"We're always asking questions and the outer world is a reflection of those questions being answered, unfolding in linear time so we have the time to experience the answers."

-E.T. Allen, author, musician

Eric's story is one of embracing the unknown—of stepping into the Fool archetype, that curious wanderer who trusts that each twist and turn is part of a greater, unfolding mystery. A multifaceted individual, Eric is a storyteller, musician, world traveler, father, fiduciary, and farmhand, with two decades of experience in commercial banking. But his path doesn't fit neatly into any one box, and that's precisely what makes him such an inspiring guest and profound human being.

My conversation with Eric was filled with warmth, insight, and the kind of passion that arises from someone who has learned to deeply trust the mystery of life. His charming southern accent, paired with the rich personal stories he shared, invites you into his world in a way that feels both intimate and expansive. Eric's stories have a unique way of drawing you in, making you reflect on your own journey in the process.

In this episode, we dive into how Eric's life was transformed by unexpected occurrences that led him to explore new ways of being. His debut novel, Coincidence Speaks, is a testament to this journey, blending the personal and the universal in a powerful exploration of synchronicity and the spaces where our inner and outer worlds meet.

Eric's journey is a beautiful reminder that we don't always need a clear path to follow. Sometimes, the most transformative experiences come when we step off the map entirely, open to the surprises that await. His reflections on serendipity, creativity, and the "indescribable reconciliation" of holding opposites will leave you feeling inspired—and perhaps even more willing to trust your own uncertainties.

"The splash, instead of a return to surface calm, stays open and splayed. That open water with risen water all around the fallen place is an open hand and palm that takes in the wounded and the lost."

Mary Tabor - author (Re)Making Love: A Memoir, The Woman Who Never Cooked, Who by Fire, Lifeboat

For this very special episode of Unfixed Interviews, I'm honored to be joined by three of my favorite writers, Alisa Kennedy Jones, Veronika Bond, in a deeply moving conversation with Mary Tabor.

Together, we explore Mary's essay Lifeboat, where she reflects on grieving her son, Benjamin, and the journey of relearning to live through the act of writing. In sharing her story, she found that the responses she received became a line cast across the sea of loss—reaching her in ways simple condolences can't. It's a reminder that sometimes the most meaningful support goes beyond "Sorry for your loss" to a more personal, reflective response that embraces the full complexity of grief.

Mary's essay is an extraordinary work born from her profound gifts as a writer and the deep despair of loss. Through her words, she channels raw, primal hurt into something staggeringly beautiful, creating a lifeline not just for herself, but for all who read it. Her readers have described Lifeboat as a refuge crafted from the very wreckage of language and memory, each sentence woven from every nerve, muscle fiber, blood, and bone. As one reader put it, "If the heart that breaks open contains the whole universe, you are the revealer of the universe, sharing a way to fly our own grief on fires in the sky." Her essay embodies the powerful truth that grief itself can be a lifeboat—a profound, often difficult-to-grasp insight she conveys with both clarity and courage. Mary's work reminds us that allowing pain to buoy us and joining in the shared human experience of loss can indeed become our salvation.

As we navigate the paradoxes of grief, creativity, and connection, the conversation dives into the ocean-like depths of mourning and the buoyancy found in vulnerability. Although Veronika could only join us briefly due to a fickle internet connection, her presence and later reflections are woven into the transcript, adding an essential layer of empathy and insight. This episode is an invitation to sit with us in Mary's lifeboat, where the raw, messy, broken beauty of grief can become a lifeline—as long as we remember to reach across the chasm of pain to pull one another close and befriend the paradoxes of this uncertain life.

Please enjoy this conversation and then head over to Mary's page to read Lifeboat and share with your community.

"What I'm teaching is how to write from the body. If you generate sound and rhythm, that's what the body feels. So you're creating at the sentence level a reality that cannot be denied. I'm feeling it, versus just a bland sentence that's only conveying information or moving the story along. It's a profound difference."

-Nina Schuyler, author, professor

In a parallel universe, author Nina Schuyler is a cardiac surgeon, resuscitating hearts and restoring life. Whether she's dissecting stunning sentences to uncover what makes them pulse with vitality or recognizing the urgent heartbeat of our planet, Nina attunes herself to the primordial rhythms of aliveness. Through her skillful, passionate expertise, she rallies us to hear them too.

Much like the heavy weight of chronic illness, the enormity of environmental issues can silence our hearts and minds, lulling us into despair. Yet, in countless conversations with those bravely navigating uncertainty, I've learned that confronting our fears with emotional honesty can reveal a resilience that shines even in darkness. Nina Schuyler is one of those luminous souls. She recognizes the power of storytelling to convey the urgency of our time, artfully weaving her love for the planet with beautiful language and empowering her students and readers to take hopeful, courageous action.

Her recent collection, In This Ravishing World, which won the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections and The Prism Prize for Climate Literature, filled my heart with an overwhelming sense of possibility. Nina's characters, including our sentient Earth, embody both the weight of despair and the buoyancy of hope, refusing to yield to the shadows of hopelessness. In a masterful dance of narrative, she intertwines disparate lives, revealing their universal struggles—whether it's the environmentalist sinking in sorrow, the architect seeking escape for his family, or the innocent youth who can't turn away.

Nina offers more than just a mirror to our harsh reality; she creates a sanctuary where helplessness and hope, hurt and healing, coexist in harmony. If there ever was a call to rally our energy and plant seeds of promise for the future, In This Ravishing World is that clarion call. Through her weekly dissections of delicious prose in Stunning Sentences and her teachings at Stanford Continuing Studies, Nina leads her students—and me—into a dance with language, bringing it back into the body, where our interconnectedness with each other and the Earth becomes a rhythm that is alive and vibrant.

"I feel completely indebted to the evolutionary track that began 4.5 billion years ago after meticulously going through it and understanding all that life had to go through to get to us. And it completely changed me and I'm heartbroken. But I'm angry and I'm trying to be risk-taking and courageous to do what I can."

"I'm no fan of myself. I've learned to tolerate myself. Like, okay, this is who I am. I don't know if anybody runs around and goes, gosh, I'm so glad I'm me. So, I don't have that, but there is an acceptance, and I think that gets better as you get older, and I think it's easier as you get older… but when I write I get to be my best self."

-Adam Nathan, writer

Ah, dear listener, what a delight awaits you today!

Before you plunge into the words below, I urge you to find a cozy nook, perhaps wrap yourself in a blanket, and instead of reading, close your eyes and listen. In this interview, the extraordinary Adam Nathan brings to life poignant excerpts from his oeuvre. Through his lyrical cadence, he leads us into imagined realms where humor hangs with mystery, play lives alongside compassion, and pain, love, and redemption reign as royalty.

He speaks of the tender moment when his mother read to him in his youth, feeling "as supple as a tiger cub in his mother's mouth." I suspect you, too, may find that same warmth enveloping you. Adam, no stranger to the full spectrum of human emotion, crafts stories that gut and mend, reminding us that to feel—even the sharpest of pains—is far superior to numbness. From that raw experience, the heart transforms, becoming more than mere anatomy; it evolves into a vessel of shared vulnerability and grand humanity.

And speaking of grand, Adam has embarked on a monumental journey: to write 100 stories in 100 months—an astonishing span of 8 1/3 years fueled by relentless creativity and fervor. He's nearing the completion of his first ten, which we discuss in our conversation. I implore you to seek them out in their entirety. They will haunt you, tickle you, and join you at the kitchen table, urging you to question assumptions, live more authentically, and cultivate gratitude for this magnificent thing we call life.

"This is my third act. This is where I feel I contribute and where I feel something that I'm leaving behind is special. Nobody really cares whether I'm writing a hundred stories or six or a thousand. But I'm telling myself, look, you have a hundred stories to say It – It with a capital "I" – and if you live that long, the hundred stories are what you're saying life means to you."

"Writing is the most true to myself that I can be."

"To me, it's just exhilarating, the notion that you can have a seed of an idea and then the only way to find out where the plot is going to go is by inhabiting those characters and the situation and just writing it and finding out. And that's pretty much how I do everything when I write."

-Nathan Slake, writer, scientist, dreamer

Occasionally, I'll discover a writer whose prose tastes like food—nourishing food, delicious food. Phrases that slow me down, descriptions to savor, sentences that land in my body like sun-warmed blackberries: complete and whole, yet always leaving me wanting more.

Nathan Slake is one of those writers. While his professional life is spent within the walls of academia, teaching and researching immunology, his soul resides in storytelling. I've found a kindred spirit, a brother-from-another-mother, in Nathan. I nodded throughout our conversation like a bobblehead as I related to his experiences of being a "slow bloomer," his love for "slow reading," and the not-so-slow exhilaration of creating and writing without a map, where deep listening precedes strategizing.

Nathan is someone to keep on your radar, friends! His imagination and craft are already captivating the minds and hearts of many readers. And while he humbly admits to only "discovering his soul" in his 30s—largely due to a deliberate cultivation of attentive presence and deep conversations with his wife Josephine—this soul is already a mosaic of memorable landscapes and characters, all grappling with poignant themes on the nature of consciousness and what it means to be human.

"I love that imagination gives us access to certain kinds of truth that don't exist in the factual world. There is sometimes way more truth we can explore in fiction than we are able to in our very limited lived experiences."

-Gail Marlene Schwartz, author, queer mom, persistent student of collaboration

When Gail Marlene Schwartz posted a section from her debut novel Falling Through the Night on Substack, I knew I'd found a woman unafraid to "go there." I fell in love with her characters immediately—unhinged, messy, complex but never far-removed from the love that bonds them to one another. I devoured the novel in under a week and wished upon finishing I could invite all her characters over for a home-cooked meal. And while that didn't happen, I did get to spend an hour with their sparkling creator and I was equally nourished and enlivened by the occasion. Gail's passion to explore personal experiences, particularly in relation to motherhood and mental health, through the lens of fiction is so infectious and playful that I'm near convinced to veer from non-fiction myself. Author Siri Hustvedt once said, "Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened," and Gail's vast remembering calls in a theater of archetypes who bruise and then embrace, unravel and then mend, each written with such humanity and care that it's easy to feel an emotional recognition, our own unfinished stories rememberingand rewriting possibility in tandem.

Falling Through the Night just won the National Indie Excellence Award in the LGBTQ Fiction category for 2024 so a hearty congratulations is in order. I'm including a synopsis below that may help orient you throughout our conversation, though you certainly don't need to have read the book to follow Gail's hard-earned and enduring reflections on identity, friendship, disability, mental health, family and fulfillment.

Audrey Meyerwitz wants to fall in love and have a family. But for this queer 30-something insomniac who's struggled with Generalized Anxiety Disorder since childhood, it's a goal that's far from simple. When best friend Jessica, a recovering alcoholic, helps introvert Audrey with a profile on SheLovesHer, Audrey takes that scary first step toward her lifelong dream. Through online dating, immigrating to Canada, and having a baby with Down Syndrome, she struggles and grows. But when Audrey unearths a secret about her mother, everything about her identity as a mother, a daughter, and a person with mental illness ruptures. How do we create closeness from roots of deep alienation? With humor, honesty, and complexity, Audrey learns that healthy love means accepting gains and losses, taking off the blinders of fantasy, and embracing the messiness that defines human families.

"By experiencing deeply and profoundly the grief, I floated on this ocean of loss. And I felt saved in my life by that."

-Mary Tabor, author (Re)Making Love: A Memoir, The Woman Who Never Cooked, Who by Fire

When I read anything by Mary Tabor, I do it slowly. Deliberately. I liken the experience to being deeply engrossed in a 5000 piece, handcrafted jigsaw puzzle, each piece just as important and gorgeous as the final image. But there's more. Solving this puzzle will reveal something I've never known about life, so while I must go slowly, there's also an urgency. I know I speak in metaphor but I've spent days trying to find the exact words to describe the incomparable experience of reading Mary. It will change you. You will make discoveries. You will feel her own necessary vulnerability hand-in-hand with your own. Her words will guide you along the vertiginous cliff of love, loss and uncertainty with an assured hand that says "It's painful, but that very pain will save you."

Mary's Substack Only Connect is a confluence of her spanning knowledge and experience as an author, professor, radio show host, and columnist, where she shares her serialized memoir (Re)Making Love, fiction, and essays about the arts, books, movies, and all things literary. "Only Connect" is the epigraph to E.M. Forster's Howard's End and she claims it's the best advice she ever got, living this truism not only through nurturing intimacy with writers on Substack but also through her staggering ability to weave together stories of her own pain and seemingly disparate subjects and literary forms. Mary is a one-woman light show of synaptic connections and it was an honor to join the shimmering display for an hour to learn more about her creative process, why she believes writing is a journey of self-discovery and how to find levity in the face of heartbreak and the unknown.

Mary is also "accidentally funny," and in between Mary's poised, wisdom-sharing, we burst into fits of laughter, so get ready to learn, feel inspired, and smile.

"You can come to a place in your life where you run out of resilience because you're in such an adversarial relationship with your body. And so it's about how to recast and reframe and re-narrativize a body that loves you, a body that can speak to you and say, "This one thing that's here is a part of you, and it's pushing you to be the person you were meant to be."

-Alisa Kennedy Jones, tv writer, author, publisher

Alisa is one smart, witty, electrifying cookie. I started reading her two columns The Empress and Gotham Girl early last year and learned very quickly to not have liquids nearby while reading. She is a one woman, laugh-out-loud, tragicomedy act and infuses her work with infectious, tinkering curiosity, humility and self-compassion that might just be the #1 super-smoothie to getting through life with sanity intact.

After developing epilepsy during peri-menopause—the first in a series of grand mal seizures that she likens to "swallowing a bolt of lightening"—Alisa was forced to use her powers of reimagining to develop a more expansive, empowering perspective from the frontlines of a brain that derails, and often detonates, her life's plans. From ground zero, instead of falling prey to despair, over-and-over-again, Alisa brushes herself off and uses her experiences to get honest and "get bigger"—sharing her voice, advocating for women's rights and healthcare, challenging the Hollywood narrative to portray more realistic stories of neurodivergence, and championing women in midlife to embrace "the messy middle—a highly generative, creative time—one in which we can source real agency in our aging."

In her deeply engaging and heartfelt book Gotham Girl: Interrupted, Alisa writes that auras feel like "someone reaches into her brain and kneads it with stars" and post-seizure she's supercharged with creative euphoria, so it was a delight to gaze upon her 13 trillion synaptic connections where multiple reconstructive facial surgeries, being trapped inside a Van Gogh painting, mothering herself through uncertainty, mothering her daughters through trauma, and refusing submission in a largely male-dominated industry are all fodder for living a wild and wonderful life.

"There are times when I'm with someone at the end of their life or I'm with a tiny bird and there is that moment where I'm just like Oh, Oh yeah, I think there's some God here. I love more deeply because of death and birds."

-Chloe Hope, end-of-life doula, baby bird carer, author of Death & Birds

Sharing time with Chloe this past month felt like a forest bath, a Maranasti "death awareness" meditation, and an expanse of dancing fireflies. I found myself numerous times throughout our conversations wanting to reach into the computer screen and bear hug her beautiful existence as she discussed her work as an end-of-life doula, a baby bird carer, and the way these two extremes demand the gift of her attention.

Bringing oneself into the present isn't always easy, and Chloe is the first to admit this, but instead of refusing the distracted and disjointed parts, she recognizes that presence doesn't need to look a certain way. Sometimes it involves falling apart and being present to discomfort. Other times it requires gratitude and recognizing the brevity of everything. For Chloe, presence is less a state of eternal Zen and more a refined attention to what is and then allowing that attention to reveal the inherent preciousness and sacredness of everything. Her Death & Birds column is a soaring contemplation on the sacred—transforming, expanding, reminding and restoring her many readers through her unflinching commitment to experiencing truth.

At some point in our lives, we all will be initiated into the language of impermanence, some through tragedy and others through death of a loved one or terminal illness. Often the deepest lessons in life come through hardship. While others cower, Chloe draws near. She stands on the cliff, teeters on the vital tension of opposites and through the alchemy of her attention, resolves duality into hushed and screaming beauty.

"Must the alternative to mindfulness be some kind of zombie existence, a living death? That's not cool. And frankly, I don't believe that's how it works—so often we stumble on beauty, grace and insight in our darkest and ugliest moments. It's ALL life, every minute of it, for everyone, everywhere."

• Mr. Troy Ford, author

Windows and mirrors are often used to describe the diversity, or lack of, found in media and how stories can portray social group characteristics like culture, race, religion, disability, gender, or sexual orientation. After spending a much-too-short hour last week with Mr. Troy Ford exploring everything from writer's block and mental health to toxic masculinity and creating inclusive narratives, I surmise that his storytelling doesn't stop with reflective, 2-dimensional portals; Troy builds nests—safe, places of congress, nourishment and growth where humans are validated and upheld in their unique complexity rather than boxed into perpetual stereotypes.

Not dissimilar to himself, Troy's characters are soft-spoken, gentle, empathic and longing to find their place in this world. Whether he's sharing through witty (and not uncommon laugh-out-loud) essays, his brilliant, heart-wrenching, serialized novel Lamb, or building QStack—a necessary platform and directory on Substack for underrepresented writers—Troy's hard-earned wisdom and light-hearted, vulnerable charm are warm invitations for us all to alight in his nest of belonging.

At the end of our interview I only half-joke about wanting to wrestle and drink tea with Troy, and after listening, I'm certain you will too.