Blogging is not walking, but for me it was. I published Valley of Blue Hope: Poems Before and After Diagnosis of Cancer on Create Space on January 10, 2014. At the time, my wife Joan and I were living with my daughter and son-in-law in St. Louis, where I was being treated for a blood disorder and an infection in my spleen and pleural cavity called empyema at the Barnes Jewish Hospital's Siteman Cancer Treatment Center. I began blogging Valley of Blue Hope: Poems Before and After Diagnosis of Cancer on January 18, 2014 in St. Louis and continued blogging after we returned to our home in Helena Valley in March. I posted each of the forty-six poems in my collection with commentary and related thoughts and memories. My last post was on June 12, 2014. It was for me five challenging and wonderful months of living with and hearing again the poems I had written and arranged--of walking through my Valley of Blue Hope.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Lowell Uda has taught English at the U. of Hawaii and the U. of Montana, and worked in Montana state government. After that he became a United Methodist minister, pastoring churches in Colorado and Montana. His story, "The Cherry Tree," won first place in the 2011 Common Review Short Story Prize competition, and a number of his stories and poems have appeared in literary and other magazines, including The North American Review, Hawaii Review, Moon Rabbit Review, and The Other Side.