Sandra Cavallo Miller, retired as a physician, starting over as a writer...

HALLIE EPHRON: Recently I had the pleasure of being on a panel

for an event with Arizona State University with retired physician Sandra Cavallo Miller. We spotted each other across the virtual dais as kindred spirits.

I am so delighted to have her as a guest today, talking about her trilogy featuring a young woman physician and set against the magnificent backdrop of the Grand Canyon.

Like me, she embraced her inner writer relatively late and after a virtual lifetime of experiences.

SANDRA CAVALLO MILLER: Old age always seems like a long way off. Then suddenly it’s here.

Technically speaking, we abruptly become geriatric at 65, whether we agree or not. We’re officially labeled “elderly,” no matter how annoying and untrue that feels. This happens regardless of how sharp or not we find our brains, how fit or not we find our bodies. Medicare coverage starts. Pilots and air traffic controllers must retire. So it’s easy to start feeling old.

But wait. Our president is 78, and a brilliant popular epidemiologist is 80. Okay, now I feel better. Especially since I started this new venture at age 66: writing novels. So maybe “geriatric” is not old, but liberating. I finally have time to create new worlds!

All I need is my imagination and a pen, literal or virtual.

Older new writers (is that confusing? should it be newer old writers?) have advantages besides more time. Experience. Perspective. We’ve seen a lot. I don’t think there’s a human on this planet without a unique story.

And we’ve been through a lot: when I started medical school, fewer than one out of ten students were female. When I became a family physician in Phoenix, Arizona, only two of us women held that role. Two, in the entire city. Now over half of medical school classes are women. Yeah, we’ve come a long way. People in those days who saw me in a white coat would ask me what kind of nurse I was.

But age is relative, and living in Arizona provides some unique outlooks. I might be old, but the place is really old. The earth cracks open at the Grand Canyon: the Kaibab limestone layer at the top boasts being 270 million years old, and the Vishnu schist at the river formed 1.7 billion years ago. So where better for an old woman to put a novel? Despite being one of the seven natural wonders of the world, only a handful of novels have been set at the Grand Canyon. It’s irresistible.

I love our planet, our natural world and our universe. I can’t get enough of old rocks and the stardust that makes us up, and how our species—imperfect and challenged as we are—came to be. Our urges to explore, to push ourselves, often at our peril and even our demise. We are seekers, although we don’t always understand what we seek. Adventure. Fulfilment.

So here I find myself, an old retired family doc writing fiction about medicine on the brink of geology. If that sounds toonoble, don’t worry . . . my novels include light, playful stuff with some real science and quirky characters thrown in. I’ve rarely found pure medical themes compelling enough to make a good story. You need plot to keep things going: some mystery, some romance, good and bad people trying to get somewhere. Even though I don’t know what I’m doing, don’t know the formulas for genres, it’s all there somewhere. Maybe a little mixed up.

But I keep getting better at it, and I have never had so much fun in my life.

Right now I have a trilogy about a young woman physician who works at the Grand Canyon Clinic on the South Rim. Each book stands alone, and the third novel, What the River Said, comes out in May. The middle book takes place mostly at Yellowstone—like the Grand Canyon, a place that’s a geology fever dream. And I’m thrilled to announce that my publisher (University of Nevada Press) will release my newest novel this September. Where No One Should Live champions a public health physician, set in Phoenix during a brutally hot summer. Although written pre-Covid, I must have had a premonition that public health doctors would become more visible in our society!

I’m curious how many of you have started new and absorbing endeavors later in life. How has that gone for you? What’s your quest? What’s on your bucket list? Don’t put off everything until you’re seventy, because your body might not get the memo and might hold you back.

Sandra Cavallo Miller is a retired academic family physician. Little fiction has been written about family medicine or women doctors, and she is on a mission to change that. When not writing, you might find her hiking with a dog, riding a horse, or sitting under a tree studying her favorite hobby, volcanology. Her writings and poems have been published in JAMA's "A Piece of My Mind," Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine, Under the Sun, and Embark, among others. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Her trilogy about a woman physician at the Grand Canyon Clinic, published by the University of Nevada Press, combines science-based medicine with adventure, geology, and romance.