Unfixed Podcast

A juicy teaser: Kimberly: Some people might see like this story of yours is actually a true redemption arc, you know, like, Oh, she solved this resolved this. So I’m curious, how does the broken part, how do the broken parts still live in you? And how do you hold them differently? Like, do you relate? Like, do you still visit self-doubt and depression? Absolutely. And all that stuff. And so what’s transformed with how you relate to those parts of yourself?Nan: I’m not afraid of it anymore. I’m not afraid of it anymore. If I feel myself getting sad, which is different than depression... I ask the sadness what it wants me to know. If I start to feel depressed, I say, what’s the message? What do you want me to know? If I get angry, there’s always that curiosity that will kick in. And for those who don’t yet have a copy in their hands, my book Nan mentioned is available for purchase! Get full access to Unfixed at unfixed.substack.com/subscribe

What a tender, joyous celebration. The festivities were abundant with laughter and tears, and overflowing admiration for my publisher Empress Edition’s & Alisa Kennedy Jones game-changing vision and artistry. ❤️❤️❤️ I never imagined a simple reading from my Unfixed launch party would ripple like this, but here we are. This book was born on Substack, chapter by chapter, held and then lifted by a community of readers who walked with me long before a publisher ever came calling. And then Empress Editions appeared, a publishing revolution created by midlife women for midlife women, born from a single question in a book club: What if we all hired each other? What if we finally centered the stories traditional publishing sidelines? Empress is flipping the entire model so midlife authors keep the lion’s share of their work, yes—but more than that, they’re building a movement to amplify the voices of women whose lives are anything but finished. I’m honored that Unfixed found its home with them, and that this Substack community has been the current carrying us forward. If you feel called to read the memoir or support the work of Empress, links are below. Get full access to Unfixed at unfixed.substack.com/subscribe

"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." Get full access to Unfixed at unfixed.substack.com/subscribe

"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. Get full access to Unfixed at unfixed.substack.com/subscribe

"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. Get full access to Unfixed at unfixed.substack.com/subscribe

"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. Get full access to Unfixed at unfixed.substack.com/subscribe

"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. Get full access to Unfixed at unfixed.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Unfixed at unfixed.substack.com/subscribe