It's a terrifying thing when the heart starts to how in any capacity, whether in grief or joy.
But I think it's sort of a terrifying primal feeling that sometimes when we get too happy,
we get really worried that it's going to go away.
But I just was so surprised after years and years of not literally not feeding myself great food,
not eating enough, not giving myself enough pleasure, enough joy, enough freedom.
When you finally give that, there can enter in the sort of howling that is both grief and joy
that you waited so long to start feeding the self.
So many of us have had this fantasy of leaving behind some kind of mainstream corporate job
to follow our passion like art or writing or some other creative pursuit.
And then reality sets in, or rather our belief about how impossible it would be to support ourselves,
let alone truly thrive and love what we do and earn a great living doing the thing that lights us up,
following some inner creative impulse, which is why I am so excited to share
executive turned full-time and flourishing poet Joy Sullivan and her amazing story with you today.
So Joy went from an accomplished marketing career to becoming a full-time creative entrepreneur
in her new book, Instructions for Traveling West.
She chronicles this journey both literal and metaphorical from the corporate world
to self-expression and more than corporate level living through art.
Joy received an MA in poetry from Miami University and has served as a poet in residence
for Wexner Center for the Arts.
She's brought her words to classrooms and events across the country and now
she helps other writers nourish their craft through her community sustenance.
I was blown away by Joy's courage to lead the corporate life behind
and build a career around her creative calling and her deep and enduring passion for poetry.
But she's quick to also bust the myth that you have to be broke lonely or suffering
to be an artist. Her story shows that it is possible to transition gradually thoughtfully
through a portfolio approach without losing everything you hold dear.
During the conversation, we explore what it takes to overcome doubt, nurture your inner light
and manifest the light that you have been dreaming of if you've ever longed to make
your passion your profession. This conversation will open your heart and mind to the possibilities
of be ready to be moved and inspired.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.
Hi, this is Janice Torres from Yolkieto Dinedo.
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What I'd love to do is actually start out before we even dive into the new book and some of the poems and some of the ideas
and the concepts and the stories.
I also want to sort of take a broader look because the journey that you have traveled over the last chunk of years is pretty astonishing.
And some of it is laid out in verse in the book but also you've written about it as well on Substack in different places.
Two posts really jumped out at me that you shared last September where you kind of did this two-part thing that started with lessons from
leaving Corporate America and then from Corporate America to Creative Entrepreneurship.
And I think the ideas in those essays would be so interesting to so many of our listeners because I think so many people harbor these desires to make a meaningful change
in the way they're contributing to the world, to their lives.
And with a really deep and profound creative impulse but they either don't believe it's possible or they don't have any idea how to do it.
So you shared these two posts that I thought just teed it up beautifully. The first was lessons from leaving Corporate America
where you kind of listed out these five different things. You basically said, if this is what's going on, you're kind of like we need to talk because this is not true.
Could we walk through some of that? I'll see some of them up and I just love to hear your thoughts.
Absolutely, I'd love to chat about it.
Awesome. So out of the gate, you basically write, if it cost you sunshine relationships or how your salary is irrelevant, take me deeper into this.
Yeah, so I really started thinking about that, about halfway through my Corporate Career trajectory.
I had been working at a brand-in agency. I had worked really hard to get promoted and for a long time that was what I just sort of thought I had arrived.
The ceiling for me was going to be how far I could get promoted into this agency. And it was a great agency in many ways, women owned, etc.
But when I discovered in the pandemic for me, really the gift of all that solitude.
And if you're somebody who's in Corporate America, like the first time maybe getting to work remote in a while, was this like expansive opportunity to be outside in ways that I had never had.
And it sounds really fundamental and basic, but just like the life-giving opportunity to go for a walk when I wanted to.
I was like, this is revolutionary. Like why have I waited so long?
Like I've been so focused on my metrics have been, you know, what, how far can I get in the career?
And it started to take this just tremendous toll on my body. So I had a big wake up call when I discovered that I was having issues with my hands and with my arms from constant typing.
And I went to the surgeon and he said, you got to find a different way to live or you're going to lose your ability to write.
And it was just this kind of terrifying moment that in all the metrics of my life, if I didn't have access to sunlight, if I didn't have access to health, and if I didn't have access to stable relationships, for me, it just all added up to net loss.
So I think I am offering readers just a different way of framing success. When we think about like, God, is this actually when I look at my end of the day and my happier, I usually am not. If I can't, if I'm in a job that doesn't need to allow me to go outside when I need to or starting to really drain my body, or I can't feel like I can have consistent relationships.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to me also because granted this came when there was a forced shift. Basically, everybody had to go through, but for so many, when we come to this awakening, we come to it on our knees in some way, shape or form.
We have known it. We've kind of sensed it. We felt it, but we've kind of put it over there. And then something, something major happens, whether it's a health crisis or some other loss or a job blows up. And then we start to think about these things. And you came to this through a subtler path.
But it was also, it sounds like, you know, this was just a profound insight and said, okay, I can't not do something about this anymore. One of the other things that you talk about in that post was this notion of work not making you quote good, which I think is this really interesting thing that we tend to hold on to.
Yeah. And just this idea of like, if I work, if I get promoted, that someone who isn't me will validate me. And for me, so much of coming back in the pandemic was this idea of sovereignty of self, just like that same notion of like, how do I really measure success for myself? What is my body that's telling me that I need to do or to change?
It's that same notion of like, no matter how hard you work corporate America isn't going to love you back. You are always going to be outsourcing time relationships and health for this thing that the end of the day didn't add up to be very meaningful to me.
I think we just a lot of, you know, I grew up in a very like authoritarian culture, religious culture. And so for me, this idea of other people sort of either making decisions for me are also validating my worth was really hard to let go of.
And I see that a lot in people and in corporate relationships that it's like, if everybody around me is pleased with me, then it doesn't matter if I'm pleased with me. And so I think the inversion for me of the pandemic was so many people was waking up to like, hey, I'm halfway through life.
And is it adding up to something that in the end, I think is really meaningful?
Yeah, that makes so much sense. I know so many people have felt that and also ties into sort of like the third point that you drop around like the importance of having a point of view because I think so often when we step into a career, we either don't have a point of view or we do but we feel like we are not entitled to share it.
And we hide it and we just, you know, and we think everyone else around the table is smarter than us, you know, more experienced than us and listen to all the brilliant things that they're saying.
And then we kind of learn along the way that no, actually, like that little thing inside of me is equally valuable, which also brings it around to the fourth point in that post, which is it's all bullshit.
I feel like those two tie together really well.
Totally. They're kind of like opposite parts of the same coin, right? I just remember my friend. I was so intimidated. I had a bit of a teacher. I had a master's in poetry.
And then I made this career jump to go into corporate America and become like a marketer and brandy and copywriter.
And I just remember like a huge and posture syndrome, which now I work with creatives all the time.
And I just see that this is the characteristic thing that we all struggle with. We all think our work is terrible.
We all think that we don't deserve to have an opinion on things. We all think that there's some kind of like arrogance or narcissism present.
And then we all have like a really formed idea about what we think is, that is a great piece of art or what makes a great poem.
And so for me, it was recognizing that everyone around me in a state of agency felt the same way and had these kinds of anxiety.
And the most valuable thing was me again with that sovereignty of self to have a point of view around my art.
And the reason why I think it's valuable in the world. And here's the rationale that got me there. And then also the reason I'm nice, that in the end, it's all kind of bullshit.
Like everybody's on that same spectrum of trying to figure out how to be a human, how to be a good human and how to make art that matters.
Yeah. So let me ask you the question. Then let's say you create something, whether you're an artist or writer, whatever, like a founder, you put something on the world.
There's a voice in you that's saying, maybe for the first time, oh, this is really good. Like this is game changingly good.
Maybe you can get just for my game, but whatever it is, how do we know without relying on others to quote, validate it because they see the value in it.
And also whether it truly is what we dream of it being or whether it, you know, it's, it's, we're kind of deluding ourselves, whether it's like ego or arrogance speaking.
Yeah, it's an interesting question because I think for me as someone who shares their work online a lot, you can get really stuck in being like, I think this poem is only good, or I think my art is only good.
If it's popular or if it's shared or it gets a bunch of likes on social, and I think it's a trap that is new specifically in contemporary society because of the prevalent the way we share our art and our creativity online that you can get instant feedback and you can start to have what I think is a misconception that everything that good art equals popular art.
And that's not always the case. And for me, I really had to say, I am settled in myself that this is an interesting idea. If this is an authentic idea, if this is a true idea that has pleased my standards.
Then I can send it out into the world and I can divorce myself from the outcome because I don't think what is popular is always good art. And I don't think it should be our metric for when we share or how we share.
We're never going to know how our art lands. We can only know how it lands in ourself, right? And so for me, it was like really raising the standards for myself.
Does this scare me a little bit? Is this interesting? Have I heard this before? Am I pushing this to some new territory? Am I a little bit, is this disgusting? This idea that I'm thinking of?
Am I pushed it far enough? Is it a little bit uncomfortable? If someone says my art is nice, that's just like the most depressing thing I could think of.
So for me, it became about a level of taste and I don't mean that in a classist or a hierarchical way. I mean, have I fulfilled for myself what I think is interesting? Have I satisfied that?
Because I see a lot of creatives and writers putting their work out there and effort of getting more likes, getting more shares, getting kind of online approval.
And they burn out because they're not feeding their own sense of creative self. They're not satisfied with that.
Yeah, now I love that. It's kind of like the way that Rick Rubin describes. You know, like when he senses what he likes, it's just he's a very developed sense of taste.
And he just knows it. And if it goes out into the world and people love it, awesome. That's great. You know, but if not, he's still there's something in him that says, like this is the only aspiration for me is to create something that rises to my level of taste, which really brings it around to the final point in that post that we were talking about, which is to nurture your knowing to like, you've got to know yourself.
You can't understand this if you don't look like what is your taste? What is the thing that is deeply embedded in you that you learn to get out and how do you know when you're getting it out in a way that's meaningful to you?
Totally. I'm very much about the wisdom of the body, the intuition of the body, the instinct to travel west. Animals have it too, right?
This instinct to migrate that I think somehow as people, we think that we're not just animals that also have instincts that lead us to some other path to some other place to some other life, which is where we really need to be.
And so this idea of nurturing your knowing is like, what are those intuitive hits that we get all the time, but we kind of push down or suppress.
I mean, very early on when I was working in agencies, I would see people, and I was, I like started as an intern, an unpaid intern at like, I was like 28 and I was, can I intern here?
I had no experience in the corporate world and I would get these hits of like, man, I could be doing that. I could be in front of the boardroom. I could be leading the creative presentations.
And that helps me take a lot of risks in that career. And then the same intuitions instinctive hits told me, hey, it's time to get out. Like your body is tired. There's more that you can do.
There are leaps that you can take, but I think we have to get really quiet. And for me, that happened in the pandemic was getting quiet enough that I could actually hear what it was inside me that was asking to come out.
And I went all the middle of the desert in Arizona to do it. I mean, I really got quiet. There's something about the desert in winter time is like the most silent place on earth.
Then in the stillness and that unbearable stillness, you get to hear what it is that your body is asking you to do. And sometimes you can't even name it.
Sometimes your body doesn't even know. It's just a thread that you know you have to pull. Like I know that I need to reframe my life. The call for me was to reframe my life and prioritize health, sunshine, relationships, and deep prioritize that time promotions and money.
And my life totally flipped when I sort of nurtured that knowing.
Yeah, and I mean, it's interesting you describe the word like that going out into like the quietness is unbearable and for so many it is.
And I also wonder whether the unbearable part of it for so many of us is the fact that when we get really still, when we sort of we eliminate all the distractions, all the stimulation, everything else.
And we just said there's nothing but us. You know, there's nothing you know that moment makes us face whatever it is that's been brewing that we've kind of been setting aside.
And you're like there's nothing to distract me from it anymore. And that's the unbearable part because oftentimes those things are not things that are happy for us.
And we don't know what to do about them. You know, for you, at least in part and as part of this journey westward for you.
But you know, set in motion even earlier, it sounds like, you know, and this also kind of leads to the part two of the the post that you shared on your sub stack, you know, it led to this really big disruption to a big transition from this, you know, corporate career that you started as an intern built up your copy director, like really succeeding by all the quote, you know, external metrics.
And then you decide, no, like this is this actually can't be my life anymore. And you leave corporate America to go into create a bunch of inertia.
And in your writings, you address a series of myths that I think hold a lot of people back from this one is this myth that if you're going to be an quote artist, well, there's a certain amount of starving that is just embedded in that experience.
So take me into this. Yeah, I was just so surprised within the corporate creative world because it was still a creative profession.
All these myths or misnomers or ways that you kind of got stuck or fixed in corporate America, it really talented brilliant creative people stayed in jobs where they were making less money, I think.
Then if they would have gone elsewhere because of this idea that like I can't I have to stay in a traditional fixed structure, I think it comes back to this like work makes me good.
But then also like I'll never make more money than this on my own like I have to be tied to this structure artist starve.
They can't be successful. They can't learn the art of marketing. There's no way to promote yourself without being it key. You can't be a best selling author and not sell out.
So there's inherently I think creatives get it on both sides you get it from corporate America, which is really invested in keeping you in that paradigm, right.
And the myth there is like you'll never make more money. You'll never have stability like you have here. And then you also do really get it in academia and on the creative side within like MFA programs that are like we're actually never going to give you any money to teach.
And so you will be you will be a starving artist if you pursue that. So for me, it was sort of revolutionary to find this third path to take like some of those skills I had learned in marketing and some of just I mean I'm very grateful for my time in corporate America because it taught me a lot about how to market, how to promote.
But also that resolve of remaining authentic to my own taste to my own sovereignty as an artist that there really could be a very happy medium between those two things.
And the idea that you can't make as much money doing your own thing as an entrepreneur was so happily overturned for me.
You know, I started my own writing community and to be able to work for myself doing the things that I wanted to do I had just such a different level of investment. I'm pretty soon I also saw a financial return that was was pretty exciting.
Yeah, it's not that when you, you know, I'm many decades into my life as an entrepreneur in many different versions and iterations and you certainly don't work last, you know, also in a very past life.
I had a hot minute in the context of my life as a lawyer and at one point I was working in what a largest law firm was in New York City.
And I often work more hours now even though I worked a lot of hours back then and I would complain about the hours that I worked in how I had no life and it was ruining me and my health and all this stuff and my relationships.
I work a lot of hours now and I always have but it's a completely different context. It changes the way you feel when you know it's more of an expression or something that is deeply meaningful to you.
It matters to you. It's an expression. It's like an emanation of who you are. And I think one of the mythologies and you kind of speak to this is it's not the hours.
It's the context that wraps around those hours that makes them like potentially so grueling and depleting.
Totally. I think as humans again for me it was really revealed in the pandemic was this idea that we're built for meaning.
And I don't think anything as is harmful to our health is doing work that we perceive as meaningless and it's not to knock on people who are in different careers than the entrepreneurial path that I have landed in.
But I couldn't think at that point in my life in the middle of the pandemic anything less meaningful than developing email campaigns right to sell products that I just didn't think mattered.
And so for me it is to your point it's not only a question of restructuring your life towards like our ultimate value system.
But it's also about like finding meaning and purpose and so for me it was a realignment with like what do I think that really matters and for me that has become helping people find their truth true their voice right.
That is work that felt like the work with the capital W. Yeah.
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Rings up another point that you mentioned and this is one of the other miss which is that if you do creative work you'll automatically love your life.
That's not entirely true all right.
Yeah that's such a funny one because you know now I am a full time writer I'm that mysterious unicorn that people are always like oh my god you're a full time writer they don't even ask me questions they just say god you love that right and it's kind of like not all the time and the hard part of.
Being a full time writer even though I feel often very aligned to that purpose is like suddenly you're responsible for your timetable you are responsible for a lot of other things as an entrepreneur you have to hire people you have to run a business god you have to do taxes which is just like the worst thing in the entire world.
So it's not always like flip the switch and you're automatically going to love everything about your life I think for me it was recognizing that there's a real trade off in this new realm and that like having full time access to writing was sometimes his own kind of burden like to make what you love the art you make take on all the pressure.
Your happiness is a lot to ask I think about it in comparison to someone that I worked with at my agency and he was a musician and an artist and he refused promotions consistently at this agency that we worked at and instead he just said like I want to come in I want to work eight hours a day and then I want to go home and I want to make art and I want to write music and then also occurred to me as like.
I'm going to make a very valid path forward to say like I'm going to put my time in here and then I'm going to go home and I'm going to make art and he wasn't asking his art to support him or to become his entire financial meetings right so I ask people when they're thinking about these things to really consider like what is the role that you want art to play and are you ready for it to try and support you.
Financially and emotionally sometimes it's not always the payoff depending on who you are as a person that's worth doing yeah so agree I don't know if you've ever read the book daily rituals but it basically tracks the 24 hour sort of like daily cycle of so many different people write our artists who are iconic a really well known and when you read that it's amazing to see.
That a number of them had full time jobs with no intention of ever leaving those full time jobs they're kind of mundane but they're okay you know and they took care of the expenses they took care of the family they took care they took that off the table so that when they went and did their art on the five to nine and then on the weekends.
It gave them the freedom to not have to worry about whether this art was rising to the standard of being sellable it was just an expression of what they wanted to create and that led them to not censor totally in a way that actually let the work be the work and that in turn ended up making you like it and it's not a shame impact.
Truly I think there's such a myth I should have written this as a six myth and a sarticle but there's such a Smith that when I have you know I'll make art when I have more time or God if I could just be a full time writer and have that literally be my job to get up and write then I would make art all the time and have a novel and no time I would have a collection of poems whatever it is and the reality is often when you have to change your relationship with art like when that thing gets to be.
The art you get to make at the end of the day it changes your relationship with it you're really excited you want to do it you're making time for it and you know I have never been as prolific honestly as when I was writing between work calls and creative presentations and on my lunch break because I knew I have seven minutes I'm going to write now when I wake up and I have two hours to sit at my desk I don't feel pressured in the same way so I always do it.
Okay so I always tell people just collect the scraps if you're somebody who's never going to leave a nine to five job if that's working for you and also that turns off sort of the part of your brain that has to be anxious about money and all those other things and that's great for your art but just collect the scraps I think people underestimate the amount of time you can actually dedicate to writing if you write in the five minute in between.
So agree and so often I think the snippets the ideas like the sentence fragments that become amazing things down the road you're doing something entirely differently and I just it drops into your head you know I have no idea what this is but I need to write the sentence down because at some point it's going to become something so
much of it just happens in those in between moments totally and also the myth of like I have to have the cabin in the woods you know and my whiskey on the desk and my you know cigarette with the long holder and then I'm going to be this great American novelist right that's not how the majority of writers that I know and myself it's just not how we produce work it's a really unsexy ways for me sometimes it's literally first thing in the morning before I've got an interview or before I've got it.
Meeting our work call I have 10 minutes and my laptop in bed that I'm dashing off the first thing that I come to and like that doesn't feel like the sexiest piece of advice but I think we have a misnomer that hurts people you have to go to a cabinet or in the woods or you have to have immense amounts of time and I just don't think that's how brains develop creative work.
Yeah I'm curious about your take on on a different thing that I've heard a lot also you know not necessarily in the context of writing although certainly in that context but in the context of quote creating great art and and it goes the referring goes something like this in order to create great art or great art comes from great suffering when I was a kid when I was on my late teens I remember spending a summer out renting house and painting houses on the east end of Long Island and like kicking around in bare feet and my roommate in the
house was an aspiring writer you know he's probably 20 years old and at one point during the summer he vanished and basically said I need to he lived a very privileged life they came from a lot of money but you want to be a great writer and he basically said I need to suffer in order to be a great all of the
greats have suffered like mightily so you know he basically took a backpack full of clothes bottom and old beat up station wagon and drove out to the middle of the country and said I just need to live you know like in a really tough circumstance forget the fact that there was great privilege that still waited any time you know he wanted to turn back to it but
you're taking and I have heard some artists who have great astonishing works that it came from suffering and they were literally afraid to remove suffering from their lives because we're afraid
it would no longer allow them to create the work that they want to create.
Yeah it's such a fascinating topic and it's what I thought a lot about because for me yes I think suffering is helpful because
suffering does bring us to language it drives us from it literally suffering drives language from our bodies it sometimes until we are in I mean in any change that we make it's
usually suffering we get uncomfortable enough to have to make it but I don't know that that exactly is the prerequisite like I think for me it's not necessarily
suffering but it's the ability to inhabit lives that are not necessarily my own and what I mean by that is the gift of like moving west was this just
tremendous ability to be anonymous for a while to like enter a new city I could go into the bar and say my name was ADA
and break my typewriter if I wanted to right it was this totally this ability to find a multitude of things that I wanted to write about and people that I potentially wanted to become and so I think there's a
level of discomfort of like really saying like what is it inside me and I think suffering is one modality but I think there's many ways to get there as an
artist I'm not really a fan of this idea that we have to live in perpetual states of melancholia which are often hurt our art as well because they could be hand in hand with things like depression
or unhealthy patterns of relationships that sometimes like accompany our depression and so I want to release artists from this idea that they have to be miserable but I do think to be a good
to be uncomfortable yeah and maybe even if you know you don't have that suffering in your own life to cultivate empathy so that you can understand what's going on around you and really sort of
like feel into other people's experiences truly I want to kind of put a bow on this part of the journey like because people may be thinking okay this sounds really interesting
inspired like there's a whole bunch of myth busting but she literally went from corporate America to creative entrepreneur like what did that actually
look like and for you listed this out you know first it was part time like pulling back to some part time work in the agency so you had a little bit more bandwidth to then started to vote to the next
thing then you started typing live poems like at different events parties whatever it is getting paper that and by the way I have seen a number of different people doing this
at events it's a real thing yeah and then getting commissioned to write poetry online to create and creating prints and then running workshops and then eventually creating your own
community sustenance community to support other writers and that it's like the portfolio of these things that eventually culminated in you saying okay so I can literally step into this and do the thing that I want to do it wasn't
like I just you snapped your fingers and like okay I'm a poet like I was a copywriter like focusing on branding and marketing and now I'm a poet and everything is awesome this was a process
and there were a number of different things that you did to piece together and then eventually kind of figure out what form and shape does this do people want to actually support
financially and will give me those things that I said I held there is like the sunshine and the relationships did I miss anything there is a context that makes sense to add
no I think that's exactly right I think again people think like well God I have to just jump straight into the abyss without having any plan and there can be a strategy to that because when you're free falling
nothing motivates you to get your life in order like the immediacy of having to figure out rent but I didn't go that route I definitely took a piece by piece step by step
my agency is very kind and letting me go part time that allowed me to open up okay if I can spend two hours a day now on writing or writing related things what does that open for me
and I sort of built this path forward very slowly I'm actually a risk adverse person and I have had to build a lot of courage around making these leaps and you know I sit at my writing desk every day and I have all these trees over looking my street here in Portland
and I watched the squirrels leap from branch to branch to power line to the rooftop and I got really interested in how does the squirrel know like they never fall how do they know the distance between the power line
and the branch at the top of the tree and so I actually did a little research on squirrels and how they learn to judge their leaps and it's that they take very small leaps at first and then they slowly build to these longer really astounding leaps
and when they miss a branch they have these claws that can kind of and they can also like summer salt back they're like incredibly agile creatures but they basically take all the data from the misleaps and they apply it to the new leap
and I thought this is a metaphor for leaving one's life and the ways that we teach ourselves as humans to leap like the reasons squirrels don't fall is because they have if they miss then they have claws that are going to catch them on the way down
or they can course correct mid air if they've overshot and then they get to fly all that data to the next leap
so for me I took just a small series of hops you know going to part time moving to typing poems live which is his own kind of tear
right but really reinforces like hey I have the skills to recover if I overshoot I can think quickly on my feet
I can bang out a poem and five you know into five to 12 seconds in front of a stranger if I have to it at live type writing event
and then from that you know proving to myself okay people will now pay me for that will they pay me the commission poems
okay I proved to myself for that maybe I could start posting poems online maybe I could start a substock
so I think sometimes as creatures and as human animals we've got to almost teach ourselves the science of the leap and build our own courage
we have this idea that we're trying to prove to the world that we're an artist but I think firstly we're actually trying to prove to our self that we're an artist
and a lot of evidence building it's just the science of the leap is figuring out okay I've done this bar can I stretch can I jump a little further
I love that the notion that we're really trying to prove it to ourselves first you know yeah and what I'm hearing also is that somebody needs to write a book called the squirrel's guide to career change
I know right because it's like they've actually done all this research on squirrels in doing parkour and it's like we gotta apply this
that is also of that now I'm like going to have to go research squirrels because now I'm really curious about this
it kind of leads us to your instructions for traveling last you know and this is words and thoughts around both the metaphorical and a literal journey
that really has unfolded over the last chunk of years what leads you to decide to sort of like mount this journey and then document it and share it
yeah so again when I was you know in the middle of the desert in the pandemic I wrote this poem to myself and it was me trying to believe in myself as a writer as a woman as a solo traveler at that time I had done something
again it goes back to the idea of making yourself really uncomfortable I had done something really scary for me which was to travel for six weeks across the American West by myself
I had never really traveled alone before and so in that process I wrote this poem called instructions for traveling west and it was it begins you know first you must realize your homesick for all the lives you are not living
I always tell people be a poet not a preacher I was not preaching to other people I was telling myself like joy there's something inside you that is asking for a different life and has been asking for a long time
and then the rest of that poem was literally just all the things I wanted to say to myself you know give grief her own lullaby that yourself with all your newborn courage
and I think the beautiful thing about the page and about poetry is it has this strange alchemy when you take a leap on the page you can take a leap in your life right sort of practice that idea in the space of the page
and within 40 days of writing that poem I had sold my house I had packed up my Subaru my two cats and all my books and I left a relationship and I had gone part time at work
and so it was just this kind of amazing momentum I think both within poetry and with also within really getting clear in yourself was what is the thing I need to say
if I really made good on that how does my life transform and then I just remember posting that poem and being shocked at how many people resonated with this idea of traveling west you know physically or as a metaphor for their life
what was the thing that they were kind of not looking at or looking away from and what was their figurative west
yeah I could see so many people really just embracing that it's funny so describing it also after I was a lifelong New Yorker like raised a family married like in 30 years in New York City
and September 2020 in the scariest part of the pandemic in New York City you know we packed up and came out to Boulder Colorado
for what we thought would be a couple of months three and a half years later as we're having this conversation like now Boulder's home
and there's I think so many people launched into this journey but I love the fact that the notion that something can start on the page
and then somehow become real enough that it inspires you to manifest it to actualize it you know
but then you know a part of that sort of like that poem also you know like the lines also come in that you must commit to the road and the rising loneliness
and I think this is something that sometimes we're fearful of because we feel like if we're leaving all of these things behind
what lies ahead of us is not just possibility but also loneliness because we don't know the people we don't know the places
we don't know what's going to happen and a lot of people from our quote past lies won't understand what we're doing and why we're doing it
and I feel like this is so much of what you weave into the different writing in this book
this idea that like you always have to go and that if you go if you take the leap your life will just be great
you know everything will work out for you'll find your true love you'll find your true career you'll find your true home
you know there was a part of me that really wanted that to be true when I started this journey I was like I'm going to do a one scary thing
and then the rest of my life is just going to be great and then I'll never have to do anything again
and what I realized is like God this road comes with its own price it is hard it is hard to leave a life
there's real grief there's real loss there's real loneliness tied to that when I was writing this book
I had all of my poems laid out and I have organized the book into sections that are different lines of that initial title poem
and I was trying to end I realized that I was writing the poems towards this idea of home as the end dean
I wanted the last section of the book to be home and I could not finish that book with that structure
and I realized that I was also trying to live my life with this very singular okay I've done the one scary thing
I've been lonely I've experienced loss I've reinvented myself I get to stop
and I realized that that was actually wasn't a truth it wasn't a truth for me I hadn't lived it and for me I had not found home at the end of this book
I haven't found every answer to everything but I have found this tremendous sense of self and this tremendous sense
and confidence in the ability to continue to leap which is inherently uncomfortable but it made me rearrange the order of the book
as you know lines of that poem and so the book now ends with the section joy is not a trick
but it doesn't end in home because for me that was a falsehood and I didn't want to write a book that wasn't true
that felt like the worst death in the world to hand to you some kind of satch or an idea that if you leap once it all be okay
the truth is we don't know it might not be okay but I am trying to suggest to readers it's absolutely thrilling
and absolutely beautiful and absolutely profound to still take the leap
yeah and once you hit on the reality that actually my current state is not okay
then you're not comparing some false illusion of okness now to some uncertain future
when you realize like actually you know things aren't as they seem now so yes I'm stepping into uncertainty but also possibility
and maybe that's better you know
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Hey everyone Craig Robinson here I want you to check out the ways to win
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in one of the early poems remember what it was like to be a kid you really
certainly recount childhood wonder that state of wonder do you find yourself
giving back into sort of like intentionally moving back into that childhood
state of wonder especially as part of the sort of the creative or the writing
process that's a beautiful question John I'm not I've never been asked that
and I quite like that that framing I do because one of the best pieces of advice
I was ever given as a writer is comes from Brendan Constantine a poet
and he talks about like moving through the world as an alien you're seeing
everything for the first time and that is what it is to be a kid you're just this
little tiny alien on earth and you've never seen any of this before
and the kind of immense wonder and so when we think about writing beautiful
profound life changing work it comes from that sense of sort of
isolating or defamiliarizing oneself from the world and it's a whole
like philosophy of detachment or defamiliarization in art is a sort of
fantasy of the world and you can see it right because of deconstructed the
face so that you could better understand what it was to be human and I think
that that's really important in our work like how can you see the world for
the first time and a lot of time that says a child and for me that was seeing
the world and then learning language for the world was so fundamentally powerful
and I remember as a kid we lived in Central African Republic so we lived
overseas my dad was a doctor and we had a telescope set up in the backyard
some nights and when we look out and you see the stars and there was a man
from a neighboring village who came by the house and wanted to look out the telescope
and he had never seen the sky up close before and as a kid seen that man
it is space the jubilant that came over him to see stars up close and the moon
up close I thought God if I could have one ounce of that in my adult life now
when I think back on his face like that is the joy of being alive is to see
things fresh and for the first time and I think that's the gift of poetry as we get to do that
over and over we get to sort of relive that sense of childhood wonder
I mean do you feel like that is an inherent in poetry or do you feel like
that's the lens that you deliberately bring to the way that you write poetry
I think both end I mean I think good poetry asked not to just be read
but to be felt in the reader's body and the only way I know to get you to feel
something in your belly and not your brain is to ask you to experience it for yourself
so you have to use that defamiliarization technique you have to say it in a new way
you have to say it as if you were a child seeing it for the first time
or else I think we bring all our own preconceived notions memories ideas
to that thing and we don't get to experience it in its fullness
so for me also having been a stranger in many places in my life growing
up overseas moving back to the US when I was young I'm kind of used to
that strangeness of a new place and seeing something as if I were seeing it
for the first time so I do try to apply that to my work
like what if I was experiencing this and I sort of take myself back to those years of a culture ration
where the you know US Ohio where we were was just blaring and strained
and there was Walmart and Happy Meals and highways so fast it felt like flying
you know what is it to be a new creature in this world to sort of have that alien experience
how can I translate that to the page in a way that wakes up my readers too
yeah that also ties in really beautifully to one of the later poems in the same part
roads where you really explore the theme of belonging
so it's interesting the notion of sort of like constantly looking with fresh eyes
beginners mind and and being in different places with new people and new experiences
but also trying to tap into this sense of this innate human need that we all have
to feel a sense of belonging and I wonder whether you feel a belonging
more is an outside in thing or an inside out
can you say more about outside is that right?
whether belonging comes from those around you seeing you as you are and accepting you
or does it first need to come from you seeing you and accepting yourself
before anyone else ever has the opportunity to do that
yeah it's such an interesting question
you know I think for me belonging has been this really elusive thing
just like the every time anyone asks me where's home I just curl up into a ball
and I don't know how to answer because I moved around so much as a kid
and I was constantly shifting culture right and so ironically when I came
towards it was because I couldn't speak the languages and the places that I was
in so to come to the page and sort of have this private way that I could communicate
was very sacred to me so I do think the sense of belonging for oneself has to
come from that innate listening to the self to that innate listening to the voice
I think we all like to think we're special little creatures for whatever reason
that oh I just I've never really felt like I fit in anywhere I've never really felt
like I belong and I think that's just like a fundamental part of being human
there's always feeling the outs a little bit of any community that we're in
but I think really what that points to is more a discomfort with self
I think when we get really clear on what that voice is who that person is
what that sovereign self is inside us it matters less sort of the geographical
location that we're in or the sense of larger homeless it can just be in
oneself if that makes sense yeah no I think that resonates with me further
into the book really deep into life's simple joy is appreciating life's simple
joy is the deep instinctual response of the heart to true happiness tell me
more about your take on the heart's capacity to sort of how for joy
it's a terrifying thing when the heart starts to how in any capacity whether
in grateful joy but I think it's sort of terrifying primal feeling that sometimes
when we get too happy we get really worried that it's going to go away and
that's where that line comes from later in the book joy is not a trick
it's like if I really let myself feel terror and then I really let myself
feel joy if I really let myself feel all of life what happens when I don't
can't feel it anymore and that's a terrifying question right and Maya
Angela she was asked can anyone write a poem and she says I think so I'm not
sure everyone would write a poem but in order to write a poem you have to
have sharp ears and you have to not be afraid of being human and for me
that's really the key of like what it is to fully feel is to have the courage
to fully feel it all which is something we're always all trying to do but
I just was so surprised after years and years of not literally not
feeding myself great food not eating enough not giving myself enough
pleasure enough joy enough freedom when you finally give that there can
you know enter in the sort of howling that is both grief and joy that you
wait it's so long to start feeding the self yeah no that makes so
much sense and part of that howling I feel like is also often embedded
in there is longing and this is something that you speak to in ghost heart
you know which really reflects on the longing for places and lives unexplored
the concept of sort of unfulfilled futures and the feeling of belonging to
the unknown and I think so many people relate to that sense of almost like
unquantifiable or unidentifiable longing but they just feel it in their
bones in some way it's so fascinating to me and Cheryl
and I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think
that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think
that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think
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that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that
was a small choice. And I think so many people struggle with that dear friend of mine. So many people struggle with that dear friend of mine. So many people wrote a book a couple years ago called microjoice where she was moving through profound season of just astonishing loss and grief and sadness and yet she found she still had this capacity to find these tiniest little moments but she almost had to let herself feel them because so often where I should be like there are reasons for me to be in the state of profound lost and
grief. I should not be feeling joy now and we shame ourselves when there's a glimmer of it. And it seems like this whole part was sort of like dancing with these ideas. Yeah, I think this strange mechanism of grief is how closely it is associated with joy and how terrified as people that we are to feel either one of those things. But I think there is this this time when we're experiencing loss and loneliness. The dark gift of the pandemic was it all
that was also brought into sharp focus all these things in our life that were quite beautiful. And then I think a lot of us got to the you know a couple years into that and didn't want to let go of those things like those things that came into focus as became not only small joys but deep delights you know the ability to go for a walk every day just became a pleasure that I couldn't imagine having to let go of when we were all supposed to come back into the office right. So for me it was this idea of like I'm not going to let go of the
bros gay also talks about this in his book of delights but just these small ways every day that we're finding meaning and that these actually grow within our collective imaginations only gives them time. So within my writing community I call it tiny tenders. I say that the base of every poem is a tiny tender it's one small detail it's one small thing that you have witnessed that you are now going to give
a reverent attention to on the page and so I think it's really an exercise of that reverence of attention you know I just remember in the loneliness of being on the road standing in the sunlight washing tomatoes in my sink and I look down and I thought my god I've never seen anything so beautiful as these tomatoes and I never want to lose this reverence for these dumb tomatoes but for me it was about that the reverence of attention that we can bring to the small delights and how we can stretch out the
mouth and give them to one another. Yeah that reverence and the attentiveness I think is just so lost in so much of our lives these days you know the pace of everything is accelerating we live in the state of such perpetual distraction that when you can drop into it even for a heartbeat like oh oh this this is actually what it's all about.
You also and you wrap around to this last part of the book remind yourself join on a trick there's a piece when the queen dies where sort of saying let's pay attention let's be here let's acknowledge the loss and also there seems to be this underlying instinct in us to move forward.
So I'm curious like in your mind how do we navigate between this attentiveness to the moment to often to loss to change and to standing in a place of also constant access to hope and possibility.
Yeah it's so interesting just even as a woman now who's gone through therapy a lot and the thing that my therapist always is always talking about is this feeling it's like I don't I feel all the time okay I'm a poet right she's like about do I think you could still feel a little bit more right and so it's this idea of like feeling every feeling fully of like having to feel all of it and then that getting us
to the next place that we're supposed to go so I think that poem begins you know the instinct of bees and of the body is to be rebuilding and sometimes I imagine myself and all the emotions and all the things that I feel is literal bees inside me that are just quivering forward like they're trying to feel the exocity of the grief or the joy and then they're literally trying to rebuild and to find the honey and the sweetness and all those things and there's that long.
And there's that line in the poem that talks about you know who is the first person that told you that your soul's monarch was dead and then even so what did you turn into honey and this idea that no matter what card were dealt in our lives like what are the ways that we insist on healing what are the ways that we insist on rebuilding just like these insist on making honey I just think there's such a beautiful lesson in that yeah so great when you bring
a work like this book to the world when you're working on when you're writing it when you're living the stories that then end up becoming the words and becoming the emotions and the feeling sensation I'm curious do you create an intention beyond your own honesty and expression or a desire for how you want this work to land in others minds and hearts.
The only thing harder than writing the book was living the book right so it's just sometimes hard when you're a person who writes a lot of autobiographical work a lot of poems that are clearly the eye is the poet in the speaker and the writer one and the same it's sometimes tough to then send that book into the world because you basically feel like you've invited everyone over to look inside your closet and to talk about all the house stress.
It's that you wear right so it's this kind of bizarre feeling to feel like God I put all of that out into the world and now people are going to read it and judge me and what I found more is that poems stand as sort of mirrors to the self like certainly they reveal something about me and but mostly they reveal something about you is the reader and that's been really helpful for me that these poems when I release them I think of them as burns that's been really helpful for me that these poems when I release them I think of them as burns that's been really helpful for me that these poems when I release them I think of them as burns that's been really helpful for me that these poems when I release them I think of them as burns that's been really helpful for me that these poems when I release them I think of them as burns that's been really helpful for me that these poems when I release them I think of them as burns that's been really helpful for me that these poems when I release them I think of them as burns that's been really helpful for me that
the only way I can write is I sort of send them off and I say like now you're your own thing now like you're flying away from me they are not me anymore so once I have written the book I sort of release it into the world and I say like you are now separate and I allow people to have their own experience with the book like I can't dictate how people read it if people like it if people see themselves or don't see themselves and I think that's a healthier approach and like keeps me sane and able to keep writing is this ability to be able to keep writing is this ability to be able to keep writing is this ability to be able to keep writing is this ability to be able to keep writing is this ability to be able to keep writing is this ability to be able to keep writing is this ability to be able to keep writing is this ability to be able to keep writing is this ability to be able to keep writing is this ability to be able to keep writing is this ability to be able to keep writing is this ability to be able to keep writing is this
ability to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to
be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able
to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be
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