In my previous post, I shared about the three workshops heading into the Rose Scott Women Writers Festival in Sydney in 2025. This post moves on to focus on the main program, held over two days, June 27 and 28, and focuses on day one.
Festival Opening Lunch: Suzanne and Gina Chick in conversation with Jane Palfreyman
The Festival opened with a lunch gathering and an opportunity to witness Suzanne Chick, Gina Chick and Jane Palfreyman in conversation on women writers and stories across generations.
Gina Chick is a rewilding facilitator, adventurer, writer and speaker and the winner of Alone Australia in 2023. She was the second woman to win an Alone solo challenge and author of the bestselling book, We Are the Stars. Suzanne Chick, Gina’s mother, is an artist and teacher, and discovered at age 48 that her mother was iconic Australian author, Charmian Clift.
The experience prompted deep ancestral searching and further unleashed Suzanne’s creativity for both painting and writing. Thirty years ago, Suzanne wrote a best-selling memoir, Searching for Charmian, and this was re-released in May 2025 with a new foreword by Gina Chick and afterword by Suzanne Chick.
This opening Festival lunch was an opportunity to hear from these two incredible women about their relationship and creativity, and the impact of discovering their lineage with Charmian Clift. We heard about life growing up in the Chick household and how wild, authentic, creative living was encouraged. Searching for Charmian and learning more about her explained so much as Gina shares in this Guardian excerpt of her foreword. It was an honour to hear these women’s personal experiences and a reminder of how creativity can find us through our ancestry and life stories.
Festivals also offer the opportunity to buy authors’ books and to meet authors. It was a pleasure to buy both Gina and Suzanne’s books, to meet them and have them sign their books. Gina said that she would write a poem for us if we purchased one of her books. Not a very good one necessarily, she said, but a poem. We had to choose a word for the poem.
For my poem, I chose the word ALIVE, my word for 2025 and chatted with Gina about why this word and what it meant to me. I admired Gina’s courage in free-writing a poem instantaneously and inscribing it in a fresh new book! Out came these words swiftly and so apt for the time:
A fabulous start to the Women Writers Festival main program, I look forward to reading both books soon and learning more about these remarkable women and their stories.
Pride & Prejudice & Hormone Therapy: Austen for our Times
In this session, Sophie Gee, Amanda Hooton and Collett Smart riffed on how Jane Austen’s work largely featured outsiders and non-conforming characters. It was a fascinating discussion that yielded new perspectives on the characters, especially female ones.
I had not thought about Austen’s novels from this perspective before. It makes you appreciate the true genius of Jane Austen. Not only was Austen non-conforming as an author in 19th century England, breaking many barriers and stereotypes. Her characters were also portrayals of outsiders, people on the edge for different reasons – psychologically and socially.
Women out of place in Regency England largely feature in Austen’s work. They are marginal figures, not beautiful heroines. Examples that were mentioned in the discussion were: Mrs Bennett and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (Pride and Prejudice), Mary Elliot (Persuasion), Mrs Norris (Mansfield Park) and the Dashwood sisters (Sense and Sensibility).
We explored the genius of Jane Austen in portraying female characters and aspects like menopause, hormonal shifts of adolescence and neurodivergence. These women were often seen as dangerous or feared, with people afraid of difference. A few examples of ‘winner’ characters, strategically navigating the times, were also identified. This included: Charlotte Lucas (Pride and Prejudice), Anne Elliot (Persuasion) and Mary Crawford (Mansfield Park).
This lively discussion about Austen’s work playing with representations of women who don’t fit in was illuminating.
Reboot the Narrative: AI, Authorship, and the Future of Literature
This session featured Tracey Spicer AM, Paula Bray, Lucy Hayward and Ally Burnham was on AI, authorship and the future of literature. Specifically, the session addressed:
How do we protect the rights of creatives in the new frontier?
What happens when machines become storytellers?
There were so many thought-provoking insights from this session that looked at different AI systems: Large Language Models (LLM) eg ChatGPT; Generative AI which leverages LLMs to create new content; and Agentic AI, an autonomous, agent-driven system that uses LLMs to plan, structure, act.
The speakers all had extensive experience in this space. Tracey Spicer is the author of Man-Made: how the bias of the past is being built into the future‘. Paula Bray is Chief Digital Officer at State Library Victoria, and set up the first innovation lab in a cultural heritage setting. Lucy Hayward is the CEO of the Australian Society of Authors.
Here are a few key insights from this session:
AI is skewed to men, has a hetero narrative, and has significant bias and ethical issues. The content is narrower, flatter and more homogenised.
LLMs ‘hallucinate’ to provide examples because they don’t like to say they don’t know. As they become more sophisticated, they hallucinate more.
AI provides the statistically most likely answer, hence the bias aspect. They are ‘probability machines’.
There are significant energy demands created by the use of AI.
Who will miss out? It will mostly be younger and older people with the effects of medical bias and ageism.
We need: audits/inclusive design; cultural heritage/emerging technology and humans in the loop. We need the creative oversight of people.
Research shows cognitive decline aspects of using the tools. What happens to creative thinking?
This was my favourite session of the Rose Scott Women Writers Festival. The focus was Hannah’s latest book, a memoir, Always Home, Always Homesick. To sit and listen to Hannah Kent’s beautiful voice as she spoke with Nicole Abadee and read from her book, reflecting on her experiences in Iceland and of writing Burial Rites was a special experience.
I have since read this exceptional memoir. It was a fabulous read, tenderly written and infused with Hannah’s rich relationship with Iceland. Hannah recounts her experiences in Iceland from arriving as a teenage exchange student. She shares how she connected deeply with the country, culture and language.
The story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last person along with Friðrik Sigurðsson, to be executed in Iceland captured Hannah’s fascination and imagination. We are taken inside the cultural research and writing process of Burial Rites with insights on historical fiction. This includes the limits of factual understanding and ‘honouring what is not known.’ Structured in lyrical chapters accompanied by photos, this was a gentle, wise, instructive read. Hannah’s grace and calmness is woven throughout this memoir. I look forward to rereading Burial Rites now after learning more about its genesis and creation! A highly recommended read.
Thanks for reading, and I hope these insights from day one of the Rose Scott Women Writers Festival main program are helpful. The next post [to come] covers day two of the main festival program.
True to Quiet Writing’s focus, I have been writing quietly for the past few years. Following my partner’s sudden tragic death in late 2022, it was all I could do to keep moving ahead. Grief affects cognitive space immensely and creativity has often felt like a far off land. Writing behind the scenes has been an anchor and guide throughout this time. But as I wrote recently: ‘It’s the beginning of a new writing time‘. It’s time to reignite my writing in a more committed way and sharing it through re-engaging with craft and community. The Rose Scott Women Writers Festival in late June with its suite of introductory workshops was the perfect place to start this new journey.
As the Festival Event page highlights, this is ‘Australia’s only literary festival run, owned and operated by women for women writers.’ It was held at The Women’s Club in Sydney, which has a long history as a safe and nurturing place for woman and ideas. It opened in 1901 to ‘fill some of the needs of intellectual and academic women’. It was the perfect place to focus on women and hearing women’s voices as I made this step into reconnecting with my writing history and voice after a tender and difficult time.
Here are some personal reflections, learning and highlights from the Festival. This post covers the three workshops leading into the Festival and the following post (to come) focuses on the main Festival event.
Workshops and re-engaging with writing
The Festival began with three workshops in the days leading up the main event. I was determined to make the most of my festival attendance, so signed up for all of them. Plus, the topics were right in my zone of interest and craft needs. They drew a wide cross-section of women with some already engaged in writing projects and poetry. Others saw the workshops as a way of making a start or reconnecting with writing. The workshops provided the opportunity for an intimate encounter with the authors and their areas of expertise.
The writing workshops were:
Writing Historical Fiction: Finding the Story, Finding Your Voice – Cindy Davies with Dr Judith Chapman
From Archive to Memoir: Crafting Life Stories – Tess Scholfield-Peters with Michaela Kowalski
Each workshop began with a conversation about the author and their work, followed by a practical writing workshop. Here’s an overview and what I experienced and gained from each workshop.
Writing Historical Fiction
Historical Fiction is a passion of mine as a reader and writer. I have a 36,009 word draft of a historical fiction novel. Writing those words in November, 2022, I reached that word count on 25 November, 2022. I was taking part in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, aiming to write 50,000 words in a month as a way of finally starting the novel I longed desired to write. Happy with that progress, I wrote on 25 November 2025:
I’ve accepted that 36,000 words is a decent and strong effort for Nano this year and I don’t need to bust a gut to complete the 50K. As good as it would be, it’s been a long year and a challenging one in many years, so that is enough for now.
It felt good to reach this point and know I could pick it up whenever it felt right for me. And then my cherished partner, Keith, passed away suddenly three days later. The world turned completely upside down and sideways, sliding me into a new paradigm. With no cognitive space for writing like this, I could not engage with the draft again until two and a half years later, just before the workshop. Opening the file, I saw with surprise I was well organised and had created characters I couldn’t even remember. But there it was, ready for me to return. So, the Historical Fiction workshop was the perfect opportunity to connect with thinking about that story and my craft again.
Historical Fiction Writing Workshop with Cindy Davis
Cindy shared how she finds her story and researches her novels. Her fiction is based in Iran, Australia and Turkiye. We learnt about the world of harems in 1520s Turkiye which features in Cindy’s latest novel, The Favourite of the Harem. Throughout, Cindy shared about how she incorporates fascinating details she has discovered to include in her novel.
The writing workshop built on this to focus us on our storyline and finding our voice. We were asked key questions to guide us in on the story and central idea, voice (person), main character, setting, research and our pitch. It was useful to think about the key structural elements of our writing or planned project. After writing 36,000 words nearly three years ago, it was helpful to answer the question:
What is your central idea – the story you want to tell?
I spent the most time on this question. Writing Wholehearted:Self-leadership for women in transition and the accompanying Workbook,taught me that having a clear focus on the what and why of our longer projects is a powerful touchstone. I spent time on this a few years ago, but it’s something I need to keep working through to get clarity. The workshop was an opportunity to hear what others wrote about this and the other questions. We learnt about each other’s projects and began some powerful conversations, which continued into the days of the festival.
From Archive to Memoir Workshop with Tess Scholfield-Peters
Of the three, this was my favourite workshop as it led to striking insights on writing archive-based narrative. Tess Scholfield-Peters is a writer and academic at the University of Technology, Sydney. In conversation with Michaela Kolawski, Tess shared about researching and writing her book Dear Mutzi, drawn from her PhD research. Dear Mutzi centres on Tess’s grandfather’s story of coming to Australia from Nazi Germany. It is told primarily through her great-grandparents’ letters to their son.
Harry Peters – formerly Hermann Pollnow, known to his family as Mutzi, fled Germany and never saw his parents again. They died in concentration camps. The story of love and circumstance is told through the letters woven as archival material along with imagined narrative.
I learnt in this session about ‘documentary fiction’, weaving archives in as part of narrative. That was a lightbulb moment for me. ‘Can you do that?’ I said to myself as I listened. In drafting my historical fiction novel, a sense of place is so important that it feels like a character. This approach to integrating archival material into the story offers me new ways of thinking about how that sense of place is conveyed.
We learnt about the Speculative Method, a specialisation of historian and biographer, Kiera Lindsay, and the right to imagine into the gaps of fact and story. With practical exercises to support our exploration, we looked at the ‘literary possibilities of archival work’ including hybrid approaches, narrative nonfiction, documentary fiction and informed imagination.
This was music to my ears as I returned to my historical fiction draft with new perspectives and confidence. I look forward to reading Tess’s book and exploring more of the writing and books featuring the hybrid approaches highlighted.
Sounding Out Poetry Workshop with Paris Rosemont
The third workshop featured poetry and developing our craft, reading our work out. As a published poet not writing poetry consistently for many years (a lapsed poet!), I hesitated joining this workshop. But attending this Festival was about reigniting my writing spirit. I acknowledged to myself, I would love a return to writing poetry and signed up for it.
An intimate group at all stages of development in poetry, Paris welcomed and encouraged us in expressing our poetic voice. She was ably supported by Ally Burnham, writer and creative producer at WestWords – Western Sydney’s centre for writing.
We introduced ourselves through a simple poetic structure, which broke down barriers about writing poetry straight away. Exploring themes of legacy, the role of women in society and the haiku structure, we listened to and wrote poems. Paris chose excellent women poets (Magdalena Bell, Kim Addonizio and others) and work related to these themes, including her own poems. This engaged us with poetic voice and in experiencing the power of spoken poetry. Emboldened, we all seemed to slip easily into expressing our own particular take on these themes in our style.
Personally, writing three poems and reading them out in a small group was a revelation and a self-honouring way to reconnect with my poetic voice. I loved playing with words again, dusting off the cobwebs and making them spark and shine, as I used to. I’m grateful to Paris and Ally for creating a safe and encouraging space for this to happen.
Connecting with kindred writing souls
The three workshops were all inspiring, providing much to reflect on and follow up. I connected with kindred women writers in a continuing spirit over the days of the Festival. These connections continue beyond this time.
We were also encouraged, particularly by Cindy, and throughout the Festival to connect with kindred writing souls through organisations. Here are a few key ones, and I was thrilled to join the Society of Women Writers NSW Inc for ongoing connection.
I’m grateful to the presenters, organisers and sponsors, and The Women’s Club, Sydney, for such an excellent festival celebrating and encouraging women’s writing and supporting our voices to be heard. Next posts will cover the main program of the Rose Scott Women Writers Festival and the South Coast Readers and Writers Festival the following weekend. So stay tuned. Welcome any thoughts or questions.
In my book, Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition, I share about anchoring practices for challenging times. In this post, I describe the linked writing and tarot practice that has helped me navigate a difficult period of change recently. So powerful for me as a grounding and clarifying practice, I hope the writing and tarot insights below provide tips and ideas you can apply in your life.
Challenging times and writing practice
With the sudden death of my beloved partner Keith in late 2022, everything changed and life was difficult. I felt so lost as I navigated the shock and unexpected challenges. This went deep, touching every aspect of my being and daily life with uncertainty.
I am a regular writer. Call it Morning Pages, journalling, daily writing – whatever works for you. I call it Morning Pages, but I make it my own, writing any time of the day, as much or as little as I want. But with Keith’s sudden death, the shock meant I couldn’t immediately engage with these regular practices that supported me like swimming, writing and tarot. I was just surviving day to day in the fog of grief, making it through the initial shock, organising the immediate priorities.
After about two weeks, I returned to the page, writing to make sense of what had happened, was happening. I tapped into that rich weave of practices I already knew as I navigated this time. It has helped immensely. Over time, this practice has grown stronger, helping me navigate the difficult circumstances and intense emotions of deep grief. It continues to support me every day as I move through the stages of grief.
So here is what that practice now looks like and how it might help you.
First steps, working digitally and connecting practices
I write Morning Pages on my computer in a Google doc and I have done this for years now. Here are some reasons:
I have osteoarthritis so it is easier on my hands.
I can search the document for when the same tarot cards and themes have come up before and learn from my own insights.
It is private, transportable, easily accessible anywhere, anytime.
I copy and paste the weekly oracle card, monthly intentions, word of the year – whatever is important – to keep front of mind as I write.
I have a connected practice with the lunar cycle, monthly intentions, a weekly oracle card, and a daily tarot card. Writing helps us live more consciously and reflectively. Tarot is a way of tapping into our unconscious, what is just beneath the surface, making connections between what we might otherwise miss. It is a powerful source of self-awareness, self-leadership and conscious living. Connecting the two, writing and tarot, and making sure we have our intentions in front of us provides a powerhouse of guidance.
Example from my Morning Pages practice
Here is what a recent ‘frontispiece’ to my Morning Pages writing looked like:
Gibbous Moon (Doing) – I trust that the perfect intention is coming into form at the perfect time. New moon intentions for this cycle: Virgo: I find safety in connection. I nurture my most honest hopes and dreams for the future. Aquarius: Each day is an opportunity to live a life that feeds me and improves my sense of wellness Soulful Woman card of the week: 7 Loving from the Inside – It is a blessing to give myself the gift of my own presence. Card for the day: Strength – fortitude, patience, gentle power (The Spacious Tarot) ‘Strength coaxes you to take a gentle but confident approach. There is a similar boldness in Strength as that found in the Chariot, but there is more grace and softness here. Strength affirms that you can bloom delicately even if you find yourself in a harsh environment. Approach challenges with fortitude, instead of ruthlessly bulldozing forward. Find empathy for the terrain you find yourself in. Have the patience to understand your circumstances and find ways to work with them instead of against them. The cactus lives in a dry environment yet holds reserves of water within. As such, this card reminds you that you also have great reserves of gentle power. Tap into those reserves. You are strong and compassionate – believe this, know this, and act accordingly.‘
Sources and scene setting for writing and tarot
Here are some sources for the entry above that support me:
I copy over the previous days ‘frontispiece’ as a template and some of it stays the same. This all sets the scene, helping me to focus and keep in touch with the lunar cycle and my intentions. I often check in with other tarot guides. The Gentle Tarot deck and Guidebook and The Creative Tarot by Jessa Crispin stay on my desk for further insight.
But the ground-breaking piece in this time of change has been connecting the daily tarot card with other occasions when it has arrived. Searching through my current and previous Google Morning Pages documents, I can see where this tarot card has come up before. Engaging with this has yielded powerful insights and learning.
Learning from our own wisdom
Working with a Google Doc makes this so easy. Using the Edit/Find and Replace function and popping in the card’s name, we can locate other times it has come up. It helps us see if it’s a frequent, rare or new card arriving. If it is a card that has popped up many times, that is enlightening. What did we reflect on last time and learn from its arrival?
I scan through the previous times and see what was happening: circumstances, emotions, realisations, priorities, how I coped, what I moved through, recurring struggles. Often I see the progress I have made and that in itself is helpful. We forget how far we have come in challenging times, often focusing on what is before us now. I frequently uncover useful insights, tools and wisdom that I apply anew as an anchor in uncertain times.
Sometimes I copy the text and learning from that time as a way into today’s writing and reflections. I come across lists of ideas already brainstormed I can add to or draw from. This method helps you rediscover a forgotten body of work with the links between writing and tarot strengthening focus.
Try linking writing and tarot more consciously!
It might seem like a lot and sometimes it takes time, but once in the rhythm, it is easily and quickly done. The insights gained far outweigh the time involved. It helps to stitch your progress into the fabric of your ongoing experience. Setting up this platform helps to have richer and deeper awareness to guide you forward. You also identify where you’re going over the same ground and need to try a fresh approach.
The reason I started using a digital approach to Morning Pages was twofold: my hand condition and exploring the advantages of digital methods. I have benefited in both those ways and many more. It provides a structured way to tap into your intuition and go deeper with writing and tarot. The outcomes for supporting you in navigating challenging times are supportive and anchoring.
So try it and see how it works for you. We all need frameworks, guides and anchors in swirly, uncertain times. And you can always fashion your own practice. You can find more tips, strategies and frameworks to inspire conscious, intuitive living in challenging times in Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition and the Wholehearted Companion Workbook. Wholehearted is available in audiobook, print and ebook here.
Welcome to Episode 19 of the Create Your Story Podcast on Fiction Writing and Empowering Your Practical Writing Life. I’m joined by Beth Barany, award winning author, multi genre writer and creativity coach and teacher.
You can listen above or via your favourite podcast app. And/or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.
Show Notes
In this episode, we chat about:
Choosing fiction writing
Genre fiction and life stories
World-building and dialoguing with characters
Centring women in stories as main characters
Women’s power to negotiate in story and life
Creative coaching for genre fiction writers
Writing the best way that works for you
Discovering your best writing process
Beth’s writing process and rituals
Top practical productivity tips for writers
Filling your well creatively
Self-publishing tips and processes
Transcript of podcast
Introduction
Welcome to Episode 19 of the Create Your Story Podcast and it’s the 28 of July as I record this.
I’m excited to have Beth Barany join us for the podcast today.
Beth Barany is an award winning author who writes in several genres including young adult adventure fantasy, paranormal romance, and science fiction mysteries. Inspired by living abroad in France and Quebec, she loves creating magical tales of romance, mystery, and adventure that empower women and girls to be the heroes of their own lives. For her day job, Beth helps other novelists write, publish, and market their books as a creativity coach and a teacher. For fun, Beth enjoys walking her neighborhood, gardening, and watching movies and traveling with her husband, author Ezra Barany. They live in Oakland, California with a piano and over 1,000 books.
This is such an incredibly inspiring conversation on storytelling, genre fiction writing, empowering women in story, creative process and finding your own writing process with so practical writing tips all the way through. Beth shares about her own life story as a writer and creativity coach and how she supports other writers to achieve their writing goals.
Grab a pen and a notebook and get ready to jot down ideas to inspire your writing story and practices. I guarantee you will take away so many thoughts to apply in practical and empowering ways from this conversation. Take some time too to learn about Beth’s work and books and connect with her via her website and social media. Beth also has a new podcast out, How to Write the Future, launched in July 2022. The podcast is “for science fiction writers who want to create optimistic stories because when we vision what is possible, we help make it so”. Links in the show notes as ever.
So let’s head into the interview with Beth.
Transcript of interview with Beth Barany
Terri Connellan: Hello, Beth. And welcome to the Create Your Story Podcast.
Beth Barany: Hi Terri thank you so much for having me.
Terri Connellan: It’ll be great to chat today. I know. And it’s just great to connect with you too and to talk about story and writing from many perspectives today. So to kick us off, can you provide a brief overview about your background, how you got to be where you are and the work that you do now?
Beth Barany: Absolutely. Like a lot of writers, I wanted to be a writer since I was small and have been dabbling for quite some time and pursued journalism for a long time. But really my love was fiction and I had a crossroads moment around age 30. Like a lot of people do, and I realized I needed to choose between journalism and fiction. And in fact, a good friend of mine said to me, you need to do one thing, Beth, because I was agonizing between the two. And so I chose fiction because it really spoke to my heart more than journalism. Journalism seemed practical. It was interesting, it was fun. It was also a lot of hard work trying to figure out how to be a freelance writer.
And when I decided to pursue fiction, seriously, it helped me just pursue it as something from the heart while I had a day job. So I didn’t put pressure on it for the longest time to make any kind of money for me. And, fast forward to now where I’ve written all these novels, it really feels like I made the right choice.
I’m so grateful for that. And I started teaching actually, started teaching English to foreigners when I was about the same around 30, 31, because my husband and I were gonna go abroad. We didn’t know where. We got married. And then we were like, yes, we’re gonna go abroad. So we both prepared by getting that four weeks certification to teach English to foreigners.
And that gave me a really lovely teaching background and teaching experience. And I started working in the field as a teacher, teaching English here in the states, before we went abroad, when we ended up going to Paris, France. So I also have been teaching for as long as I’ve been serious about fiction.
I’ve also been teaching actively. And when it came time to be self-employed, which is its own story, that was 16 years ago. I knew that it was gonna be teaching writing, teaching and coaching, coaching writers, cause I had stumbled upon creativity coaching which I got some training in and, you know, always knew I’d be a creativity coach for writers.
I didn’t quite know what that meant at the start, but I knew the creative umbrella was big enough, so I could invent as I went.
So that’s a little bit about that journey and that all kind of coalesced 16 years ago and fast forward to now, I’ve just kind of niched down as I went. First, it was all writers, fiction and nonfiction. It was always oriented towards books because I knew I loved the tangibleness of the books and about eight or nine years ago, I really started honing in on just helping fiction writers and specifically genre fiction writers, which is what I love to read. You know, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, romance, adventure, whatever mashup of those, that was always, always my love since I was a teenager. Actually, since I started reading, as a small girl. So that’s a little bit about my journey and I’m as passionate today as ever about teaching, writing and about writing. It still drives me tremendously today.
Terri Connellan: Oh, fabulous. It’s lovely to hear your journey from that love of books, love of writing through journalism, through fiction, through teaching others and how it’s evolved along the way. Thanks for sharing that with us. So you are an author in several genres, reflecting that love of genre fiction, including young adult adventure, fantasy, paranormal romance, science fiction mysteries. Can you tell us how you came to write in so many diverse genres?
Beth Barany: Well, it didn’t happen overnight. That’s for sure. Ironically, I started with historical fiction, my very first novel, and that was just an exercise in completion. Like I just started writing it spontaneously. I consciously decided, this will be set in 1850s or sixties Paris. Cause I loved that period. I pursued it. It was an exercise in finishing a novel. It took me five years and it taught me a lot. And especially taught me that I did not want to stick to the facts I wanted to make it up. I really wanted it. It kind of came alive for me as I was finishing that project. I’m like, oh, I really love fantasy.
I really love the fairy tales and folklore that I read as a child. So I tried to do that in my second book. It was inspired by the hero’s journey as it’s mapped out in the book, The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler. But it ended up being a time travel to the future with romance, with spies, with mystery. And I had a character who was an investigator and the woman was a bar owner who was kind of in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It was really fun, but I couldn’t do anything with it. I didn’t know how to sell it. It was just my second book. I didn’t know what I was doing. So then I put that aside after struggling with it. And I came back to a story that I wrote when I was 20, a three page story about Henrietta, the dragon slayer, who was telling her adventure in a tavern and kind of drunk about how she killed this dragon.
And at that point, when I was 20, when I wrote it, I stopped it there. I didn’t know what to do with it. And now here I was fast forward at two books that were shoved in the closet. And I’m like, wait a minute. Now that didn’t quite work and book number two, didn’t quite work. What do I really, really, really love?
Oh, I love fantasy. I love folklore. I love fairy tales and I’ve always, always wanted an adventure story with a woman in charge going on adventures. Cause I grew up with Jack, the giant killer, Jack and the bean stalk, Jack and the seven giants. There’s all these Jack stories. And as a young child, eight years old, seven years old, I was upset that there wasn’t a girl going on those adventures.
So that was the impetus of the original story when I was 20. I’m like, she’s gonna go on adventures, but I was 20. I hadn’t yet gone on any adventures myself. So fast forward to there I was 35 years old about that and I was looking for the next story.
And I remembered this story or maybe someone reminded me of it. I sat down and now with some experience and life experience and writing experience, I was able to write that story. And that’s Henrietta the Dragon Slayer, which is book one in that trilogy. Everything clicked like my deep love from a childhood, my desire to put a woman in the driver’s seat of the adventure.
I now had the chops. I had the experience, I understood what the hero’s journey was, and it felt very intuitive for me. And I was able to write that story. So that’s really how fantasy came about. But I was also in love with romance. I love a lot of things like a lot of people. I’ve read widely and in my twenties I started reading a lot of romance and I really loved how romance helped me as a young woman just open my heart and help me define what I wanted in a love relationship.
So I joined the romance writing community here in the local San Francisco area and was trying my hand at it, dabbling dabbling. And while everyone else around me is writing romance, I was just doing my fantasy. Finally, a whole bunch of different events happened so that I came up with a fun idea. And my critique partners said, well, why don’t we all write a little romance around that fun idea? So I wrote a novella and I really fell in love with that shorter form. A novella is about a hundred pages. Novels are like 230 pages and upward, you know, standard novels, about 300 pages.
And that really got me excited to write short romances. And again, the paranormal, which is basically fantastical elements and I love magic. I always have. So every book has like a different kind of magic. And a lot of it is inspired by folklore. And some of it is inspired by other parts of my childhood, like Christmas elves have a place in my childhood.
So it was really a fun, playful space. And of course it still had the fantastical elements. And then science fiction came about because, again, many interests. I’ve been interested in science since I was a child. I studied science in high school. I was gonna be a doctor until about age 19 when I said, no, the college sciences are too hard and that’s not where my true love is, but I still loved science. And so about six years ago, I was trying to decide whether or not I would pursue more romance and more like paranormal, romantic adventure stories or this other idea, which was a woman investigator on a space station, which came to me in a literal dream.
So I was literally weighing these two ideas at a screenwriter’s conference and had a chance to pitch to the teacher in a big class on science fiction writing, screenplay writing for science fiction stories. The teacher said to me, oh, you’re writing CSI in space. And I said, yes, I am . That was so helpful to see what came out of me, which was an idea, a very strong idea and a very strong concept.
And I got really excited and I knew after sitting on it for about a day, I’m like, yeah, I’m pursuing this. I’m gonna pursue this. It kind of came to me pretty quickly that I would write four books fairly quickly. I wrote all four books in seven months.
I edited those books slowly, cause my father unfortunately was sick and dying. So while that was happening and I was helping with the caretaking, I was able to slowly edit those books while writing my business. And then in the fall of 2019, I knew it was time that I had done all the easy edits.
Now it’s time for the final edits and I released all four books, two in 2020, one in 2021 and then one in the spring of 2022. And those are the four books that I had written very quickly. And now I’m preparing to write book five. So it’s like you never know where the imagination’s gonna take you and who knows? Am I going to come up with other stories and different genres? Maybe, but right now I’m really dedicated to the science fiction mystery series.
I’m still pursuing fantasy. And I still have this romantic suspense adventure story on the back burner that I knew when I first came up with the idea in 2015, that it would take me at least a decade to write because it is big, it’s like a nine book series, all this world building, which I know we’ll get to later.
And so I have many ideas and they brew or percolate on the back burner until I really inquire into my creativity. What am I ready to write next? And I really let that one thing pop up and everything else gets to be pushed to the back-burner and that’s my creative process. So I unexpectedly am writing science fiction mysteries, but not totally. Like, if you look in my past, you’re like, oh yeah, I see all the signs. This is not out of the blue that I’m writing these genres.
Terri Connellan: Mm. Yeah. That’s fascinating to hear how your passion, your imagination and the craft has sort of come together over your journey. As you said, it’s one thing to get the idea, have the imagination, but then, you mentioned all the way through, you know, I was at this conference, I worked with this critique friend. There’s the craft aspects too all the way through.
And I loved too hearing how you follow up on the ideas, but also allow them to brew and to ferment and see what comes to the surface. It’s yeah, beautiful to hear about your process. With all of that, you must be incredibly skilled at world building. So what does world building mean to you and how do you go about creating different worlds in your fiction?
Beth Barany: That’s such a great question. And it’s something I’m deeply focused on now, cause I’m also creating a whole program and I’m launching a podcast on this topic called How to Write the Future. And that’s specifically for science fiction writers who want to build positive futures. But bringing it even further in terms of fantasy, really world building is creating a world that your characters live in.
They live in it. They are the ones who are my guides and every world has a past, you know, how it came to be, whether it’s the origin stories or the things the adults tell the children in school, what everyone’s telling each other in media. Hey, this is how we got here. Right? And then every world has its present day infrastructure and systems and the way things are that other people created in the past. And then every world has its vision for itself of the future. What they tell themselves they can be or what they can’t be. So every world has its rules. There’s always a boundary of some kind, and there’s always the dos and the don’ts, whether that’s through actual laws or the parents telling the children or the unspoken social customs.
So keying into all of that is world building. And making decisions and some writers write that up ahead of time. Some writers figure it out as they write. Some do accommodation, some refine it in edits. I actually do a combination of all of those. I realised early on that it was overwhelming to try and figure out my world from some godlike perspective. That felt alien to me, even though it also felt what was expected.
A lot of people don’t realize that our idea of especially a fantasy is really filtered through what Tolkein did, who was a professor and that was his way. That was his way of going about things. That’s not the way, that was that person’s way. And so a lot of people that have come to expect fairy tales or fantasies to one, maybe have sort of a fairytale feeling where there is no world built or it all starts with a history.
And I just felt that was artificial. I’m a very character driven storyteller. So Henrietta is 17 at the opening of the book. She doesn’t know a whole lot about her world, but I realised if I could understand the world from her perspective, that was enough. So I would interview my character while I was brainstorming the story and also in edits.
And then as the series advanced, because there’s three books so far in the series, I interviewed other characters and what they knew about the world. Then sometimes I would be interviewing characters who never even showed up in the stories, but they became part of the background. Someone who knew someone or someone who maybe never had a speaking role, but they were there. And so I could interview them. And that became how I discovered the world, through my characters.
Terri Connellan: And how do you interview them? In a dialogue, written dialogue?
Beth Barany: Mm-hmm written dialogue. Yeah. I love doing that. And I think it’s important for writers to realize that we’re writers, writers write and the best way to discover the story is through writing. For a lot of people, not everyone has that process. I know my husband, who’s a writer. He can just lie in bed and daydream a whole bunch of things, make a lot of decisions and then write them down. Whereas I tend to be in that playful space, through the written form. I literally discover the story through the brainstorming process and the first drafting process.
Terri Connellan: Great. I love hearing different ways people come into the writing process. So do you think world building is something anybody can do? I guess some people might be naturally able to world build than others, or do you think it’s a skill anyone can learn?
Beth Barany: I think it’s a skill anyone can learn. I mean, if we think back to childhood. Most children get the opportunity to play and play make believe. Well ,they’re world building. They are literally world building. So for most people that is an instinct from childhood and to tap into that and to come back also to that childhood inspiration and then continue to nurture it.
I think there’s two big parts of world building. One is noticing what’s in your imagination and really giving yourself permission to write that down and to really imagine that as a fully realized reality. And then the other part is to study and research and fill your imagination with lots and lots of things that maybe you don’t know. Studying other cultures, reading books that you don’t normally read, getting to know folklore from other cultures that aren’t your own reading. Reading books and watching television, watching documentaries. Follow your interests and there you’re feeding your creativity.
And then from there then you get to sit down and then write down and see what comes out. See what’s ready to be articulated and enter into your story. So I absolutely think anyone can learn to do world building if that’s what they want. They especially have to want it yeah. And then I believe they can learn.
Terri Connellan: Great. And I love those two points about noticing and studying and research it’s beautiful to begin scoping that for people. So thank you. You’ve mentioned earlier that one of your driving themes is empowering women and girls to be the heroes of their own lives and to center them in your stories. I really love that. So tell us a bit more about this focus in your work.
Beth Barany: Absolutely. I really love putting my main characters as women in roles of leadership, either growing into leadership, which I notice I write a lot about in my young adult adventure fantasy. I mean appropriate for the age, being 17, 18. In my little paranormal series so far, all of my heroines are business owners of one kind or another. And I love exploring that.
They’re in charge, they decide and I love seeing that. When I was in my twenties and reading lots of romance, there was this one author who would also often put her heroines in that position of self leadership. I love you use the term self leadership in your work. And they were in charge and learning what that is and working hard to make those dreams reality.
And then I noticed with my science fiction mystery. She’s the lead detective and she is in charge and she’s also newly in charge. She’s in her thirties. So I am exploring kind of that stage of life and she’s in charge. And what does she do with her power and how does she run her team? And some of the day to day decisions while she’s both solving a mystery and running a team and dealing with people who have power out in her system that are deciding her fate.
So she’s kind of in the middle. She’s not entirely on her own. That’s also something I’m exploring. Like we, as women, we need to be in power, need to have our own power. And we are working within systems where there’s other people who have other kinds of power and we’re all in negotiations. And I wanna kind of presence that, that we are in negotiations all the time.
We don’t have to be the victim here. We can be equal to the powers that that are outside of us. And that’s the first time I’ve articulated that. That’s how I see it. And I think for so long, women have, and I’m speaking historically like long term, like several thousand years, we have been trained that we have no power. We’ve been told that we don’t have a voice.
So of course we believe it to survive. And so the paradigms are changing around the world and I want to be a part of that. I want my stories to show women with agency, with power negotiating, with others, with power making changes in the world, small or large, and really stepping into their, think you mentioned in your book, the zone of genius, or I was reading something about the zone of genius today.
I’m like, yeah. What if we are all in our zone of genius? So the more women and girls see that, the more opportunities open up in their own minds. So storytelling is so pivotal to that. This is how we learn is through story. Whether it’s a story from our parents or from the house of worship or from the school or from the government or the community center.
Adults are telling stories to children overtly and without speaking as well. So I’m a culture maker, I’m a storyteller. I want women and girls to open up to their possibilities and to see and hear new stories, whether they’re made up like by me. Or I even have a project where I want to do some retelling of historical stories that have been basically left out. And a lot of those are coming to light as well in our cultures. It’s time. I feel like it’s time. It’s now. So that drives me, the work I’m doing. It’s important that I show my woman investigator Janey McCallister doing her work.
And it’s important to me to show vulnerabilities as well. This is not about being superhuman. As much as I love my superheroes who are behind me in my figurines here on my desk, we all have vulnerabilities. Well, even they have vulnerabilities, Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel and Princess Leia. They also have vulnerabilities and look at what they did, look at the power they held and how they wielded their power. Those are the things I want to put into my stories and then continue to generate conversations around.
Terri Connellan: Oh, I really love that. And I love that it’s looking at different ages, like 17, like 30 like, moving on in life. I think that’s great because there’s different challenges for women and girls at different stages of life. And to be able to have stories they can read where they can see women with agency. I particularly enjoyed the points you made about negotiating equally with people in power. I’m thinking of stories which I won’t share cause they’re private stories, but they’ve been very much about that power of women to stand their own ground and to say, well, no, I’m here to do this and I’m not here to do that.
And these are the terms on which I’ll be here and that takes a lot of bravery. It takes a lot of courage. So to be able to have those conversations, have this conversation and to see women having those conversations in story, I think is so powerful.
Beth Barany: Yeah. And just talking about this, you know, I had to learn how to negotiate in business. I didn’t know. I thought I knew, but when it came time in the training to practice it, I realized how I actually was unskilled and unpracticed in negotiation and didn’t really understand the ins and outs. So it is really awesome that we’re talking about this. It’s actually giving me some story ideas for the next book or a subsequent book to like really deeply put it in there and very overtly, because again, we aren’t necessarily taught how to negotiate.
Especially here in the United States, there’s a lot of either or conversations. You know, you’re either with me or you’re against me. Well, that leaves zero room for negotiation zero, absolutely zero. And it’s a zero sum game and it’s all, it’s a win, lose model. And how do you go from there? That’s the question.
Terri Connellan: Look forward to those ideas bearing fruit. Cause I think it’s really important work. So alongside your writing, you also help other novelists write, publish, and market their books as a creativity coach. So what support do you provide novelists and what are the common areas of challenge that you help address?
Beth Barany: I have a school called Barany School of Fiction where people can come in and learn the planning phase of writing novel, the writing phase, the editing phase, the publishing phase and the marketing phase. So we help, with the focus on genre fiction novelists, all these phases. We generally help people who are at the earlier stages of their writing.
They may be experienced at writing, maybe non-fiction, but they’ve never done fiction. And so we really help them gain clarity and offer very practical hands on tools to get moving. These lessons aren’t theoretical. They’re all designed to get you working on your story. And we’ve had hundreds and hundreds of students take our courses, both live and self paced, and it’s just fabulous to watch them really fulfil that dream of being a novelist.
And so we also offer once a year, a 60 day novel course, it’s actually coming up in 2022, starting October, one where we walk you through the process of planning your novel based on our ‘Plan Your Novel Like a Pro’ book, and course, the home study course. So we do this live in terms of weekly calls.
You have weekly support calls, and then in November, we invite you to write your novel. Write alongside the National Novel Writing challenge that was started here in the San Francisco bay area, and which is now international. So we use that energy and we provide support through this class we have. Two teachers other than me, plus me as a support and a coach. That’s the live class that we do every year.
And then I also work with writers one on one. I create customized programs for them. We’ll get on zoom or phone and we will meet on a regular basis sometimes twice a month, sometimes once a month. And we really work at their pace. They need highly customized work. And then every once in a while people come through and they’re like, oh, I just need one session. So we’ll do a deep dive session for clarity and transformational work. I bring in some of my other tools, including N L P, which is neurolinguistic programming, which is really a toolkit helping people with compassion to help them come to terms with where they are as well as support their transformation.
So a gentle transformative toolkit that I love. And I bring in my other skill set as well with all my tools as a writer and an editor.
So those are the main ways that I support people. And of course, I also teach workshops. I’ve been overseas multiple times and I’ve gone to multiple conferences. My favorite thing to do is get people working together in a room on their own material, activating people, inspiring them, helping them really get into action. That’s my absolute favorite thing to do. That’s how I support people in my role as a coach and a teacher and a workshop leader.
Terri Connellan: Awesome. And what sort of challenges do you find crop up most commonly? What issues are people facing?
Beth Barany: There’s the whole craft piece, learning the skills of craft, but really what I notice I’m helping people with the most is making friends with their creative process. Or another way of saying that is getting to know their creative process and separating out the should and the, oh, that’s how other people do it, or this is what it means to be a writer that they might have seen in a finished product. They don’t actually know how deeply messy the creative process is and how there’s a whole host of unknowns that they are basically walking through. And it can be scary if you’ve never done that. It can feel very uncertain. And they could really doubt themselves and then think something’s wrong with themselves.
So really a big part of my work is really helping people come to terms with their creative process and get to know what is their creative process and how can they harness that and make it work for them because each writer is unique. And while I can tell you how to design a character or how to design a world, or how to design a story arc, learning how to sit down and make friends with that creative process is really the work, in my opinion.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, it’s something that’s dear to my heart and my work too. I work with personality type, Jungian personality type in a similar way that you might use tools as insights into people’s personal preferences and processes. And, it’s absolutely right. There’s the writing process and the steps that you can go through, but there’s all the different ways we can approach that and navigate that process and find out what works for us. Whether we’re introvert preference or extrovert, for example, it’ll be different. So, yeah, really interesting. So how can writers use who they are to help write their book their own way?
Beth Barany: Yeah. I love this question and really the first place I usually start with everyone is where is their high point energy in the day? And let’s use that time for your creative work. So maybe some people like to write in the morning, like one of my clients. I have another client who would like to write right after dinner.
My favorite time to write is right after lunch so that’s my high standard energy time. Some people can write any time of day, like my husband. Other people want to write very late at night or very early in the morning . There’s no one right way. But I really inquire and I work with people, like, what is your favorite time? When is your energy the highest? If you could put your writing, let’s put it there and then help people come up with strategies and habits and help them harness the habits that are already working in their life and repurpose some of those things they may be doing unconsciously, but well, and regularly.
Like a lot of the self care habits we have, brushing your teeth is an example I use all the time. Or even just making sure we have our favorite breakfast every morning. Okay, what are the things that you do to ensure that happens? Let’s walk you through the writing process and let’s help you anchor the beginning, getting into the writing, the writing itself, and also some kind of closing ritual that allows you to kind of close the circle, so to speak.
And it allows you to go back to the other things that are happening in your life so these two points of entry are really powerful. Cause once you can really write in your prime time and really anchor the coming in and the doing and the leaving then you can get work done. Then you can show up and you can do the assignments in the planning class, or you can do whatever is next that you know is right for you and do the writing cause writer’s write. That’s what we do.
Terri Connellan: I think that’s great. Two really important places to start and when we’re talking about using who they are, it’s about, like you say, finding what’s the right time for you, when your energy is the best. Cause often we make choices that don’t always work in our best interests. Even though we might think it’s the right thing to do, cause everybody says, write in the morning or do this, but it might not be right for us.
Beth Barany: Absolutely. And here’s another point. Some people are like, oh, all the experts say I should write every. And I say no, if that isn’t working for you, don’t try and squeeze yourself into that. I notice now that I’m generating a lot of nonfiction content consciously, I’m writing every day, because it’s part of my wellbeing. When I’m working on a story, it is generally, I’ve tracked it, it’s like four to six days a week. So just because there’s the perceived wisdom and the experts are saying, you should do it this way, actually do it the way it works for you.
For example, I have another client who tends to write on the weekends. Some evenings he can fit in after a long day of work. But it’s the weekends. He calls himself a binge writer and that has served him. He’s gotten this far, he is polishing up his fantasy novel. It is his way.
Other people are writing when all the kids are out of the house, or other people are writing whatever they can at these odd little moments. So what I notice is it doesn’t really matter what the experts say. What matters is what works for you. So dig into that, lean into that, use your natural inclination and go with it.
Which means writing down ideas in the middle of the night or dictating into your phone, when you’re driving. I have another client, he drives a lot for his work. And so I was helping him figure out the tech and the tools and opening up the possibility that he can dictate his book. He doesn’t need to type his book. And he was like, wow. Oh my God, that’s perfect. Because he also moving into voice acting and he is very auditory and very verbal. So that was perfect for him. And just helping him settle into that routine. He’s like, oh my goodness. I could get my novel done in like a month. It was so beautiful to watch him dig into his skills, his strengths, his habits that were already working for him.
So I really encourage people to open up that possibility and ask what if I could make it work? What would be the best ingredients for me, and really kind of push away perceived wisdom, because that can sometimes get in the way of what your heart is saying to you. No matter how odd it looks from the outside, that doesn’t matter.
What matters is that you get in your creative groove. It really doesn’t matter the way it might appear. You’re stepping outside of yourself and you’re putting yourself into someone else’s imagined perception of you. It’s completely made up. it’s entirely a fiction. Awesome. You’re a fiction writer. Let’s focus on the stories you wanna tell. It can be very easy in this world of social media to really feel the gaze of the other, but it’s not always appropriate in the creative writing process to be paying any attention to that.
There comes a time, especially when you’re in the editing phase and where you’re working on bringing your work out into the world. You do want to start perceiving the gaze of the other. That helps us refine our work. But in the beginning phases, we need to protect the space, put up tall walls of that garden and really let yourself flourish within your own vibration, your own energy, your own heart, because that is where the truth is. We all want each other’s truth. We don’t want perceived wisdom. There’s already that stuff out there. We wanna know what you think, what you vision, what’s in your heart.
Terri Connellan: Mm. Yeah, that’s beautiful. And I love that question. Great one for us all to ask ourselves. What if I could make it work? That’s fabulous. I love that. It’s a great one to journal on just to have a good think about as a take away from our conversation. So thank you. So what does your writing process look like? I’m really interested to know. You’ve touch a little bit about the brewing and the ideas that come and the world building but yeah, tell us a bit more about what your writing process looks like.
Beth Barany: Well, I’ve really been going through a shift in the last six months or so, where I’ve realized that I used to have a bucket for fiction writing and then a bucket for the nonfiction writing, which would include marketing writing, and curriculum writing and, and the weekly newsletter, which is like an inspirational essay and the how to pieces and all of the instructional things.
And they were living in two different territories. And I realised, actually this has been brewing for almost a year now, that I wanted to put a bigger boundary around it. So there was one bucket and it was called creating. And that’s where I would create whatever content, whether it was fiction or non-fiction, whether it was for the novel or the short story or the podcast that’s coming out or the weekly newsletter or whatever is ready to pop.
So I’ve noticed over the years that when I sit down to write with an intention to write, sometimes surprising things come out. I realised I wanted to offer myself more opportunities to let that happen. So generally now in the mornings, right after breakfast and actually during breakfast too, I’m like in a study mode in the mornings. I watch videos. I listen to things. Ted talks, things about the latest science, launches. I watch the space industry or self-help introspective. I’m very much into human design or some random interesting thing on screenplay writing. And then I want to move into creating. So I like to go walk to a cafe, 12 minute walk from my house here in Oakland and work on, kind of like talking to myself, asking myself what’s ready to be born? What’s ready to be discussed?
So I have a little journaling process where I ask myself, I have little prompts. Literally it’s like a little template. I open up the template and I have my little prompts. And then I just start, cause I read the prompts. One of my favorite prompts is, ‘ So what I really wanna say is…”. It’s almost like there’s a burbling conversation, a little below the surface and I have to start writing to hear the, so what I really wanna say is.. And it’s almost like, okay, Beth, yes, tell us what you have to say.
And then we start going and I do produce a newsletter every week and now I have this podcast brewing and I wanna put the two together. So like today I wrote the script, but I realized, oh, I’m writing the newsletter and I’m writing the podcast script at the same time. That made me really happy, really excited about that.
So I can start to not have to do so much work, double work. You know, now it could be one thing pretty much, which is super exciting. And then generally, I’m in a little bit of a fallow period. And then right after lunch, during lunch, I often go back to kind of a study period. I’m prepping for a podcast or I’m learning about podcasting or I’m studying the latest launch, what just happened or wherever my fancy, my curiosity takes me.
And then I generally move into fiction and I have a little ritual. I get into fiction. I put on my soundtrack that I’ve made, which is like hours and hours and hours of music I’ve brought together. A lot of Star Trek music and from other films and just kind of this moving music that’s very like adventure. There are some songs with words, but mostly none, no words. And I just kind of pick up the thread of wherever I am, whatever I’m doing.
I sometimes start with journaling and I call it journal to write. So I have a journal entry space inside of my writing program, which is Scrivener, where I keep all my story research and where I put my first drafts. And I just talk to myself about whatever with the intent of getting to fiction. So sometimes I’m encountering resistance and I don’t know why. And so I have a little conversation with myself and then somehow I inevitably, I start asking myself story questions, and then I’m like, I’m in.
And then I scurry off to edit or to research or to plan or to write. So whatever’s next. I let that bubble up. And then that’s the writing phase. And then usually in the afternoons, I have appointments. I have a client appointment or a podcast interview or a marketing conversation or a networking conversation. I’m more into the, let’s talk to people phase of my day for a few hours. And then I actually take a dinner break and then my husband and I sit on the couch and sometimes we watch shows together. But often we’re doing our own thing and I might do a little bit more work. If I’m in a high creative phase, I’m like, oh, I wanna have to edit this thing for a client or I need to prep this or I need to plan that or, oh, I’m researching this.
It’s kind of a play space. And sometimes it’s a workspace as well. But I’m not usually creating new content in the evening. That is not the high point for me. So that’s like a typical day, not every day is like that. But I’ve had many days like that.
A big caveat to all of this is like, that’s great. But sometimes it’s not like that. Sometimes like yesterday I took the afternoon off and I watched behind the scenes about Star Trek, Strange New Worlds and it fed my soul. I needed that. I needed to hear other storytellers talk about how they create their stories. And I needed to be in the fan chair instead of in the creative chair. I needed to be a fan girl. It just fed me so much. I love what that show is up to. It feeds me because it helped me think about, well, what am I up to as a science fiction writer. I am very inspired by the Star Trek universe and what that show has always tried to do and by its optimism and its hope, and I needed to connect to that.
So I’m really also working to allow myself to not do what I think I should do, but do what my soul needs in the moment. And it doesn’t look like it should most of the time and that’s okay. Yeah. That’s why I’m a creative entrepreneur.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, that’s right. And in all of that, it’s just shows how complex the world of being a creative entrepreneur is because you’ve got your creative work, you’ve got the preparation, the learning, the craft, the earning an income, the running a business. But the actual writing, and I think what you’ve showed really well in that description, there is how you center the writing in the energy time of the day and protect it and make sure for the most part it happens. But you also of course make time to fill your well, which is lovely.
Beth Barany: Yeah, absolutely. And then there’s some days, like a few days ago I spent a lot of my time marketing and I have people helping me. I have people on my team and I’m like, oh, I have to initiate a lot of the material. Then I can give it to other people to work on. And we’re always creating new things within the business. So I had to create new marketing content and then I’m bringing other people in to help me.
And there a big part of being a creative entrepreneur is I’ve had to learn how to market and then how do I build systems around that? So I also spend time and in fact, today, the rest of my day will probably be working on those systems and helping my team operate those systems. And I love that actually. I love creating systems. That’s why I’m a teacher. That’s why I created all this curriculum. It’s like, here’s a system, go operate it. You know, give it to the writers to operate, create their own stories.
Terri Connellan: Well, that’s fabulous. So with so many books published in a number of genres, what are your top productivity tips for writers?
Beth Barany: Protect your writing time. Figure out what your prime time is and protect your writing time and protect yourself. So for me, that means I have had to cut out interferences, things that would upset me unnecessarily. So I don’t watch the news. And my husband likes paying attention to the current politics of the day, which I find very upsetting.
So he knows not to have it on when I’m around. We have a negotiation about that so that’s protecting my spirit, my soul. So protect your writing space and protect your spirit. Those are two things.
And then something that I do personally, is that I have found lots of ways to be inspired. And I have come to realize that this little study period that I do in the morning, it really is about inspiration. That’s why I kind of let myself do it however I would like in the moment. And it’s so pivotal to me. It means that I spend a lot of time alone and that’s okay. I live with another writer. We both spend a lot of time alone.
And I think part of productivity is also scoping down. What I’ve seen with a lot of writers is they think, oh, I gotta write this book. Oh my God. And they see it as a one big chunk. But in fact, you don’t get there in a day. Right? We don’t climb Mount Everest in a day and, and they do a lot of planning before they climb Mount Everest. So for me, productivity is also about kind of roadmap. I do a lot of planning and I also scope it down.
So I’m constantly asking myself, what can I actually get done today? What can I get done in one hour or even 30 minutes or even five? I’ve seen writers, my students and clients use that tool, that helps them. So whatever gets you moving. And that sometimes means, I have five minutes. What can I do in five minutes? Or. I know for me, I like 15, 20 minutes, but this morning I actually wrote in a span of 10 minutes, I did all this productivity work.
I like it. There’s something about giving yourself a very enclosed amount of time and putting on a timer if you need it. We push out all the distractions and all we’re doing for this very small amount of time is we’re writing on this one thing. We’re not trying to write the whole book. We’re just trying to write a hundred words. I have friends who’ve written novels that way. There’s like 100 word challenges where you write a hundred words every day. I have friends who’ve written books that way. It’s super awesome. I love it. And it’s very satisfying.
Part of productivity is writing more, more often and the people who get really good at their sport and their craft, they do more repetitions more often. And brain science has shown us that that is how we learn. So if you really want to get better at writing, it’s more productive to give yourself five minutes a day. It could be depending on who you are. Even this author of mine who loves to write on the weekends, he’s discovered that he really wants to write more often. So now what he does after his long day of work, he says, okay, five minutes. I’m just gonna work on five minutes for my novel. And then that gets him moving. So now he is writing more often, he’s editing more often, and that allows the learning to happen quicker because what we crave too is results.
So if you can give yourself a daily win, that is self-reinforcing and then you’re like, oh, I did that five minutes. Wow. Well, look at the words I did, awesome. Tomorrow. Boom it’s tomorrow, which is now today. you set the timer for maybe seven minutes, do some writing. Wow. I did it. Right. So you just build up the win and that allows you to get stronger, it’s self-reinforcing and within a week, you know, look at everything you’ve written within a month, look at everything you’ve written. So whatever you can do to give yourself that real world evidence of progress helps build momentum, pick up speed, advances learning.
And then one last piece of productivity is maybe you need accountability, which is just sharing with someone. Oh, look what I did, which is super fun. My husband and I do that all the time. Oh, can I just read you this cool paragraph. Or it’s joining a critique group or it’s hiring a coach joining a class. There’s a lot of ways that you can get accountability. And so I’m kind of in the business of that people say, ah, they pay me money because it gets ’em to show up. It gets ’em to do the work. And it also I’m their first audience. They get to share work with me in a very safe space and they get to say, look what I’ve done. And I get to say yay with them. You know? And, that is like the self-reinforcing positive reinforcement helps ’em keep moving.
That helped me as a beginning writer. I joined a critique group right away, I met my husband there. And I had to show up, I got to critique other people’s work. I had to turn in my work I knew I needed that. And I know not everyone needs that, but if you are serious about pursuing writing and you notice you’re not moving, you probably need some kind of outside accountability and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, for sure. Some fabulous gems there. All the way through, as you were talking through those productivity tips I was nodding and thinking about how important they are. And I particularly like that idea of scoping down. I’m writing a novel. I’m researching a novel, which is what I’m doing at moment. It can feel so huge. But if you can just say, well, today in this five or 10 minutes or 15 minutes, I’m just going to summarize what I just read in that chapter, like just keep it really simple, you can move ahead. So yeah, really resonate with that.
And also the accountability. I learn about accountability by co-writing virtually with a friend in short bursts using, you know, exactly that. And then now we’ve set up a group, The Writing Road Trip, that’s centred around that, just writing together. We actually don’t critique, but we write together and we do it in short bursts and we have a quick chat about what we’ve done, then we do it again and all those practical strategies work so well. So thank you for sharing that. Sure. So, publishing, can you give us a few insights on how you publish your books?
Beth Barany: Yes. So I’m independently published. I’m self-published. Both my husband and I are primarily self-published. I have a few interesting little publishing deals that happened when I wasn’t looking for them exactly. So that means I’m entirely in control of the whole publishing process. And I’ve been at this long enough. So I build in some marketing essentially at the very beginning of the planning process. And actually those are already installed in our Plan Your Novel Like a Pro material.
And this helps us peak at the marketplace, even at the very beginning. It’s also part of the creative design of a book, in my opinion. So I have my eye on publication. It really motivates me. I have a cover designer that I work with and it has always motivated me even right when I was starting out at the very beginning to start to envision my book covers. That’s more from an inner perspective of something that motivates me forward. And then in terms of publishing, I use the tools available. I use print on demand, currently we use Amazon’s print on demand and we use Ingram Spark ‘s version. We use actually Lightning Source right now.
We have invested in tools. So for example, we use this wonderful tool called Vellum. It’s a standalone piece of software that allows you to lay out your books, both epub and print. We love that. Before that existed, I’ve used other tools. And I really care about the finished product. I really care about how a physical book looks. So I take a lot of time to daydream about that and notice that, and I’m always caressing books. So I’ve tried a lot of different things with publishing and the first four books and the science fiction mystery series, the Janey McCallister mystery series I used pre-orders and I’m probably not going to do pre-orders per se.
I’ve experimented with different ways to fund my book. I did a Kickstarter this past spring, which basically reimbursed me. I upfront all the costs, but then the Kickstarter allowed me to reimburse some of those production costs and the book was about ready to be published. So I don’t use Kickstarters to fund the beginning of the process, just mostly to market.
And then publishing is really about marketing. It’s really about finding your audience. So I’ve invested a lot of time and energy and trainings, et cetera, to figure out ways to find my marketplace. And honestly, that’s an ongoing effort. I feel like I’m always improving in that area and I can always do better. I’ve always come up with fun ways to do that, to find my audience.
I offer a class on self-publishing eBooks. I used to book produce for other people. They would hire me to walk them through that whole process so I know a lot about it. I probably produced gosh, over 30 books, including mine and my husbands and clients. And, you know, I love it, I love that the means of production are in our hands. I mean, I really control the entire process just about, except for royalties. I’m beholden to other folks on that unless I sell directly, which I occasionally do, or I did for the Kickstarter. And I’m probably gonna do more of.
I think frankly, that’s the future of publishing, for independently published authors, is to sell direct to the readers. We’re almost a hundred percent. We have the tools and I have friends who do sell direct to the readers and I do occasionally sell direct. And I’ve done a lot of book fairs, where I’ve sold directly to readers as well. So, yeah, I love that publishing has become completely pretty much in our control. And I think in partnership with printers and vendors and things like that.
Terri Connellan: Oh, thank you. Those insights are really fascinating. I’m someone who’s really interested in self-publishing. I didn’t actually self-publish my first book,Wholehearted. I worked with a small press independent publisher, but it was only because I just found it quite overwhelming and I wanted to partner with someone to walk through the process.
But, I just think it’s so exciting as you do that we have this ability to take the whole process from idea through to publish a book ourselves and to control every aspect of the process and it’s a creative process. So thank you really exciting. And, I love too just seeing how people can market. A friend of mine’s just published a book. He’s one of the podcast guest, Joe Arrigo, he’s posted on Etsy, [including] a PDF on Etsy. I noticed your Kickstarter. People use Payhip, lots of different ways. And I think that ability to work through online retailers but also pursue our own options is totally exciting. So thanks so much for that insight.
So we’re just about towards the end of our chat today. It’s been so fascinating and there’s two questions I always ask guests on the podcast. So interested in your insights. So the first one is how have you created your story over your lifetime?
Beth Barany: I really love this question. And I feel like my story is a story of transformation and of almost constant transformation. I really recognized as an adult how many times I’ve reinvented myself and I probably will continue to do so. I really love the imagery of the Phoenix. It lives its life, burns up into a pile of ashes reborn. So I’ve had many experiences like that, where it feels like you’re dying, but really you’re just completely changing yet again. And I’ve had many experiences like this as an adult and pretty much starting probably when I was 16.
I got to live abroad in Quebec and learn French and I was an exchange student and that was a very clear transformation. I could really experience it very vividly. And of course, coming home, and then going to college, all the different transformations. Just being in business as long as I have now, I probably have gone through, I count kind of roughly four or five transformations already, just in the time I’ve been in business. And I’m right in the middle of a new one. I’m starting a new chapter right now with my How to Write the Future material. And it’s exciting.
And so part of having transformation as my story is that there’s always a period of painful, unknown, where, and I noticed you spoke of this in your chapter where what was doesn’t work anymore, and what is, has not come into being in any kind of way.
You just know it’s something out there, but it’s dark and it’s unknown. So there’s this a crossroads feeling, this very low energy feeling, this confusion, this pain about not knowing, which is something I go through. And I feel like I’ve been through that a bit in the last few months. And now as my, How to Write the Future material starts to solidify and I start working on it and I start voicing it, wow. It’s like, oh, I see it. I see the pathway in front of me. I don’t have all the steps in front of me, but I have the next few steps.
And it’s so clear to me that as long as I continue having conversations, writing content and talking to the people I would really like to talk to, I am creating the path as I go. I’ve just seen that time and time again. And that’s what they talk about in the entrepreneurship world. Very much as a creative entrepreneur, it’s like you are creating the path as you walk it. So part of the journey is having a tremendous amount of trust in this process, which is very scary and very kind of lonely on some levels because I’m the only one who can walk this path, but I’ve actually come to terms with that. I feel expansive towards what’s possible.
And I also see how I’m bringing people along with me, which is so beautiful. And I also see how there’s the other trail blazers out there, who I get to wave at and compare notes to and talk shop. We’re all these amazing trailblazers and we’re all weaving together something. It’s still in the unknown phase which is a whole new world I hope, that’s positive for everyone and of the benefit of all.
Terri Connellan: Mm, I love that. It really gladdens my heart, that whole description, because that’s pretty much what my whole book was about too, in many ways, just how to navigate that messy middle of, whether it’s a big change or just like you were saying, different transformations that we go through. And I feel like I’m in another messy middle myself at the minute. It’s iterative, but we learn new skills for navigating that uncertain space. And I think we learn that it’s okay to sit with it and as you say, from your practices that you do each day to learn new skills, to fill your well to do the work, to sort of find the way ahead through just sitting with what might be in that liminal space. It’s quite an exciting time, isn’t it?
Beth Barany: It is. It is. And I also want to presence that sometimes, I mean, we have been through and maybe still will continue to go through very challenging time on a global level. And there’s a lot of grief. There’s a lot of sadness. I write about grief. My first four books. Grief is part of those stories and losing my father in 2018, it’s like boom presencing the grief and his illness that, you know, when someone goes through a progressively declining illness, that’s very, very sad. So being okay with the emotions, whatever they may be, whether it’s sadness or just that down energy, for me, I’ve just have to create space for that.
And part of the transformation is letting myself be in that, not knowing, feeling sad, the doldrums, just things aren’t moving. And you know, there’s no wind in my sail and I get kind of upset about that because I’m such a productive person. When it’s not happening and I don’t feel any kind of energetic push towards the next thing, I can make myself wrong for that. And that will just compound it. When I just kind of like be in the sadness and eat ice cream, it’s okay. And watch my favorite TV show is fine. Cause I know the energy will shift and I know the inspiration will come back. But too often it’s easy to put ourselves down for being down. And it’s actually like, well, what if we could just be down and that’s okay. Mm.
That allows actually the energy of emotion to just move through us, which is the definition of emotion. Right. It’s e-motion, to move this movement, this current and, just kind of allow that to be. Cause it is right? There’s actually nothing we can do. Like you were describing in your book in your beautiful first chapter, it’s like sometimes we just need to sit on the couch, cozy up, have our favorite dear pet with us. I too have cats and just really let ourselves be there.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, that’s amazing.. So what are your top wholehearted self -leadership tips and practices, especially for women?
Beth Barany: Well, I would go back to being with our emotions and being very compassionate with ourselves and those emotions. I would say that’s number one. Number two, really trusting the instincts that come up, whatever those passions might be. They may seem unusual. They may seem outta left field, or maybe there’s something deep from one’s childhood, to really explore them and nurture them and take a little risk and do something a little bit new. And then the third thing is to ask ‘what if?’ what if it could be different? What if it could be better than this? What if it’s actually all okay?
Terri Connellan: I love that. It’s just lovely to hear people’s learning over their lifetime of how they’ve created their story and what their tips are for for others. So thank you for sharing that. Just to finish up, Beth, can you tell us where people can find out more about you and your work online?
Beth Barany: Absolutely so people can find me at bethbarany.com. I hang out a lot on Twitter for social media. So that’s at @BethBarany and then the other social media channel that I like to interact on is LinkedIn actually same @BethBarany. I’m not so much on the other socials so if you try and get a response from me, you’re not going to get one on a timely basis. I also invite people to email me and my contact information is out there. And then lastly, I have a really fun blog. It’s called Writer’s Fun Zone and it’s by and for writers. And it’s really a fun way to engage with material and learn more about what we do also, and it’s there for everyone. Also, How to Write the Future podcast is blossoming and people can find me through that as well.
Terri Connellan: That’s exciting. A new podcast. That’s great. Oh, thanks so much for your time, Beth today, it’s been really great to chat.
Beth Barany: Oh, really wonderful. So thank you so much for having me.
Beth Barany
About Beth Barany
Award winning author, Beth Barany writes in several genres including young adult adventure fantasy, paranormal romance, and science fiction mysteries. Inspired by living abroad in France and Quebec, she loves creating magical tales of romance, mystery, and adventure that empower women and girls to be the heroes of their own lives. For her day job, Beth helps other novelists write, publish, and market their books as a creativity coach and a teacher. For fun, Beth enjoys walking her neighborhood, gardening, and watching movies and traveling with her husband, author Ezra Barany. They live in Oakland, California with a piano and over 1,000 books.
In Podcast Episode 16, Raising Social Justice Awareness, I chat with Meaghan Katrak Harris – author of Memories and Elephants: The art of casual racism about her book and how the arts can be a powerful medium for raising social justice awareness.
We chat about writing Memories and Elephants, genres, influences, publishing, casual racism and privileged practices and behaviours and their impact on individuals and society. And how the arts can be a powerful medium for raising social justice awareness.
You can listen above or via your favourite podcast app. And/or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.
Meaghan is a social worker, academic, consultant and writer. She has a long and diverse social work background. This includes extensive experience and commitment to working alongside First Nations Peoples, families and communities. When not writing, Meaghan lectures and researches in social work at the University of Sydney and works in private practice across social work supervision, individual, group work and organisational change. Memories and Elephants: The art of casual racism is her first creative non-fiction book.
Meaghan and I have connected online as fellow the kind press authors, publishing our books within a few months of each other. It’s been exciting to watch Meaghan launch and share her important book, Memories and Elephants: The art of casual racism with the world. We chat about Meaghan’s book as well as her work as social worker, academic and writer, and her key themes and lived experiences. They all weave together around the value of community and raising awareness of social justice issues and impacts.
Today we will be speaking about writing Memories and Elephants, genres, influences, publishing, casual racism and privileged practices and behaviours and their impact on individuals and society.
Enjoy listening to this insightful and inspiring conversation!
I hope it encourages you to read Memories and Elephants and to take some time to think beyond the dominant narrative.
So let’s head into the interview with Meaghan.
Transcript of interview with Meaghan Katrak Harris
Terri Connellan: Hello Meaghan. And welcome to the Create Your Story podcast.
Meaghan Katrak Harris: Hi, thank you for having me.
Terri Connellan: Thank you for your connection across our writing and books. We’ve connected online as fellow authors in the kind press around writing and publishing. And it’s great to chat further on this today. So can you provide a brief overview about your background, how you got to be where you are and the work you do know?
Meaghan Katrak Harris: Sure. Yes. Thank you. So I’m a social worker and I have been for probably nearly 30 years now, working alongside communities in various roles. Probably about the last 15 years, I’ve also been an academic, teaching and researching in social work. So that’s been my career to date and social work’s such a broad profession, it’s given me the opportunity for lots of different ways of working with people. And, academia, I guess, has led me into doing more writing as well.
Terri Connellan: Awesome. Yeah, so it’s great to see how all the different strands of your personal life and professional life have come together to this day. So let’s have a look at your book, particularly, I’m really excited to talk about Memories and Elephants: The art of casual racism.
And congratulations on your book published in early December, 2021. So we’ve both recently enjoyed that process of taking a book from that idea from jotting things down, through to published book. Can you tell us a bit about what that process was like for you?
Meaghan Katrak Harris: Sure. It actually happened quite quickly, the process, which was exciting and interesting. And it actually started with my submission to the This I Know is True book through the kind press. And that happened really just because a good friend of mine, Annabel Sharman, who writes the introductory chapter, said to me, you should put a chapter in this book. You should get into this. And I looked at it, I looked at the submission and I thought, this looks awesome, but I don’t think that I’m the right fit.
Anyway, I said this to Annabel and she said, look, please just talk to the publisher. Talk to Natasha [Gilmour], everything that you talk about, she has a similar view on crossing genres and perhaps, maybe disrupting genres a bit and writing across academia and also creative writing. And, supporting women led businesses, the whole gamut. So the long story short was I did do the chapter and then I got into a conversation.
I’d already written the essay. And I got into a conversation with Natasha and I said, look, I’ve got about 12 I’d like to publish. And, several months later there we are. I’d nearly finished all the essays. I did another self sort of lockdown to get the last bit done, but, I had the work there and it was just a beautiful fit to find the kind press, I think for me.
Terri Connellan: Yes, I absolutely loved working with the kind press too. Natasha and her team are just really fabulous. Kind, as their name suggests and groundbreaking, I think in the approaches that they take to different voices and as you say, cross genre work, pushing the boundaries a bit. So in terms of the actual pieces, were they written over many years?
Meaghan Katrak Harris: Oh no, I smashed it in a few months, probably in lockdown. I got a bit of inspiration and one of the first essays was the privilege of sharing parenting fails. And I wrote that as a response to what I was seeing happening and kind of my internal discomfort with it.
And once I started, I just wrote them all. And, I guess, lockdown probably had something to do with that, time to think, walking and thinking, because I’d written them all in my head. By the time I kind of sat down and put them down on paper. But, I always saw them as a collection. So that’s why I was so happy to put them out together because I kind of felt like it told a story. They are each a standalone essay, but I felt like in their entirety, it was a better story if you like.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. And I found reading it that there’s a lot in the spaces between what you write. There’s the spoken of what you experience, but also the unspoken. And I think, as you say, across the essays, it connects off into a bigger picture. So can you share with us a snapshot of what Memories and Elephants: The art of casual racism is about?
Meaghan Katrak Harris: Sure. So I describe it as a series of sociopolitical memoir based essays. So while they’re memoir based, I share my experiences against the backdrop of a bit of a socio-economic analysis of Australian society, culture, you know, the way we see ourselves.
And I kind of try to shine a broader light on the story, on my story, which I think can be extended to other experiences. So I guess for me, the analysis is as important as the memory or the memoir. And that’s kind of was my focus. Yeah.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, they’re beautifully told, and I think to me, the power of them is really just capturing those moments in life, when, as you call it casual racism and casual because it just seems to slide off, people’s tongues because of that privilege that people feel. And I think it’s that ability to capture the moment, but also the impact on you. You talk about feeling winded at times and the physical reaction of what happens on you is really beautifully told, but also must’ve been hard to tell.
Meaghan Katrak Harris: It was, you know, I shed tears writing it, but I felt like it was an important story to tell. The hardest thing was deciding whether it was in fact, my story to tell. And again, I consulted with people I love and my family and basically, they said, well, you know, this is your story, this is your story. If you can’t tell your own story, then what can you write about? But I was very careful to not to appropriate an experience that wasn’t my own. Because I’m also a white Australian person. So I have with that, all the inherent privileges, that every other white Australian has, but I have borne witness to this casual racism with my Aboriginal family and my multicultural family.
And, it is my lived experience, but I really wanted to be clear to position myself as to not to be appropriating the lived experience beyond what was mine. And I think doing it as memoir based, I just told it how it happened. So hope that that came across and the feedback I’ve had so far is that it, that it did. That’s how I came up with the ‘we’re all more than one story’, we’re all more than one defining characteristic. And, I could be defined by lots of things and lots of things that don’t define me at all, based on my appearance or where I live or what I do when we’re all so much more than that.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, absolutely. I loved that point where you said, you know now we are all more than one story and I think that intricacy to the insider/outsider dance, that’s hard to get right in your memoir. I was interested to hear more about that dance. It’s a dance you’ve engaged in for many decades now.
Meaghan Katrak Harris: I guess it is, but I think it’s probably something that, as we get older and wiser, we think about more, perhaps the complexities of when we’re younger and we’re living our life. And I was always very sure of my place in my family. Absolutely. And I still am in and in my community. But I guess I talk about when, being part of an Aboriginal community and the commitment to the advancement and activism, when that morphed into work, I felt there was a change in me that I became more aware that I could be taking up, as a white person, taking up space.
And I was never made to feel like that by other people. This was my own internal dance, if you like. And I think it’s an important one to be aware of. And I know at times, I consciously stepped back from employment and changed to work in mainstream as we call it, because I was so fortunate to start my career as a community worker in an Aboriginal community controlled organization. And, that was a privilege that has shaped me beyond anything I could say.
But then I also reached that time in that dance when I realized that, you know what, this is part of who I am too. And if I’m not honoring that, I’m not honoring my Aboriginal family and friends. If I’m feeling like I can’t honour that part of my life, then that’s not showing respect to those people that have had such an impact on my children, my family. And I feel like, in some ways maybe the essay, particularly, The art of casual racism was kind of my showing up for that and saying, okay, this is it. This is how I see it. This is who I am, and this is how I’ve lived it and continue to live it.
Terri Connellan: And I think, as you said before, touching into your lived experience is a really powerful lens for each of us. Particularly for you, telling your story with so many different cultural experiences and community experiences and diversity, which is fabulous. Thank you for sharing that. So, how would you describe the genre that you write in and what were your influences? We mentioned cross-genre before.
Meaghan Katrak Harris: Creative nonfiction, I guess. They’re memoir based narratives. I have always been a big reader. and I guess I never really realised the impact that reading creative nonfiction has had until quite recently, when I started writing these. And I talk about it in the first essay where I am suddenly drawn back to reading this genre because my head’s in that space. I’m writing these stories in my head. So I’m back reading Helen Garner, I’m reading, Joan Didion, I’m reading Roxanne Gay. I’m just really quite obsessed with reading other people’s stories. And I found that very validating because there is so many different ways to do this. There’s not one right way to write it. You write it as it comes, I guess. But yeah, I don’t think I’d realised the impact that creative non-fiction has had until now.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. And you mentioned Julia Baird’s Phosphorescence too, which I also read when I was writing my book and I found that a really validating book.
Meaghan Katrak Harris: Absolutely. And I’m glad you reminded me of that because I read that after I pretty much finished that essay. It came out or I got hold of it anyway. Julia Baird talks about, 20 years ago, as a young uni student, I think finding Helen Garner. And I thought, oh gosh, I’ve talked about that. And then I thought, of course, that’s not an accident. We’ve all talked about that because it is such an influence. So hence, my line about. I know, I felt late to the party, but in good company. So yeah, I found that I bought a copy from several friends. I found that book so important.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, and I think that’s been my experience and from reading your work, I think it’s that trying to find a way to bring our personal life experiences into a narrative that it also shines a light on ways it can help people or guide them on their own journey or give them some tools to think about things.
So, you write in the second person, which I love. It’s one of my favorite voices, I guess, in literature. Why did you choose that? How did you come to writing as you, rather than I, or we?
Meaghan Katrak Harris: I can’t do this question justice and several people have asked me. People have contacted me specifically to ask me why I chose to write the essays like that. And I’ve got no good answer, Terri, other than that’s just have they came out. And I don’t know if future writing will come out like that. I don’t know, but I just couldn’t write them any other way. That’s how they came to me in my head. And so that’s how they went down, and any analysis I’m doing now is retrospective.
I’m wondering why did I need to step back from it? But I don’t know. This is all, you know, with the benefit of hindsight and it’s interesting to think about, and I guess part of the answer will be how any future stuff comes out. If I continue to write it in that style or not.
Terri Connellan: I found it interesting. You said you wrote , the ‘parenting fails’ piece first. Cause that’s the one where I actually really noticed how you’re using ‘you wonder’. The piece is about that ability to joke about something with parenting fails that in other contexts would have dire circumstances or have judgment. And what I found was you were saying, you wonder, hmm, you wonder. I particularly loved how you used it in that context.
Meaghan Katrak Harris: Well, thank you. And that was, like I said, I would come home and I would say, can you believe it, this happened or that happened. And I was in a way, naively amazed at how people could not see that or understand, or, even feel a bit embarrassed to be able to joke about these things, because it is such a mark of privilege. You know, I would’ve died before I told anyone that my kids had nits and I’m still like that. And I know it’s a socially responsible thing to do, but when people send those messages, oh god, how can they do that?
If you’ve never been judged, if you’ve never been stereotyped, if you’ve never felt that society could be making assumptions about you, then you have that freedom. And I got such great feedback about that essay. One of the best bits of feedback I got was someone messaged me and just said, ‘Ooph – that got me in the gut – and thank you.’ And that was from the perspective of someone who was in a position to be able to do that. And she had never seen that that was a privilege. And I wondered if I’d been a bit harsh then, but, she was very gracious in her feedback.
Terri Connellan: That’s so amazing to hear. My feeling of reading the piece is I think, cause you took people on the journey with you, of like you said: I’m seeing this, and I’m thinking this, and I’m trying to work this out. I think it just works incredibly well to get the point across and for people to hear you processing, with all your knowledge and all your life experiences, where does this fit? This is not right. And I think, that way of approaching that type of content is going to have more impact than people saying ‘don’t do that’, for example. Yeah. I guess it’s raising awareness, isn’t it and consciousness about the impact?
Meaghan Katrak Harris: It is. And I think honestly that’s probably one of my motivators for doing the essay was I actually feel that the arts is a far better way to address social justice issues and awareness, than straight academia. You know, I joke about, as academics, we might write a paper for other academics to pretend they’ve read or students to read because they have to. It may be great work, but it’s to meet certain criteria for academia and it doesn’t necessarily reach a wider audience.
And I’ve long felt that the most powerful stuff that, I think it can be life-changing has been creative and in the arts. And I didn’t consciously think now I’m going to do this. I got a bee in my bonnet about it. I started that. And then there was that sort of ripple effect where it grew from there, but I feel like that’s where I can make a contribution, if any.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. But then also your academic work is important in another way.
Meaghan Katrak Harris: Oh yeah. I’m not diminishing it and I’m not a serious academic like some people are but then I’ve written a few things and I’m part of some great research that I’m very committed to. But I don’t have a full on tenured position. I have had in the past. Then I consciously chose not to stay on that path and it’s important work, but I get far more joy out of creative writing, far more joy.
Terri Connellan: And was it hard to shift from the academic voice or academic way of working to the creative, more personal?
Meaghan Katrak Harris: No, no, this is like the natural state, I think. It was great because a colleague and friend, another academic, who read the book messaged me, and this is the wonderful things you learn about people. She said, ‘oh, fellow over-user of capital letters’. Because I talk about in the acknowledgement that I had a very kind gentle editor who let me have my desire to capitalise important thoughts.
And this friend said, you know, I do that too. Everyone who knows me personally knows I do that. And we joked about it and I joked about how my PhD supervisor many years ago had to beat that out of me. But, in creative writing we can do these things.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, it is great. My work was in government and in the TAFE sector, mostly where you’re writing strategic documents and there’s a certain way of writing. So for me, I still think I’ve got a long way to go to get back to probably my more natural voice. It’s sort of dusting off, or shifting from that academic voice. Yeah.
Meaghan Katrak Harris: Exactly. Because it is very different . It’s far more rigid in corporate or academic writing. Of course. Yeah, absolutely.
Terri Connellan: But as you say, it sounds like the way that you’ve worked with Memories and Elephants it’s like you’ve hit your natural gear, found a way to really write joyfully and perhaps express things that have been there for a long time.
Meaghan Katrak Harris: Yeah. And it was an absolute joy to do. Absolutely. I loved doing it. I had so many ideas and thoughts that I wanted to get down. And as I said in the first essay, I probably think I only had about 12 stories in me. Well, I did, I had 12 and I knew I was done then with that, I felt like that was enough. And I know I spoke to Natasha from the kind press, when I talked about putting them together. And I said, but I’m worried it’s not enough. And she quoted Elizabeth Gilbert, who’s another writer that I really admire as well, in saying that the story tells you when it’s finished, to paraphrase. That the story will end when it ends.
And I honestly felt like that. I would have had enough material, but I just felt that’s what I wanted to say. And I feel that collection is enough as it is. And funnily enough, lots of feedback has been, I didn’t want it to end. And I thought for a minute, oh gosh, is it not long enough. And then I thought, you know, what? It was finished when it was finished. So that’s not a bad thing.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. I think it’s beautiful just the way it is. As I said before, to me, it’s that sense of each piece stands alone, but they reverberate and echo and also keep you thinking a long time after you’ve read and something to go back to. So yeah, I think they work incredibly well. So you’re a social worker, academic and author in the social justice area, as well as we’ve mentioned, across all sectors of government and non-government human services. Can you tell us more about your focus, projects and writing there?
Meaghan Katrak Harris: At the moment I’m teaching at Sydney Uni. I’ve been teaching there for the last three or four years, and I’m working on a few research projects with my colleagues there, that I’m really committed to and feel very fortunate to be involved in. So that’s my academic work at the moment. And I’m also working on a couple of other creative writing projects that I’m hoping will come into fruition this year.
Terri Connellan: Oh, fantastic. That’s great to hear there’s more creative work in the pipeline. Yeah. And I’ve spent some time just reading through some of your academic work too. So it’s been interesting just to see the different perspectives. In a way, your theme is pretty much similar.
Meaghan Katrak Harris: It is, my work is all, whatever it is, social justice, underpinned with my commitment to social justice. And it was interesting when I told a friend of mine about the creative work I was doing… he’s a filmmaker, artist, musician, activist. Richard Franklin, his name is, and he’s a very dear friend. And he said “oh, you’ve been dancing around the edges of the arts for a long time. So it’s about time you jumped in.”
Cause I would always be involved, as a participant, as an audience member, as an advocate and a supporter. And I found that very validating from someone, who’s achieved so much in this space.
Terri Connellan: So have you got any advice, if there’s people who have a similar passion or a similar theme or focus in life around social justice and want to write more personally, would you have any particular tips or thoughts for them?
Meaghan Katrak Harris: Honestly, I think finding your authentic voice is the key. Then I don’t really have any advice other than particularly as females, particularly as women to be unapologetic about wanting to have a voice and wanting to put something out into the world, not make ourselves smaller or feel we have to justify and apologise for wanting to do that. I think my advice is take up space, find your big voice. As one of my dear friends and colleagues, Dr. Mareese Terare talks about in social work, is find your big voice and find your authentic voice. I think that would be my strongest advice. And it doesn’t matter, if you’re not ready to share your work, I feel that it helps us grow so much in doing it. And you will find your audience.
Terri Connellan: That’s beautiful. I love that. Find your big voice, that’s great.
Meaghan Katrak Harris: I love it too. And I quote Mareese very regularly with that beautiful term.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. And as you say, it’s not all about publication. Just working with a group of women writers at the moment and I think publication is important to think about as a potential path. But it’s really great to have that free writing and that exploring and that ability to find your big voice comes from play.
Meaghan Katrak Harris: Yeah, I think that we know what we want really in our heart to do with that work. I know when I had written a few of the essays, I told a friend. They said, oh, you know, maybe you won’t want or need to get them published. Maybe writing them will be enough. No, it won’t be, I want them published. I knew, I felt I had something to say and I knew I wanted to put it out in the world. And it’s just about finding the right way to do that and, and the right time and things like that.
Terri Connellan: That’s great that you did find the right way and the right time then. And I think that’s just part of the author journey, isn’t it? It’s meeting the right people, collaborating, the publishers, the editors, the people encouraging us behind the scenes. It’s all part of the rich journey.
So, a question that I’m asking all people on the podcast being the Create Your Story podcast is how have you created your story over your lifetime?
Meaghan Katrak Harris: Oh, gosh, how have I created my story? I think that I’ve never really had a plan particularly. I know that works for some people. I’ve always been open to opportunities and not been frightened to take risks, creatively like, in my career, you know, leave a job, find another job. I think I’ve kind of just tried to live true to my values.
And my commitment to my family has been my driving motivator. But, even if five years ago, someone had said that I would be doing creative non-fiction, I would have been like really? It’s not like I had that on the plan. It’s not like I thought I really want to write, I’m going to sit here and think about what to write about. Like, the stories came to me and I just told them, and I feel like a bit of a witness in that sense, that, it’s our obligation to share what we learn. So I guess my plan has just been to try and do no harm and live a good life.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. It sounds like share your wisdom along the way too.
Meaghan Katrak Harris: Well, we hope we get some the way. I don’t know, but we hope so don’t we? I say to my students, the more I know, the less I know, I know. And that remains true.
Terri Connellan: Yep. That’s true. So, my book, Wholehearted, is about wholehearted self leadership tips for women and practices. Thank you. And, so I like to add to the body of work I’ve created by talking to people about their top wholehearted self-leadership tips and practices, especially for women. So I’d love to hear yours.
Meaghan Katrak Harris: Honestly, more and more. And I just had a conversation with a dear friend today about this, it’s about, you know, we say, lift a sister up. Let’s take every opportunity to support each other, to promote, to validate, to do all those things that lift us up individually and as friends, but also helps all of us, as women, as writers, as creatives, whatever it might be.
And about that authenticity, about just showing up as you are, doing your best to support the cause is what I’m pretty big on. I think it’s kind of that simple and that complex.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. And it is too, but I love that lift your sister up and yeah, I just really appreciated your support all the way through my writing journey there in the background saying, well done. Thank you. And you know, just liking posts and things. It really helps.
Meaghan Katrak Harris: I feel like we talk a lot about supporting the arts or creativity whether it be black businesses or, and I have this conversation with students where they say they might really want to support a female led business or a black business, but they may not be in a financial position to do that.
And, you can share a post, you can like a post, you can spread the word. And that is helping, that is supporting and that’s showing up. There’s lots of ways we can do that for each. And if we are in a position to purchase something, let’s think about it. I read a quote recently, the way we spend our money basically is a vote for the world we want to live in.
So, do we want to try to support small business, female led, all those things, and less the, you know, big multi-nationals. If we can do that, we should try try the best we can.
Terri Connellan: So true. But I also agree with your point, that there’s so much you can do that doesn’t cost money too. Doing reviews for people, sharing their podcasts, different reviews on blog posts. It’s certainly been part of my journey to both acknowledge others and be acknowledged by others. Again, it’s another type of dance that we can engage in with others and I know my life is so much richer for it as I can see yours is too. So thank you. And, that wraps up our conversation for today. It’s been lovely to have a chat with you, so thank you for your time.
Meaghan Katrak Harris: Thank you for having me, Terri. I’ve really enjoyed thinking about some of those questions you posed, so thank you.
Terri Connellan: My pleasure. So where can people find more about you and your work on line?
Meaghan Katrak Harris: Well, I’m on Instagram and there’s a link to my stuff there. I’m late to that party, but you know, I’m there for it. I’m finding it a very supportive environment. I’m on Facebook. I’m on LinkedIn also. So I’m not hard to find.
Terri Connellan: And we’ll pop the link to your book too, in the show notes and yeah, just encourage everybody to read Memories and Elephants: The art of casual racism. It’s a really important book. I think everybody should read it. And make sure you do all those things we’ve talked about: post a review and share it with others.
Meaghan Katrak Harris: Thank you very much.
Terri Connellan: My pleasure.
Meaghan Katrak Harris
About Meaghan Katrak Harris
Meaghan Katrak Harris is a social worker, academic, consultant and writer. She has a long and diverse social work background. This includes extensive experience and commitment to working alongside First Nations Peoples, families and communities. When not writing, Meaghan lectures and researches in social work at the University of Sydney and works in private practice across social work supervision, individual, group work and organisational change. Memories and Elephants: The art of casual racism is her first creative non-fiction book.
Memories and Elephants: The art of casual racism is a collection of memoir-based essays set against the socio political background of Australian society.
In these essays—written with clarity and compassion by Meaghan Katrak Harris—you’ll explore the intersectionality of Australian culture, classism, racism and identity as the author has lived it.
Drawing on her experiences of being a teenage mother, a member of a large multicultural family, a social worker, and an academic, Meaghan uses powerful personal narrative to illuminate often uncomfortable aspects of our society—the elephants in the room that have been historically downplayed and ignored.
Taking you from memories of country life to the city, from the street to national television, Memories and Elephants invites you to think beyond the dominant narrative of Australian identity.
Beth Cregan of Write Away With Me and I co-host The Writing Road Trip. Beth and I co-write together in the mornings virtually via Zoom. We’ve completed three books between us in 2021 and we’ve found community and partnership helps get writing happening and books written. So from this, we’ve shaped up exactly what helped us into an exciting new community writing program in 2022.
So join us. Get on our email list now and we’ll send you information and inspiration for your writing journey:
The Writing Road Trip is an exciting collaboration for Beth Cregan and me. We have created exactly what we found worked when we faced the task of writing and completing our books together.
The program has three components that we plan to keep cycling through so join us at any time. Join the email list to keep in touch with what’s available. Here are the three components!
We kick off with a free writing challenge focusing on writing identity, a two week challenge helps you explore your relationship with writing and your unique writing identity. Whatever stage you are at in your writing journey, this is a powerful foundation for your writing.
Then we have a six-week Writing Road Map course that helps you zero in on your purpose and direction. We work on: creating your vision, getting in flow, mindset, creativity for the long-haul and sharing your work with the world. It helps you map the writing journey your way with the support of community.
The Writing Road Trip is a longer community program for extended support as you write featuring virtual writing retreats, community calls to check in on your writing progress and writing input as required based on what you need!
We are kicking off on the Writing Road Trip in May 2022! So get on the email list for the latest news as well as regular writing inspiration and tips from us.
Here’s a map of where the Writing Road Trip is going in 2022:
Watch us chatting about the program here on YouTube
The transcript of the conversation is below if you prefer to read or read along.
Transcript of our conversation
Beth Cregan: Now just waiting. I think we’re going to get Terri up on screen any minute. There we go. We did it. So welcome to anybody who’s watching this live. And also to anybody who might catch up on this, on the replay. We’re so thrilled to have you here and you can tell by our smiles that we’re really excited to be spending this time and telling you what we’ve been planning over the last weeks and months. So I’m Beth from Write Away with Me.
Terri Connellan: And I’m Terri Connellan from Quiet Writing and it’s fantastic to be on Instagram live together. This is our first time popping on together and we’ve had a lot of laughs getting connected and things organised, but it’s great to be with you Beth, and to be sharing our story.
Beth Cregan: Exactly. And I think what we’d really like to start with is to tell you a little bit about how this program came to be, because we have developed something that comes from our experience of writing successfully together and finishing our books. And we’re hoping it will really inspire you to join us next year and take out your writing program.
So if we zoom back to the beginning of last year, I had a draft of a book and a publishing contract, and I was just beginning to restructure that book when COVID hit. And of course, all of our lives changed dramatically. And I was at home overwhelmed and anxious and really wondering how I was going to make my commitment of finishing this book.
Then it really became important to me, or it became obvious to me that I needed support. And I put out a call to writers I knew in my circle to see if anybody wanted to write in the mornings together online. And that was how Terri and I first connected. We knew each other, but that was how we connected in terms of our writing together. And other people came in and out of that group, but we hung in there, didn’t we Terri?
Terri Connellan: We did.
I think the fact that we were both writing books, like we both had a long haul writing project really kept us engaged with that support for each other.
I know for me, for my situation, I was writing two books at once. And I think when we connected, I was well through the draft of one and the other, I still had to do quite a lot of work on. So it was actually quite a hard slog at the time when we connected, because it was working through the editing when you’re going over and over and over drafts. And when I went through that process, it was quite challenging. So to have people who you can connect with really helps with that and getting up early and writing with you really helped to get that writing done. It was so much more fun.
Beth Cregan: Absolutely. That was my sense of it too. And now end of if that was somewhere in the midst of 2020, now we’re at the end of 2021. And I have my book now finished and going through its final edit with the publisher and Terri, tell everybody your great news too.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. I was able to get two books finished at once. So ‘Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition‘ and accompanying workbook, which I worked on in conjunction and they were published by the kind press in September this year 2021 and that’s after four and a half, five years of writing. So yeah, it was fantastic to have that support to be able to finish that work. So, yeah. Thanks for being there. And it’s great to share our story.
Beth Cregan: And I think that it is the things that we learned during that time that helped us achieve our goals.
And it became, I think really obvious to both of us that we’d cracked a code that really made the difference for us and that we could then offer what we had learned to others to help them on their writing journey, to guide and support them.
I know for me, that time in the morning felt really sacred. It felt like a safe space. It felt like a creative space and it wasn’t just the opportunity to work and, and know that somebody was holding space with you at the same time and offering you that courage but I think it was just our conversations. We’d have a break and it was our conversations that made all the difference.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. And I think for me it was definitely that accountability of getting up early to write, but also very much the camaraderie around writing. So that ability to one, write together, but also just to stop and have conversations about what was hard, what was easy, what we were learning. We often think writing’s a really solitary process. Obviously there’s aspects of it that are, but there’s plenty of aspects of writing that are supported by being with other people. And, people talk about how lonely it is. It can be super lonely and I think having community on the journey can help us incredibly. So, yeah. So it’s like a magic sauce, Beth, that we want to share with others.
Beth Cregan: Yes, absolutely. And I know for me, it was the fact that there was somebody just ahead of me in the journey that made such a difference because the overwhelming part is that you don’t quite know. It’s an organic process and you don’t quite know how it’s going to come together. So just having you one step or two steps ahead meant that I had a path forming and it normalized what I was doing, the overwhelm, the fear that dealing with my inner critic, the resistance. It really normalized all of those things because I knew that you were feeling them too.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely.
That sense of, you’re not alone and it’s quite a normal part of the journey. Yeah, I think the idea of normalising, it’s really important. Also for me, I never went into any session or any times we were writing together without having a note pad or pencil beside me, where I was writing down a whole list: here’s a great podcast, here’s a great book.
And I know you recommended Anne Janzer’s The Writer’s Process. To me, that’s been such a fantastic inspirational book for my journey and for my sharing with others. So I think just sharing insights about writing and resources helped incredibly too. So it’s a whole lot of things, isn’t it?
Beth Cregan: Well, the combined resources was just an absolute bonus because I now have bookshelves and kindles full of things that I know you found helpful and no doubt you have the same experience because everybody finds their own, you know, they follow different people. They find their own magic in whatever resources they use. And then we had the chance to pull those together and share them, which was really fantastic.
Terri Connellan: So it might be time for us to share about what we’re thinking of or what we’re planning to offer all these great experiences that we’ve had. What we found was that from that we’re able to create a program that’s something that we wish we had while we were going through the process.
Beth Cregan: I think every time we’ve got together to work and dream up this program cause it’s been a Thursday afternoon burst of inspiration when we get together and do it. And every time I finish, I think, man, I wish I had this when I was writing or when I was doing this journey, because it’s exactly what I would have needed to help me along my way. So how about I start by just talking a little bit about the challenge.
The program will have three parts and we’re going to start with a live challenge. It will involve six free activities or workshops over two weeks. And that’s just to ride the energy of the new year, and get everybody thinking about what their writing goals might be for the year. How they feel as a writer, what is their writing identity as well as just inspire and spark imaginations and creativity. So that will involve lots of hands-on writing and interactive opportunities, which will be really fun way to start the program.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. It’s called The Writing Road Trip, the whole program. The first part is really a bit of way-finding, like getting a compass, getting all the travel books out and deciding where you might go. But again, having fellow travellers, even at the early stage of the journey to have a chat about what you’re thinking about, how you feel about yourself as a writer, as Beth said, and then we thought we’d build on that with a six week more intensive course, which is a Roadmap. And that’s really about creating the shape of your project and what it might look like. So in that program, we’ll have a look at things like, what your purpose is, what your why is, what the steps might be, what do you want to do with what you write?
My journey has been very much that, knowing what I want to do with it at the end, I needed to know a bit at the beginning or at least have some idea. Do you want to publish? How do you want to publish? And we’re talking in this, it could be a book, but it could also be blog project. It could be feature articles, series of feature articles, could be social media. It could be writing a course, any sort of writing. So in that six weeks Roadmap program, we’ll be looking at: what you want to do, where you might go, why it’s important to you, because one thing I’ve found, and I know you have too, Beth, is that knowing our why really helps us on the whole journey.
Beth Cregan: Yeah. And I love the imagery of the road trip because I think it was born out of a time when we were quite stationary with lockdown and road tripping was completely off the agenda.
But writing is a journey and creating any sort of project and finishing any sort of project, I think, is a transformational journey. So it feels so right to have that image as our starting point.
And then once we’ve done that six weeks together where we will really shape and map out where you’re going and what you want to do with your project, then we have a six month community. And in that community and program, that membership, you’ll have a chance to meet other writers, to work together, to be accountable to each other, to listen to other guest speakers who arecoming into that space, to share our resources.
So, not only will you have the opportunity to connect with our guests, but you’ll have a wide library of resources that we can share with you. And also, which I think will be really helpful because it’s what we have done. And we still do many mornings every week is to have virtual retreats where we come together and we’re online in our own space, but we’re working together and sharing what we’re doing, our goals and our intentions and carving out space, making that container to allow the writing to happen. So that to me is a really important part of this journey because I don’t think I realized until we started working together, Terri, just how I’ve given lip service to community, but I don’t think I really understood it. And now I really do see that that makes all the difference.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. Yeah. I’ve often been envious of people who have writing groups and join together to to write. And particularly with the way things work now that we are perhaps not connecting as much or traveling across the world, or as you said, actually doing road trips as much, being able to connect virtually and write together, have community together and connect asynchronously as well as at the same time, it’s been absolutely perfect. And I know one of my clients said to me, I didn’t think I had time for a group program, I just wanted to get the writing done. And I think that’s, our tendency is to want to put our head down and just get the writing done.
But I think our experiences have taught us that to have connection to someone who knows what’s happening on the journey to talk through, when you get to the really difficult things, to be able to have a safe space to be heard, you don’t always have to solve the problems, but it’s just not having it rattling around inside your head can make a huge difference.
And I think we’ve both said without each other, we wouldn’t be where we are today with the projects that we’ve done. So that’s what we really hope to share with the community work. And yeah, that idea of being connected with creativity.
Beth Cregan: I think if you imagine writing as flow and we often talk about creative flow, I feel like community removes many of the obstacles. For me, it really allows the writing when you have that space to write, you actually use your time really productively, because you have a lot of your other needs met in that community space.
Terri Connellan: I think I’ve said to you before that, we’d get up early, six at the moment. If you’re not there and I get up early, I just faff around. It’s just amazing that having someone there, you know, we write for 25 minutes, we have a break. These are the sort of practices we can share with people. Another thing we’ve talked about doing is buddying people up potentially, if people are interested in this sort of experience we’ve had, because it’s made all the difference.
Beth Cregan: Yeah and I know we were talking this morning about the fact that we’re in the middle of a reno and our, Terri and my, writing time hasn’t been happening. And my rest of the day doesn’t feel the same and it is nowhere near as productive as having that regular routine. So it’s reminded me once again, that a writing practice is made up of so many elements that fit together. And once you get what’s right for you, what you need to move forward. So we hoping that you will be interested in joining us. We’re going to be kicking off at the end of Jan with our challenge, and you can be part of that free challenge and have the opportunity to come and work with us and see what it’s like to have that experience.
Terri Connellan: And so the first step today we’re opening the waitlist, which is really exciting. So inviting you to come on the Road Trip with us. So we’ve both popped the links in our bios and that waitlist information tells you about the program. There’s quite a lot of information there in that post if you have a look and then there’s an opportunity just to join our email list, which is a joint email list. Beth and I have our own businesses, our own email lists. This is a unique one, unique to Writing Road Trip. So we’ll just be sending information out about the Road Trip and, and writing inspiration tips to inspire you particularly about community.
Beth Cregan: And we would love you to join us and have an opportunity to be supported by the lessons that we’ve learned along the way to finish. You finished your two books and I think you’re nearly working on the third.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, I am. Yeah, it’s happening in the background. So again, it’s whatever projects and it’s not genre specific. I think that’s something too we want to mention to people. We’re not going to be talking about say, novel writing specifically. But you could be writing a novel, it’s certainly a goal of mine next year. Mm. But whatever writing it is, we’re here to support you around the writing process generally, the community, the support. We’re both writing teachers by background. We’ve told you about ourselves in that landing page (waitlist page). I’m a coach and teacher and Beth also is mentoring and many years’ experience as a teacher. So together, we bring a fantastic skillset too. And of course everyone who joins brings their wisdom. That’s what I love about group programs. We met through a group program, didn’t we Beth?
Beth Cregan:
And we really feel like this will be a co-creation. We will set that structure up and use what we know in that space or share what we know in that space, but it really will be created with everybody and what they bring into that program as well, which is really exciting.
Terri Connellan: It is absolutely. So yes, we hope you’ll join us. So as I said, we’ll both put a post up today kicking off the waitlist. So any questions feel free to pop them in now, or we can pick them up on our respective Instagram profiles. So look forward to connecting with you and to going on a Road Trip with you, writing away.
Beth Cregan: Totally!. And have a great day and any questions, please shoot them our way. We’d love to answer them. And we’d love to see you on that wait list so that you can get more information as it comes into the world. Yeah. Bye.
We hope you’ll join us!
You can get on the email list here and find our more about us and the program here:
