Alicia Merchant, organizers of Raconteurs, a monthly event featuring storytelling live on stage at Nobody Writes to the Colonel bar on CollegeFernando Morales/The Globe and Mail
As a writer, Alicia Merchant was incandescent. She loved words and knew how to use them with precision, honesty and humour – the hallmarks of a widely read blog she wrote for the past five years about her struggle with ovarian cancer under the title "A little bit worse." The title is derived from the children's rhyme that begins "Second verse/ Same as the first."
She was just 22, a student at Concordia University in Montreal, ready to spread her wings, when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer (rare at that age) in the course of a routine pap smear. She had a complete hysterectomy and was told she had a bomb in her belly. On her blog she later wrote: "I may have survived cancer (touch wood) but there is a wasteland inside me. Not everything survived. A lot of what was important didn't." She never indulged in self-pity, not even when her dormant cancer returned after almost eight years.
Vibrant and beautiful, riding around town on her bicycle, she was also the soul of Toronto's effervescent storytelling and literary scene. She helped start and continued to host groups, including Raconteurs, the Write Club and Young Adultery, that met to enjoy the opportunity for self-expression and mutual entertainment without the commercial veneer.
Her friend, Megan Griffith-Greene, who works on CBC-TV's Marketplace program, met her at a Raconteurs evening three years ago. "She was ill the whole time I knew her," she recalls. "It was difficult to reconcile the Alicia I knew with an ill person. She had so much energy; she made things happen."
Raconteurs, which Ms. Merchant ran with Laura-Louise Tobin, was modelled on The Moth series that started in New York. Anyone could come and tell a 10-minute story on that evening's theme (for instance, fish out of water; talking to strangers; it's all in your head) but it had to be true, had to be about the teller and told without notes.
Initially held at a bar, the event moved to the Tranzac Club, just off Bloor Street. The evenings were magical. Some stories, according to Ms. Griffith-Greene, "were terribly funny, others terribly sad," but everyone felt supported in the telling. "There was a tremendous sense of acceptance and love, fostered by Alicia. The way she curated it – she made it work."
Many are preserved on YouTube.
The Write Club, which Ms. Merchant created with Catherine McCormick, inspired by a Chicago series, featured pairs of storytellers in competition, reading seven-minute pieces on contrasting themes (provided in advance). Themes might be "attic vs. basement" or "light vs. dark." The winner – decided by the volume of applause – receives a donation to his or her favourite charity. Like Raconteurs, it attracted theatre people, writers, journalists, artists, researchers, students – the motley habitués of downtown Toronto whom she helped to weld into a community.
Young Adultery was an original book-club concept Ms. Merchant dreamed up and held at Type bookstore on Toronto's Queen Street West. Participants would reread and discuss the Young Adult books that had influenced them in their teens.
Alicia Louise Merchant was born on April 6, 1980, in Merritt, B.C., one of three daughters of Coleen and John Merchant, who later divorced. She grew up in Kelowna.
"I met her in high school – we were part of a crew of autodidacts," recalls Ryan Van Huijstee, now managing editor of McGill-Queen's University Press. "We dated for a year before she went off to Montreal. She was my first love. She was a great reader, with a sharp brain and a sharp tongue and was very funny."
After the surgery and chemotherapy that followed her initial diagnosis, Ms. Merchant moved to Toronto with her Concordia English degree, working at first as a nanny. Later, she cobbled together a living working on short-term writing, editing and research jobs. She wrote questions for a new edition of Trivial Pursuit; did freelance work for Reader's Digest; worked for a company that put out human resources manuals; and was a fact checker at Zoomer magazine. All the while, her health was monitored by an oncologist and she began a blog titled "Bombinmybelly" under a pseudonym.
In 2009, when The Globe included her in an article about cancer survivors, she was, in effect, outed and started "alittlebitworse," a frank new blog under her own name, which found a larger audience.
"She formed a lot of friendships through her blog," said her sister, Rebecca Merchant. "It was important to the cancer community." One cancer patient in Tennessee invited Alicia Merchant to her wedding, where they met in person for the first time.
In July, 2010, Ms. Merchant learned that her cancer had returned.
At first, her doctor had no treatment plan, but when she sought a second opinion, the result was surgery to cut out the new tumours and, starting in February, 2011, a new five-month course of chemo.
She worried about getting "chemo brain," a diminished ability to express herself. "When I lose words, I lose myself," she wrote.
The blog helped her control information about her own condition, but it also helped others, particularly young cancer sufferers like her. In addition, she moderated a website, wikicancer.org, and later worked on a book for young patients, This Should Not Be Happening, with Ann Katz, an American nurse, which was published this year by a Pittsburgh press.
When the chemo sessions at Toronto's Princess Margaret Hospital ended in July, 2011, she rang the hospital's "Bell of Bravery" and her many friends brought Prosecco and filled her hospital room with noise and laughter. "We were loud and had to be asked to keep it down," she blogged.
In a bitter irony, the cancer recurred again less than a year later. There was more surgery, more chemo and when her doctors could think of nothing more, a clinical trial of an experimental drug. Her blog became a heartbreaking chronicle of all the indignities to her body: rashes, fluid buildup in the abdomen, swollen legs, nausea and vomiting, bowel obstructions, mouth sores, an abscess.
Still, she tried to live her life in between treatments, continuing with her organizing activities and in 2012, she reported on the blog that she had travelled to Chicago, Scotland and Hawaii. She also took two writing workshops.
The spiky humour of earlier years was less in evidence. She found herself wondering, she wrote, "how to be funny when I live under the sword of Damocles."
The past year was especially brutal. Depressed and ill, Ms. Merchant found out about a clinical trial she was eligible for in Detroit at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, but there were costs involved in getting there every two weeks. She put out a call on her blog and in a short time raised $38,382 from 654 contributors through crowd funding.
She began the trial in April, 2014, but quit at the start of September, exhausted. She wrote that the side effects were too much for the slight payoff. That month she met with a palliative care team, knowing that other options were exhausted.
In her final months, she was trying to write fiction. Her last blog post was dated Oct. 1.
"She had two long-term battles with cancer," said Mr. Van Huijstee, "and ended up giving her creative energies to that."
She died on Nov. 13 at the Kensington Hospice in Toronto. She was 34.
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