Cloud Messenger: Love
and Loss in the Indian Himalayas
Karen
Trollope-Kumar is a Canadian family physician who has worked in farflung parts
of the world, from remote northern towns in Ontario to the Himalayan foothills
of India. She is an associate professor of Family Medicine at McMaster
University in Hamilton, Ontario, and she also holds a PhD in medical
anthropology, the study of health in its social and environmental context. She
and her husband Pradeep Kumar spent many years doing medical work in India, and
they maintain close ties to that part of the world. Her interests include
hiking, traveling, reading and writing. She recently published an award-winning
memoir of the years they spent in India.
“Cloud Messenger” is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kindle and
Kobo. She currently works as a family physician at Grand River Community Health
Centre in Brantford, Ontario. For more info, please see: http://www.karentrollopekumar.com/
1. What really inspired you to write your book, to force you from taking an idea or experience and conveying it into a book? Cloud Messenger is a memoir about the most dramatic chapter in my life – the 11 years that I spent living and working as a doctor in the Indian Himalayas. I learned so much about medicine, about culture, and about the human journey itself, that I felt a deep need to share these experiences.
2. What is it about and whom do you believe is your
targeted reader? “Cloud Messenger” begins when I first traveled to India
and met the man who would become my husband. Pradeep was a young pediatrician
who inspired me to marry him and move to the Himalayan foothills of north
India. After our wedding, my husband and I began our medical work, a time of
tremendous learning and exploration for both of us. I learned about tropical diseases and also
about how culture affects illness. I learned to speak Hindi and also about how
to live in an entirely different culture.
Meanwhile, my husband and I had to build a lasting relationship and
create a loving home for our growing family. Then, a series of dramatic crises
occurred – an earthquake, an assassination and a political crisis – and
suddenly our lives and ideals were at stake… My target audience is older women with an
interest in culture, spirituality or cross cultural experience. The book would
also appeal to those interested in travel, anthropology, and medicine.
3. What do you hope will be the everlasting thoughts for readers who finish your book? What should remain with them long after putting it down? The central message of my book is that it is possible to build bridges of the heart across the great divides of class, education and culture. During the 11 years I spent in the Himalayan foothills, I established deep friendships with so many people – members of my Indian family, medical colleagues, the nurses who worked with us and the women of the villages of the Himalayas.
4. What advice or words of wisdom do you have for
fellow writers? I suffered from writer’s block for a long time because it
seemed like such a difficult task to describe this extraordinary time in my
life in words. Finally, I made a verbal commitment to complete the book to a
large circle of my friends and acquaintances. They really kept me on task, and
didn’t allow me to procrastinate any further! Once I got going, it was a real
joy to write.
5. What trends in the book world do you see and where
do you think it is heading? Definitelythe book publishing industry is
undergoing some major shifts at present, with the Indie publishing trend
growing by leaps and bounds. Overall, I think this is a positive development.
Authors now have more decision-making power, although they do have to be much
more involved in the marketing and promotion side of their books.
6. What great challenges did you have in writing
your book? My most difficult challenge was in finding my “narrative
voice”. The first draft was a rather dry account of those years in India, with
lots of medical and historical detail. But it just didn’t seem ring true. I
think that a really good memoir has to be written in a personal voice, allowing
the reader into the mind and heart of the author. This is what happened when I wrote subsequent
drafts of Cloud Messenger – it became a heartfelt and genuine story of that
dramatic chapter in my life.
7. If people can only buy one book this month, why
should it be yours? At its heart, Cloud Messenger is a love story of a
young woman who marries a man from a very different cultural background and moves
to the Himalayan foothills, where she and her husband work as doctors. But it is much more than a love story,
because it blends interesting insights into medicine and anthropology with a fascinating
account of travel in a remote part of the Himalayas. At the deepest level, it
is an exploration of the human journey: What inspires us? What challenges us?
And when faced with disaster and disillusionment, how do we go on?
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Brian Feinblum’s views,
opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his
employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him
at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the
third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog 2017©. Born and
raised in Brooklyn, now resides in Westchester. Named one of the best book
marketing blogs by Book Baby http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs
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