Former UWEC nursing professor CeCelia Zorn’s first fiction novel is called Angels Don’t Get Tattoos.

Juggling the fine line between writing non-fiction and fiction simultaneously can be difficult for any writer. But for CeCelia Zorn, an Eau Claire local and former UW-Eau Claire nursing professor, it’s one she’s been embracing later in her career and today after retiring two years ago.

Released in early October, her first novel, Angels Don’t Get Tattoos, centers around Kennedy, a 16-year-old girl with terminal cancer. As her family and friends urge her to keep up the fight, K acknowledges her situation for what it is. With the cancer having spread to all parts of her body, she realizes there is little time left.

Having come to peace with her inevitable fate, K returns home, and the novel focuses on her last few months comforting loved ones. 

Zorn said she first thought about writing the novel early in her career, but it took five years to finish. She was fresh out of nursing school and was working with a young girl named Natalie who was in a similar position.

“I was just a young 20-something registered nurse thinking, ‘God, this teenager is dealing with dying herself and she’s also dealing with trying to convince her family and her friends that it was OK. That experience with Natalie inspired the book.”

While she didn’t know any of the girl’s friends directly, Zorn said Natalie’s story was an important one for people to hear. Since the novel was published, she’s received numerous responses from people young and old nationwide, telling the author how influential her book was to them. 

But along with fictional writing, Zorn is keeping up with research she and two other colleagues conducted prior to her retirement. She said they’re working on their fourth manuscript of data-analysis research for this specific project. Along with that, she published an academic nursing book, Becoming a Nurse Educator, in 2010.  

“I was just a young 20-something registered nurse thinking, ‘God, this teenager is dealing with dying herself and she’s also dealing with trying to convince her family and her friends that it was OK.” – CeCelia Zorn, on the inspiration for her book: a teenager named Natalie dealing with terminal cancer

 “My academic, non-fiction writing was with colleagues, students and faculty colleagues,” she said. “The fiction writing was pretty solo with support from fiction writing experts. So they are very different, but there are similarities thinking about target audience, being clear and concise, being dedicated, and seeing it through the rough spots.”

Prior to her novel’s publication, she said there would be days where she would work on her research project all morning and then work on her novel all night. While she said it’s a weird mix, it’s something she’s really started enjoy since her retirement.

Those interested in reading Zorn’s novel can do so for pretty cheap, as well. She said it’s priced around $10, rather than $20 like most national and international distributors prefer, because she didn’t want teenagers to be deterred from buying it.

“I really wanted teenagers to read the book,” Zorn said. “I didn’t want the cost to prohibit them from reading. That was really important to me. My goal is to get the book in the hands of young adults particularly, but really anybody who is interested because I think it opens up an opportunity to think about end-of-life issues from a teenage perspective.”

She said so much of this type of literature is about people surviving breast cancer with the support of loved ones. By contrast, Angels Don’t Get Tattoos deals with someone who doesn’t survive cancer and how everyone close to the person deals with it as well.

Find the book at The Local Store, Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble. Zorn said she is now in the process of drafting a sequel to Angels Don’t Get Tattoos.