was an exploration of things I was trying to understand better in my own heart.

These days, I have four books published with Quill Tree Books, an imprint of HarperCollins—Where the Watermelons Grow, Beginners Welcome, The Stars of Whistling Ridge, and No Matter the Distance. 

How has your life as an individual with CF impacted your writing? 

Besides the things I've mentioned—like how treatment time is still when I get a lot of work done even today!—CF has been intimately tied to all of the writing I've done. Because I write books for kids in the 8-13 range, I often think about the girl I was back then: lonely, scared, often overwhelmed at the realities of growing up with CF and experiencing things like routine blood draws when I had a severe phobia of needles, nights all alone in the hospital, and constant stomach pain. All of my books so far have been about kids dealing with big challenges, and I have written all of them with 11-year-old Cindy in mind—that little girl who just really, really needed to know that she was not alone. 

From a practical standpoint, I am definitely a slower author than many! I've had to learn how to be fairly efficient with my writing time, and I still just simply don't write as quickly as many authors. I also have to balance very carefully things like book events, conferences, and travel, which I love but can be extremely draining.

Tell us about your newest book release. Why now? Why this story? 

My newest book, No Matter the Distance, released on February 21st. It is about an 11-year-old CFer named Penny who finds a lost dolphin in the creek by her house and has to hatch a plan to help the dolphin get back to her pod. I have always known I wanted to write a book about CF; for a long time, I didn't feel ready to look at my own baggage enough to write about it in such an intimate and public way. Once I thought I was ready to try, I had a variety of different story ideas that I played around with, but none of them felt quite right.

In the very beginning of the pandemic, I was experiencing the worst writer's block of my life. Desperate to write, something, ANYTHING, I sat down and started writing Penny's story in free verse. I have always loved the novel in verse format, and it fit Penny's story so perfectly and the stream-of-consciousness style was easier for me to access than traditional prose during that period of intense emotion. NO MATTER THE DISTANCE has changed quite a lot since those first words on the page (originally it was actually about the pandemic), but it is at heart what I always wanted to write: a story that presents an authentic, un-sensationalized view of what it's like to grow up with CF, balancing the knowledge that you are blessed to be alive and have access to medical miracles with the understanding that CF life can still be very hard, no matter how "lucky" you've been in the health lottery.

Tell us how we can be a part of the release: 

Purchasing the book, asking your library to request it, reading it, sharing it on social media, and reviewing it on Amazon (even if you haven't purchased it there) are HUGE helps in getting the word out! You can also see a fun release interview I did with Anderon's Bookshop in Illinois on the @abteens Instagram account, where I talk about what it was like writing a book about CF while living with it. I'm also hoping to set up more CF-specific events and outreach as the year goes on, so keep an eye on my Instagram account @cindybaldwinbooks for details!