Wakeful Night
Wakeful Night is a book Nicole wrote and illustrated, and was published with Dottir Press in the Fall of 2018. This book is an illustrated exploration of cancer-related loss she developed to lead readers through their own stages of identity, fear, and metaphorical thinking associated with a cancer diagnosis. Through art -- the book also contains a series of Skibola’s abstract linocut prints and India ink paintings -- and some narrative storytelling, Wakeful Night aims to support readers to understand their experience of cancer and develop a creative practice. Nicole will be touring California, Oregon, and New York with the release of her book in the fall where she will discuss cancer, art and cannabis.
At Cosmic View, we are passionate about supporting the physical and emotional health of our patients. We hope that those of you who resonate with the words on this page can find a bit of solace with this book.
About Wakeful Night, in the words of Dottir Press
Wakeful Night: A Structured Reflection on Loss and Illumination transcends the world of self-help books and blogs, cancer writing, and new age spiritualism that often lacks tangible guidance on how to move through grief. Nicole began to understand how much people want to share their loss and to make meaning out of trauma. Applying themes from The Artist’s Way to a tailored exploration of grief, Nicole created a process for leading the reader through the stages of identity, fear, and metaphorical thinking that she used in developing her own narrative of loss. Wakeful Night is a reminder, as Nicole says in the book’s introduction, that “in losing so much there is space to grow,” and it is also a tool for that growth. This is a beautiful journal you can use to explore the darkness, unknown, and depth of a cancer diagnosis.
+
“Nicole Skibola is sensitive, wise, resilient, beautiful, inscrutable, crazy, mundane, and (thank god) unstoppably creative. Her gift is knowing that all of these are her gifts, even the ones we might not want.” —BEN ERLICH, The Dreams of Santiago Ramón y Cajal
