a podcast about writing, work, and friendship
We are going full-clickbait with this question in Episode 49, which you can listen to here, or on your favorite podcast aggregator.
We answer that question, and then turn to a discussion of what we’re loving about this podcast and our friendship. Finally, we finish up with our recent branding decisions – new colors and typefaces. We hope you like it, but let us know what you think!
Meghan and I have both had a lot of work travel, and we have also been recording pep talks that we wanted to share with you. So, instead of a full-length episode, we have not just one but three pep talks to share:
Pep Talk #4 from our Episode 33 interview with poet and book publicist Abigail Welhouse, where she reminds us that people probably don’t care, but if they do, it’s such an amazing gift. And that writing is all about connection:
Pep Talk #5 from Meghan that should calm your nerves if you’re in one of those times where you’re not writing. Are you still “a writer”? Listen to this:
And Pep Talk #6 is a real-life conversation that Olivia and Meghan had, when Olivia wasn’t sure if she should continue with this novel, her first. Meghan had some great words of advice:
All our Pep Talks can be found here on our new Pep Talk page.
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Today, we’re stoked to talk to librarian Ayanna Gaines about reconnecting with her creative side, balancing work and writing, and how she sets up her space to nurture her art. We also chat National Novel Writing Month, and Olivia helps Meghan figure out how to set her Nano goals.
Ayanna Gaines is a librarian and pop culture geek in Southern California. She’s just made the switch from academia to public libraries and is reconnecting with her creative writing side.
Her academic work includes the chapter “That’s Women’s Work: Pink-Collar Professions, Gender, and the Librarian Stereotype” in The Librarian Stereotype: Deconstructing Perceptions and Presentations of Information Work” and papers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gilmore Girls.
She writes poetry and is hard at work on her first novel. You can find her and her adorable kittens on Twitter @popcullibrn or Instagram @againeslibrarian
Full show notes are here, and you can subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or wherever get your podcasts.
We posted Episode 7, and in it we open up about the ugly side of writing when you have a day job – when you can’t really manage to fit everything in, when you feel frustrated, or when you’re just really freaking tired. We know everyone feels this sometimes, so we just went with this feeling, picked it apart, and then talked about some of the things that can get us to writing.
Some of it comes down to this –
– but there’s some other stuff in the episode as well.
As always, we would love to hear how you are doing – so contact us here, on Instagram, or by email. Send us a voice memo, and we will include it on the show!
Full show notes are here.
(Disclosure: I actually do not like that slogan – not sure of the grammar of it, but I will use it because it’s what they use.)
There’s this thing I’ve been doing since 2011, or in other words (but coincidentally) as long as I’ve been doing my “corporate drone” job. It’s called 10Q, and was inspired by the time of reflection between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but you don’t need to be religious in any way to participate.
As you might have guessed, there are 10 questions that it sends you – one question per day, that you can reflect on (stuff like, how did a significant experience affect you) and write an answer to. At the end of the 10 days, you lock your answers away in a vault until the next year. Sure, anyone could do this for themselves any time, but there is something about the process and the community that I like. It probably adds some accountability.
You can choose whether your answers are public, or you can make them public but anonymous, or totally private. It’s up to you.
Also, you can answer all the questions on the last day, or only answer some of them, or answer a few at a time if you’re busy at work and haven’t gotten to it (speaking from personal experience). So I like that it’s not super rigid, but it has a structure.
There are lots of things I love about it, but these are probably the biggest ones:
“When I was in university, I believed that I wanted a life in pursuit of knowledge and wonder. I think I need to add “joy” to that list. I have been pursuing knowledge for some time, but not with the wonder and definitely not with the joy. I have been making rules for myself, and that means as well making rules for others. I need to be myself. I think it is still important to seek knowledge – to evaluate and analyse – but I need to do this because of a deeper pursuit of joy and love.”
We’d love to hear from you if you’ve done it before, if you enjoy it, if you are going to do it again?
(olivia)
The title of this post is totally stolen from a Times Literary Supplement podcast I listened to today, which had this lovely interview with the British theatre director Peter Brook CBE. You can listen here, or on iTunes or wherever else you get podcasts. The interview starts around 27:10, and it’s lovely.
Next week on the podcast, we’ll be talking about inspiration and motivation – what’s the difference, and what makes a difference for us. This is totally inspiration for me. I’ll give you bits of it if you are interested, but obviously listen to the whole thing if you want more.
First of all, he talks about the need to try but let go – we will have a longer discussion about this idea on a future podcast, because it’s something I’ve learned about through yoga. Here’s a quote from Peter:
There is something very subtle that can come through if we, just for a moment, try the best we can, and then quietly let be.
He then goes on to talk about what he calls “the formless hunch,” which I’ll let him explain:
I had to have gone through all the impossibilities. I had this very early on in my career, where people said to me, if you’re a young director, you must prepare. So I took it seriously. … I had a great ball doing this. But then I came into rehearsal and just saw simply that none of it was any good. And I think all one needs is to be able to say to oneself, ‘It’s no good.’ And at that moment, things fall away, and that’s what the formless hunch is about.
I really loved how he talks about the separation of the form and the meaning. He says that, for the podcast, they have a microphone, a table, whatever, but continues:
but they are not the cause of whatever good may come out of anything we say to one another. That will happen. And that’s why I say the formless hunch. People get obsessed with the form, and the form is just a starting point. It’s something we need… We need words, but words are just a form. Gradually you can find that the word is either a dead piece of useless bone, or it is vibrating because within the word there is more.
And then, the magic (bonus tip: I basically love anything about magic used in this way):
Yes you have to prepare and now, when you come to it, you have to trust the true magic of intuition, and the intuition only comes if you’ve prepared the ground and if you then have the simple good will to stop taking yourself so seriously.
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We’re collecting inspiration for our podcast next week. What type of thing do you learn to hear about?