Podcast: Creating Out of a Common Experience
We know that one of the things about motherhood that makes it such a unifier is the common ground we all find in mothering our children, but we each tackle that task in different ways. The same is true with many of the hard things in life: we can each experience the same type of event but go through it, process it, and have it affect our creative lives differently. In this episode, Abbie, Sonya, and Sarah Hauser discuss how the common experience of losing their mothers affects their creative lives, and Sarah shares three “rules” for knowing how and when to publish a story written about your grief.
**Tissue Warning: You might need a box.**
Sarah lives in the Chicago suburbs with her husband, Colson, preschool twins, Elijah and Isabel, and their one-year-old, Josiah. Sarah used to work in the nonprofit world, but now she stays at home with her crew and writes about food, faith, creativity, and motherhood on her blog. She’s been working on a book proposal this last year, but just saw another book launch for the very topic she wants to write about. We chat with her about how this discovery made her feel, what she’s doing to push past it, and what’s next on her book-writing journey. You can find Sarah online at sarahjhauser.com, or at Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest, and make sure to sign up for her monthly email newsletter which Sarah herself says is her favorite thing to write.
Things We Talked About:
We last chatted with Sarah in Episode 15 of the Exhale Podcast, “When Someone Else Writes Your Book.”
The quote Sarah mentioned from Henry David Thoreau: “Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.”
Behind the scenes of this episode: Sarah’s kid woke up from a nap, Sonya’s daughter locked herself out of the house, and the combine kicked into gear next to Abbie’s house to harvest corn… and it all brought a little levity to the otherwise heavy endeavor.
Our Prompt:
In her book A Million Little Ways, Emily P. Freeman has a chapter titled “Listen” and in it she talks about “listening to your tears” as a way to find your desires. She writes that “Change in the world comes when we acknowledge what moves us and why.”
We would like to challenge you all, the next time you are moved to tears, caught short by grief, when your heart starts beating fast and you’re tempted to change the channel on the news segment that makes you want to weep… think on what is really triggering that grief? What moment is it that makes you react in a visceral way? What does that say about you and the story you are maybe meant to live?
Our Submission Idea:
Modern Loss is a place to share the unspeakably taboo, unbelievably hilarious, and unexpectedly beautiful terrain of navigating your life after a death. Beginners welcome.
This project grew out of two friends’ separate experiences with sudden loss, and their struggle to find resources that weren’t too clinical, overtly religious, patronizing or, frankly, cheesy.
Our Quote We Shared:
“Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, how it holds you in place.” ― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever
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