cancer – C-VILLE Weekly

By Alana Bittner

I’m cooking along with local chef Janey Gioiosa’s “A Kind (of) Cooking Show” on YouTube, and get halfway through the video before I realize I’ve overlooked something on the list of ingredients—yeast.

This recipe is a brave choice for me. As far as I’m concerned, pretzels come from Auntie Anne’s at the Fashion Square Mall. Yet in her rustic Crozet kitchen, Gioiosa’s easygoing attitude gives me the confidence to think I can pull this off. But as I follow her direction, and pour lukewarm water into a mixing bowl, something hits me: Pretzels need yeast.

Images of flat, concrete slabs of pretzel flash before my eyes. I rummage desperately through the fridge, the implications of last March’s global yeast shortage suddenly becoming clear. Just when I’m sure my pretzel venture is shot, I see it. There, at the back of the cheese drawer, is a jar of bakers’ yeast. Several risings later, I pull out huge, golden- brown soft pretzels, just as Gioiosa promised. Auntie Anne’s, eat your heart out.

For anyone intimidated by making pretzels, or any recipe for that matter, “A Kind (of) Cooking Show” is for you. Gioiosa takes the kind part seriously in two ways: She sets a goal of kindness, not perfection, and she says “If I make a mistake, I’ll show you that I made a mistake. So it’s just kind of a cooking show.”

Gioiosa begins the pretzel video by shouting “Take one!” with a determined clap. Thirty seconds and a few montages later, she’s at “Take 12!” The winning intro is, “Welcome to ‘A Kind of Cooking Show.’ My name’s Janey. We’re gonna make some shit up today.”

At times, Gioiosa’s dog wanders in to see what’s going on. At others, her husband (musician Will Overman) hands her utensils from offscreen. She frequently sings her sentences and sometimes forgets the egg and butter. The effect is charming and utterly authentic. It’s when we’re twisting dough into pretzels, that Gioiosa says, “So…cancer.”

Gioiosa was 19 when she was diagnosed with uterine sarcoma. She was plucked from typical teenage soul-searching, and thrown into a new reality of hospitals, scans, and chemotherapy. She fought it off, only to have it return when she was 23. Today, not yet 30, Gioiosa is a two-time cancer survivor.

She’s thankful for the support from her family and friends. But still, being a young adult with cancer was isolating. “You’re in this weird in-between, where you’re too old for pediatric care but too young for the older generation,” Gioiosa explains. “Nineteen is a weird age where you’re becoming an adult and you want that independence.” As her friends went to college and began their new lives, Gioiosa watched from the hospital, feeling more dependent than ever.

The resources around her didn’t make things better. “You watch cancer movies all the time and they have all these friends who have cancer,” Gioiosa recalls. “I’m like, where are my fucking cancer friends! That I can bitch to and relate to, just the simplest thing!”

In that vacuum of connection, unlikely things stood out—such as a YouTube series called “Shit Cancer Patients Say.” “It was one glimmer of like, ‘Yes!’ I watched those videos over and over again, because it didn’t feel like I was alone.”

After her second battle with the disease, Gioiosa had newfound determination. “There is a pre-cancer Janey and a post-cancer Janey, and they’re very different people,” she says. “I’d always wanted to do culinary school and I never did, so I just did it.” She completed the two-year culinary program at Piedmont Virginia Community College and entered the Charlottesville restaurant scene. If you live here and eat food, it was probably made by Gioiosa at some point. She’s worked in local favorites from Brazos Tacos to Petite MarieBette.

Yet Gioiosa knew she still had work to do. “I’ve always disliked the saying that everything happens for a reason,” she says. “I’ve turned it into, ‘You make a reason out of something.’ So what’s the reason I got cancer?” “A Kind (of) Cooking Show” has given her an opportunity to provide the community she yearned for as a young person who was sick.

The recipes come from moments in her journey. Those soft pretzels, for example, were first made during an early round of treatment. However, she eventually wants to shift the focus from herself, and she plans to bring in guests to tell their stories about cancer and food. It could be memories, she says, but it could also be, “What did you crave or what did you wish you could eat?”

No matter how “A Kind (of) Cooking Show” evolves, its goal will remain the same. “I just want that person that was like me when I was 19 or 23 to not feel so alone,” says Gioiosa. “That’s success there, period. Signed, sealed, delivered.”

You can find “A Kind (of) Cooking Show” on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQBkTRgw5KJ7egTEpDsfxCA/videos) and Instagram (@janeygioiosa).

Whistle Words helps women impacted by cancer share stories

Before she received a Stage 3 breast cancer diagnosis at 39 years old, UVA writing professor Charlotte Matthews lived on a cattle farm. Whenever the farmer found a dead cow in the pasture, he bulldozed a grave and buried the animal. Matthews remembers the farmer whistling to himself in these moments.

“He was so authentic in his whistling,” Matthews says, “Sometimes there just aren’t words. That’s how I felt a lot during treatment. Chemo played with my brain.”

Matthews underwent a bilateral mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiation—mere millimeters from her heart, as she wrenchingly describes in her poem “Whistle What Can’t Be Said,” from her third book of poetry with the same name.

After her diagnosis, Matthews struggled with depression and feeling powerless. As a lifelong writer with a notebook always nearby (she used to have a white dashboard in her car where she scribbled thoughts in black sharpie), it was only natural that Matthews turned to words to process her experiences.

“We have a culture that is very willing to superficially talk about cancer,” she says. “We put a sticker on our car, run a race, buy a keychain.” Though she feels grateful for those efforts, something is still missing. “Do we get deeper?” she asks. “Not yet.”

Matthews became determined to empower other women impacted by cancer to go deeper—to put their stories into words and collectively raise their voices. With the help of friend and filmmaker Betsy Cox, the multimedia Whistle Words project was born. It’s a series of free writing workshops facilitated by Matthews, where participants can share their stories, for possible inclusion in a documentary film that Cox will produce.

“If I meet another woman who has or who has had [breast cancer], it’s like meeting your cousin,” Matthews says. “The veneer drops to the floor. I can ask, ‘How was it when they lopped off your breasts?’ Real kind of talk.”

In a previous workshop, Matthews prompted participants to envision a room—anything from a childhood bedroom to a bathroom at a party—and write for 10 minutes.

“What came of that was so incredible,” says Cox. She remembers the experience of a friend who participated in that session. “She told me, ‘I knew I had things to work through, but placing myself in that room made me realize how much I had to say.’ Has there ever been a more important time for women to speak up?”

After 14 years teaching writing at UVA and institutions like Hollins University and Bard College, Matthews has learned that the answers are only as good as her questions. She believes in the power of silence and play. She incorporates whimsy in every workshop, like having participants play Bananagrams or Scrabble.

For another prompt, Matthews asks the women to bring in a commonplace photo of themselves—not from their wedding, graduation or other major life event—and write for 10 minutes in response to it. The participants share however much they choose, and in turn, the women listening share which aspects of their peers’ stories resonate with them.

“We’ll make a group poem out of the lines they share—it’s immediately a community,” says Matthews, emphasizing that the workshops are judgment-free. “I want these women to walk away from a workshop with tools and a community.”