"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.

"Language. I burn it to stay warm."

-Bertus Meijer

Interviews aren’t supposed to be this fun. My conversation with Bertus felt more like hanging out in a sandbox with an old friend, making castles and then destroying them with just as much delight.

But describing my sandbox mate is a bit of a challenge, and I think he prefers it this way. Bertus Meijer is an imaginative, free-spirited, deeply intelligent polymath whose spanning creativity is born from the dynamic unknown. If I could summarize the gestalt of Bertus in one word it would be “freedom.” Freedom from conditioning, freedom from the known, freedom from boxes, labels, expectations and assumptions. In his essays, his mind simultaneously reaches beyond and pierces the present; renewing and surprising itself in a dynamic, improvisational dialog with its surroundings.

Because language itself is limited, perhaps a list of descriptives can at least point us in the general direction, as perfectly illustrated in Bertus’ self-description:

Outcast, savant, jack of all trades, self-taught, intuitive, ambidextrous, introvert, performer, non-academic, fool, writer, thinker, holistic, mystic...but then again if it can be named...

“…but then again, if it can be named…”

So with that challenge ahead of us, Bertus and I enter into a mind-bending, thrilling ride of a conversation—using words and “putting names” to the imagined that both he and I might prefer to leave in the visual and sensorial realms. Together we explore the challenge of language to convey and honor the creative impulse that precedes it, expressing one’s originality in a world that wants us to conform, the meaning and importance of living unfixed, and how creatives can learn to lean in and trust the playful unknown.

If you haven’t already, treat yourself to the wonder of Bertus’ illuminating and liberating body of work, including his serialized epic TCOTNK—a beautiful, imaginative adventure into living authentically, without cultural conditioning, finding one’s tribe and living within the aliveness of collective creativity.

"I think the solve for humanity, if there is a solve, is empathy. If there was a way to put an empathy chip in every single human, so many of our problems would go away."

• Ben Wakeman - author, musician

Today’s interview is with author Ben Wakeman, a brilliant and stirring author and musician whose songs, short stories, essays, novels, and immersive audio, to name a few, explore deeply thought-provoking themes. For the sake of our Unfixed audience, in this interview I explore his serialized speculative fiction novel Memory of My Shadow, a gripping tale of technological advancement, human emotion and the perfectly flawed code of sentient beings that redeem us in the end. It is a stunning example of human fallibility/vulnerability and how it interfaces with technology.

Reading this novel, I was bowled over by the detailed, plausible universe Ben builds and the philosophical implications that flourish within it. It is a masterful allegory about love as the penultimate code, one that predates understanding and complexity, and how it intuits what is most needed to save us.

If you haven’t already, please take a moment and subscribe to Ben’s spanning, illuminating, (and wholly entertaining!) body of work.

Dogs are unspoken healers. For some, they offer companionship, to others they act as an essential lifeline. In this episode, two women living with chronic illness explore the joy and purpose dogs brought into their lives. Morgan was born with spastic diplegia cerebral palsy, while Jennifer developed debilitating autoimmune diseases. For Morgan, her service dog Dewey became her reason to get out of bed every day and gain more independence. For Jennifer, a desire to bring joy to others caused her to found Pile of Puppies, a non-profit that connects puppies to children living with chronic illness. The two discuss the remarkable abilities dogs have, and the times they’ve witnessed their comfort and healing firsthand. Dogs are the beautiful blessing that taught them that joy and light can always be found, even in hardships.