When a Diagnosis Can’t Keep You From Your Dream

While inspired by the whirlwind romances in Hallmark movies, Racquel Henry knows all too well that life doesn’t always feel like a fairytale. But an unexpected diagnosis (and 92 rejections) couldn’t stop her from becoming a published author.

content warning: cancer, chemo

Racquel Henry and I were supposed to meet at Lineage Coffee, where we would’ve walked across a mint green floor and ordered iced matchas and lemon cakes before sitting in two black iron chairs at a small round light-wood table, us talking a little louder whenever metal eviscerated whole coffee beans.

But on the day of interview, I had a sore throat, and with Racquel’s recently compromised immune system we didn’t want to risk an in-person meeting.

Instead, Zoom connects our two at-home writing offices. I meet her in my Taylor Swift Lover-era T-shirt while she wears a cozy white sweatshirt decorated with delicate pink flowers.

Racquel has straight black hair cropped just above her shoulders and wears silver hoop earrings just below her brown-framed glasses. Behind her are white shelves so packed with books, it’s as if each end of the shelf is giving the books a bear hug. Racquel sits in a computer chair with a pink blanket draped over it—a set of flowery curtains to her left, a sign that says “Home is where the Hallmark Channel movies are” to her right.

But it’s her tone of voice that stays with me long after our interview is finished. It’s somehow both high and low-pitched—soothing and yet unexpectedly punctuated with the kind of laughter that makes me feel like I’m eight years old again at a sleepover with my best friend.

I first met Racquel online three years ago. It was Christmas 2020, and I’d just moved back to Florida from California, something I hadn’t planned on doing when I thought I’d left Florida for good in 2016. But we needed to move back to Florida because of a family health crisis, and I was determined to make the best of it.

I loved the creative community I found in California.  The last profile I’d written was in LA on location for a big Netflix show where Rashida Jones casually walked by me in a suit and sneakers. Where was I going to find that in Florida?

I was disappointed but dedicated to finding a creative community in my hometown.

I used Google to find artists and writers in Florida, and that’s how I found Racquel. I followed her on Instagram and noticed she’d written a Christmas book called Holiday On Park. I conveniently found it in December, so I purchased it on my Kindle and started reading right away.

I was delighted when the two main characters met for hot chocolate at Lineage Coffee, a local coffee shop I was already familiar with since it was just off Colonial Drive—a road I’d driven all my life. I’d never read a book set in Orlando before, and it felt like a good sign, something I was desperate for after so many things went wrong when we moved to Florida, like the dead bunny in the dryer vent of our rental house.

I wanted to know more. How did this Trinidadian Floridian become a full-time writer while running a writing community and publishing a successful literary magazine?

I didn’t know then that Holiday On Park was Racquel’s first romance novella, nor that she’d been resisting writing romance for a long time. But I would soon learn why finally writing the thing she had secretly always wanted to write would inevitably change her life.

 It all began with a fuzzball on her pajamas.

“I’m always worried that I might die too soon and that a whole family of characters will be trapped forever inside me.” –Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, How I Came to Be a Writer, p. 38

Racquel has always been happiest when she’s at home in old pajamas, writing or editing something with a Hallmark Christmas movie playing in the background.

One day in 2021, amidst all of these things, she dusted a fuzzball off of an old navy blue pajama top she was wearing, the one with gold stars that said “Dream in Gold” on the front. But this time, as she dusted the fuzz off, she felt a lump.

She went to the doctor the very next day where she was sent in immediately for a mammogram and an ultrasound. Racquel remembers this time as feeling squeezed in every way—squeezed into gowns, the soonest available appointments, loud machines, and tiny cold rooms.

The quickness of it all made her nervous, but deep down, she was grateful for the urgency. relieved to be seen, and glad to get this over with.

Then she heard the word she didn’t want to hear: biopsy.

After her biopsy, she received a phone call asking her to come in.

Then fear set in. She’d seen the movies. Getting asked to come in was never a good thing.

Racquel already knew bad news was coming. She’d seen it already, a few days earlier, in the surgeon’s eyes when she looked at Racquel’s ultrasound and then back at Racquel. She wasn’t allowed to interpret the results yet, but Racquel knew: “Her face said, ‘You have cancer.’”

Racquel waited in her primary care doctor’s office. The doctor walked in and nonchalantly said, “So, did you look at the charts?”

“I don’t know how to read them,” Racquel replied.

“It’s cancer,” the doctor said bluntly.

Racquel didn’t hear anything else after that. The word cancer wrapped around her ankles and quickly pulled her underwater. It felt as if she were in the middle of an ocean: no life jacket, no oxygen tank.

Racquel let herself be dragged under as her doctor kept talking.

Her mom was with her, and while Racquel doesn’t remember leaving the office, eventually her mom led her out to the parking lot where Racquel’s dad and sister were waiting to hear the news.

“Is everything okay?,” they asked as soon as Racquel and her mom got closer.

Racquel looked up at them and immediately burst into tears.

They hugged her in the parking lot as they grieved every possibility. All Racquel was told was that she had cancer. The doctor didn’t have any other information yet since more tests were needed. For now, she had to process every scenario, every idea of what her life might be and might not be—and her family held it with her.

The doctor said she couldn’t get more tests for another week, and Racquel felt acute panic. “This thing is growing,” was all she could think. “We gotta get this thing out of here. They said a week is not going to be that significant of a difference, but I was like, ‘No, every day counts.’”

Beneath her initial panic was another stronger terror: “What if I never get to write all the things I want to write?”

“It wasn’t until my late twenties, when I began to feel comfortable about myself, that I realized how much easier it would have been if I had had a role model.” –Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, How I Came to Be a Writer, p. 66

Racquel wrote her first book in kindergarten from multicolored construction paper and tied it with yarn. The book was about golden retrievers. “I wanted a golden retriever for some reason,” she says. Next, I tell her how my first childhood dream was to live on a farm with many Golden Retriever puppies—mostly because of the dog Comet in Full House and the dog Chance in Homeward Bound. Racquel is pretty sure those dogs influenced her early dreams, too, which caused us to spend the next five minutes of our interview talking about the cute yellow Golden Retrievers we both had on our Lisa Frank folders).

In Trinidad, where Racquel was born and lived for the first two years of her life, dogs are strictly considered outside animals; Racquel’s mom always said no to having a dog. But Racquel learned early on that just because you can’t have something in real life doesn’t mean you can’t have it.

She learned she could create it.

So, she did have a dog growing up. His name was Milo, and he lived in her books.

Then, in fifth grade, Racquel’s teacher said six words that made Racquel believe that maybe writing could be more than just a way to make her dog dream come true.

Those six little words became a belief she’d carry with her for the rest of her life, even when it got buried for a little while.

Her teacher had said, “She has a way with words.”

Racquel recites the phrase as if each of the six words is a fragile and beautiful shell she’s found by the ocean and placed on a special shelf.

Then, young Racquel went to The Scholastic Book Fair which came to her elementary school every year. One year, a nonfiction book caught her eye: How I Came to be A Writer by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, the Newbery Medal-winning prolific author of the Shiloh books and author of more than 100 others. Racquel bought it and read it immediately Like many books, it planted a seed.

It was still a timid, tentative dream that seemed mostly out of reach, especially when Racquel was frequently told you can’t make any money being a writer.

But her parents were supportive. And Reynolds Naylor did it. And that one teacher said she had a way with words. What if she could do something with that talent? What if it could mean something? What if she could become a writer too?

 But then, just as the dream began to rise, peeking out to see if it was ok to come out, one class crushed it.

“What happens when someone with no real concept of who she is? Where does she get the courage to trust herself, to be herself, whatever that is?” –Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, How I Came to Be a Writer, p. 67

Throughout school, Racquel had many teachers praise her for her writing…until her AP English class.

Racquel’s AP English teacher singled her out, but this time, it was to belittle her, often in front of the whole class. Racquel was the only Black girl in the class, and she knows now—the way anyone from an oppressed group instinctively knows—that she was being treated unkindly based on the color of her skin and not the quality of her writing.

It’s something your body often knows first, something a million little microaggressions teach you to recognize for your own survival. It’s often something you wish were untrue, something you’d rather not deal with. In the moment, it can feel like it’d almost be easier if you were a bad writer so the harsh comments made sense, but deep down, you know you’re not. You know there’s something else going on here.

There’s still a part of you that might wonder if your body is wrong, if your instincts are wrong and if the oppressor is right. “I felt so inadequate,” Racquel remembers.

“Maybe I shouldn’t be a writer,” she thought. As discouragement set in, Racquel put writing aside and let the Phyllis Reynolds Naylor book collect dust on the shelf.

Racquel stopped writing altogether and later looked for a career that would pay the bills.

She went to college and majored in optometry in college because her mom’s friend was an optometrist and Racquel thought, “Well, I have glasses.” She laughs when she tells me this, remembering the logic we used at eighteen to try to find something familiar to do for the rest of our lives.

Before Racquel could start her optometry classes, however, she had to take the basics. Technically, her AP English test score could have gotten her out of having to take English 1101, but Racquel took it anyway because she still believed she wasn’t a good writer. She wanted to take college English to prepare her for the next four years.

A few weeks into class, her English 1101 professor handed out their first graded essays. She stopped when she placed Racquel’s on her desk, turned to her, and said, “I’d like to see you after class.”

Racquel was devastated. The teacher was going to tell her she needed to take a remedial class before she was ready for this one. It felt like AP English all over again.

After the other students had left, the professor turned to Racquel and said, “I just wanted to say you’re the only person in the class who earned a perfect score.”

She handed Racquel her perfect paper and told her she didn’t need to be in the class.  Then she asked Racquel what her major was.

“Pre-optometry,” Racquel answered.

“Why are you choosing that major?” the professor asked kindly.

“It just makes sense. I like glasses, and I wear glasses too,” Racquel said. “I could be a doctor,” Racquel went on, “but I don’t want to go to med school.”

The professor took all of this in and gently said, “I’m not trying to deter you, but I’m going to suggest you start exploring paths in the writing field because I think you need to be in the literary space.”

Racquel considered changing her major, but she couldn’t get those eight little words out of her head: “You can’t make any money as a writer.”

So, she kept her pre-optometry major.

But then, her English 1102 professor kept saying things like, “You’re a great writer,” and “You have everything it takes,” and “I know you can do it.”

Why didn’t she know she could do it, though? Why was she so confident she could be a doctor if she wanted to be, but not a writer?

Her parents raised her to believe that through hard work and faith, she could do whatever she wanted, so being a doctor seemed completely possible. They believed she could be a writer, too, but once Racquel left home, the world’s messages conflicted with her parents. The world seemed to believe a medical path was more possible than an artistic path.

And the world’s voice got louder as Racquel got older. Her voice, too, was getting quieter. “In those days,” she says, “I didn’t know myself.”

After she realized she wasn’t enjoying her pre-optometry classes, Racquel changed her major to pre-law. At least there was more writing involved in that major, and she liked words. Law would be the answer.

“It was not the answer,” Racquel laughs.

She did eventually find the answer, though, on the first day of her Creative Writing elective.  When the class ended, she found she was upset that it was over already. “I was glued to every single word the professor was saying,” she says.

She changed her major to English after that class, even though she still had no idea what she would do after that. But for once, she didn’t care. “I’ll figure it out,” she thought. Instead of being so focused on a plan, she decided to focus on something she loved.

After college, Racquel got her Master of Fine Arts in writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University where she found a literary community that would inspire everything that happened next.

Graduate school was the first time in Racquel’s life she wasn’t alone in her love of writing. For the first time, she had people who wanted to sit on the steps of an old building and talk for hours about their craft, all while helping each other when they were stuck. “That was the best thing,” she says. “I didn’t have that in Florida.”

But that was about to change.

“It took four years of full-time writing before I got up the courage to attempt the one thing I had been too terrified to try: a book.” –Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, How I Came to Be a Writer, p. 58

After Racquel graduated with her MFA, she made money by taking every freelance editing job she could get from Craigslist.

While Racquel edited things like dissertations and blog posts, she also started looking for a potential physical space to cultivate an in-person writing community. Racquel missed sitting on stone steps talking about craft during her MFA and wondered if she could create her own steps in Florida.

“I had been to a few local events,” she explains, “where people seemed a little cold. I wanted a space where that wouldn’t happen, where people could be open about whatever writing dream they have and can learn about writing and not have to worry.”

In 2014, she found an affordable studio space in Winter Park, FL that she shared with her sister Natalie (who now owns and operates the successful stationery company Pretty Peacock Paperie). She called her part of the space the Writer’s Atelier, a safe and welcoming space where she hosts literary classes and events to connect writers in her hometown.

But it took time to develop. “It’s not easy to get people to sign up for things,” Racquel laughs. But she kept going and, at one point, worked five jobs just to keep the space open.

Slowly but surely, Racquel’s writing business grew, as did her writing community. She grew it one writer at a time, sending individual emails, attending literary events, and starting an Instagram account for Writers Atelier.

In 2019, she was able to quit her other jobs and only focus on editing books while running Writer’s Atelier.

Today, about 60% of her income comes from book editing and coaching, then classes and her books make up the other percentages. “I’m honestly a bad business person,” she laughs as she tries to come up with the numbers breakdown. I laugh, too, and tell her the fact that she’s never had to get a nine-to-five job means she’s actually a pretty good business person.

Most of her time is focused on helping other writers thrive. She’s edited over 200 books, and published over 800 writers.

She’s also proud of the fact that she pays writers for everything they do—classes, editing, and submissions to the literary journal she co-founded, Black Fox Literary Magazine. She also has a shop; I have one of her stickers—one that says Book Babe in pink, designed by Racquel’s sister—on the laptop I’m using to interview Racquel.

Racquel is so proud of the work she’s done to connect, publish, and pay other writers.

But in 2019, there was still one writer she hadn’t published yet, one that still wouldn’t leave her alone: herself.

“Many more were rejected than accepted, of course, but even I was astounded at the number of rejections to date: 5,971 acceptances; 10,335 rejections.” –Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, How I Came to Be a Writer, p. 107

While Racquel focused most of her efforts on supporting the writing of others, she still wanted to be a writer and author herself. She never stopped writing herself, writing one book every year since 2010. One of the books was a YA novel with dark themes that she’d been querying agents for years but kept getting rejected. To comfort herself, she often turned to Hallmark Christmas movies.

She still remembers the first time she saw a Hallmark Christmas movie. It was 2009, and she’d just gone through a bad breakup. “I was bitter,” she remembers. “Really bitter.”

The Hallmark movie made her feel hopeful again—not just about love, but about everything

From then on, every Christmas (okay, every month), Racquel watched Hallmark movies. And every month, she’d feel the urge to write a book that would make people feel the way Hallmark movies made her feel.

But then she’d remember how often she’d heard that “genre” work like that wasn’t “literary.”

Society seemed to only view literary fiction as “worthy” or as “serious writing.”

“Romance is serious writing, too,” she believes now. “But I was in a different headspace at that time,” she says. “I was just taking what people told me.”

At this point, Racquel became a ghostwriter for romance books, literally writing in secret. She was invisible, a ghost.

But like the famous ride in our hometown, she was a kind of happy haunt. She loved writing romance even if she wasn’t using her name.

She loved it so much that she decided to write a romance novella—this time with her name attached to the story.  “I’m just going to do this for me,” she thought. She wasn’t going to worry about querying agents or what people would think. She was going to self-publish it and just write something for fun, for herself.

Also, the YA novel that kept getting rejected was “quite depressing,” she says. She needed a break.

Racquel wrote and self-published her first romance novella in 2019—Holiday on Park.

“That book,” she says, “changed my life.”

“So I rewrote the entire book. It took seven months.” –Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, How I Came to Be a Writer, p.62

Racquel thought Holiday on Park would sell about 10 copies to her family and friends, and that was fine by her. But then the book took off.

Because when she launched it, she’d already spent years showing up for tother writers in her community. And this time, it was their turn to show up for her.

They bought and shared her book which led to a spike in sales. She was also invited as a featured author at various events, including the annual Trinity Prep author event she’d gone to for years as an attendee. She once greeted her writer friends who sat behind the tables and wished she’d be at one of those author tables one day—and it was finally coming true.

When she received the email invitation for the event, she emailed back to ask if they’d made a mistake. She thought she was still many years from getting asked to attend thcis kind of event as an author. She still didn’t have an agent. She’d never guessed her “fun” project would have fast-tracked her to where she’d always dreamed of being.

“I realized,” she says, “that all of the external things that I thought I needed, I don’t need. Everything is in me already.  I don’t need to have an agent. I don’t need to have a book deal. I just need to have myself. And believe in myself.”

Rejuvenated after the success of Holiday On Park, Racquel revisited her rejected YA novel and spent the next seven months revising it. She decided she would query it one last time, and if it didn’t get accepted by any agents, she would publish it herself.

At this point, Racquel had been querying agents for seven years. She had received 92 rejections. It may have worn down her confidence,  but Holiday On Park was a much-needed salve. This time, she queried with more confidence and peace because she knew she didn’t need an agent or a publisher to share her work with people who would love it. She could do that herself.

But she would try one last time. She sent a query letter to one last agent.

She got her 93rd agent reply, and it wasn’t what she expected.

Her 93rd agent email was a yes.

The agent said she’d stayed up late into the night reading Racquel’s YA book.

Since receiving that yes, Racquel is now working on final revisions and then her agent will pitch the book to editors. But Racquel isn’t worried about what happens next.  She knows even if it doesn’t sell to a publisher, it will still find its readers, and she will still be an author.

While that project is still in development, Racquel continues to work diligently on all of her other editing and writing—including writing and publishing a total of four holiday novellas to date, the most recent called Meet Me in December, another way of her giving to others what Hallmark movies have given her.

“The world is so heavy,” Racquel says, explaining why Hallmark movies have always mattered so much to her. “They are my happy place. It’s hard sometimes to just have something that makes you totally joyous. Hallmark does that for me. It takes everything away. Even when I was going through chemo and everything, I would lie in bed and watch Hallmark, and it would make me feel cozy and happy.”

“The stack of three-ring notebooks by my chair is growing and I’m sure that on my deathbed I will gasp, ‘But I still have five more books to write!’”–Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, How I Came to Be a Writer, p.120

I followed Racquel on Instagram when she was going through chemo, and what I remember most is the sparkling glitter filter she used as an overlay on photos featuring her post-chemo lattes with a Hallmark movie on in the background.

After the hugging in the parking lot, Racquel eventually received more tests and was diagnosed with breast cancer. But this time the news was easier to receive because now they had a plan. “Once you have a plan, it feels a lot better,” she says. She was scared, but at least now she didn’t have to hold all of the potential outcomes and plans in her head. Now she could focus on just one problem, one plan.

That plan, unfortunately, included starting chemo in December of 2021. One of the first things she did was cancel the Christmas novella she’d been planning to write that year.

It felt like so much was being taken away, but Racquel tried to reframe it and decided those things weren’t gone forever. They were merely on pause.

She focused on remembering that all that was paused would hopefully one day get un-paused. And during the pause, the support from her family and writer community is what kept her going. Like her mother who was a constant support during that time, or her sister Natalie who would run to any restaurant to pick up any food Racquel was craving, like gluten-free fettuccine alfredo from Franceso’s in Maitland. Racquel’s appetite was frequently off, so she wouldn’t want to eat much throughout the day until she finally did—and Natalie would make sure she had exactly that.

Racquel also says Hallmark movies helped her through, as did her writing. She didn’t write as much as she used to during this time, but she did still write. Some doctors encouraged her to do what made her happy, to stay as close to her regular life as she could, so she tried to do just that. She’d never been more grateful that she’d found a job she could do from bed.

After six months of initial treatment, Racquel found out she was cancer-free. She then had another year of radiation and then a lighter version of chemo.

She was relieved to hear that phrase, but also skeptical at first. She was nervous about not being as closely monitored and anxious about it coming back.

Today, she’s still processing through the journey in therapy. “There’s no going back to normal,” she says. “It’s a new normal. You’re sort of like this new person and you have to learn how to deal with that. You’re never really going to go back to your old self. It’s not a bad thing, but you kind of mourn it a bit.” Racquel still has to go in for regular checkups and has to get a shot in her stomach every month for the next decade. Her doctor recently added another test to her checkups to ensure one of her medications isn’t causing another kind of cancer.

Racquel says the idea of cancer returning is going to be hanging over her head for the rest of her life. But she says this realization is what gave her peace: finally accepting it’s something she can’t change. Now, she’s finally able to learn how to live with it.

“I was determined to end my short writing career before it got any worse….Never again would I humiliate myself in this way.” –Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, How I Came to Be a Writer, p.32

Before we finish the digital interview, Racquel pulls out a book on the shelf behind her. It’s a worn early 1990s copy of  How I Came to Be a Writer by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor— the exact copy she bought at the book fair when she was a little girl.

When Racquel reflects on where she is today—especially on the 10th anniversary of Writer’s Atelier—she says, “It feels like finally my hard work paid off,” she pauses for a moment before adding, “and that what Amy said was really true.”

“Amy” is Amy Christine Parker, a close writer friend of Racquel’s.

Years ago while Amy and Racquel were having lunch at Cape May Cafe at Disney’s Beach Club hotel (something we Florida locals do on occasion). After the seafood buffet, Racquel received another agent rejection email in the hotel parking lot, and began crying. She looked up at Amy and said, “I’m done.”

Amy listened and comforted Racquel. Then, she said, “Do you want to know what the difference is between you and all those published authors, all those New York Times bestselling authors?”

“What?” Racquel said.

“The only difference is they didn’t give up. They’re not better than you. They’re not better writers. They’re not any of those things. Sure, they probably have talent, but the only difference is that they didn’t stop; they didn’t give up.”

Racquel carried that revelation with her ever since, all the way through her 92 rejections and one yes. Or really, two yesses—the most important one being when she finally said yes to herself.

To learn more about Racquel, you can follow her and Writers Atelier on Instagram or visit racquelhenry.com.

Logo by Don Hahn
Copyediting by Kayla Hollatz