Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Hi everyone. This is Liz Olds and I'm here with Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, author of the release.
And I'm excited to have you here. Welcome.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Why don't we start with the reading?
[00:00:16] Speaker B: All right. This is from the introduction.
A few years ago, I took a few blithe publishing missteps that quickly plunged me into trouble. I made choices about how I communicated my novel's focus to my agent, what I agreed upon with my publisher, and how I marketed the book that made me feel dirty. I wound up at the doctor's office for heart palpitations and on the therapist's couch for anxiety and addictive behaviors. Once I cleaned up the mess, I swore never ever to lose myself like that again.
My mistake was not that I'd chosen to publish. Sharing creative work can be tremendous. A chance to connect with others, to grow, to widen our world. No, I had stumbled when I had allowed my own values to be subsumed by the markets. Once I stepped off a life giving path, the consequences avalanched. I hadn't realized publishing could jeopardize my integrity.
Afterward, I swore I would never make that mistake again. For me, writing is first and foremost a practice of transformation.
I'm committed to making artful literature as best I'm able. But it seems to me that literature is only artful when it truthfully and effectively uplifts the human spirit. Mine included. And that the way we writers offer our work to others should follow this path. Surely I don't have to lose my bearings to launch a novel.
I believe creative endeavors have their own life. And part of my responsibility as a writer is to serve that life in the world.
Often, although not always, that means sharing it. Before I loved writing, I first loved reading how I assumed I was reading a story when the story was really reading me, changing me. Until on closing the covers, I woke to the world made new.
When my writing ushers readers through this remarkable phenomenon, the creative cycle reaches completion. My work arrives.
I believe what is born in solitude reaches fulfillment in relationship. Just because the tasks required to send my work into the minds and hearts of readers go against my grain, I'm not absolved of finishing the labor of creation. It's my responsibility to support the continuation of what I've made as it evolves into others hearts and imaginations.
So I posited these questions. Must I be fettered to the whims of my ego and the market economy as I share my work?
Or can I continue to be generative and free?
Is it possible to approach the period after finishing as an opportunity for continued creativity, perhaps even an integral part of the writing process.
What might it look like to stay grounded, heck, even flourish during this final stage?
My answers have become this guidebook. Today, after I finish a project, I use the principles and exercises here to keep myself on a healthy path.
[00:03:34] Speaker A: Thanks. That's Elizabeth Jarrett. Andrew Reading from the book the Release now, when I heard the title of this book, I thought it was going to be A through B book about how to publish and who to publish and how to get an agent and all that stuff. And I was pleasantly surprised because it's not that at all.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: It's the anti publishing how to publish book.
[00:04:03] Speaker A: And yeah, talk more about the book.
[00:04:06] Speaker B: Sure. So the subtitle of the book is Creativity and Freedom after the writing is Done. And it's really about how to stay creative and how to preserve your freedom, your creative freedom as you're moving your creative work into the world. And I think of how we move our creative work into the world, really in two different planes. There's the writing. I'm dealing mostly with writers. So we write something and then we want to share it with other people, traditionally through publishing.
So there's that plane, but then there's the plane of all that gets created in us for having written, all the changes that happen in us, all the new insights, new, you know, what we've learned about the writing process, all the people we've met along the way, you know, so there's all these.
This creative stuff that's happened inside of us for having written. And what do we do with that when we're done? Lots of times we just ignore it. And I am encouraging writers to celebrate it and to really pay attention because if we're so product oriented, we often lose sight of the gifts that come in the process. So this book is really about uplifting the creative process and cherishing the gifts that are there and nurturing them through the completion and sharing of the project.
[00:05:51] Speaker A: You talk a lot about the gift economy. What is the gift economy?
How is it different from the market economy? And how do the two stay apart and also possibly fit a little bit together?
[00:06:05] Speaker B: Sure. Well, we all know the market economy because we're saturating.
But market economy is an economy of exchange. It's an economy of extraction.
It's an economy of transactions.
And so when something moves in the market economy, it usually moves because money passes hands.
And in a market economy, we own things and then we exchange them by buying and selling them in a gift economy. And we actually all do know Gift economies because we all have experienced them. I mean, being parented is a gift economy because parents give of themselves to their children, or lots of times parents share childcare with neighbors. That's gift economy.
A lot of faith communities function in the gift economy with their offerings.
My father had a kidney failure and he was given a kidney transplant.
The whole transplant system functions in a gift economy.
So we do know experientially, gift economy, buy nothing clubs that are flourishing right now on Facebook are prime examples of gift economies. And the gift economy is where people give out of their abundance and gifts move freely.
Ironically, gifts are not free. In a gift economy, gifts come with the price of responsibility and relationship. So for instance, if I borrow my neighbor's lawnmower, that gift comes with the price of the responsibility to take care of that lawnmower, but also the cost of being in a relationship with my neighbor. So there's reciprocity, there's exchange, but no money. Change his hands. And the reason that I'm looking at gift economies is because I was inspired by a book by Lewis Hyde called the Gift, where he draws from indigenous gift economies to explain how artists work, and particularly how writers work, that when. When creative people sit down to create, we receive a gift which is usually in the form of inspiration or energy or impetus, and we then become stewards of that gift, and we move it through the development of the work, and then that gift moves beyond us as we release the gift into the world.
So I love how that reframing of the creative process as being in the gift economy makes it possible that we can really cherish the gifts that come in the writing process and.
And not be so focused on the product. I think our obsession with product is the result of the market economy. And so what this book is about is how do we nurture that gift economy? How do we nurture that capacity to receive gifts as we create? And how do we nurture the capacity to recognize gifts in.
In the stage after we're done? And I just want to clarify, because lots of times when I talk about gift economy with writers, people assume that I'm expecting writers to give their books away. And that's not at all what this is about. And in fact, it's certainly possible to give your writing away. But if you're giving something away out of obligation or with an agenda or out of coercion, then it's no longer a gift. A gift has to arise from abundance. So the real question isn't, you know, are you going to give your work away? But it's what's your place of abundance at the end of a project? And how can you.
How can you give from that place?
And that's a way to keep the creative work moving in the world.
[00:11:09] Speaker A: I noticed your acknowledgement pages were nice and long.
[00:11:13] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:11:14] Speaker A: There's a lot of acknowledgments. Yes. Well, we'll come back to gifts in a bit.
I just am wondering how your experiences with publishers and the publication process inform this book and why you wrote it.
[00:11:32] Speaker B: Well, like I referred to in that introduction, I had a miserable publishing experience with my first novel.
And a lot of that misery was self generated.
It was in part because of my expectations around what success is.
I was very dismissive at that point of self publishing and very bent on traditional publishing.
I was very, very fortunate to get an agent to represent that book. But we tried over three years and 50 submissions to sell it to a publisher. And it was only on the 50th submission that we got a nibble.
And in that conversation with that publisher, my heart sank. There was something about the way he interacted with me that felt really dismal. Dismissive of me, dismissive of my writing, dismissive of my agent. And I knew that this was not a healthy relationship for me, not something that I wanted for the book, and I agreed to have him publish it anyhow.
So kind of for the cause of getting my book into the world the way I thought would be the most successful, I really compromised my own integrity and sent myself into a real downward spiral. In hindsight, I'm really grateful for that experience.
But that revealed to me all of the unconscious forces that were at work in me and in my desire to be published, what publishing symbolized for me. And so it invited me then to do some real deep searching about what really are my motivations and how can I stay true to my values even as I'm making all of these hard decisions about putting a book into the world.
[00:13:57] Speaker A: Let's talk about memoir for a minute, because memoir in my mind, is a wonderful and dangerous thing to publish.
I'm curious about. Well, there are two stories in the book, and one of them, I don't know if it's a memoir or not, but an author left a rather large amount of money on the table to hold onto her integrity. And then there's a poet, Mary Berg, who wrote a memoir and then decided not to publish it again, I think, about integrity. But could you kind of go into those two stories a little bit and talk about integrity in publishing?
[00:14:44] Speaker B: Yeah. So the first example is a very successful novelist and she, she sold her first book and got a two book contract.
So writers often have this experience that when they have huge success that they then crash following.
So in her case, she found that first of all, her relationship with the publisher was not life giving for her and that the publisher didn't really believe in the second project.
So the publisher was kind of twisting her arm to make the project go in direction she didn't want to go.
But then she was also under contract, so she had this huge sum of money that she'd been given and also a deadline that put pressure on her creative process such that she wasn't doing her best work. So between those two factors, she backed out of the contract and that really put her career into a tailspin.
But she, you know, would not have, you know, she says it's one of the best decisions she's ever made and has landed in a much healthier place in really good relationships with an agent and an editor right now. So she's been a real teacher for me in terms of, you know, what does really matter and how much are you willing to put on the line for staying true both to yourself, but then also to your vision for the book? Because there's a lot of forces out there, a lot of market forces out there that are at work to convince you otherwise.
[00:16:46] Speaker A: Talk about then, success versus failure. Some people would say that what she did was a failure, but I sense that you don't think it was a failure.
[00:16:58] Speaker B: Well, I don't think she would either. I think she would say that it was successful in terms of honoring her characters, honoring her vision for her fiction, and landing her in what is ultimately a healthy place, personally and professionally. So, yeah, I think one of the insidious features of the market economy is this assumption of success and failure. And for writers, lots of times success means getting published. It means large readership, it means good reviews, it means getting the grants, getting the residencies, having lots of readers, having a large following, having a platform. You know, that's what we assume is success for readership. And, you know, yes, perhaps that is success. But on a human level, is that really what brings fulfillment and gratification to us as writers? And I love to tell the story about the moment when I realized what I'm truly about as a writer, especially around sharing work. I was at a panel discussion at Hamline, actually, after my first book was published. It's a memoir called Swinging on the Garden Gate, and it's a memoir about bisexuality and faith and so I was on this panel of people speaking to these college students. And afterwards, this young woman came up to me and she had a copy of my book that was dog eared and underlined and highlighted. It looked like a truck had run over it. I mean, it was a wreck. And my first reaction was, what has she done to my book?
And my second reaction was, oh, my gosh, she has ingested my story.
And she asked for my signature. And I got to know her over time. Well, come to find out, you know, she had been raised Catholic. She was in the closet.
And after reading my book, she came out lesbian. She left the Catholic church because she felt a calling to the ministry.
She went to seminary. You know, it's like that book was this turning point in Nikki Kirby's life that I still tear up thinking about, because that is why I write.
And that kind of profound connection with another human being and profound impact on a life is perhaps the most gratifying experience that I can have as a writer.
So in light of that, you know, a six figure book deal kind of, you know, it has a lot of bells and whistles, but I would take Nikki Kirby any day over that.
[00:20:10] Speaker A: Your book is pretty full of spirits and spirituality.
How did you take that road as opposed to some other road that you could have taken?
[00:20:24] Speaker B: Well, it's really inherent in the gift economy. You know, I did a lot of reading of indigenous women, especially their writing on the gift economy. Robin Wall Kimmerer is the primary example. She has both a book called Braiding Sweetgrass, but then also a new book coming out on.
Oh, it's something about the serviceberry. But she's contemporary spokeswoman for the gift economy.
But indigenous women root the gift economy in the natural world, right? So the natural world is always giving to us, giving us clean air and clean water and strawberries and, you know, and then those gifts nurture us, nourish us, and we then have energy to continue passing those gifts forward.
And those gifts come with a price, right? So those strawberries come with the price of relationship and responsibility that we have to tend the strawberries, we have to pick them, we have to care for them, and then they are abundant.
So that flow of generosity is inherent to the natural world.
That's how we humans live and have our being. And what those indigenous women teach is the intentionality, the deliberate relationality that is participation in that gift economy. So to me, that's all very, very sacred, and it's very much aligned with my own Christian, contemplative kind of mystical perspective on how the world works. You know that I think another really great example of gift economy is parenting. And so, you know, parents love their children. In ideal situations, parents love their children. And that love, then is a gift that implants itself in the child and moves through the child's life and is able to get passed along beyond the child. So to me, that's the spiritual dimension of it, is how love moves, how the gifts of the natural world move, how the gifts of creativity move.
[00:23:16] Speaker A: Well, believe it or not, we are almost done.
Can you very quickly talk about what you have coming up?
[00:23:27] Speaker B: Yeah. So I have two release parties coming up, one on November 8th, and the other, I believe, is on the 15th. The first one is in conjunction with Literary Witnesses and the Eye of the Heart center, and that one's going to be in person at Plymouth Congregational Church. The second one is online, and that's through Eye of the Heart Center.
I always teach Writing the Sacred Journey, which is an ongoing spiritual memoir class that anyone can drop in, and that's both online and in person. And these days, I'm hosting an online writing community. It's a free community, and the entrance to that community is a free course that introduces the gift, the gifts of writing.
So that's a really great introduction to the ideas of this book.
And that that micro course will land you in the community space where everyone is practicing this orientation on the gifts of writing rather than kind of the kind of end goal of publishing or the end product. It's not that there aren't serious writers in there who are producing work, but the focus is really on honoring the process.
[00:24:52] Speaker A: Well, I have four pages of questions, and we're not going to get to them. Excuse me. We've been speaking with Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, author of the release what's the Creativity.
[00:25:07] Speaker B: And Freedom after the Writing is Done.
[00:25:09] Speaker A: And my personal opinion is it's a wonderful book. And I want to thank you, Elizabeth, for coming.
[00:25:16] Speaker B: Oh, gosh, thank you, Liz.
[00:25:17] Speaker A: I wish we had more time, but we don't. So I want to thank Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew for coming and sharing her work and her information with us. Thank you very much, Elizabeth.
[00:25:31] Speaker B: Yeah. So good to be here.
[00:25:32] Speaker A: Yes, it's good to have you. And now this.
