Juliet Robertson’s Poetry on Living with AML

Living with AML

Juliet Robertson walks 10,000 steps most days, after her morning porridge in her suburban Scotland home. “I can reach trees and pathways and rivers very quickly,” she says. “I know all the routes very well, and every time I find a new pathway, I go down it. That's part of my challenge.”

It is a powerful analogy for her larger-than-life challenge, the acute myeloid leukemia (AML) she lives with after a 2022 diagnosis and unsuccessful treatments. She was told she could expect to live just a few months. That’s still what she’s told – two or three months – though it has been 2 ½ years.  Three rounds of targeted therapy offered her a brief remission before the treatments stopped working. Not a candidate for a stem cell transplant, Julia chose to embrace her quality of life, surrounded by the support of family and friends.

Reflecting Through Writing

An author who writes about outdoor learning and play, she is well known for her books “Dirty Teaching” and “Messy Maths – A Playful Outdoor Approach for Early Years.” Now, she has a forthcoming book titled “Blood Lines: living and dying with cancer – a lyrical journey. She says, “When my blood became ink, words began to flow.”  The book is a heartwarming, poignant, layered collection of poetry and prose about her life with terminal cancer, including a number of taboo subjects, such as death and dying, and a bold frankness about the medical world that cocoons her as best it can.

“I am not a poet,” Juliet recently told me with a beaming smile I could feel from more than 3,000 miles away. Then she adds that she has always written. “Writing is the way I process my thoughts, my feelings, and also it allows me to reflect.” Her background is as a teacher, school principal and education consultant. “As a result of chemo fog, I found it hard to concentrate on reading novels. But poetry was doable.”

She began as any good teacher would recommend, by studying. “I read and re-read poems that I enjoyed.” At the time, she was having her first rounds of chemotherapy, staying in the hospital.  Friends sent her a number of books and anthologies. She holds one up and begins to describe several on her shelf. “So this one is a poem for every feeling. Thank you. Just what I needed. Because, as anyone with cancer will tell you, you hold many different feelings simultaneously. And bright poems for dark days. Yes, please,” she laughs. “Especially when your treatment's happening in winter, in the northeast of Scotland, you need a brighter day.”

Empowered Through Poetry

Juliet describes these readings as “bringing nature, wild ideas, humor and fun back into the dreary grey hospital room.” From her home office, she recalled how it made her feel, being able to walk around the small room she was confined to at the time, reading to herself, often aloud. But as of this writing, just weeks later, she is emailing me once again from those same gloomy hospital walls.  

In 2022, Juliet began writing her own poetry, finding it particularly empowering. She posted a different poem every day in September, Blood Cancer Awareness Month, to thank family, friends and the many charities that helped people living with blood cancers, including HealthTree Foundation. It was a way for her to process all that was happening to her as she lived with AML, “and how it turned my life upside down,” she said. These and other poems, along with works of creative note writing, are compiled as “Blood Lines.”   

Blood Lines is Available in June

The person Juliet calls her mentor, writer Sue Burge, says this about her new book: “Blood Lines is a handbook for living and dying well, delivered with grace, fortitude and humor.”   The book was published on Monday, June 9th  in the UK. It will be available in the US in September 2025 and is now available for pre-order. 

You can order your copy of Juliet's book at the link below.

Click Here to Order Blood Lines: Living and dying with cancer - a lyrical journey