Emily P. G. Erickson interviewed Amy as she prepared to launch Tiny Altars (published in April 2023) and quickly honed in on a key message: fractals, aka recurring patterns.
Emily P. G. Erickson is a Minnesota-based writer specializing in mental health and parenting. You can find her bylines in major digital publications, including Everyday Health, Health, The New York Times, Parents, Romper, Verywell Mind, Wired, and more. A former PTSD researcher for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Emily also holds a master’s degree in counseling psychology. Today her work focuses on bringing personal insights, scientific findings, and expert advice to the public through writing.
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Amy Hallberg [00:00:01]:
Hey. This podcast is all about how we find and keep walking our unique creative path in the world. And if you're interested in that topic and you'd like to know how I got here, I have a book about this. It's called Tiny Altars. A midlife revival. It's my memoir, and I would love for you to read it. You can find it anywhere. You buy books online, and if you've already read it, I would love an Amazon review to help other people find it as well.
Amy Hallberg [00:00:38]:
Okay.
Amy Hallberg [00:00:39]:
Onto the podcast.
Amy Hallberg [00:00:41]:
As I launch my newest book, tiny Alters a Midlife Revival, I have invited authors, writers that I know to read the book and to see what they find in it and to interview me. So today I am so excited to have Emily P. G. Erickson here. She and I met through an essay she wrote around the time of the Minneapolis uprisings, and it's an honor for her to now have read my book and to be talking to me about what I've written. You're listening to courageous wordsmith? I'm Amy Hallberg, story coach, book writing, mentor, and author, and these are conversations with real life creatives, because if you want to be a real life creative, it helps to know what that looks like for you. Welcome to Courageous Woodsman.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:01:44]:
Amy, I am so happy to be here talking to you about your book. It seems like such an intimate peek into what it's like to be alive and have things unfold in ways you plan and unfold in ways you don't, and unfold in ways you control. And in ways that you don't control.
Amy Hallberg [00:02:10]:
True. Yes.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:02:11]:
I mean, that is what it's like for me to be alive, at least. And one of the concepts I have to tell you, a pet theory I have about books can I tell you this theory?
Amy Hallberg [00:02:23]:
Oh, please. Yes.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:02:24]:
You then can tell me if it's right in this case or not really at all. But a theory I have about books, especially and novels, is that there's kind of always a moment or maybe two moments where the author sort of calls you to the side and says, whispers into your ear, like, this is what the book is about. And I feel like if you read books with this idea, you will notice those moments, or at least I do. And some of those, I'm sure, are just moments that I think that are my story mapped on to what the author intended. But I think sometimes it is the author saying, yes, that was me. I put that character in there to say that, because that is the meaning of the book to me. And I thought that one of the moments that you do that in your book is on page 16 when you talk about fractals. And I don't know if it would be appropriate now to read a little bit about that portion of the book or if we should just start kind of talking about the idea of fractals.
Amy Hallberg [00:03:32]:
You're welcome to read it. I do not have it in front of me. Do you have it?
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:03:35]:
I do have it, yeah.
Amy Hallberg [00:03:37]:
I would love to hear you read it.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:03:38]:
Okay, so you write chaos and fractals. The idea lit up for me like a light bulb. Fractals are geometric patterns that repeat themselves at every scale as found in a seashell's, mathematically precise ratios. Ever the math teacher, mom had explained it so many times because this concept was her creative passion. At midlife, it may look like you're surrounded by chaos, but in fact, there are patterns called fractals rippling out. If you zoom back a great distance, you'll see them zoom way in under a microscope, and those same patterns appear. But specific patterns aren't a given, I told myself, because patterns can be interrupted, patterns can change. And so that was one of those passages.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:04:26]:
When I was reading that, I was reading it on my phone, and so I copied the text and I put it in another document because I was like, oh, this is juicy. So tell me more about what this means to you, this idea.
Amy Hallberg [00:04:44]:
Well, I'm so glad that spoke to you. The bigger context for that piece was that I was at a writing retreat trying every which way to find the heart of my story. And so when it came to me, it was like I had almost been in this chaos, and suddenly it all fell away. I was about to drive home, and it didn't turn out the way I wanted at the retreat, and I was just standing there in nature and thinking about that. It didn't change that I didn't know what the patterns were. Do you know what I'm saying? There's patterns, and I'm just stepping into what those patterns are. But it at least gave me a thread to follow forward. And I think that's one of the hardest things about writing memoir is you're writing it either you're writing it after the fact, which is really hard because then you have to go recapture it.
Amy Hallberg [00:05:37]:
But a lot of times you're writing things as they happen, or you might be writing about the past, but then more things happen. You're writing it as you go. You don't actually know. Those patterns that we see start to be a way to find the sense of it and write your way through it. Does that make sense?
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:05:55]:
Yeah, it does, because I think that fractals, they're patterns. They're things we repeat. People will talk about the seasons or the cycles or the circles. That also makes me think about fractals as themes, because I notice in my life and some of this is there's a cognitive bias that has to do with when you're thinking about red cars and you're like, red cars are pretty neat. All of a sudden, you're going to see red cars on the road everywhere, and I notice themes thematically, both due to my attentional bias like that, and also because they are the kind of task that I'm working through at that moment. So sometimes something I work on in my friendships is really the same skill that I'm working on flexing at my job. So I love the idea of fractals as these themes that happen in a life, in a memoir.
Amy Hallberg [00:06:52]:
Well, and then to that point, so I've struggled to know what is this book about? Because it's about many things, but is it about so you and I met around the time of George Floyd. Is it about racial reckoning in America? Yes. It's also about religion. Is it about religion? Yes. Is it about education? Yes. Is it about women's rights and reproductive freedom? Yes. Is it about women having the right to speak our voices? Yes. Is it about being defined by our careers? Yes.
Amy Hallberg [00:07:22]:
It's about all these different things. Right. But the way that I energetically move through the world is going to be similar across all those different venues. Somebody else might have a very different set of patterns and so they might have the exact same experiences as me, but then they respond differently. Therefore the pattern is different. And what I've noticed, both in good happy times but also sad times, is we have those patterns. And so it'll be like, dang it, why am I coming up against this thing again? And it's the same thing. You look back and it's the same thing that hit you all those times, and at the same time you look back at those things and those are the strengths that carried you through.
Amy Hallberg [00:08:08]:
They're the exact same thing. The weakness and the strength are different iterations of the same pattern, almost the light or the dark of it, or it's somehow the same, even though it expresses itself different ways. This is probably how we end up living our full lives and keep finding things to be interested in. Is that the pattern keeps morphing too?
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:08:31]:
Yeah. And those small changes can have these big ripple effects too.
Amy Hallberg [00:08:36]:
Yeah. So there's a moment of interruption, almost like something happens to make you aware and then that's just by nature going to shift the balance and the pattern is going to ripple out in a different way. Yeah, absolutely.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:08:50]:
How did that show up for you as you were writing this? Either in the active writing or in the stories that came to you?
Amy Hallberg [00:08:59]:
These topics that wanted to be written, I don't think I would have chosen to write them, quite honestly. These were the topics that came up in my life. When you're writing about your life, you really have to look at things closely and you have to start to see how they relate. When you're constructing a book, you have to see how they relate. There are things in my life happening that don't belong in this book because it's not really related to what's going on, and it doesn't mean that they're not important. One of the patterns I just like to speak it, I guess one of the patterns in my life that I've noticed is that we Americans really love to look at Germany. We love to point fingers at Germany. We love to be aware of that.
Amy Hallberg [00:09:40]:
And that's a pattern, then, of pointing outwards and sort of externalizing evil, externalizing badness, externalizing inhumanity to humans. And one of the things that happened in this book was that that was a mirror that kept getting turned on me. How am I doing that? How am I looking outward at things that are uncomfortable at home? And then how do I start becoming more aware of them at home? And then that place of OOH? This is a pattern, and it can feel, like, almost helpless, even, right? Like I'm stuck in this pattern. I don't even know how to shift the pattern. But the awareness of it, just by that observation, does change. You do see the pattern more clearly, and then you can choose different responses to it, I guess, is how I'd like to put it. I'd like to reference back, actually, to how you and I met. You wrote an article about how perfectionism was at the root of some of the white women supremacy stuff.
Amy Hallberg [00:10:46]:
And I think sometimes looking at patterns, we don't want to do it because it's highly uncomfortable to change. It's a lot of work. Our brains aren't meant for change. We aren't actually built that way. Right? So seeing something that's uncomfortable pattern and being aware of it, well, now you either have to do something with it or you have to live with the fact that I'm perpetuating a pattern that I don't like. So that's not an easy thing to do, I suppose. And so then I'm always looking for how do I bring lightness into that, or how do I bring joy into that, or how do I bring humor into that? And that doesn't have to be a bad thing. We don't have to be perfect, but we are just growing.
Amy Hallberg [00:11:25]:
We are becoming.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:11:27]:
Yeah, I just want to let that land. I want to give that space because I feel like the idea that making those small changes and that awareness of the patterns can be part of that change. And some of what I hear you talking about is that, like, that incremental change. And part of the memoir is also about, in addition to all the things you said, your track from your teaching career to entering really embodying your writing career more fully, that transition, because it was all these kind of incremental moments. And in the moment, it may have I'm sure it sounded like it felt in some ways quite chaotic or uncertain, but the pattern was there kind of at every level, like, you were always, Amy, moving through these spaces. You were always the teacher. You were always the writer. But how that looked in the world shifted bit by bit by bit as you found each new part in the path.
Amy Hallberg [00:12:28]:
Right. And I think we burrow into our identities. When we land a good identity, we want to really burrow into it. So, like being a tenured language teacher, okay, when I meet people who are you? Whatever else is going on in my life, that's a thing I can tell them. But aside from that identity and that clearly defined, here's who I am and here's what I do. And in fact, we are so much bigger than those roles we let ourselves be. But I think when we don't fit neatly into society or when we are in transition, it is hard because people want we want an answer. We can give people, here's who I am, here's what I do, here's how I am in the world.
Amy Hallberg [00:13:14]:
We want those simple answers. And it can be really painful unless you just let yourself I mean, you have to almost give yourself permission. Yeah, I'm going to be many things, and I'm going to allow all those parts, and I'm not going to have words for all of the things that I am, which as a writer especially, that's my trade, is I'm a writer, I should have words for this stuff. But you're a writer, so how many times have you been at a loss for words?
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:13:44]:
Yeah, it happens. And I think that more. I know with the pandemic and the uprising and the economy is really moving and shaken, there have been a lot of major changes in a lot of people's lives right now. So I believe that a lot of people, and more people maybe than could have even five years ago, probably can see themselves a little bit in this story, too. Even though it is a very specific story about you and your journey and your family's journey. I think that it is very relatable. What is it like to construct a self apart from one facet? I'm thinking now of truly what that were a diamond. And it is true that you are and always will have been a tenured language teacher.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:14:36]:
And that is a true fact about you. And that doesn't stop just because that's no longer your job title. It's locked in time, not only commemorated in your work, but also in reality, in space and time. But it was never all of you.
Amy Hallberg [00:14:52]:
Right. And I think you get far enough away from that. There is what we keep. And I think that the skill set, the understandings I derive, those are always going to be there, like you said, and then what? Right? And do I have to keep all of it? No, that's hoarding. I need to make space for the new. And then what does that become? I try, and I think that different people will see if it's successful or not for them. But the books that I really enjoy. That person has grounded themselves so fully into their own story that I don't have to worry about where I am in that story.
Amy Hallberg [00:15:32]:
I can just kind of be in their story. And paradoxically, I feel that it allows me to see myself in that story as well.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:15:42]:
Oh, yeah.
Amy Hallberg [00:15:42]:
That's how I was. Right. So hopefully somebody reading this book could understand that they were not. So, for example, I go into my religious journey, which I wasn't planning to do, but somebody pointed out that you used to be pretty Christian. Okay, well, then let's talk about that. Right. Well, so somebody who isn't Lutheran or Congregationalist or didn't go to church, they still sing in the church choir. They still could maybe see some of what I'm grappling with and understand.
Amy Hallberg [00:16:12]:
But maybe for them it happened on the sports arena or it might have happened somewhere else. And then if I stopped going to school, you break the pattern. I went to school every single day most times and take some time off, but for 41 years, I was part of the American educational system in some way.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:16:32]:
Wow. Yeah.
Amy Hallberg [00:16:33]:
So if you break that, it breaks a lot of other things in the chain. Going to church, same thing. I don't belong to a church anymore. Stop going to church on Sundays. It breaks a lot of things in the chain. Well, now what? Now what is going to fill that time, that space, that purpose? If I stop going to church, does that mean that I no longer have what I got there? Or does it mean that actually it kind of reached a capacity and now it's spilling out into other parts of my life? It's what happens when the pattern shifts, when the pattern almost gets too big to be contained.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:17:04]:
Yeah, I mean, those are really interesting questions that make me think a lot about a lot of different things. And they make me think about sort of the idea of a seed crystal. So, like, you place a grain of sand or something in a solution and it allows the chemicals to kind of form these crystal chains. It's the thing that kind of starts the reaction and then it might repeat. And I've probably totally goofed that description. That might not be exactly right, but that's how it is in my head. And so if we imagine that's what.
Amy Hallberg [00:17:41]:
A seed crystal is, where it's just.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:17:42]:
Like you've got a nugget of something and it started something new and it keeps repeating and it keeps going, I mean, that's a really powerful possibility, but it's also a big possibility because yeah, if the chain is broken, that's a little scary. That's a scary thing. I'm just thinking about how many years of your own life were part of the education system. And sort of one of the things that strikes me about your memoir is that it really is situated very clearly in your family, in your extended family of origin. And that long view, I think, was really an appealing part for me as a reader because I think sometimes we can get really myopic on just what's exactly in front of us and what's happening in our own lives. And we don't take this long view of like, oh, this is the era that I was like this. And then something big happened. You talked about a relative who made a big move and really disrupted the stories that were expected of her.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:18:43]:
So yeah, say more about all that.
Amy Hallberg [00:18:46]:
My aunt. So I have some pretty big personalities in my family.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:18:50]:
Yeah.
Amy Hallberg [00:18:51]:
And I mean, this is a story of me saying, yeah, I'm going to be a full time professional creative. But my grandfather was a sign painter. Like, that's what he did, right. That was his career. And then my aunt, who just she had a tragedy in her life, and she could no longer keep up the pretenses. And so she just left her marriage, left her home, took her kids, went to an island in Florida, and built a shopping center. And then she built a shopping center. But the truth is that's not how it started.
Amy Hallberg [00:19:17]:
Right. So there's actually a little story where I talk about how she went to Florida and she had nothing because she lost it all in her divorce, because in the 70s, divorces were not necessarily kind to women. And she had this tiny little shell, like a little necklace with a tiny little shell. Right. That's the start of the dress shop. She ended up selling jewelry and she sold dresses, and she had this beautiful shopping center that looked like the house she grew up in. She actually recreated it, but to her standards, right. And in Florida.
Amy Hallberg [00:19:52]:
So it's this tropical little I mean, it kind of looks like a little Minnesota white house with picket fence around it, except it's not. It's a big white Florida house with walkways that look like the picket fence. All of that came out over 20 years. So if I look back at it, I could see what my aunt had done with her life. I could see all the inspiration she had taken from our little family in Minnesota. Like the shopping bags that she had in her store were flowers, like my grandma's garden, like her little boxes she had were like, silver, like my grandfather's glitter. Like she took all those things and she redid it, but she did it in a way that she could live with because she no longer could live with the way her life was before. And yet I have to remember, but I remember when she had nothing.
Amy Hallberg [00:20:38]:
And so when I quit my teaching career and I don't think this is unique to me when I lost my career, I quit it. I did quit. I was not fired, but it was sure inhospitable towards the end. And I don't think that anybody could say that walking away from a teaching career, tenured, teaching career in the middle of the school year is a great sign of success per se. Right. I left panic stricken, but also like, nope, I need to do this, I need to do this. My shoulder was frozen remembering that my aunt almost died of an ulcer. That my aunt had this thing where she had nothing and she went to Florida and all she could buy was a little charm and somehow that turned into a dress shop and a jewelry shop and it turned into this bigger thing but that it didn't happen all at once and that there lot of living into it to happen.
Amy Hallberg [00:21:29]:
In retrospect, it's a great story going through must have been terrifying for her.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:21:33]:
Yeah. And in the moment. The interesting thing about fractals is that it's the scale, the self similar aspect at any scale. But the interesting thing about our lives is that we don't always see any of it. We don't see the pattern in the small, we don't see the pattern in the big. But I do find when I zoom out more that it helps. And that's one of the things I really loved about this memoir was that you did a lot of toggling in and out, including your aunt's story so prominently. I think really did a lot for inviting the possibility that your life and selfishly I project when I read so like that my life can make sense at a different scale than I might be first looking at that, I'm just not seeing what's there.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:22:27]:
So I think that's a really exciting part of it.
Amy Hallberg [00:22:30]:
And as a writer, everybody isn't going to do that with my book. Everybody's not my reader. But it is my dream that the book finds people where they do invite themselves into my story. Not in the sense that it's my business what you make of it, although I would love to talk with you about, but the interpretations you draw from my story, that shapes your life, that shapes your decisions. And so if you can see yourself in there and it cracks open some possibilities for you, that's everything that I want for my book is that people see my story and they start to go, well, what in my life can I look back on? Maybe it's seeds planted. Look at what I did there and wow, I'm so proud of her him for having made that decision there that makes this thing possible here or at the same time, here I am. What else would I like to do in my life and what would I have to do to start walking towards it? Maybe it's 20 years out, but it's out there. It's not impossible.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:23:33]:
I feel like that's some of the life coach background of you showing up in your writing, you're engineering this to inspire my evolution. It's tricky and that is a definite.
Amy Hallberg [00:23:46]:
Shift entering the life coach world was a really big mind. There was a lot of chaos, mind chaos, because this is another interesting thing. So you know how there's things that they kind of have similar patterns and so it looks like they might be derived from the same thing, but they're not the same thing. They look the same, they are not the same. So education and life coaching seem as though they're the same thing. And sometimes I would get confused because I would be behaving the way that was expected in the teaching world, in the life coaching world. So for example, as a teacher, somebody lends in my classroom, public school teacher, and I do believe in public school and public education, and I guess I really need to say that especially in this time when public education is taking a beating, there are things that need to be changed. We need to stop piling more onto it and not removing any obligations because it's killing teachers.
Amy Hallberg [00:24:40]:
But there's a lot I love about it. But there were kids who ended up in my classroom. They didn't want to be there, they didn't want to learn from me. And it was my job to figure out how to get them to learn from me and to try and make it meaningful for them. And then it was my job also to grade them on how successfully they had done that. And hopefully if I was doing what I really in my heart of heart wanted, I was finding ways for them also to feel successful while at the same time I'm grading them while also there's a whole lot there in the life coaching world. Should is not favorable. That's not a good word.
Amy Hallberg [00:25:18]:
It's not. It's imposing your expectations onto other people. And so when I work with people as a life coach or as a writing mentor or whatever it is that I'm doing, it's not my job to impose upon them the curriculum. And that was really hard. I think one of the hardest things to change patterns is it looks exactly the same, but it is diametrically opposed.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:25:41]:
Yeah, and that's interesting because for somebody on the outside, they might not be able to perceive the change. It's internal, which just really reminds me of how internal this journey is. You talk about identity and career and that that was happening on the interior. What was it like to be writing this and trying to show such an interior journey in a way that somebody like me could pick it up and follow?
Amy Hallberg [00:26:11]:
So one of the things that I learned from my writing mentors and that I want to pass on to the people that I work with, the writers I work with, and with my readers is look for an image and there's some sort of an image that can become the container. You can externalize it so that what's happening with that image reflects what's going on in the inside. Because I can say I'm sad or I'm mad or I'm afraid. The image that I ended up calling forth, and it's not one that I meant to in the writing of things. I wrote a little thing about a doll house, and people were like, oh, dollhouse. I was like, you like the doll house? I hated the doll house. I hated the doll house. Like, they gave me the doll house, but people were like, Doll house, right? So that doll house becomes a container, and what happens with the doll house is an externalized representation of what's going on inside.
Amy Hallberg [00:27:10]:
And then I can layer onto it. Here's my interpretation of it. And people are like, oh, yeah, that makes sense.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:27:15]:
Was that scene real? Did that really happen?
Amy Hallberg [00:27:19]:
When you say real, you mean the one where I smashed the ever living shit out of the dollhouse?
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:27:23]:
Yes. I wasn't sure if that was a spoiler. Did that really happen?
Amy Hallberg [00:27:27]:
Because that was yeah, it happens halfway through the book, right?
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:27:30]:
Yeah.
Amy Hallberg [00:27:31]:
So the rule about creative nonfiction and I think you know this, right, is you don't have to say everything, but it has to be true, right?
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:27:40]:
So I was wondering oh, yeah, I did.
Amy Hallberg [00:27:43]:
And it was such a mess, and my kids loved the shit out of it. They loved it, loved it, loved it, loved it. So my kids got to enjoy it. I did not. For me, it had to be pristine for them. They played with it because I was like, look it's here. Play with it. And also, my kids are twins, and so there's something about twin energy that you just can't kind of get in the way.
Amy Hallberg [00:28:05]:
It's a subversive thing. Like, they're both that age and they're like, yes, why wouldn't it make sense to do this? And so they give each other permission, almost. And so they were very creative from early on. And so they got creative with the doll house, and sometimes they wrote on it, and sometimes they added whatever little bits of nature. So there was definitely resentment on my part, too. On the one hand, I'm like, yeah, do this. But it's like, why didn't I get to enjoy the doll house? It might have been really fun if I didn't have to clean the damn thing up all the time. They didn't clean it up.
Amy Hallberg [00:28:36]:
They just threw crap in there. But you don't always know what the image is going to be. So I had the image this book came in with my first book. First book came in, it had birds, and then there was the doll house. And I'm like, well, the doll house must be about the Berlin Wall, know, because I smash it and there's a Berlin Wall falling. So I smashed the doll house. They smashed the Berlin Wall, and it turned out the Berlin Wall didn't need another image. The Berlin Wall is its own image.
Amy Hallberg [00:29:05]:
So once that book subdivided. I'm like, well, I've got this doll house. What do I do with it?
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:29:09]:
Right?
Amy Hallberg [00:29:09]:
So it's sort of, okay, well, now I've got this doll house. And so the doll house forced me in a good way to think about things in ways that I wouldn't well, what does that actually mean, then? What does it mean that I smashed the doll?
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:29:25]:
So that was one of the moments where I was like, whoa. Okay, Amy.
Amy Hallberg [00:29:30]:
All right.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:29:31]:
But it was surprising in the way that real life writing is surprising. Right. If it's true, it seemed like something that I had to ask you is, did that really happen? But also I believed that it really happened, because what a strange thing to make up. It just read like somebody who was changing the pattern, who was doing something different.
Amy Hallberg [00:29:54]:
And I think when you're writing, sometimes you give yourself permission. I mean, it wasn't destroying anything. It was my doll house. It was mine to smash if I wanted. But it's almost like, okay, I'm in this moment, and there's several moments of this in the book where I'm like, oh, my goodness. You're sort of reading it on one level and another level, and you're like, okay, let myself be in it. But also pay attention. The act of writing, it does change the experience of it, because even as I smashed it, I was already writing.
Amy Hallberg [00:30:26]:
And so as I was doing those, I was sort of, like, watching myself. I actually talk about this very early on in the book where I'm writing and I'm doing horrible I'm not doing horrible things. I'm venturing close to the edge. I'm a little crazy, and there's a part of me going, wow, you're a little crazy. Let's see what happens. And yet also at the same time, protecting myself up, like, don't go destroying your life, please. Yeah. Or don't destroy the things that you don't want to destroy.
Amy Hallberg [00:30:53]:
Maybe that's more to the point. Like, please protect the things that you care about. My husband, my children, my home.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:31:01]:
Yeah, and it's not a real home. That's an interesting part about it. And I think that that is also one of the fascinating things about writing and the possibility of pattern and fractals is that you can look at anything in your life and suddenly see, oh, my gosh, this is the same topic. This is what I've been thinking about or pondering. And because we do repeat our patterns, and because we are ourselves looking out yeah, say more about that.
Amy Hallberg [00:31:33]:
Well, I was going to say then that's almost I think every writer has an origin story. This one, isn't it? I would say the other one. The first book, German Awakening, was where you start to recognize as a writer, part of what you're doing is observing, what is my work here? What do I make of this for myself? But then what do I want to share with people? What do I want people to know, what do I want to pay forward with the experience? So I think writers who have let ourselves become writers, we are different than we were before because we give ourselves permission to see beyond that veil, let's say to recognize that we create everything and we create within a world that everybody else is creating at the same time.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:32:18]:
And so how did you think about then sort of what patterns you wanted to explore in this book? I know that you have a deliberate approach, and yet there were parts of this book that just, as you were saying, kind of needed to be written or just kind of came out or you wouldn't have picked them. So how did you kind of marry those two realities that you have a sort of responsibility to what you want to share and what you're choosing to share, but also there's some energy of its own that's coming out.
Amy Hallberg [00:32:49]:
Yeah, I mean, we live in the times we live, right? And so the nature of my journey is that I quit my job at a time when racial tension was rising, being stoked. So I would come into conversation with people from different cultures, people of color, people who for whatever reason stand out in the American landscape and were starting to be targeted, or maybe they always were, and they started saying, we're tired. Could you maybe step up and own your part of this story and please don't interpret for us? So these were things where I just happened to be in places where I was asked to bear witness to things the situation asked me to. But I started to notice there's a lot of otherness that I'm being asked to both experience for myself, but also be aware of my privilege, be aware of my place in it. Okay. As somebody who by nature of what I look like, I don't stand out in Minnesota. I'm very quintessential. White, Minnesotan.
Amy Hallberg [00:33:57]:
I can blend, I can move. I have a lot of freedom put in situations where I see where people don't have a voice, and I see where by not using my voice, I'm actually part of the problem. And I don't have to fix it. I didn't start it. I didn't found this country. I was born here, but I am part of it. And if I choose not to acknowledge that, then I am part of the problem. So therefore, I need to look at my religion because that was part of how I was raised.
Amy Hallberg [00:34:28]:
I need to look at the geography of Minnesota. You and I connected around that pretty early. That Minnesota is shaped a certain way, that segregates people in a certain way. I don't have to change it, but I can be aware of it, and I can be aware of how do I interact with that reality. So I wouldn't have chosen to write about politics. I would not have chosen probably to write about history. I would not have chosen to write about religion. I would not have probably chosen to write about the fact that my career sucked at the end.
Amy Hallberg [00:34:59]:
But those are the things that we got there. So that's what I needed to write about.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:35:03]:
But that's honest, isn't it? Like, that's being real, that we don't live in an ideal. I used to, as a child, fantasize about living in the olden times in a vague kind of way. Like, it was vague. It was know, oh, I would live in the prairie or the ancient egypt or something, and what would I do there? And it was only really as an adult that I came to realize that I don't know who I would be, because I exist completely of my time and space and my lived experiences. Like, there is no Emily Erickson that exists as I would recognize her, that grew up in a completely different way. And so, I mean, it feels like a very honest thing to account for. Yep. I write in a time, in a place, and I think that's where sometimes novels and memoirs can fall short of their possibility when they ignore those factors and they try to kind of be timeless, because as we were talking about more in the beginning, that specificity is sort of where we find connection and where reality lives.
Amy Hallberg [00:36:07]:
Yeah, we edited it out. There's some of the stuff that gets in there, and then it comes out. When I'm standing in DC. I'm standing at the white house. I'm watching the 45th president be delivered to meet the 44th president for the first time that the two men had ever actually met. And I'm forced to stand on the curb and watch it. And we decided in our editing and I think it was a good decision to edit that portion down to my thoughts about reproductive rights, but what's running my head as I'm sitting there going, I don't know what I'm doing with my life, and, oh, my god, I did not like the outcome. So I was a little traumatized by that outcome, hanging out in Washington, DC.
Amy Hallberg [00:36:46]:
With my german exchange, like, I'm not happy. But what's happening in my head is not just reproductive rights, but, OOH, I'm straight. What privilege accrued to me there? Oh, I'm christian, and I understand the bible, and even if you bring the bible at me, I know what it actually says there. What privilege accrues to me there? I am highly educated. You and I went to very similar schools that if I hadn't gone to my school, I'd want to go to the one you went to, you know what I mean? Where we have the privilege of being taught how to critically think things through but also see lots of possibilities. All those things are there. Well, if that's the case, then instead of bemoaning it understanding, well, then what can I do? This is the piece I bring to the puzzle? What can I do to bring that to bear? How can I use my English facility? Because some of the people who are going to struggle don't know English that well. I'm good at English.
Amy Hallberg [00:37:40]:
So even though I lost my grounding in my career, there's still the things that come with, and I think that we are remiss if we don't acknowledge, here are the ways I've struggled, here are the ways I've been really privileged. And here's ways in which I can use that privilege to influence how the pattern goes forward.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:38:02]:
And I like what you're saying about kind of looking at the things that are in your domain or are possible within your sphere of influence to do. Because the other thing that I thought of when I was reading your bit about fractals was the idea of fractals as microcosm. And there's a quote from Buddhist traditions, and it's been co opted by lots of different people, and maybe even the Buddhist thing isn't fair, but that's where I encountered it. And it's how you do anything is how you do everything, which also then makes me think about I don't know if you've read Adrian Marie Brown's book, Emergent Strategy, but one of the themes from that book is small is good, small is all. And I took that to mean I interpreted that to mean know, all we can do is what we can do. And there is actually immense power and responsibility in the actions that we can control. And we don't need to necessarily get lost in things that are so big that they feel intractable.
Amy Hallberg [00:39:04]:
I think that's everything. I think that's absolutely everything. What's the little thing? And it all adds up. But if we don't do the small thing, we got nothing. Well, thank you so much. It's so much fun to hand over the hosting and to let you just talk about my book and to see what you saw in it. And I'm delighted that you saw what you did. So thank you so much.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:39:30]:
Yeah. Would you want me to read the blurb that I wrote for you just to tantalize people? Is it too embarrassing?
Amy Hallberg [00:39:39]:
I would love that.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:39:41]:
I'm going to make you blush.
Amy Hallberg [00:39:43]:
Let's land on that. I would love to blush. I could blush all day.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:39:46]:
Okay. So, Amy, you asked me to blurb your book, and I was very honored. And so this is what I sent over to you. Amy Halberg offers us stories of family and self with a willingness to wade through the messy parts. She explores how from the ashes of one dream, another was born. This book asks us to consider the forces that shape us and how we can shape ourselves.
Amy Hallberg [00:40:12]:
That's the whole conversation right there. Thank you, Emily.
Emily P. G. Erickson [00:40:16]:
Thank you, Amy. Thanks for having me on.
Amy Hallberg [00:40:20]:
Thanks for listening to courageous wordsmith. Today's Episode featured emily p g erickson. You can read about her and check out her links in the show notes backstage at Courageous Wordsmith. My editor is the talented Will Qui.
Amy Hallberg [00:40:37]:
And my producer is the wonderful Brooke Roy.
Amy Hallberg [00:40:41]:
If you enjoy this podcast, you can help it thrive and grow. Please tell your friends and sign up for my email so that you'll hear about future episodes. And if you're feeling the call to write, join us in our free community for real life writers. You'll find these links right on this page. You can learn more about me and my books and my work with book writers@amyhalberg.com. I am Amy Hallberg, and until we meet again, travel safely.