In this episode, I was in conversation with Mimi Zacharia, writer and gymnast, about the power of imaginary worlds when dealing with intergenerational trauma, and how writing a novel is like performing the perfect backflip.

We talked about:
🔥 Using obsession to guide your fiction
😱 What happens when your entire novel draft is destroyed
📖 Writing the book you need that doesn't yet exist

Mimi's ceremonies for writing are:
🌠 Conferring with her ancestors to share their stories
🌲 Being in community with like-minded writers at home and in the forest
🤸🏽 Perfecting her backflip

Mimi Zacharia was a toddler when her displaced Palestinian parents moved to England via Lebanon escaping civil war. As she grew up, her obsessive reading habit became a way of dealing with intergenerational trauma, and eventually she started to write about her experiences. 

More recently, throughout the Covid-19 lockdowns, Mimi spent months imagining she was somewhere more exciting. This led to her creating a bucket list of things she’d love to achieve once restrictions were lifted, which included learning to backflip, performing at a spoken word event, and getting published. She took online writing courses that fit around her family within working-from-home hours, and wrote a book that incorporated her gymnastics hobby. 

Mimi lives in South London with her family, performs at spoken word events, and attends regular backflip workshops. Follow her on  Instagram, TikTok and Facebook all at: @mimi_zacharia_author. 

To read the transcript, go to the episode page here