April

These days, April is enjoying a quieter kind of reinvention. With her daughter now grown, she and her high-school-sweetheart husband are finding their way into a new season: weekly pickleball, date nights, a book club of two, and more room for the work she built from scratch.

A self-described introvert and longtime writer, April has always used words to understand her world. Before breast cancer, she was a newspaper reporter. After a stage 3C HER2-positive breast cancer diagnosis in 2012 while breastfeeding her daughter, writing became a way to process what happened—and find people who understood it.

The problem was, she couldn’t find many.

So she created what she had been searching for.

Wildfire began as a magazine for younger people affected by breast cancer and grew into a writing community, workshops, and retreats centered around vulnerable storytelling—the stories that don’t wrap themselves up neatly with a pink ribbon. She’s intentional about creating space for early-stage and metastatic breast cancer stories to exist side by side.

That closeness carries grief. April has lost friends and writers to metastatic breast cancer along the way, and she is candid about the weight of staying face-to-face with cancer. Still, “I don’t ever want to harden myself or cut myself off,” she says.

More than a decade beyond her diagnosis, April remains intentionally visible as a long-term survivor while recognizing that everyone gets to decide how much space cancer occupies in their life. She often sees the same thing happen with her writers: they arrive thinking cancer is the whole story, only to discover their stories are much bigger than cancer.

That perspective shapes what “comeback” means to her.

“We’re always surviving something,” April says. What gives her hope is “this idea of an after.”

More than a decade after breast cancer, April is living inside one of those afters now—still writing, still building community, still making room for what comes next.