I have over 40 short story and flash fiction publications, including in: World Literature Today, The Irish Times, Descant, AGNI, The Fiddlehead and others. I was born in South Africa and have British and Canadian citizenship.
My work has received a number of awards including winning the Grindstone 2020 International Novel Prize, Bridport Prize's 2019 Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award for a First Novel, the 2012 bosque Fiction Competition and the 2011 J.G. Farrell award for best novel-in-progress. I have been awarded Professional Writer’s Grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Arts Council of Ireland and Arts Council England. I have recently finished a comic coming-of-age novel based on my time as a teenager in Co. Donegal, Ireland.
I was a guest writer and panellist at the 12th, 13th and 15th International Conference on the Short Story (Little Rock, Arkansas, Austria and Lisbon); an invited participant and workshop leader at The Galle Literary Festival, Sri Lanka in 2011 and 2018 and a seven-time participant of the Sirenland Writer’s Conference in Positano, Italy. I attended the 2019 Autobiography and Fiction with Electric Literature residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and the Banff Centre’s Wired Writing Studio in 2011/2012.
In my spare time I run Animal Welfare Advocates for Bosnia, a small group raising awareness and funds to stop animal suffering.
I live with my partner, David Crean and my foundling cat, Rónán.
My writing mentors are Barbara Turner-Vesselago, who teaches Freefall writing - without her support and guidance I would not be writing; also: Deena Metzger, Dani Shapiro, Marina Endicott and Jim Shepard.
More information: http://www.sandrajensen.net
Specialties: Fiction, creative non-fiction, flash
My cnf flash ECLIPSE has been awarded Runner Up in the WOW! Women on Writing Creative Nonfiction Essay contest. Second time I’ve placed in their competitions in six months! The other was for a previously published piece, What Men Want. Have a look at that post to read about this lovely organisation. I will also have another interview up soon.
I’m in the midst of my first COVID infection which has been awful, so this is a bright light for me at the moment, so grateful.
Many thanks to everyone at WOW! Women on Writing. What fantastic work you do for women writers!
I’m super happy that my cnf flash What Men Want is Runner Up in the WOW! Women on Writing Creative Nonfiction Essay contest. I didn’t discover this amazing group until recently. They not only run competitions, but courses and articles, and they also list a number of writing resources on their website. Unusually they accept work that has already been published, which means this piece of mine gets a new lease of life, but more importantly the lovely emails I’ve had back and forth with the organisers were a highlight of the recent months for me – much needed as I’ve been in quite a funk. The emails were supportive, encouraging, personal. Most competitions don’t engage to this level. AND, I have an interview! WOW! asked me questions about the piece, about my writing process, and about the book I was commissioned to write from Story Machine (slated for publication later this year). You can read the interview here.
I’m very proud to announce that “MOTHER“, a creative nonfiction flash story about, yes, my mother–and grief–is now published in Emerge Literary Journal. Many thanks to everyone involved in creating such a wonderful journal, and for all the hard work involved. It’s an honour to be part of the Emerge family.
For some reason I cannot post an update to my Fundrazr Can you support my journey to physical recovery? So I emailed everyone who donated, and am going to post a version of what I emailed, as so many lovely people have reached to see how I am doing. (If you are stumbling across this blog and don’t know the ‘story’ (and want to!) have a look at The Art of Illness.)
I just had my first consultation with Dr. Ben Sinclair, which is what the fundraiser was for, two consultations with him. Oh I wish all Doctors were like Dr. Sinclair. Prior to the session I had completed several pages of questions regarding my health history and so on, which he had read through prior to the meeting (Google Meets). Dr. Sinclair was very thorough, and my take was he had an excellent, intelligent and multi-disciplinary approach, taking in all the complicated aspects of my story. As I also suspect, I most likely have both viral and bacterial issues, plus damaged autonomic nervous system / dysregulated immune system, from both trauma and pathogens (including EBV, HSV, mycoplasma pneumonia, tick-borne disease etc). He listened really well, was articulate and positive, and I felt had a clear understanding of the many issues I have/have had. He himself had Long Covid and had such poor treatment on the NHS, which is why he started his own private practice with a small team behind him including Dr Carsten Nicolaus who specialises in Lyme, tick-borne diseases and associated health conditions.
Dr. Sinclair came up with a plan for me:
First off I need to do some blood tests on immune function, vector borne diseases and so on. Some of these I might be able to have paid for on the NHS, others will have to be done privately. I won’t know for a week or so as I’ll be filling out further forms and discussing with my own NHS GP what she can get done. I am hoping I have enough from what was raised to at least cover the blood tests, but I’m not sure at this point.
Once the tests are done, I will go on a trial of a month of the antiviral drug, Valacyclovir (which I know my NHS GP will be willing to prescribe, thankfully). This is something I’ve been thinking of doing for a while. Dr. Sinclair talked about ‘clearing the decks’ so to speak, before bringing out the big guns (my words!) – as it will help him decide more specifically what to use – antibiotics or alternative approaches or both.
Dr. Sinclair said a lot of very encouraging things, including how it’s possible my activated sciatic nerve issues could be connected not so much to the prolapsed disk but to all else that is going on. I do know there are people walking around with exactly my diagnosis (pinched nerve from prolapsed disk) who have NO pain, so…. It would be miraculous if this was one of the many things that eased with his treatment programme. And, he thinks my restless leg syndrome could also be an aspect of the whole situation. It would be so amazing if this also cleared up! And, it will take time. I think we are talking about at least 6 months or more of treatment.
My health has been bad lately, including a week of such profound physical weakness I could barely open my eyelids. This is very unusual for me, it might occur for about an hour in the evening but not for a full week. I was so despairing I thought if I had the funds I’d check myself into a respite care or something similar (mostly respite care is for carers, but as I am my own carer for the most part some respite would be lovely…). Thankfully the weakness eased.
Anyway, I am eager to get started on this journey!
I’m sure most of you aren’t interested in all these details but I did want to update once I had the first consultation.
Again, thank you all so much for reading, and for your generosity.
It’s been over a year since I wrote a blog about my health (the latest one being Finding Home). Mostly because not a lot changed since then, both positive and negative aspects were on an even keel – nothing drastically new, but manageable, many thanks to all the support I received from so many of you. So: better mental health, lessening of weird symptoms (burning mouth/foot syndrome, thyroid goitres etc) but still the small window of energy each day, bordered by exhaustion, still a continuous discomfort veering sometimes into pain down my sciatic nerve, still my pancreatic insufficiency for which I have to take digestive enzymes with everything I eat, still getting up in the night to wee several times, and sadly the restless legs returned when I stopped the sciatic pain medication, but if I can get my ‘bad’ leg pulled (quite literally!) before sleep, this seems to ease it so I’m sure it’s associated with my prolapsed disk. I’m also still waiting for consultations with an NHS cardiologist etc (it’s been over 2 years now…), but it’s been a while since a tachycardia episode has woken me violently in the night.
If there is an art to illness, I felt I was learning it.
I suspect one of the main skills involved in such an art is being willing to ask for help. If you’ve read my blogs you’ll know how difficult this is, was, for me, and yet doing so created a fundamental shift inside me, the beginnings of rewiring of old programming that I had to do it alone, had to be independent, strong, without needing help from others. This was what my mother modelled, and although I could see how negatively this affected her and her life, it was hard to shake myself free of the same beliefs. I was forced to, my health deteriorating so severely I more or less had no choice (see The Unendurable).
But something changed in March and once again I’m asking for help. If you’d prefer to skip to the specifics rather than my lengthy preamble, go here.
For no particular reason (that I know of), my exhaustion no longer had a window of energy and became crushing. It is 24/7. It’s affecting my eyesight, I can barely focus until late in the day (I’ve had my eyes tested, they are fine). The only times this had happened before was if I was actively ill, or after my adverse reaction to the vaccines. I was (am) still “aggressively” resting which means guided meditations lying down and an eyemask, at least twice a day – my days being shorter than most people’s as the best sleep I seem to get is in the morning, so I get up late, and my body starts to shut down around 7 pm, so the most I’m doing then is watching TV or reading.
Although this exhaustion bothered me, I decided to participate once again (and hopefully assist a little) in my partner, David Crean’s Body Resonance Goddess retreat in the beautiful Milelja Retreat Centre near the little town of Molyvos. I was much sicker the first time (two years ago), and almost didn’t go. I’m so glad I did as it was a deeply healing experience. This time, although I continued to feel very tired, it was once again amazing. Particularly important for me was making deep connections with three beautiful women, two of them half my age (but twice as wise), connections I know will last my life. But the journey home was challenging, 19 hours of delayed flights and long drives and sitting on runways or in the air awaiting a slot.
Two days later I became profoundly ill. What I sometimes call my ‘usual’, only more severe and lasting much longer than normal: deep malaise, as if you are about to come down with a tropical illness, or a bad flu, but without any coughing or sneezing or even fever. I could sense something was ‘in’ me, something unwanted – a virus, bacteria, mycoplasma, I don’t know. Something that lives inside me and hurtles to the surface when triggered, most likely. A retained pathogen, my acupuncturist believes. Three weeks of utter grimness.
At the time I was reading The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, a 2022 medical memoir by the poet Meghan O’Rourke. It tells the gruelling journey of her own physical health, but also delves into the social and political ramifications of chronic illness. The gaslighting, the sexism, the failures of the medical institutions. The book is extensively researched and she interviews a number of doctors and scientists. It’s not an easy read, not because it isn’t well written, it is, but because of all she suffered emotionally and physically, still suffers, and the truth she writes about how it is for those with chronic illness.
There is so much I’d like to quote from the book but the parts that struck me the most were about how so many who are ill are expected to learn something from it. We do, of course we do, but at what cost? As Meghan writes:
“There is a razor-thin line between trying to find something usefully redemptive in illness and lying to ourselves about the nature of suffering. Until we mourn what is lost in illness—and until we have a medical community that takes seriously the suffering of patients—we should not celebrate what is gained in it.”
Like myself, Meghan has multiple reasons for her illness. But the thing that helped her the most, the thing that allowed her to live a relatively normal life, was treatment for Lyme disease: an intense and long-term course of antibiotics. (She followed this up with FMT in England – fecal microbiota transplant, to take care of the microbiome killing side-effect of antibiotic therapy, something I’ve known about for years as it can help those with chronic illness, but for me it’s unaffordable).
One of the factors that most likely triggered my ME/CFS was South African Tick Bite Fever (similar to Lyme, but often called Rickettsia). I’ve long thought about embarking on an antibiotic treatment, long avoided it, long wanted to try everything else. I’ve also thought about taking antivirals, which some with ME/CFS do very well on, and given it’s likely I have flare ups of Epstein Barr Virus and that I do have flare ups of HSV 2, they could help. But my impulse has always been towards alternative approaches, and even when I went to a tick-borne illness versant doctor in Germany fifteen years ago, she treated me with herbs (one year of them, after which she said I was cured and yet my health steadily deteriorated, possibly because I wasn’t properly dealing with past traumas that can also be a factor in chronic illness. I went on another tick-born illness focussed herbal protocol about six years ago – you read Finding Home you’ll see the extensive trauma therapy journey I’ve been on – and my mental health has never been better thanks to this. But I’m still ill).
Reading Meghan, and feeling so entirely awful for three weeks got me thinking. There are tests for tick-borne diseases, mostly in Germany and the US, but they are hugely expensive and not entirely conclusive. I spoke to my GP here in the UK and she told me she has a patient with a similar profile– trying everything including trauma therapy, and that the antibiotic most used for Lyme, Doxycycline, finally helped this patient. Would I like to try? I had no hesitation. YES, I said. I didn’t expect any result but within a day of taking them I no longer felt grim. The tiredness, the difficulty focussing, yes, but not grim. I’m on a week trial, to be extended another week if I’m doing alright.
A couple of days after starting the antibiotics I connected with someone in a support group for those with tick-borne illness. I’m not sure why I reached out to this particular person, perhaps because she’s both a scientist and a writer, because I liked her profile picture, her posts about solar power, about how humans and apes share a common language, her posts about cats. She hasn’t been ill for as long as I have and she initially thought it was ‘just’ Long Covid. She discovered Dr. Ben Sinclair, a private consultant who is putting together a centre of excellence focussing on hard to diagnose and treat illnesses like Long Covid and Lyme and is working with some world leading experts on these.
As I know, many with post covid infections or adverse reactions to the vaccine have reactivation of other viruses or bacteria and based on her symptoms, Dr. Sinclair treated her with both Doxycycline and antivirals (Valacyclovir). While she still has Long Covid, she is doing much better since this combined treatment, and still works with him.
Given my own GP is not a specialist in this area, given the NHS only allows for 10 minute slots if that, and given this new journey I am on is not straightforward, not without side-effects or detours or set-backs (as is clear from Meghan’s book) I strongly feel I need such a support, at least an initial consultation.
It’s not cheap, of course, but much cheaper than the blood tests I had vaguely been thinking about over the years: £299 for an initial 45-minute consultation. (The ten-day FMT Programme Meghan did in the UK costs £5175.00 but that’s not in my sights right now!).
So, yes, once again I’m asking for your help. Once again it isn’t easy, and I have no expectations. But if you can help that would be amazing. (If you’ve read this far, that’s amazing too!).
I would like help towards two consultations with Dr. Sinclair, one to start with and another to see how I’m getting along. Thankfully as I’m ancient now, prescriptions are free 😊
Thank you for reading. Thank you for being there. Thank you for the little messages I get on my Facebook and Instagram posts, it all means so much to me.
Out Of The Blue – a creative non-fiction flash piece of mine won first place in Discourse Literary Journal’s June competition with the theme of ‘Weird.’ (The link takes you to the Featured Essays page, and my piece is second down). I need to add a warning as this very short piece describes some strange/disturbing things. I wrote it some years ago as part of a daily practice of writing I call ‘A Page a Day’ and then very recently edited it for sending out. I have another short piece coming out in a month, also written some time ago and then recently edited.
That these pieces were buried in a pile of “old” writing and now are being made public somewhat astonishes me, and reminds me how powerful and productive the Page a Day process can be, and how much I wish I had kept at it – each day, every day. Another thing that these publications prove to me is what I so often say – that editing work is MUCH easier the longer you leave the writing in a drawer.
I talk about the Page a Day process in the Story Machines blog here. While this blog was written for those with chronic illness, the practice works for anyone, at any stage of writing.
Over the years I’ve had many short pieces published from this practice, and while I think the meme below is both funny and mostly true, I do know that I feel better, if not happier, when I write, and particularly if what I write speaks to others.
I promise myself I’ll start a new Page a Day practice, today, but of course I won’t. I’m writing this blog instead. But I’m still promising myself!
So Karaoke Girl which I entered into a little competition where you record yourself reading a flash piece, won first place. Thank you everyone who helped make this happen! Funny little competition, but always nice to be ‘a winner’! To listen, go here (YouTube).
Yesterday was a first for me, I had TWO pieces published in one day. One is a personal essay about my mother’s death, titled Now That You Are Here published by the wonderful Cutleaf Journal (the most money I ever received for a literary magazine publication!), and the second is Karaoke Girl which I entered into a little competition where you record yourself reading a flash piece, and apparently I’m shortlisted. I only entered last week. I’m not entirely sure how it works, if you like it and leave a comment (only if you DO like it), possibly it helps get the piece further in the competition! Or just click if you want to hear what I sound like…
I should say that these are not brand new stories. In fact the essay took NINE years to get published, turned down by far lesser (and non paying magazines), so it’s worth never giving up.
I can’t believe it’s been been five months since I wrote here. I don’t know where the time has gone. My various symptoms were really awful for a long time – the burning feet syndrome (most likely small fibre neuropathy), the nocturnal polyuria made for very little sleep, which in any case is never restorative. I was given a drug to help me sleep, but that gave me restless legs, which was almost worse than either of these, so I stopped taking it. I had an awful, endless viral infection in January, not COVID but a kind of cold or flu, the worst I’ve ever had. It caused a ticking sound in my head which got worse if I moved or even moved my eyes, and this was layered on top of my already horrible tinnitus. But it did pass, eventually. I still have burning feet and I still have to wee throughout the night, but it is better than it was. My pancreas is still not working properly so I have to take digestive enzymes with every meal and snack, and my hormones won’t settle down into something relatively normal. I’ve had weird heart arrhythmias and I’m still waiting to see a cardiologist about this, so too an NHS neurologist and rheumatologist to proceed with the small fibre neuropathy diagnosis. I did have an appointment with an NHS gastroenterologist, and I’ve had an abdominal CT scan for which I’m awaiting results. I’ve had brain and spine MRIs, which showed nothing out of the ordinary (other than the prolapsed disc).
About the prolapsed disc — my sciatic pain has varied from awful to completely manageable and back again, but mostly it is nothing like it was in 2021, not even close, I can’t tell you how grateful I am. I still take a drug for this, but I’ve reduced what I had to take in the early days. Overall I’d say most of my symptoms have eased, even if only a little. Again, I’m so, so grateful. But I still have a tiny window of energy available to me each day, no more than 3 hours usually. I still have severe, crushing exhaustion, and dry eyes and dry mouth and so on.
But….! I’ve had some really good days recently. My mental health is overall better than it’s been in many years – and it is this I mostly want to talk about because I’m going to ask for your help again.
I was long ago diagnosed with C-PTSD – complex post-traumatic stress disorder. I have never really known what to do with this – over the decades I’ve done different kinds of therapy and therapeutic approaches, and I’m sure these helped but I still have had breakdowns and periods of severe depression. And, as you know, after the drastic downturn in my physical health in 2021 I knew I had to do everything I could, both on a physical and mental level, to at least bring me some kind of ease, for otherwise my life as it was then was not worth living.
Thanks to so many generous people I’ve managed to do a lot about my health from acupuncture to seeing private consultants. I’ve talked about Rex Brangwyn, the extraordinary EMDR therapist I worked with for several months, and then early this year I started work with another therapist, Montseratt, someone Rex recommended who has a different approach. As soon as I saw her photograph on her website, I knew she was someone I had to work with. She’s a soul worker, mentor, grief worker, doula, childbirth activist, singer and of course, a psychotherapist. She and I do weekly sessions on Zoom, and 3 or 4 intensive in-person sessions that last all day. I’ve had 3 so far, and the last one was incredible.
I was able for the first time in my life to truly access the deep river of pain that lives inside me, that lives beneath all the dissociative behaviours I’ve learned to avoid the pain. I’ve always been frustrated that I could not access how it actually felt to be seven years old and survive a car crash that killed my father in Crete, and all the associated trauma that unfolded afterwards: my mother’s severe illness, living in a foreign country and so on, not having family or friends around for support. Not to mention my early teenage experience of being an unwitting/unwilling witness to my mother’s violent and overtly sexual relationship with her second husband. And all that followed: the years of bulimia, the suicide of a friend, the near death of my own second husband. I can remember how awful it was when I was older, but when I was seven? No. The traumas that followed just compounded my dissociation, my feelings of isolation, my coping behaviours (be strong, capable, independent).
In this last long session with Montseratt felt all of the pain, all of the grief. So deeply and so fully and so painfully it literally flowed throughout my body – for hours, and at the same time I experienced an extraordinary sense of compassion and love. Montseratt was with me the whole time, witnessing what I was going through, holding me, talking with me. At one point she said, “This is home.” The issue of not having a home has been huge for me all my life – not just because I have lived in so many countries, but because I’ve never felt grounded in myself, never really felt committed to living, to life. And when she said This is home, I could feel the truth of that. And afterwards, something shifted inside me. I’d felt the pain I’d been avoiding all my life, and I’d survived. Not only survived, but discovered within me a compassion I never knew existed.
After this session I had some days and hours of feeling better in my body than I’ve felt in years, actually healthy. And even happy!
And, the work is not over, I need to practise this self compassion on a daily basis. And after this long session I knew I needed to do another one. The original idea was to only do three, but my second session was not fruitful, so it felt clear to me that more is needed to truly ground the work within me, or possibly to access other emotions I’ve repressed (anger, for example, an emotion I so rarely feel I assume I am just someone who doesn’t really feel anger, but….). Montseratt brought it up too, that one more session like that would be really helpful.
But these long sessions are expensive – not relatively, but it’s a six to seven hour process, all in one day and Montserrat is completely focussed on me the entire time. I need help to do this, and as always as I write this, I feel… awkward. I have no expectations, I trust that somehow it will be possible.
If you can help, that would be amazing. If you can’t, thank you so much for reading this far. It’s a support just knowing you have, that you are there.
Delighted to have a story published in the third edition of Atticus Review. This is a piece of creative nonfiction, perhaps not an easy read, but I’m proud of it. It’s a lyrical delve into my own psyche and some of the events that happened to me in my childhood. In this issue Atticus Review states: we look deeper at the role of language in shaping our lives, our relationships, and our world. We have love languages, expressions of grief, ways of processing trauma and creating hope. As an access point, language gives shape, and is shaped by, our sense of self and our sense of community.
Many thanks to editor Rachel Laverdiere for her help in polishing the story.
Sandra Jensen 