You shouldn’t have written that poem, he said.
What poem?
That short one about brain tumors.
But I wrote it before her daughter …. I protested.
Doesn’t matter. She needn’t be reminded of it.
I can’t take it back. It’s out there now.
You didn’t have to give her the book the poem was in. Each time she reads it she’ll be reminded.
But …
You could have pulled it, he said. It didn’t have to be there.
He was right. It didn’t. But it was a good poem. My editor said it had to go in. Anyway it wasn’t about Jess. It was written about a tumor I had seen in Scientific American, how beautiful it was, how like the wings of a butterfly unfurling into the hemispheres of the brain.
Are there subjects we should not write about?
John Malone 
Yes.
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This question hounds me too.
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I don’t think there’s an easy answer. Just be clear in your own head that no harm is intended and post 🙂
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it depends on how we handle the subject I suppose. It is awful easy to offend these days. The alternative is to not handle it at all
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the last for an artist of any kind — and you are a writer just like me — is not a viable alternative; one has to write about such things without being offensive. Tricky sometimes 🙂
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