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Local author provides tips on how to ‘bite back’ when facing personal vampires

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POLSON — “A vampire can’t just walk into your house and start sucking your blood. First, it has to be invited,” Claudia Cunningham read to a packed house at Page by Page Books on Sept. 17. Cunningham is the author of “Biting Back, A No-Nonsense, {No-Garlic} Guide to Facing the Personal Vampires in Your Life.”

Cunningham was not talking about vampires with fangs who sleep in coffins during the daytime, wear capes and can be killed only by a stake through the heart or a silver bullet.

On her blog, The Practical Vampire Slayer, Cunningham defined vampires.

“What we’re talking about are the relationships that so many of us have with people, institutions, and beliefs that become vampires to us, and drain us – not of our blood – but of our time, our resources, and especially our freedom and happiness every day.”

Her book provides practical advice on how to recognize vampires, bring them into the light and either evict or slay the bloodsuckers.  

During a subsequent interview, Cunningham said she worked on “Biting Back” for well over six years. 

After a rocky beginning with another agent, Cunningham found an editor who was crazy about “Biting Back.”

“You need to find an editor who has the same vision for the book you have,” Cunningham cautioned.

But there were still a few boulders in her path. Cunningham was diagnosed with breast cancer. The day of her first chemotherapy treatment was the day she signed her contract with Llewellyn International to publish “Biting Back.”

“All my anxiety was on the book,” Cunningham said, “My anxiety was about meeting deadlines.”

She had “the most incredible doctors” and an oncologist who said, “I will go to war.” 

Cunningham also had “the unblinking confidence of my husband and daughter that I was going to do it (defeat cancer and finish the book.)”

She also credits Jennifer Groneberg, friend and fellow author, with pushing and pulling her through.

“She brought me soup, earrings, toenail polish, fuzzy slippers,” Cunningham remembered.

When she told her friend she just couldn’t get the book finished, Groneberg told her to go do something fun, like visit a second hand store and that she would be there the next morning at 10 a.m. to help Cunningham finish the book. 

“She sat on the floor outside my room, reading pages as I was writing,” Cunningham said, “and pulled it (the book) out of me.

“She (Groneberg) taught me how good people behave.”

A couple of Cunningham’s other life heroes are Julia Child and Mr. Rogers, who “basically show you how decent people behave.”

Having lived in the Polson area since the early 1990s, Claudia is married to Robert Cunningham, and the couple has an eighth-grade daughter, Madie. 

Cunningham has “always been a writer who didn’t write.” She wrote her first story when she was six or seven on a green typewriter of her parents’ and stapled it together. She recalled a teacher reading one of her stories aloud in the 8th grade, but then in high school she “got really, really diverted and chose to go a different way.” 

At 36 or 37, after she got sober, Cunningham started writing again.

A 12-step program was the “solution to the pain of alcoholism.” Cunningham said the last thing she wanted was to be in a 12-step program, which she thought of as a place where she would sit around with people who were just so grateful to be alcohol free and hold hands. Instead, she found the program was “actually medicine for the disease of alcoholism, very much the foundation of my health and the way I live my life.”

“I married it (the 12-step program) in a big way,” she laughed.  

“It (writing) was always the thing I did that put me in touch with part of me that was really me,” Cunningham said. 

She likes to write at 4 or 5 a.m.

“There’s something about that time of the morning,” Cunningham said. “It’s quiet in the house, and then the sun comes up.”

The people at Llewellyn — editors, promotion people — have been so nurturing, Cunningham said.  “They’ve taught me so much. I’m so excited to do another book.” 

“Now it’s time for me to call the shots,” she added, “since the (Biting Back) book kind of called the shots when I was going through cancer.”

She wants to have a career in writing and has a couple of books in the works.  

“At this point in my life, I’d really like to . . . just use every minute, to just receive the gift of every moment I’ve got left.”

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