Beth Cregan of Write Away With Me and I co-host The Writing Road Trip. Beth and I co-write together in the mornings virtually via Zoom. We’ve completed three books between us in 2021 and we’ve found community and partnership helps get writing happening and books written. So from this, we’ve shaped up exactly what helped us into an exciting new community writing program in 2022.
So join us. Get on our email list now and we’ll send you information and inspiration for your writing journey:
The Writing Road Trip is an exciting collaboration for Beth Cregan and me. We have created exactly what we found worked when we faced the task of writing and completing our books together.
The program has three components that we plan to keep cycling through so join us at any time. Join the email list to keep in touch with what’s available. Here are the three components!
We kick off with a free writing challenge focusing on writing identity, a two week challenge helps you explore your relationship with writing and your unique writing identity. Whatever stage you are at in your writing journey, this is a powerful foundation for your writing.
Then we have a six-week Writing Road Map course that helps you zero in on your purpose and direction. We work on: creating your vision, getting in flow, mindset, creativity for the long-haul and sharing your work with the world. It helps you map the writing journey your way with the support of community.
The Writing Road Trip is a longer community program for extended support as you write featuring virtual writing retreats, community calls to check in on your writing progress and writing input as required based on what you need!
We are kicking off on the Writing Road Trip in May 2022! So get on the email list for the latest news as well as regular writing inspiration and tips from us.
Here’s a map of where the Writing Road Trip is going in 2022:
Watch us chatting about the program here on YouTube
The transcript of the conversation is below if you prefer to read or read along.
Transcript of our conversation
Beth Cregan: Now just waiting. I think we’re going to get Terri up on screen any minute. There we go. We did it. So welcome to anybody who’s watching this live. And also to anybody who might catch up on this, on the replay. We’re so thrilled to have you here and you can tell by our smiles that we’re really excited to be spending this time and telling you what we’ve been planning over the last weeks and months. So I’m Beth from Write Away with Me.
Terri Connellan: And I’m Terri Connellan from Quiet Writing and it’s fantastic to be on Instagram live together. This is our first time popping on together and we’ve had a lot of laughs getting connected and things organised, but it’s great to be with you Beth, and to be sharing our story.
Beth Cregan: Exactly. And I think what we’d really like to start with is to tell you a little bit about how this program came to be, because we have developed something that comes from our experience of writing successfully together and finishing our books. And we’re hoping it will really inspire you to join us next year and take out your writing program.
So if we zoom back to the beginning of last year, I had a draft of a book and a publishing contract, and I was just beginning to restructure that book when COVID hit. And of course, all of our lives changed dramatically. And I was at home overwhelmed and anxious and really wondering how I was going to make my commitment of finishing this book.
Then it really became important to me, or it became obvious to me that I needed support. And I put out a call to writers I knew in my circle to see if anybody wanted to write in the mornings together online. And that was how Terri and I first connected. We knew each other, but that was how we connected in terms of our writing together. And other people came in and out of that group, but we hung in there, didn’t we Terri?
Terri Connellan: We did.
I think the fact that we were both writing books, like we both had a long haul writing project really kept us engaged with that support for each other.
I know for me, for my situation, I was writing two books at once. And I think when we connected, I was well through the draft of one and the other, I still had to do quite a lot of work on. So it was actually quite a hard slog at the time when we connected, because it was working through the editing when you’re going over and over and over drafts. And when I went through that process, it was quite challenging. So to have people who you can connect with really helps with that and getting up early and writing with you really helped to get that writing done. It was so much more fun.
Beth Cregan: Absolutely. That was my sense of it too. And now end of if that was somewhere in the midst of 2020, now we’re at the end of 2021. And I have my book now finished and going through its final edit with the publisher and Terri, tell everybody your great news too.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. I was able to get two books finished at once. So ‘Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition‘ and accompanying workbook, which I worked on in conjunction and they were published by the kind press in September this year 2021 and that’s after four and a half, five years of writing. So yeah, it was fantastic to have that support to be able to finish that work. So, yeah. Thanks for being there. And it’s great to share our story.
Beth Cregan: And I think that it is the things that we learned during that time that helped us achieve our goals.
And it became, I think really obvious to both of us that we’d cracked a code that really made the difference for us and that we could then offer what we had learned to others to help them on their writing journey, to guide and support them.
I know for me, that time in the morning felt really sacred. It felt like a safe space. It felt like a creative space and it wasn’t just the opportunity to work and, and know that somebody was holding space with you at the same time and offering you that courage but I think it was just our conversations. We’d have a break and it was our conversations that made all the difference.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. And I think for me it was definitely that accountability of getting up early to write, but also very much the camaraderie around writing. So that ability to one, write together, but also just to stop and have conversations about what was hard, what was easy, what we were learning. We often think writing’s a really solitary process. Obviously there’s aspects of it that are, but there’s plenty of aspects of writing that are supported by being with other people. And, people talk about how lonely it is. It can be super lonely and I think having community on the journey can help us incredibly. So, yeah. So it’s like a magic sauce, Beth, that we want to share with others.
Beth Cregan: Yes, absolutely. And I know for me, it was the fact that there was somebody just ahead of me in the journey that made such a difference because the overwhelming part is that you don’t quite know. It’s an organic process and you don’t quite know how it’s going to come together. So just having you one step or two steps ahead meant that I had a path forming and it normalized what I was doing, the overwhelm, the fear that dealing with my inner critic, the resistance. It really normalized all of those things because I knew that you were feeling them too.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely.
That sense of, you’re not alone and it’s quite a normal part of the journey. Yeah, I think the idea of normalising, it’s really important. Also for me, I never went into any session or any times we were writing together without having a note pad or pencil beside me, where I was writing down a whole list: here’s a great podcast, here’s a great book.
And I know you recommended Anne Janzer’s The Writer’s Process. To me, that’s been such a fantastic inspirational book for my journey and for my sharing with others. So I think just sharing insights about writing and resources helped incredibly too. So it’s a whole lot of things, isn’t it?
Beth Cregan: Well, the combined resources was just an absolute bonus because I now have bookshelves and kindles full of things that I know you found helpful and no doubt you have the same experience because everybody finds their own, you know, they follow different people. They find their own magic in whatever resources they use. And then we had the chance to pull those together and share them, which was really fantastic.
Terri Connellan: So it might be time for us to share about what we’re thinking of or what we’re planning to offer all these great experiences that we’ve had. What we found was that from that we’re able to create a program that’s something that we wish we had while we were going through the process.
Beth Cregan: I think every time we’ve got together to work and dream up this program cause it’s been a Thursday afternoon burst of inspiration when we get together and do it. And every time I finish, I think, man, I wish I had this when I was writing or when I was doing this journey, because it’s exactly what I would have needed to help me along my way. So how about I start by just talking a little bit about the challenge.
The program will have three parts and we’re going to start with a live challenge. It will involve six free activities or workshops over two weeks. And that’s just to ride the energy of the new year, and get everybody thinking about what their writing goals might be for the year. How they feel as a writer, what is their writing identity as well as just inspire and spark imaginations and creativity. So that will involve lots of hands-on writing and interactive opportunities, which will be really fun way to start the program.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. It’s called The Writing Road Trip, the whole program. The first part is really a bit of way-finding, like getting a compass, getting all the travel books out and deciding where you might go. But again, having fellow travellers, even at the early stage of the journey to have a chat about what you’re thinking about, how you feel about yourself as a writer, as Beth said, and then we thought we’d build on that with a six week more intensive course, which is a Roadmap. And that’s really about creating the shape of your project and what it might look like. So in that program, we’ll have a look at things like, what your purpose is, what your why is, what the steps might be, what do you want to do with what you write?
My journey has been very much that, knowing what I want to do with it at the end, I needed to know a bit at the beginning or at least have some idea. Do you want to publish? How do you want to publish? And we’re talking in this, it could be a book, but it could also be blog project. It could be feature articles, series of feature articles, could be social media. It could be writing a course, any sort of writing. So in that six weeks Roadmap program, we’ll be looking at: what you want to do, where you might go, why it’s important to you, because one thing I’ve found, and I know you have too, Beth, is that knowing our why really helps us on the whole journey.
Beth Cregan: Yeah. And I love the imagery of the road trip because I think it was born out of a time when we were quite stationary with lockdown and road tripping was completely off the agenda.
But writing is a journey and creating any sort of project and finishing any sort of project, I think, is a transformational journey. So it feels so right to have that image as our starting point.
And then once we’ve done that six weeks together where we will really shape and map out where you’re going and what you want to do with your project, then we have a six month community. And in that community and program, that membership, you’ll have a chance to meet other writers, to work together, to be accountable to each other, to listen to other guest speakers who arecoming into that space, to share our resources.
So, not only will you have the opportunity to connect with our guests, but you’ll have a wide library of resources that we can share with you. And also, which I think will be really helpful because it’s what we have done. And we still do many mornings every week is to have virtual retreats where we come together and we’re online in our own space, but we’re working together and sharing what we’re doing, our goals and our intentions and carving out space, making that container to allow the writing to happen. So that to me is a really important part of this journey because I don’t think I realized until we started working together, Terri, just how I’ve given lip service to community, but I don’t think I really understood it. And now I really do see that that makes all the difference.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. Yeah. I’ve often been envious of people who have writing groups and join together to to write. And particularly with the way things work now that we are perhaps not connecting as much or traveling across the world, or as you said, actually doing road trips as much, being able to connect virtually and write together, have community together and connect asynchronously as well as at the same time, it’s been absolutely perfect. And I know one of my clients said to me, I didn’t think I had time for a group program, I just wanted to get the writing done. And I think that’s, our tendency is to want to put our head down and just get the writing done.
But I think our experiences have taught us that to have connection to someone who knows what’s happening on the journey to talk through, when you get to the really difficult things, to be able to have a safe space to be heard, you don’t always have to solve the problems, but it’s just not having it rattling around inside your head can make a huge difference.
And I think we’ve both said without each other, we wouldn’t be where we are today with the projects that we’ve done. So that’s what we really hope to share with the community work. And yeah, that idea of being connected with creativity.
Beth Cregan: I think if you imagine writing as flow and we often talk about creative flow, I feel like community removes many of the obstacles. For me, it really allows the writing when you have that space to write, you actually use your time really productively, because you have a lot of your other needs met in that community space.
Terri Connellan: I think I’ve said to you before that, we’d get up early, six at the moment. If you’re not there and I get up early, I just faff around. It’s just amazing that having someone there, you know, we write for 25 minutes, we have a break. These are the sort of practices we can share with people. Another thing we’ve talked about doing is buddying people up potentially, if people are interested in this sort of experience we’ve had, because it’s made all the difference.
Beth Cregan: Yeah and I know we were talking this morning about the fact that we’re in the middle of a reno and our, Terri and my, writing time hasn’t been happening. And my rest of the day doesn’t feel the same and it is nowhere near as productive as having that regular routine. So it’s reminded me once again, that a writing practice is made up of so many elements that fit together. And once you get what’s right for you, what you need to move forward. So we hoping that you will be interested in joining us. We’re going to be kicking off at the end of Jan with our challenge, and you can be part of that free challenge and have the opportunity to come and work with us and see what it’s like to have that experience.
Terri Connellan: And so the first step today we’re opening the waitlist, which is really exciting. So inviting you to come on the Road Trip with us. So we’ve both popped the links in our bios and that waitlist information tells you about the program. There’s quite a lot of information there in that post if you have a look and then there’s an opportunity just to join our email list, which is a joint email list. Beth and I have our own businesses, our own email lists. This is a unique one, unique to Writing Road Trip. So we’ll just be sending information out about the Road Trip and, and writing inspiration tips to inspire you particularly about community.
Beth Cregan: And we would love you to join us and have an opportunity to be supported by the lessons that we’ve learned along the way to finish. You finished your two books and I think you’re nearly working on the third.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, I am. Yeah, it’s happening in the background. So again, it’s whatever projects and it’s not genre specific. I think that’s something too we want to mention to people. We’re not going to be talking about say, novel writing specifically. But you could be writing a novel, it’s certainly a goal of mine next year. Mm. But whatever writing it is, we’re here to support you around the writing process generally, the community, the support. We’re both writing teachers by background. We’ve told you about ourselves in that landing page (waitlist page). I’m a coach and teacher and Beth also is mentoring and many years’ experience as a teacher. So together, we bring a fantastic skillset too. And of course everyone who joins brings their wisdom. That’s what I love about group programs. We met through a group program, didn’t we Beth?
Beth Cregan:
And we really feel like this will be a co-creation. We will set that structure up and use what we know in that space or share what we know in that space, but it really will be created with everybody and what they bring into that program as well, which is really exciting.
Terri Connellan: It is absolutely. So yes, we hope you’ll join us. So as I said, we’ll both put a post up today kicking off the waitlist. So any questions feel free to pop them in now, or we can pick them up on our respective Instagram profiles. So look forward to connecting with you and to going on a Road Trip with you, writing away.
Beth Cregan: Totally!. And have a great day and any questions, please shoot them our way. We’d love to answer them. And we’d love to see you on that wait list so that you can get more information as it comes into the world. Yeah. Bye.
We hope you’ll join us!
You can get on the email list here and find our more about us and the program here:
I’m joining forces with Beth Cregan of Write Away With Me to co-host The Writing Road Trip in 2022. Beth and I co-write together in the mornings virtually via Zoom. We’ve completed three books between us in 2021 and we’ve found community and partnership helps get writing happening and books written. So from this, we’ve shaped up exactly what helped us into an exciting new community writing program in 2022.
We kick off today 31 January! So join us. Get on our email list now and we’ll send you all the information and links to join in:
The Writing Road Trip is an exciting new collaboration for Beth Cregan and me. We have created exactly what we found worked when we faced the task of writing and completing our books together.
The program kicks off with a free writing challenge focusing on writing identity. This two week challenge helps you explore your relationship with writing and your unique writing identity. Whatever stage you are at in your writing journey, this is a powerful foundation for your writing for 2022.
We want to challenge you, nurture your creativity and provide opportunities to connect with other writers in a positive and affirming community.
Here’s what you need to know:
✍🏼 The Challenge goes from Monday 31 Jan to Friday 11 Feb.
✍🏼There are 6 x 30 minute live workshops Tues Wed Thurs each week.
✍🏼 Workshops are live at 7pm AEDT Sydney/Melb via Zoom + recorded.
✍🏼 Each workshop has a key focus, writing prompt & time to chat.
✍🏼 The private Facebook group is open for further connection & exploration.
✍🏼 The Challenge Workbook is ready for you to download.
Don’t forget to add us to your contacts so our emails land in your inbox.
The Challenge is free so connect with us, to get writing in 2022.
If you are already on our email list, then check out today’s email with all the Go Live links. DM us if you haven’t received it for any reason! We don’t want you to miss out.
Watch us chatting about the program here on YouTube
The transcript of the conversation is below if you prefer to read or read along.
Transcript of our conversation
Beth Cregan: Now just waiting. I think we’re going to get Terri up on screen any minute. There we go. We did it. So welcome to anybody who’s watching this live. And also to anybody who might catch up on this, on the replay. We’re so thrilled to have you here and you can tell by our smiles that we’re really excited to be spending this time and telling you what we’ve been planning over the last weeks and months. So I’m Beth from Write Away with Me.
Terri Connellan: And I’m Terri Connellan from Quiet Writing and it’s fantastic to be on Instagram live together. This is our first time popping on together and we’ve had a lot of laughs getting connected and things organised, but it’s great to be with you Beth, and to be sharing our story.
Beth Cregan: Exactly. And I think what we’d really like to start with is to tell you a little bit about how this program came to be, because we have developed something that comes from our experience of writing successfully together and finishing our books. And we’re hoping it will really inspire you to join us next year and take out your writing program.
So if we zoom back to the beginning of last year, I had a draft of a book and a publishing contract, and I was just beginning to restructure that book when COVID hit. And of course, all of our lives changed dramatically. And I was at home overwhelmed and anxious and really wondering how I was going to make my commitment of finishing this book.
Then it really became important to me, or it became obvious to me that I needed support. And I put out a call to writers I knew in my circle to see if anybody wanted to write in the mornings together online. And that was how Terri and I first connected. We knew each other, but that was how we connected in terms of our writing together. And other people came in and out of that group, but we hung in there, didn’t we Terri?
Terri Connellan: We did.
I think the fact that we were both writing books, like we both had a long haul writing project really kept us engaged with that support for each other.
I know for me, for my situation, I was writing two books at once. And I think when we connected, I was well through the draft of one and the other, I still had to do quite a lot of work on. So it was actually quite a hard slog at the time when we connected, because it was working through the editing when you’re going over and over and over drafts. And when I went through that process, it was quite challenging. So to have people who you can connect with really helps with that and getting up early and writing with you really helped to get that writing done. It was so much more fun.
Beth Cregan: Absolutely. That was my sense of it too. And now end of if that was somewhere in the midst of 2020, now we’re at the end of 2021. And I have my book now finished and going through its final edit with the publisher and Terri, tell everybody your great news too.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. I was able to get two books finished at once. So ‘Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition‘ and accompanying workbook, which I worked on in conjunction and they were published by the kind press in September this year 2021 and that’s after four and a half, five years of writing. So yeah, it was fantastic to have that support to be able to finish that work. So, yeah. Thanks for being there. And it’s great to share our story.
Beth Cregan: And I think that it is the things that we learned during that time that helped us achieve our goals.
And it became, I think really obvious to both of us that we’d cracked a code that really made the difference for us and that we could then offer what we had learned to others to help them on their writing journey, to guide and support them.
I know for me, that time in the morning felt really sacred. It felt like a safe space. It felt like a creative space and it wasn’t just the opportunity to work and, and know that somebody was holding space with you at the same time and offering you that courage but I think it was just our conversations. We’d have a break and it was our conversations that made all the difference.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. And I think for me it was definitely that accountability of getting up early to write, but also very much the camaraderie around writing. So that ability to one, write together, but also just to stop and have conversations about what was hard, what was easy, what we were learning. We often think writing’s a really solitary process. Obviously there’s aspects of it that are, but there’s plenty of aspects of writing that are supported by being with other people. And, people talk about how lonely it is. It can be super lonely and I think having community on the journey can help us incredibly. So, yeah. So it’s like a magic sauce, Beth, that we want to share with others.
Beth Cregan: Yes, absolutely. And I know for me, it was the fact that there was somebody just ahead of me in the journey that made such a difference because the overwhelming part is that you don’t quite know. It’s an organic process and you don’t quite know how it’s going to come together. So just having you one step or two steps ahead meant that I had a path forming and it normalized what I was doing, the overwhelm, the fear that dealing with my inner critic, the resistance. It really normalized all of those things because I knew that you were feeling them too.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely.
That sense of, you’re not alone and it’s quite a normal part of the journey. Yeah, I think the idea of normalising, it’s really important. Also for me, I never went into any session or any times we were writing together without having a note pad or pencil beside me, where I was writing down a whole list: here’s a great podcast, here’s a great book.
And I know you recommended Anne Janzer’s The Writer’s Process. To me, that’s been such a fantastic inspirational book for my journey and for my sharing with others. So I think just sharing insights about writing and resources helped incredibly too. So it’s a whole lot of things, isn’t it?
Beth Cregan: Well, the combined resources was just an absolute bonus because I now have bookshelves and kindles full of things that I know you found helpful and no doubt you have the same experience because everybody finds their own, you know, they follow different people. They find their own magic in whatever resources they use. And then we had the chance to pull those together and share them, which was really fantastic.
Terri Connellan: So it might be time for us to share about what we’re thinking of or what we’re planning to offer all these great experiences that we’ve had. What we found was that from that we’re able to create a program that’s something that we wish we had while we were going through the process.
Beth Cregan: I think every time we’ve got together to work and dream up this program cause it’s been a Thursday afternoon burst of inspiration when we get together and do it. And every time I finish, I think, man, I wish I had this when I was writing or when I was doing this journey, because it’s exactly what I would have needed to help me along my way. So how about I start by just talking a little bit about the challenge.
The program will have three parts and we’re going to start with a live challenge. It will involve six free activities or workshops over two weeks. And that’s just to ride the energy of the new year, and get everybody thinking about what their writing goals might be for the year. How they feel as a writer, what is their writing identity as well as just inspire and spark imaginations and creativity. So that will involve lots of hands-on writing and interactive opportunities, which will be really fun way to start the program.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. It’s called The Writing Road Trip, the whole program. The first part is really a bit of way-finding, like getting a compass, getting all the travel books out and deciding where you might go. But again, having fellow travellers, even at the early stage of the journey to have a chat about what you’re thinking about, how you feel about yourself as a writer, as Beth said, and then we thought we’d build on that with a six week more intensive course, which is a Roadmap. And that’s really about creating the shape of your project and what it might look like. So in that program, we’ll have a look at things like, what your purpose is, what your why is, what the steps might be, what do you want to do with what you write?
My journey has been very much that, knowing what I want to do with it at the end, I needed to know a bit at the beginning or at least have some idea. Do you want to publish? How do you want to publish? And we’re talking in this, it could be a book, but it could also be blog project. It could be feature articles, series of feature articles, could be social media. It could be writing a course, any sort of writing. So in that six weeks Roadmap program, we’ll be looking at: what you want to do, where you might go, why it’s important to you, because one thing I’ve found, and I know you have too, Beth, is that knowing our why really helps us on the whole journey.
Beth Cregan: Yeah. And I love the imagery of the road trip because I think it was born out of a time when we were quite stationary with lockdown and road tripping was completely off the agenda.
But writing is a journey and creating any sort of project and finishing any sort of project, I think, is a transformational journey. So it feels so right to have that image as our starting point.
And then once we’ve done that six weeks together where we will really shape and map out where you’re going and what you want to do with your project, then we have a six month community. And in that community and program, that membership, you’ll have a chance to meet other writers, to work together, to be accountable to each other, to listen to other guest speakers who arecoming into that space, to share our resources.
So, not only will you have the opportunity to connect with our guests, but you’ll have a wide library of resources that we can share with you. And also, which I think will be really helpful because it’s what we have done. And we still do many mornings every week is to have virtual retreats where we come together and we’re online in our own space, but we’re working together and sharing what we’re doing, our goals and our intentions and carving out space, making that container to allow the writing to happen. So that to me is a really important part of this journey because I don’t think I realized until we started working together, Terri, just how I’ve given lip service to community, but I don’t think I really understood it. And now I really do see that that makes all the difference.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. Yeah. I’ve often been envious of people who have writing groups and join together to to write. And particularly with the way things work now that we are perhaps not connecting as much or traveling across the world, or as you said, actually doing road trips as much, being able to connect virtually and write together, have community together and connect asynchronously as well as at the same time, it’s been absolutely perfect. And I know one of my clients said to me, I didn’t think I had time for a group program, I just wanted to get the writing done. And I think that’s, our tendency is to want to put our head down and just get the writing done.
But I think our experiences have taught us that to have connection to someone who knows what’s happening on the journey to talk through, when you get to the really difficult things, to be able to have a safe space to be heard, you don’t always have to solve the problems, but it’s just not having it rattling around inside your head can make a huge difference.
And I think we’ve both said without each other, we wouldn’t be where we are today with the projects that we’ve done. So that’s what we really hope to share with the community work. And yeah, that idea of being connected with creativity.
Beth Cregan: I think if you imagine writing as flow and we often talk about creative flow, I feel like community removes many of the obstacles. For me, it really allows the writing when you have that space to write, you actually use your time really productively, because you have a lot of your other needs met in that community space.
Terri Connellan: I think I’ve said to you before that, we’d get up early, six at the moment. If you’re not there and I get up early, I just faff around. It’s just amazing that having someone there, you know, we write for 25 minutes, we have a break. These are the sort of practices we can share with people. Another thing we’ve talked about doing is buddying people up potentially, if people are interested in this sort of experience we’ve had, because it’s made all the difference.
Beth Cregan: Yeah and I know we were talking this morning about the fact that we’re in the middle of a reno and our, Terri and my, writing time hasn’t been happening. And my rest of the day doesn’t feel the same and it is nowhere near as productive as having that regular routine. So it’s reminded me once again, that a writing practice is made up of so many elements that fit together. And once you get what’s right for you, what you need to move forward. So we hoping that you will be interested in joining us. We’re going to be kicking off at the end of Jan with our challenge, and you can be part of that free challenge and have the opportunity to come and work with us and see what it’s like to have that experience.
Terri Connellan: And so the first step today we’re opening the waitlist, which is really exciting. So inviting you to come on the Road Trip with us. So we’ve both popped the links in our bios and that waitlist information tells you about the program. There’s quite a lot of information there in that post if you have a look and then there’s an opportunity just to join our email list, which is a joint email list. Beth and I have our own businesses, our own email lists. This is a unique one, unique to Writing Road Trip. So we’ll just be sending information out about the Road Trip and, and writing inspiration tips to inspire you particularly about community.
Beth Cregan: And we would love you to join us and have an opportunity to be supported by the lessons that we’ve learned along the way to finish. You finished your two books and I think you’re nearly working on the third.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, I am. Yeah, it’s happening in the background. So again, it’s whatever projects and it’s not genre specific. I think that’s something too we want to mention to people. We’re not going to be talking about say, novel writing specifically. But you could be writing a novel, it’s certainly a goal of mine next year. Mm. But whatever writing it is, we’re here to support you around the writing process generally, the community, the support. We’re both writing teachers by background. We’ve told you about ourselves in that landing page (waitlist page). I’m a coach and teacher and Beth also is mentoring and many years’ experience as a teacher. So together, we bring a fantastic skillset too. And of course everyone who joins brings their wisdom. That’s what I love about group programs. We met through a group program, didn’t we Beth?
Beth Cregan:
And we really feel like this will be a co-creation. We will set that structure up and use what we know in that space or share what we know in that space, but it really will be created with everybody and what they bring into that program as well, which is really exciting.
Terri Connellan: It is absolutely. So yes, we hope you’ll join us. So as I said, we’ll both put a post up today kicking off the waitlist. So any questions feel free to pop them in now, or we can pick them up on our respective Instagram profiles. So look forward to connecting with you and to going on a Road Trip with you, writing away.
Beth Cregan: Totally!. And have a great day and any questions, please shoot them our way. We’d love to answer them. And we’d love to see you on that wait list so that you can get more information as it comes into the world. Yeah. Bye.
Here’s a map of where the Writing Road Trip is going in 2022:
We hope you’ll join us!
You can get on the email list here and find our more about us and the program here:
Welcome to Episode 6 of the Create Your Story Podcast on Writing Together and in Community.
In this episode, I’m joined by Beth Cregan of Write Away With Me – writer, writing teacher, mentor and workshop leader, and soon to be published author—and my morning co-writing buddy and collaborator for the upcoming Writing Road Trip kicking off in late January 2022.
You can listen above or via your favourite podcast app. And/or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.
Welcome to Episode 6 of the Create Your Story Podcast and it’s the 20th of December as I record this and we’re steadily marching towards Christmas. I hope things are not too frantic for you and that you are able to find some quiet spaces in your days and time to read, write and reflect on the year that’s nearly complete and the year to come.
I’m thrilled to have my friend Beth Cregan join us for the podcast today. To introduce Beth:
Twelve years ago Beth combined her passion for creativity with her great love of writing to launch her business, ‘Write Away With Me’. Since then, she’s presented hundreds of writing workshops to inspire and encourage young writers to find their voice, develop their writing skills and connect with their inner storyteller. Her work has branched out to include presenting writing workshops for adults of all ages and stages and taking on the role of a writing mentor. She believes writing simply makes life better so in 2017, she set out on a journey to write a book to inspire teachers to develop a daily authentic writing practice in their classrooms. Soon to be published in 2022 by Hawker Brownlow Education, writing this book was a transformational experience both personally and professionally. Beth lives in Melbourne.
Beth and I have a special relationship as early morning co-writers. We’ve never met in person but for many months now as we’ve both written our books, we’ve got up to greet each other at 5:30am or 6am, connecting via Zoom and dawn writing virtually in 25-minute bursts. In between we have the most fantastic chats on writing, editing, publishing and life. Today we will be chatting writing, co-writing, editing and working collaboratively as part of our wholehearted journeys. I am so excited we can share some of the joy and insights from our early morning private chats more publicly with you today.
Beth and I are also collaborating and co-hosting a community writing program The Writing Road Trip that kicks off in late January 2022 with a free 6-day challenge on your writing identity followed by a 6 week course to shape your Writing Roadmap and then a 6 month community program. If you’d like to join us or are just interested to find out more, head to The Writing Road Trip waitlist link in the show notes on QuietWriting.com. Or you can find the link in my bio on Instagram where I am @writingquietly and of course all the links to connect us with both are in the show notes. Before we head into the podcast, warmest wishes to you for this festive and holiday season. I hope you get to send time with loved ones and curl up with a good book or two. Thank you for listening and connecting with me, Quiet Writing and the Create Your Story Podcast. It means so much to me. So now let’s head into the interview!
Transcript of interview with Beth Cregan
Terri Connellan: Hello, Beth. And welcome to the Create Your Story Podcast. And thank you so much for your support of me and my book Wholehearted, especially as morning writing buddies.
Beth Cregan: It’s a pleasure to be here and it’s a pleasure to be here in daylight hours!
Terri Connellan: Yes. We usually catch up first thing in the morning at about five thirty or six in the dark. So yeah, so it’s good to connect and we’ll talk about that more as we go through. We’ve had lots of conversations about writing, editing, publishing, and so much more on our journey together so it’s great for us to be able to share some of those conversations with people today. So can you, as a starting point fill everyone in on how you got to be, where you are, what you do and your new book.
Beth Cregan: I trained as a kindergarten and primary teacher. So that was like 35 years ago and after I’d been teaching for a few years, I had a gap year in Asia, and I wrote every day. So I’d always loved writing, but it wasn’t so much of a daily practice. And then while I was away, I had that experience of making writing really part of my life.
So I came back and taught, but when I had Molly, my first daughter, I decided that perhaps I’d like to reinvent myself a little. I wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t teach, but I wanted to do something a little bit different. So I started to study professional writing and I loved it.
I loved everything about it. I loved being a student. I loved talking about writing, but I think perhaps the biggest part of that was that I worked out you could teach someone to write. Before then I had the experience of capturing my own thoughts, but I hadn’t really discovered that I could capture images and thread them together and make stories.
And when I realised that somebody could teach me to do that, I had that understanding that I could teach somebody also to do that. So I rather than go back into the system, I taught for a company that ran programs for gifted kids and I taught writing. So I did that and various other jobs along the way.
Then finally in I think 2010, I’d had the experience of setting up a kinder and I’d worked there for three years and I loved it. But it was where everything came together because I had the experience of running a business cause a kinder is a little like a business. So suddenly the writing and the running a business and the teaching all felt like they combined and I decided to start my own business.
So that was Write Away With Me and then I started to teach classes after school. So I had a core group of kids some of who’d been in my kindergarten groups came through into my writing classes after school. So that was lovely and then I started to also go into schools and teach writing workshops.
And from there, I also started to teach professional development workshops for teachers. So those three: my private teaching, in school teaching and working with teachers became the core of my business and my writing. And so I blogged about that and wrote newsletters. And from there, that was the start of the book really.
At first, I felt that creativity was being sidelined and it was very structured and very much based on assessment and data. And I wanted kids to have a chance to be creative and to fall in love with writing. And I had those kids after school who were kids that loved writing. And I just wanted to bring that spirit into schools. So that was my start and the book has changed and it’s something a little bit different to that now, but my original intention and it’s still the intention is to re-imagine how creativity could fit into the actual structure of our program as it stands now. So I think that answers all of those things.
Terri Connellan: Fantastic. Yes. It’s a big question, but in there, I’m just seeing writing as this thread that goes all the way through your teaching, your professional development with others, your own professional writing, learning, realising you can teach writing and then, sharing your knowledge from all that in a book. So, I love beautiful body of work focused around writing and around sharing the love too in there.
Beth Cregan: And I think writing has been my solid companion as a kid, as a teenager. Recently I spoke to, the year twelves at my school and they have a journal as part of their year 12 program. And I went back under the stairs and through all my boxes and found the journals that I had in year 12. And I realized that it’s just been there all the time, not always at the forefront, but al ways there.
Terri Connellan: It’s something that I connect with too. So it’s that idea of a body of work or ingredients or passions that keep popping up, but they take different forms that I think is something we connect. So we both have a passion for writing. We both have a love for writing, and one of the ways we connect around that is writing in the morning together.
So, Beth was already doing Dawn Writing and invited me to join. So at five thirty or six o’clock, depending on the time of year, we hop up together. I live in Sydney, Beth lives in Melbourne and we work via Zoom virtually to write. It’s a great joy. isn’t it Beth?
Beth Cregan: It is and it started so organically. It was the beginning stages of lockdown 2020. And I was talking to Sandra who joins us as well, it was just a let’s jump on and sort of connect with each other. And then that night, I just thought I’m going to do this Dawn Writers idea and invite other people to come and write with me because I felt like I really needed a structure.
I was needing to move on with my book and locked down and a house full of people all working at different places and the distractions. So it had this lovely start to it, not much thought just, sort of an idea in the shower and I had no expectations for how that would look, I think.
And, how it looks now is exactly the way it was meant to be, just a very small group of people, greeting each other at dawn and giving each other courage to work on our own projects.
Terri Connellan: It’s fantastic. And it’s been such a support for me in getting my book written and published and and I know we’re going through a similar journey, and we’re able to share experiences of particularly going through those hard, sloggy times where it feels like it’s endless, cheer each other on a bit.
Beth Cregan: Absolutely. I don’t want to say, I don’t think my book would be finished now if it wasn’t for that, because who knows how I would have wrangled it into shape, but I don’t think it would have been as joyful as it’s been and I don’t mean necessarily the writing experience has been joyful, because I think we’ve had lots of conversations about that. It’s not always joyful, but I think the conversations about writing that we have are joyful.
Terri Connellan: And I think the way we do it too, which, for people listening is like a 25 minute Pomodoro type, set a timer. And so we’re co-writing, but doing our own writing. And then at the end of the twenty-five minutes, we stop and have a chat. And often that might be what’s surfaced in the morning pages or what might be the focus of our work. So all those conversations are really helpful too. I think they take away the isolation.
Beth Cregan: They take away the isolation, and they become part of your writing identity. I think over the last, probably 18 months, at least we’ve been doing it consistently now, haven’t we? I feel like some of my real aha moments and real formative moments about writing have come from those conversations because there is something about the dawn and sort of breaking open and you’re breaking open your own day.
And there is a sort of a vulnerability about that energy. And I feel like some of the biggest things I’ve learned about myself and recorded are really important, foundational, to how I think of myself, came from those conversations.
Terri Connellan: I find that too. I’ve always got a notepad here and I’m often writing down things that might be something you say, or you recommend or a podcast. And, I think it’s too the rhythm of checking in regularly, you develop ongoing dialogue perhaps.
Beth Cregan:My book is for primary teachers, ultimately, although for any teachers at work and teach writing, but one of the chapter is about writing routines and rituals. And we don’t think always in terms of that in a primary school setting, but it has been really instrumental… it’s a rhythm and a routine for me to wake up and do a series of actions and to come in to the space where it’s usually quite dark. I only have a lamp. I do things very much the same each morning. And it means that when I sit down to do that, my brain signals, this is time to… if it’s journaling, then this is time to reflect. Or if it’s writing, this is time to think things through, this is time to brainstorm ideas. So that routine and that rhythm of, same time, same place. It’s always you and I, but other people come in and out of that as well. It’s amplified for me how important, routine and ritual is to really any sort of project that you’re working on.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. And I think it’s that idea of where practice, writing practice or practice anything, and routine come together. But routine can sound dull and boring but that idea of practice and craft showing up to the page.
Beth Cregan: It does feel like in its own way, it feels like it’s sacred. And I think we’ve talked about this recently, that it feels somehow, it’s not religious or spiritual experience, but it is the regularity of a form of worship with words really and turning up to do that, making space to do that every day or five days and the days that we give ourselves off to sleep in.
Terri Connellan: And I know we often get to the end of that, it might be an hour and a half might be an hour, whatever we choose to do and say, well, that’s great. We’ve done the important thing for the day. And I think it gives you a bit of a headstart.
Beth Cregan: It does. On the days when I don’t do it, it feels like a slippery time in terms of settling down and getting work done. I’ll find myself sort of nine 30 and then suddenly I’ll do something else and it’ll be 10. Whereas when I have that start, I do go and do something afterwards. I usually have a bit of time out, cause it’s quite focused, even if you’re doing morning pages, it’s a real focus sort of time. So I usually take my stuff away, but when I come back, I’m in that zone of ready to go. I’m not all over the place. I’m not scattered. When I don’t do it, I have that feeling of being a little bit scattered and it takes me probably an hour or more to settle into my day. Whereas I think we’ve already done that by the time we have breakfast. That’s a bonus.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, I totally relate to that. And I think it’s that accountability to each other, but accountability to the practice too, which is great. Yeah. Some people have asked us about how hard it is to get up early and write. And, I think we’ve found that it’s not so hard, the more you do it. So what would you say motivates you or makes it easy to get up?
Beth Cregan: Well we were talking recently at your launch about morning and evening. And I think I wasn’t perhaps always a morning person because I know when my kids were little, they used to go to bed quite early and I used to have the evening where I would do creative things or whatever I was doing.
But I think over the years I’ve become a bit of a morning person. So the actual getting up naturally isn’t that difficult, but in 2016, I got acquainted with Ayurveda and they have a real teaching about greeting the day and various routines that you do. So I was already in that frame of mind. So getting up wasn’t such a problem, but I do think that once you start to wake up early and you do it consistently, you do find yourself going to bed earlier. I find when I get out of the habit of it, I think over January, when we had a break, I found myself going to bed at like 1130, midnight and sleeping in.
But when you actually get in that habit, you naturally can’t last long past 9: 30, 10, and then I just have everything set up, ready to go. I’m not a crazy organized person, but I usually spend a few minutes getting my teapot ready, getting my drink bottle, ready, making sure I’ve got room to balance a computer somewhere. I have my Ayurvedic routines that I might do already in the one spot. So I find that makes it easier. Just to not be scrambling for things. So I never have that sense that I’m belting down to turn on the computer in the nick of time. I always feel like it’s a smooth transition.
Terri Connellan: What I’m hearing from you is what I’ve learned too, and also working with clients is it’s what you do the night before really helps with the morning. The morning routine starts with the evening routine. And it was funny, we only talked about it at the virtual launch, but I do the same thing. I always make sure my clothes are there. I make sure the kettle’s filled up, the cup’s there. It’s got the teabag in and I just know there’s a set number of things and in a way that’s actually lovely. It’s nice. Cause you don’t get distracted. You’re just there to do that. And I said to you, I think this morning when we were talking that if I don’t have the accountability of you being there, I might get up early, but I tend to faff around. I think it helps to focus.
Beth Cregan: Yes, it does. And I think when I don’t have somebody else there, I don’t do the twenty-five bursts in the morning. I do sometimes do that during the day by myself, but in the morning I don’t tend to do it. And I think that does sort of lead you, the 25 minutes is a really good container for pouring things out. So yeah, I’m a bit the same. If I’m by myself, I tend to go through all those steps but I don’t settle as easily, I think, because part of the routine isn’t quite there.
Terri Connellan: For sure. So tell us more about your book and where you’re up to in the writing.
Beth Cregan: Well, as of today, I had the last 800 words or so, which were the conclusion. And I don’t know if you felt like this, but I felt a bit teary today just finishing off that last 800 words, because this piece of writing, this project, has been such a companion through lockdown. And we haven’t always seen eye to eye and it’s sometimes been a bit of a love, hate relationship, but we’ve had each other’s back the whole two years or close to two years.
So it felt great to start piecing that bit of writing together but I realized that I’d left it for a while and I think it was because I just didn’t want to sign off on that container that has really held my work and my life together, cause I haven’t been able to work in schools consistently.
So I’ve just finished that and the rest of the book has just undergone the first full structural edit where you move everything around and check your arguments and all those sorts of things. So, I know you, and I always say this that, you finish one part and you go, oh, that’s that? And I finished my book and then you find that you haven’t quite finished your book. So I feel like I’ve been saying I finished for a long time. But I think the gritty writing part of it is finished or close to finished.
And the book is about the importance of developing a daily writing practice in your classroom. It has prompts and ideas and activities, whereas we tend to work on our own, generate our own, writing projects. It’s not dissimilar in a way to what we do. I think when I first started it, I saw it very much as being the way to balance standardized testing. And in the re- writing cause I’ve actually restructured the whole book from the original manuscript, I had to really try and find a way to make it doable for teachers. So it’s really about how you could do a daily writing practice in that first 15 minutes of the day or, or some time in the day. So how you could actually make sure that your kids had that opportunity to interact with writing away from obvious assessment and how they could learn to develop their own processes.
Because often in a classroom, you’re providing one way of doing things. Whereas this is very much about kids learning to appreciate their own creative processes and have the sorts of conversations that we’re having in the morning, that form writing identity that get them to think about how they interact with writing.
So I guess my goal is to have a group of people that don’t see writing as something that happens in a classroom. That they see, like we’ve discussed, writing as a thread that will run through their lives in all different ways. That would be my greatest wish for that book.
Terri Connellan: What a brilliant goal to have for your book and to bring all your body of work as a teacher and a writer to share that love.
Beth Cregan: I have a love affair with capturing ideas. I like to think. And so I think writing is a way of capturing ideas and playing with words and I do really love that. I think writing makes life better, much better. And I think we could solve a lot of problems if people not necessarily wrote at 5:30 in the morning, but had time to think on paper every day.
Terri Connellan: I totally agree. And it’s made all the difference in my life and it’s something I’ve shared about in my book too. Of my 15 wholehearted self-leadership skills for women, writing regularly, is right up there whether it’s for clarity or sorting things out. It doesn’t have to be a book.
Beth Cregan: It’s a tremendous thinking tool. I think some people do leave writing at school and they finish and they think that that’s that. But if you can write for an audience of one, you don’t have to see yourself as writing for other people. You can be a writer that just writes and thinks on paper for yourself. And I think if we could get our politicians in the habit of daily writing practice, I think we’d see some real changes in Australia.
Terri Connellan: I think we might too. It makes a huge difference. So we’ve shared the ups and downs through the long haul writing processes in working on books and we both experienced challenges in the editing phases that we’ve talked about. My journey of writing was that I found the editing so much harder than I ever thought it would be. How about you? How did you find that?
Beth Cregan: I had a slightly different experience, I think, because the book was picked up by a traditional publisher and the publishing house was taken over by another company. So when it was taken over, I was then given the feedback that the book as it stood needed to be restructured. So I basically had this manuscript that I had to come up with a different plan and then find bits of the book that fitted into all of those sort of chapters.
So it was a real puzzle for me. And I think that’s where Dawn Writers made such a difference in those early days, because it really took a lot of courage to get in and try and piece this together. So the editing, the structural edit and checking that everything’s matched and that I put the puzzle back together in the right way has been… yeah. I love words, but it’s been a slog, an absolute slog
Terri Connellan: I’ve used the word slogan because it is. And when we had a discussion, some in the morning and some in the virtual launch, other words come up like tenacity and resilience, but yes, when you going through it, it definitely feels like a slog.
Beth Cregan: And I think culturally, we expect things to move. We live in a fast world. We expect things to move quickly and everywhere around you, you do have information, ideas, like, write your book in 30 days. And there’s this expectation that writing can be done quickly if you’re productive. And if you put time and where I found that I did all of those things and it was slow.
And so you have to learn to be happy with progress in whatever way it takes. I don’t think I understood that unfortunately to the very end. I think in one of the conversations that we had in the morning, we talked about slow writing and that wasn’t that many weeks ago. And I think the penny dropped that my expectation of what I could do and what actually played out were quite different. So instead of being happy with where I was in the process and being in the moment, I was always berating myself for not being faster and not being more productive or not being this or not being that. And I think it might be easier the next time because I’ve had that experience of my expectations and the reality of being quite different. That’s a real mindset. Any long haul project, I think you have to really put your mind to it.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. And it’s patience, that getting frustrated with yourself because it’s not finished or it’s not this, or it’s not, that can pop up quite a lot. My particular version of that is that I made it quite tricky for myself cause I wrote this huge draft and then fortunately working with Penelope Love who received it as a friend and an editor helped me with the developmental editing to realize there was two books in there. But then we had to separate them out and then it was working on the two at one time. So I certainly didn’t make it easy for myself in that.
Beth Cregan: So sort of similar in that your manuscript was a bit of a puzzle. That first manuscript was a puzzle to put together.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. When you said puzzle, I went, yeah, that’s, that’s exactly what I experienced because what we actually did was went through and color-coded the bits that went.. We did that to the whole manuscript. Blue was the main one, pinky color was the second color. And then there was another color for things that perhaps didn’t quite go in either. It really was a puzzle.
Beth Cregan: I used to worry about this last year, and I don’t think too much about it now, but I used to think, parts of this are going to get missed. And they’re going to sort of fall off and I’m going to want them back. I don’t worry about that so much because I feel like any parts that are missed, I’ve got all the manuscripts. So they’ll be repurposed in some way, but it seemed important to me last year that I couldn’t lose any of it.
Terri Connellan: I felt that too. I have a document. I just put all the things that didn’t go anywhere else there. Yeah. Interesting. So one thing we’ve talked about on the way through was maybe doing a session of how not to write because of all the things that we’ve learned on the way through the journey. It might be nice to share with people, a few things we have learned about what not to do.
Beth Cregan: Ooh, what not to do. One of the things that is significant to my experience and perhaps it would be across genres as well is I think writing a book in the educational space has mostly a particular structure. And I didn’t understand that. I wasn’t quite aware of that. And I think perhaps if I’d have taken a step back early days and looked at what that structure might be, I perhaps wouldn’t have chosen the way that I chose to approach it.
However, the flip side of that is that I got to say it exactly how I would have said it and it has been possible to make it into a different shape. So I think rather than spend too much time worrying about it, perhaps people should jump in and know that if it’s not quite the right outline, or it’s not quite the right structure, it is possible to change, that’s the upside of it. But I feel like if I had perhaps done that, I could have saved myself a lot of time. Definitely.
And I also used an editor because I intended to self publish. I also used an editor and whilst the editor, a freelance editor, her work was fine, but I think I also needed someone who had worked in that space and who was in educational publishing. So I think that would have also, probably given me a few more clues early on that the structure might not have actually worked. So I think being a bit specific to your genre, perhaps looking at what other books in that space might look like and the structure they use and looking at who edits in that space, sort of narrows down, builds your field of expertise.
So I didn’t do that. I really sort of threw it up and did it my own way, which now I can say that it all worked out for the best, but I think I may have saved myself some time and heartache perhaps.
Terri Connellan: And as you were talking, that really resonated with my own experience – that idea of writing that very long draft and then realizing that there were two books. I had always thought about a workbook, for example, but not probably something that was a distinct, separate book that had quite a lot of content in it too. So yeah, similar learnings. Maybe it’s just part of the writing process that you create a bigger thing and you do your own way of working and then you work out what the piece wants to look like.
Beth Cregan: You could spend a lot of time and energy researching and fitting into a structure and mate, you may have to change it any way. So I think you have to start don’t you, you just have to make a start and trust that the material, if you have a strong enough connection and a strong enough will to birth it into the world, that piece of work will find its shape. I think you just have to trust that. Did you think too much about that – what you might have to do to shape it when you were writing it?
Terri Connellan: Not in the way that it happened, but I did have a strong sense of what it looks. I’ve shared on social media, the mind mapping. And I had a structure pretty early on about what I wanted it to look like. And I had that idea of being layered and spiraled, which is in there. But I think it had to evolve itself. Like you said, it had to incubate and it had to grow and I had to have life experiences to bring to it. And we’ve both read the lovely Anne Janzer’s The Writer’s Process, where she talks about it, like bread and, the idea of the dough rising, where sometimes things have to almost take on a life of their own before, when they know what to do with them.
Beth Cregan: Yes, absolutely. So I think what else would… I know we’ve had so many conversations about this and I think perhaps because I’ve just finished that last little bit of writing I’m in that optimistic space where I feel like I did everything, everything happened as it should, not necessarily that I did everything right. But everything happened to plan in some shape or form. Well, what other things have we talked about that we would do differently?
Terri Connellan: I think probably the structure is the big one that we’ve both experienced. Sounds like that’s something that you learn from experience. The next book you write will be different to the first time around or second time around. Probably some of the things we’ve talked about, the idea of that mindset around the long haul, long haul creative mindset, and just being a bit more patient.
And then the other thing too, I think, is just realizing the value of writing community andco-writing. But it took me a long time. On my journey, it’s been very much about realizing that writing is much more collaborative than I thought it was.
Beth Cregan: Yes, and I think that’s true. I did work with a mentor originally to start things off and I really liked having that comradery with somebody else. Yes, then it did feel for a long, long time like I was just left to my own devices and it’s lonely to hold faith to something that you’re not really quite sure what the outcome will be. So yeah, I think Dawn Writers always feels like an act of bravery. Community does have that sense of bravery. Doesn’t it?
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. Yeah. I think it’s realizing too, whilst we often write alone, even if we’re writing together you write alone, it’s that idea of realizing that it’s the communities or the connections. We met through a mastermind, through the Gentle Business Mastermind,, which supported me as a community. And I know supported you. So that idea of at least having somewhere where you can just say, well, this is what I’m up to. This is what I’m doing.
Beth Cregan: And we’re invested in each other’s work, you know, I think that’s what you find, that you become really interested in what you’re doing. And I’ve got to see the process unfold for you, which has been highly motivating. So yeah, the value of community and early on, the value of having that community is really important.
Terri Connellan: I wish I’d had it a bit early on in the process too. It’s been a big learning for me about, co-writing and writing community and how important it is.
So, we’re both writing teachers by background. Interestingly, I also started as an infant’s/ primary, teacher and then went into adults and then I worked in the adult literacy area. You took another path, but, I’m interested as a fellow writing teacher, how being a writing teacher helps you with your own writing?
Beth Cregan: I haven’t had afterschool classes now since the beginning of 2020, but prior to that, I would run pop up after school classes based at schools. But I also had my own group of students that followed through over years, many years, and they were my writing group really, because I would write with them. Anything that I learned at all, was interested in, I took to that group. I’m forever grateful to those parents because although I would at the beginning of the term plot out a program, but the parents were incredibly trusting of what we would achieve during that time and how it would play out.
So I had a lot of freedom. Like one time, I was reading Natalie Goldberg about walking meditation. So I decided that we would do walking meditation before we started writing. So all the things that I learnt I could bring and share in community. And although these writers were aged eight to 12 and 13, they were equally as skilled as me. So I did have that sense of meeting with another group of writers every week. But also when you’re teaching, it’s never the same. So you’re drawing on what the kids give you and you’re learning things as you go.
Once we were sharing bits of writing and talking, we ended up just talking about the power of verbs and how a verb really transported the meaning of the sentence. And it had to be quite specific. And it led me on this personal journey about verbs. So I felt like anything I learned, I brought to my classes and anything that came up at those classes became my points of curiosity. So it’s this wonderful circle of giving and taking.
I did a podcast a while ago and Ellen, who, you know, introduced me as a teacher at heart. And I thought that’s very true. I think teaching and writing have always been so important to me and it’s the teaching I learn and I never feel with teaching that it’s just something that I’m giving.
I feel even when I step into a classroom to do a workshop, I always come out knowing that I’ve discovered something new or I’ve seen something new or something has happened that keeps me company on the way home. Some student had this little piece of writing about the book of everything. And I mulled over this book of everything all the way home. So, the characters that I hear and the storylines that I get to hear just sort of play in my head on the way home.
Terri Connellan: It sounds like a wonderful dance of ideas and inspiration, imagination.
Beth Cregan: Actually that’s a beautiful image because that’s how it really does feel like, a nice sort of flow between those things.And this lovely sort of movement and choreography, some of which is planned and some of which is just moving to the music.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. Beautiful. So there’s two questions that I’m asking every guest on the Create Your Story podcast. It’s a big question, but just interested in what comes up for people. So firstly, how have you created your story of your lifetime?
Beth Cregan: I think that the beginnings of the story that I’m in now, the phase of life that I’m in now, I think part of the thread of that and perhaps part of the writing, how the writing fits into this too, is that I’m one of six kids. So four older sisters and a younger brother.
And I think when you come in at number five, some of the key archetypal roles in the family are already taken. So we already had the smart one, the super generous, the athletic, the organized. So, I never felt under pressure to do this, but I do think you try and find ways to be different and to define yourself and looking for your voice or finding your voice and being heard in that group is really important.
And I think part of what I do now with writing and what I do with teachers is about finding a voice. So I feel like find your voice has been the common thread in that story line. That’s the plot really, and it’s finding a voice through all these different mediums and elements and relationships and experiences. And I think Morning Pages, and I know that tarot is something. I had Oracle cards, but I think tarot is something that I’ve really seen and read from your book, but seeing you do, and it’s now becoming something that really inspires my intuition. So it’s not just finding your voice and speaking out, but it’s feeding and, and nurturing that inner voice, that voice of intuition.
So those tools, writing, tarot, and incubating ideas for me, gardening, all of those things are about creating something and speaking through the things that you create or the stories or whatever.
Terri Connellan: I love that thread of finding your voice in all that you do and teaching’s a way of sharing what’s important and making a difference too. So, thank you. It’s beautiful. And you’ve touched on some of these. So in Wholehearted, I talk about wholehearted self-leadership tips and we share some passions in those areas, but are there any particular top wholehearted self-leadership tips and practices, especially for women that you’d mention?
Beth Cregan: Well, I know we’ve spoken about writing, perhaps that’s probably that or some sort of daily reflection time. Perhaps for some people that’s not necessarily writing. Maybe that’s painting, maybe that’s reading, but I do think that having some time out and it doesn’t have to be long. Sometimes when we think of self care or self leadership, we imagine we need big chunks of time. And I don’t think you do need big chunks of time. I think you need to just carve out a little bit of space to hear your voice in whatever way plays out for you. Whether that’s in the garden or in the shower, wherever. Just tuning into something other than the world around you is really important to me. Perhaps it is about finding your voice, using your voice, but nurturing your voice as well.
And creativity, I think is the heart and soul of us. And I think everybody’s creative. I think some people practice creativity in different ways and their skills may be more defined in certain areas. But, we’re all creative. That is what makes us different from animals and from various other species. So I think honoring that in some way is one of the best ways that you can make your mark on the world, which is self-leadership. So whatever that is, however you decide to practice creativity and in whatever shape or form, I think those two things, taking some time to reflect and perhaps an internal response and an external response, making something, thinking about something, connecting ideas, all of those things. An internal and an external responses is a nice connection, just a way of responding, a nice response, I think to your day.
Terri Connellan: So it’s like a way of internalizing, but also bringing in like a balance thing. We know too much internal work, not externalizing can be a problem, but getting out and not taking the time to settle and integrate can be a problem too. So yeah, I think you’re right. I think it’s about that balance or of the two that makes a big difference.
Beth Cregan: And in whatever way it works for you. I think we’re spending so much time and we have so much great information at our fingertips about how people all live. And sometimes it looks like other people what they’re doing works so well and we have to try it, but, I’ll never forget when I first started yoga, I had this great teacher Rita and we were all mid pose and I’m not particularly flexible when it comes to yoga. So holding a pose for me, mid pose isn’t a fabulous way to stop. But we’re all mid pose and she stopped us and said, just out of the blue, be your own guru, stop paying so much attention to other voices and listen to your own voice. So I always have somewhere on my desk, ‘be your own guru’, because part of that internal is looking at what you already have in there.
Terri Connellan: And what the truth is for you cause we’re also different. Yeah. Beautiful. I love that. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. So, where can people find out more about you and your book and the work online?
Beth Cregan: Well I have a website, so the website is WriteAwayWithMe.com and I’m on Instagram also @write.away.with.me which is a blend of my own writing life and my work. I do run programs and hopefully we’ll run programs again in schools once we’re up and running. But I do also run programs for kids online. So if you come to the website and you can have a look and see what’s around. I’ve had a term off, but, I’ll be heading back into doing some online classes.
Terri Connellan: Great. That’s fantastic. And you and I’ve also been hatching up some plans for something very exciting together to offer next year. So shall we chat a little bit about that? So yeah, Beth and I are joining forces to offer I think the experiences of a lot of the things we’ve talked about today. That community support, skills, teaching, coaching, skills we bring together. But also, I know you and I are both big believers in creating a space, creating a container and facilitating. So that’s something with a focus on writing.
Beth Cregan: We had our first planning session yesterday. I was all buzzy by the end of the day. So it’s nothing better than having that feeling. But we’ve talked a lot together and because I’ve had this experience, I’m really keen to explore writing identity and how we view our relationship with writing and how we can build that relationship with writing. Because I know that the experience of working on a book has changed that dynamic for me completely.
I think writing has always been there, but now writing is very much part of how I see myself and that wasn’t always the case. If someone asked me what I did, I probably never said that I was a writer. I probably chose teacher or various other labels. So I’m really keen to explore how we step into that relationship with writing and how we develop that relationship with writing, because I think that makes all the difference to how you then approach writing projects.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. And I think that’s something we’ve both learnt as people always passionate about writing, being writing teachers, working with others, but also going through writing projects and writing longer haul projects like books. So the things we’ll be focusing on are all about identity. And in that to me is a bit around mindset, how we see ourselves, skills because there’s obviously skills involved in writing. But I think both of us are very strong on process, writing process too. And that will be a key part of what we’ll explore.
Beth Cregan: And also the conversations, that’s where the real jewels are. Don’t you think? That ability to share your experience with someone and have them say, oh, I see you, and I hear you. I know where you’re coming from. And I think that has been part of our journey together because we’ve been able to do that for each other. And we have the proof of how that works or how that has worked for us. So, yeah, I’d love to be able to offer the goodness of that to other people who want to be involved or take on a writing project of some sort.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. And as we said earlier, I think I particularly said, but I think you’ve also mentioned, that idea that I wish I had writing community earlier in my journey. And I think that’s what we can offer too, is that idea of community, how to create community, being a community together and the support. We’ll put a link where people can express interest if they’d like to know more in the show notes. So stay tuned.
Beth Cregan: It’s being currently planned as we speak.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. But I think that’ll be a really exciting space and program for next year for us to share. So thanks again, Beth. It’s been a real joy to talk today.
Beth Cregan: My pleasure. I’ve loved it. And I feel so proud to see your book in the world is like seeing the dream of our mornings in a really tangible way, isn’t it?
Terri Connellan: Thank you. That’s really beautiful to hear. I can’t wait to see yours in the world. That’s going to be a very exciting day too.
Beth Cregan: I think there’s nothing like having other writers invested in your work because it feels incredible to have people who are not just happy for it to be out in the world, which of course everyone is, but to really have a sense of watching it grow up almost.
Terri Connellan: Yes, because it’s a real psychological journey, that whole practical and psychological journey. So for someone to go on that road with you ,on that trip, it’s very special. So thank you for being that for me.
Beth Cregan: Oh and thank you. I just marvel at the fact that one night in the shower, I had this idea and it ended up being so fruitful for both of us.
Terri Connellan: Oh, thank you. I’m glad you had that thought in the shower.
Twelve years ago Beth combined her passion for creativity with her great love of writing to launch her business, ‘Write Away With Me’. Since then, she’s presented hundreds of writing workshops to inspire and encourage young writers to find their voice, develop their writing skills and connect with their inner storyteller. Her work has branched out to include presenting writing workshops for adults of all ages and stages and taking on the role of a writing mentor. She believes writing simply makes life better so in 2017, she set out on a journey to write a book to inspire teachers to develop a daily authentic writing practice in their classrooms. Soon to be published in 2022 by Hawker Brownlow Education, writing this book was a transformational experience both personally and professionally.Beth lives in Melbourne and when not writing or teaching, you’ll find her painting, hiking, rummaging in her garden or in a forest, hugging trees.
Welcome to Episode 4 of the Create Your Story Podcast!
In this episode, I’m joined by Penelope Love, publisher, speaker and winner of the International Book Awards as author of Wake Up in Love and editor of my Wholehearted book.
You can listen above or via your favourite podcast app. And/or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.
Show Notes
In this episode, we cover:
Penelope’s book Wake Up in Love
The process and experience of writing Wake Up in Love.
Collaboration on the writing journey
Love, relationships and life connections
Balancing writing and publishing journeys
Writing practices
Spiritual practice, Sadhana and Self-Inquiry
And so much more!
Transcript of podcast
Introduction
Welcome to this episode of the Create Your Story Podcast. This is the first one on interview episode which will be the predominant focus in the podcast so it’s wonderful to be stepping into the deep one on one heart-filled conversations that are what this podcast and Quiet Writing are all about.
Today I chat with Penelope Love, who you might remember featured in Episode 2 of the podcast as part of the first Wholehearted virtual book launch. Penelope received the long draft of my book and helped to shape it into the book it is. Today we focus on Penelope’s story more as well as your collaboration and touchpoints and it’s a magical interview.
But first, a personal update and something you might like to be part of. As I speak it’s the 5th of December 20201 and the Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club is now open for enrolment. This is a year-long, actionable, community read of my books, Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition and the Wholehearted Companion Workbook. So it’s part book club, part group coaching and a transformative reading experience where you can do the work of transition over time with accountability and community, and make space for the deep shifts you desire.
We kick off with an orientation in mid-December ahead of a section by section read of Wholehearted together in 2022. So head to the Book Club links in the show notes transcript on Quiet Writing or the links in my Instagram bio, where I am @writingquietly to find out more and join us.
Payment is with upfront or via monthly instalments and 50% scholarships are also available to encourage participation and equity. I’ve aimed to make it as accessible as possible for those who wish to do this deep work with me as your coach. There’s a fabulous group f women gathering, so I hope you will join us for this journey and co-creative read of Wholehearted to make the transitions you desire in your life.
Now to introduce today’s special guest.
Penelope Love, MA, is a publisher, speaker and winner of the International Book Awards as author of Wake Up in Love. In 2000, her career launched in the editorial department of the University of Michigan Press, followed by Barnes & Noble, and the original publisher of Chicken Soup for the Soul. As she expanded into book design, production and business management, it was a natural evolution into the role of publisher. In 2016, she founded Citrine Publishing based on a visionary publisher-author partnership. Penelope passionately supports people in writing the books that only they can write, while also sharing the memoir only she could write, about sexual trauma healing and marriage to her spiritual teacher along a united path of Tantra and Self-Inquiry, illuminating these essential steps on the journey to liberation.
Penelope holds a very special place in my heart as a friend and editor of Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition. She is also author of the wholehearted story, ‘The Journey to Write Here’ on Quiet Writing. Today we will be exploring writing, editing, publishing, becoming an author, working collaboratively as part of our wholehearted journeys, the spiritual practice of self-inquiry and so much more. I am thrilled to share this conversation with Penelope with you.
Transcript of interview with Penelope Love
Terri Connellan: Hi Penelope and welcome to the Create Your Story Podcast.
Penelope Love: Hi Terri. Thank you for having me.
Terri Connellan: Thank you so much for your support of me, my book Wholehearted and Quiet Writing and congratulations on your book. Wake Up in Love being published earlier this year.
Penelope Love: Thank you. And you’re so welcome. It’s an honor.
Terri Connellan: So we’ve had lots of conversations about writing, editing, publishing, and so much more on our journey together. And it’s great to be able to share those conversations with others today. So can you tell people about what you do now, how you got to be here and your new book.
Penelope Love: Sure. Well, I’m an editor and a publisher and also an author. I recently walked through the pearly gates of authorship in January of 2021 when I published my memoir, Wake Up in Love after 15 to 16 years of writing and editing, and working on it. In that time, I was also running a freelance business. Prior to that 15 year period, I did get my start earlier in a career in editing and publishing in the book industry, working at the Chicken Soup for the Soul publisher, the original publisher that is, and they’re based in Florida, where I was living at the time.
And Wake Up in Love actually taps into that journey of leaving the corporate world when I found that I was editing books about changing a life, but I wasn’t really changing my own life. And when I started going into that deep dive of changing my life, that’s when my freelance career took off and I became skilled in not only editing, but designing, and then publishing books and then learning the business end of the publishing side. And over the years developed myself into a publisher.
Terri Connellan: Awesome. What an amazing journey you’ve had. That’s incredible. We’ve known each other for quite a long time online, but we really connected when I reached out with my 100,000 word draft of Wholehearted, which you received so beautifully, and you’re such a magical editor, so supportive. Could you tell us about your work as an editor and why you love editing?
Penelope Love: Editing is just like my heartbeat. I don’t know. It comes effortlessly and naturally, and I feel like it has to do with the way I grew up, patterns of hyper vigilance and being very conscious of what I was saying. And if it was going to make anybody mad or not mad, and also trying to predict what they were thinking. And that is a survival skill in a way. But when you become an artist, you turn your survival skills into creative forces and that’s what editing is for me.
Terri Connellan: Beautiful. So you’ve worked on editing a long time, it’s been a longterm career for you?
Penelope Love: Yeah. You know, I didn’t get into it intentionally. When I was in college, I saw an editorial internship bulletin on one of the boards in the religious studies department. And I’m very interested in different types of spirituality and religion. And this fluorescent yellow poster just called to me. Interestingly it said, ‘seniors only apply’ and I was a junior and I still applied. I don’t know it was something in me said, why not? And I went ahead and applied and I ended up working for two years for this teacher who ended up being quite karmically connected.
Terri Connellan: And what do you love about editing? What’s so special for you?
Penelope Love: Well, it’s the relationships that I develop with the people that I work with. It is such a close, connected, intimate relationship. Editing somebody’s book, their book is an expression of their soul. It is their heart’s song playing to the world and I get to be a part of helping them shape it. It’s an honor and so much fun.
Terri Connellan: Oh, that’s wonderful. I’ve certainly experienced that as someone who worked in an editing partnership with you. So it’s a true gift. So thank you for sharing that with me. So at the same time we worked on my book, you were also completing your memoir, Wake Up in Love. So tell us about your writing journey of creating that book.
Penelope Love: Well, it’s funny, in the book, there’s actually a chapter about starting the book and it’s called The Book of Love. And I remember when I met my husband. Maybe I’ll just share a bit of backstory. The book begins where I meet my spiritual teacher, and then I marry him two weeks later. It actually begins a lot earlier in childhood, but it comes forward to this moment. And that’s the beginning of the writing.
And I sat down to write this book of love because I had fallen in love and I was married to him for probably about two or three months. And I just thought I knew absolutely everything about love. And I was 29 years old just hitting that Saturn return, you know? I was ready to take on the world as an author. And I wrote the introduction and then I didn’t really know what or else to write. And he looked at me and he said, well, maybe it’s because you don’t know what love is yet. And I’ll spare you my response, there was an expletive in it and it’s in the book, but I went ahead and became very angry. And yet I used the tools that I was learning from him along this journey, one of which is called the self-inquiry and I took this process inward. I took my anger at that thought that I didn’t know what love was inward. And I went on a journey that lasted about 15 years from the first time I put that pen to paper to write a book to the time it was actually published.
Terri Connellan: Wow. That’s amazing. So the writing over 15 years, what did that look like? Was it like lots of different periods of drafting and editing? Or was there times where you sat down and wrote a lot of the book? How did it work in practice?
Penelope Love: Yeah, in my case, it was a really cool mix of old journals that I’d kept during those years of my early Sadhana, Sadhana being a spiritual practice that you enter when you commit to a spiritual path under the guidance of a teacher. And so I had these journals from my early Sadhana, one of which I started writing on my first trip to India in 2004, when I had no idea, I was beginning to write a book. It was just writing my journal, writing my thoughts for that day. And I feel like that’s a lot like life. I think we don’t really know when our book is exactly being written because we’re just living our life.
And so there are these bits of moments in my life that got recorded in my journals that eventually became fodder for what became the book. We lived in Costa Rica between 2007 and 2010. I went through a period of trying again, to write this book of love. And in that time I was practicing the Morning Pages. So that became a tool and a lot of free writing and beautiful ideas coming out across the Morning Pages. And during that time, a local editor who was starting a magazine, asked me if I would write a column for the magazine. And that’s when I started to write some articles. And I did write about relationship because that was an obsession of mine. Ever since I was young, I was looking for a relationship.
There’s a karma to that too, at the same time, you know, it is one of those human desires. And at this point in my evolutionary journey, exploring relationship in an intimate context, it was the biggest step that I personally could have taken on the journey. So going ahead and, and writing about that process really brought a level of consciousness to it that I think would not have been present had I not had pen and paper. And that quiet time alone to explore what was happening in the relationship. And I applied these wisdoms to the articles that I was writing for the magazine and I got a great response.
It was a local magazine published in Santa Cedro Costa Rica between 2008 to 2009. And it was called Montaña al Mar. Everybody loved when this magazine would come out. People would come up to me in the grocery store and just give me a hug and tell me that they related to what I’d written. And it gave me a lot of encouragement. And I had another mentor of mine say to me, once, you know, if you write enough articles one day, you might wake up and realize you’ve written a book. So I think that time came around 2012, where I had written some of these articles in Costa Rica and I’d taken them also online. There were some websites at the time, sort of like Huffington Post-ish type of websites. And I was putting some of the pieces on there and yeah, those pieces that I created for those contexts, it started to look like I had the material for a quilt that could be a whole piece.
And I remember one day I took every single article I’d written. I wrote the title of it on a sticky note, and then I stuck them all on the wall and I arranged them in different orders. And that started to be the beginning of Wake Up in Love. It was a wall full of sticky notes at one point. And then I said, there’s some order here. There’s some structure, there’s a spine. Now let’s give it some legs. Let’s give it some arms. And over the years I started to become clear what pieces were missing, what pieces needed more fleshing out.
And there was one point , an editor pre-reader, beta reader read it. And I had written this whole book about my journey of sexual awakening through self-realisation, through the exploration of tantra, combined with Self-Inquiry. And I had written this whole book and the editor said, yeah, but I really could use a sex scene in here.
And you know, I was feeling most vulnerable about writing about certain topics, that being one of them. So when she asked for it, I knew it was time in the journey to put that forth into the book. And it actually was the crowning piece, even though it’s in the middle of the book. And that to me speaks a lot to the writing process. You can’t put things in a logical order at first. You have to let it be a wild, creative throwing. You know, some people say throwing spaghetti at the wall. One of my clients uses that term. And there’s some truth to that. There’s not an orderly process when it comes to some aspects of the creative process. And then there’s other parts of the creative process where that order is absolutely essential. And if you don’t have it, your projects won’t ever come to fruition.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. I really relate to your story, having gone through my writing journey. And for me, it was a mix of sometimes having to stop, to integrate more experience, you know, to work out either what you’d written or what you’d lived and then to bring it all together into a new phase. So it’s sort of like an iterative process.
Penelope Love: Yeah. There’s most definitely that time of integrating in between. It definitely calls for patience and that’s real soul growth. That’s real important work that’s being done, even when it seems like no work is being done on the manuscript. And then of course, in the final stages of putting a book together and in the style that I did, where it was from pieces written over the years, was bringing it a sense of coherence to sound like, because it really is the journey of somebody’s awakening over the period of time. There’s some things sound very elementary in the beginning and they should, because that’s where the voice was at that point. But when you’re trying to stitch something together, that’s written over the periods of time, there’s a lot of editing work that has to go into making it make sense and keeping the raw parts raw on purpose and polishing up the polishing of some things that you were really just writing cause you needed to learn it yourself.
We call it like taking the preach out of the book. And I had an editor and she’d done the same thing with a book of essays she’d written on parenting and she said, you know, we were just busy taking the preachiness out of our book because we were preaching early what we needed to learn. And then when we learned it, it had been integrated and now you can take it back instead of telling the reader of the article or the essay, ‘you need to do this’. I could take it back to first person and say, oh, when I was going through this process, this is what I learned. And there’s a vulnerability in coming back to that first person perspective. It’s much more vulnerable than saying, ‘here’s what you need to do to have a great relationship’. This is what happened to me. And I had to go through this and I had to fail in these ways and I had to learn these lessons in order to have the successful relationship I have today.
Terri Connellan: I so relate to that from my experiences. And I guess it’s that ‘show, don’t tell’ too, isn’t it? Rather like showing what you went through rather than telling, like you said, this is what you need to do. I think that’s so powerful. So you’ve mentioned some of the challenges you came against writing Wake Up in Love. Is there anything else that comes to mind as particular challenges or insights you might share from your writing journey?
Penelope Love: Patience, I’ll echo that. It was a really challenging piece because the world began moving very quickly. 2004, there wasn’t even YouTube. I did a little research on that for my book actually, cause when I went home from meditation the first time when I met my husband that night and there had been this photograph of his teacher on the wall, behind him, Ramana Maharshi, and I needed to go home and Google Ramana Maharshi to find out, you know, what I was getting involved in. And I ended up searching only on Google and, you know, cause YouTube wasn’t really a thing. Otherwise I will certainly, would’ve gone to YouTube if I could catch a video of this man. So anyway, long story short, patience, the time. That dates me on how old I was or how young I was when I started writing the book and in the information explosion since then with social media and, you know, the proliferation of book publishing through print on demand, everybody seemed to have a book or a website or a blog and every time I tried to have one, it just wasn’t happening. It wasn’t coming together. It just wasn’t the time. There needed to be a maturing process that, the only way for a maturing process to happen is over time. So I couldn’t rush that one. And that was challenging because I really wanted to be an author like so many other people.
Terri Connellan: I relate to that too. And you are also an independent publisher at Citrine so I’m interested in how becoming a publisher has dovetailed with supporting or conflicting with your own writing, because it must’ve been a bit of tension in there. Working with books all day and then trying to write your own at the same time must have been challenging.
Penelope Love: That’s exactly right, Terri. And that was the thing, I was falling into that, ‘I’m helping everybody else write that book’ and when is it going to be the time that I dedicate to the message that I know is on my soul to communicate with the world and that took grace and patience again. Other types of challenges that come from just the sheer amount of information and really sorting through, you know, what is my message? What is my voice? What is my authentic knowingness? And how do I put that in words and sort out the other voices that are constantly coming into my mind all day, because I’m reading so much information.
So I did end up taking time off last year in the months leading up to the publication of my book. Another man was running my company and he did a wonderful job while I was on this sabbatical, even though at the time, the way it happened was, and I won’t go into the full details of the story, right now. But the way it happened was that I was actually really, truly believed I was giving the company away and that Todd was going to be running the company. And I was just going to be helping him and supporting him. And I truly had to believe it was completely out of my hands or I would not have let go. And it was so gracious the way it came back into my stewardship a couple months after Wake Up in Love came out. Then Todd said, I was only always holding this company for you. And I was like, wow, what a friend, what an amazing person. And he was one of the first authors published with Citrine and he has been by my side in every way. And I’m grateful for him. And not only him though, all of the authors were so supportive of that time that I needed. And even though they thought I was not necessarily going to be their publisher anymore, they supported me. And it’s that type of relationship that I’m even in this whole work for, that connection, that bond, that caring about each other. I think the publishing process holds up a microscope to that. It lets us really explore it and feel it and live it and know a quality of human relationship that I’m not sure you know, is possible in other types of contexts.
Terri Connellan: Hmm. Yeah. So what I’m hearing is that I guess it’s about holding your own space for your own story whilst holding space for other people’s stories and just how that, that whole tension gets managed and it makes sense to me that you would need in a way to step away so that you could sort of get space around your own story to bring it to life. Makes perfect sense.
Penelope Love: And it was wonderful too, because it was a luxury. I got to finally walk the talk I’d be talking for all these years that I knew in theory. And I knew it pretty intimately because my husband went through this process and so I was up close and personal with my husband and seeing what he went through as an author. And that was actually a big part of what played into the formation of Citrine Publishing was just watching the way that his publisher dealt with him. I want to create a company that treats authors the way I know they deserve to be treated and not the way they necessarily are treated in the traditional publishing world. Not to say that all traditional publishing goes that way, but a great deal of it is. There’s not that personal connection that I feel can be one of the strengths of independent publishing as I feel you’re experiencing right now with the kind press.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. For me, that whole writing/ publishing journey has been a real learning process for me, but certainly that relationship you have with both the editor on the way through, the publisher. I’ve been really honored with the kind press to have a very similar experience. It’s been great.
Penelope Love: Yeah. And it’s one of those things I think I may have even said this to you along our journey. It’s something that I often reflect on, you know, the first publisher with a printing press and the first author with a manuscript, having their conversation. What did that look like? Who said what to who, and you know, how did that go down? But I’d like to get to the essence of, look at, what a powerful partnership that was. And so every time I’m speaking with someone who has a manuscript, I try to harness that original creative energy of that, like archetypal conversation. How do we do something? You have a talent, I have a talent. How do we make it synergistically more than it is the individual parts alone.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. And for me, it was a real journey in learning about collaboration with you and with Natasha from the kind press. And I reached out to you because I felt so lost, you know, with what to do with my book. I had created the draft. And then I got to a point, I had planned to self-publish, but I just didn’t know what to do and what step to take and I’ve come to realise writing is such a collaborative process. So is that your learning also, how do you see collaboration as part of the writing and publishing journey?
Penelope Love: Well, I feel like partnership is one of our greatest tools for evolution or heading towards self-realization. That collaborative opportunity to master our own communication because ultimately we are talking with nobody, but our own heart, our own self. And if we know that our outer world is a reflection of our inner world, then we can really use our partnerships in collaboration to master that knowingness and to realize who we are. And I feel like the writing and publishing partnership holds an extremely effective magnifying glass to that process. Because writing freezes everything in time and lets you look at it and notice it. And then if something is not quite right about it, you can edit it and you can change it. And so this freezing in time that writing does, it forces us to be clear with our words. And it ties into that self-realization that is in my own experience, the purpose of being alive.
Terri Connellan: Beautiful. And I think there’s often that view that writing is a solitary process. But the moment it really all fell into place for me was when I wrote my acknowledgements and there was this cast of many, many people who were involved in the writing process and all the inputs. And is that how you feel too about it? We can feel like it’s a solitary performance, but it’s so not.
Penelope Love: I love that you’re saying that because it’s really making me think about it and reflect on my own experience. And it was those times when I was trying to be the writer in the cabin in Costa Rica, you know, Walden, my own personal Walden Pond, creating for myself, that I was struggling the most with writing. But when I was living my life and having the daily stresses of running a business, those precious mornings or couple of hours. Sometimes I do my morning pages at night. But I didn’t call them Morning Pages. I would call it my Nocturnal Journal. And I went ahead and when I found those moments, that’s when life is happening all around me and I was dealing with people and that gave me not only material to work with, but emotions and feelings that could come through on the page.
You know, I don’t think writing can be done in a vacuum. That said, there’s a paradox for everything. And sometimes I really do need that solo hermit time to get something exactly the way I want it to be. So I think it’s balance.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, I agree. I think that’s what I’ve learned from my experience, but it certainly shifted my stereotypical view of the writing process.
Penelope Love: Yeah, maybe that taps into sort of that patriarchal view of like the solo man in the cabin and Walden Pond, writing. And to not deny the beauty of those manuscripts and those publications just, I mean, there’s some awesome literature. At the same time, that image that gets perpetuated in culture, I think we’re really challenging that now with our new technologies and our new capacity for relating with each other, and we’re able to explore more of the collaborative aspect of writing and the power.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. And so part of our collaboration too, has been through you sharing a story on my website and my blog as part of the Wholehearted Story series, which some people might be familiar with. And your story in that series was called The Journey to Write Here, which is about your calling as a writer, your relationship with writing over time. So what writing practices have supported you and have evolved over your time as a writer?
Penelope Love: Yes, Morning Pages, of course. I could sing their praises every day and never get tired of it. They are just such a wonderful, wonderful tool from The Artist’s Way and Julia Cameron, I’m sure your listeners will be familiar with that already. And then free writing. So like there’s nothing like a good free-write. But, that said, I also had another contrasting practice to that, and that would be writing for publication. I think, setting some goals to write for publication started to give order and structure to the free writing and Morning Page chaos that would be upon my eight and a half by 11 line paper in the morning. Because I would start to take the golden nuggets out of those ideas and start to shape them and polish them for publication. And as I alluded to earlier in the interview, when I spoke about writing for the Montaña al Mar magazine, in Costa Rica, that was my first experience of giving structure to those ideas. And it was so helpful. Because now we’re walking that balance out of the writer solo in the room and in the collaborative environment.
And then when you write for publication, that is another key piece, I feel, of practicing. Your early publications won’t be as good as your later ones. I mean, never say never because you could have a really, really awesome first time that you tried to do something like a lot of artists do. And then, you know, then the doer will kick in and the one who wants to try to do that again and try to make it as good as the first time. So we see that with a lot of musical artists. It’s almost more easy to hear in music than it is to see in writing, but it happens in all craft when you first start something, that one who’s trying so hard to be the writer isn’t there and the writing flows, and then the more you practice.
And it’s the same thing with meditation. That happens with meditation too. Sometimes the first time people come to meditation, they will have great, deep profound meditation. And then they’ll start trying to meditate. And that’s when it becomes a more restless experience until you learn to consciously tune out the the doer.
For me, that has been my spiritual practice of Self-Inquiry, using what I learned from my husband, but which is a lineage from Ramana Maharshi in India. And if anybody wants to look up that teaching, it is really profound. And the reason that I got hooked on it is because of our mutual friend Carl Jung. Carl Jung wrote a forward to Ramana Maharshi’s book. And I write about that in Wake Up in Love. I write about how I was very uncertain being a Catholic raised woman to go to a meditation class and start taking instruction from a man in a dhoti. But at the same time, when I read that Carl Jung had written the forward to Ramana Maharshi’s book, I said, you know what, I’m going to give this guy a chance.
And so the Self-Inquiry practice of taking any anxiety I had inward, including the anxiety of ‘I need to write. How do I write? This needs to get done.’ You know, ‘I’m not a writer yet’. Well, who thinks that? I do. And then I was able to be like, oh, I’m not the one. If I’m aware of the one who wants to be a writer, am I that? No, I have to be something so much vaster so much greater, so much beyond words.
Terri Connellan: Beautiful. Two things come to mind for me, from what you’ve just said. First is that writing for publication can be a really important part of our process. So for me, blogging filled that that way of writing. And I started a blog in 2010 for exactly that reason. I think it helped me to work out what I wanted to write and how I want to write it. So that was an important part of my writing for publication journey.
Penelope Love: Yeah. That’s beautiful. And I think blogging has definitely filled that… I’ve never formally read it or heard it stated anywhere that there’s a sort of like structure or balance you need to hit as a writer to develop your craft. But you know, maybe in our conversation here, we’re coming up with a sort of template that people can use, which is, make sure you’re doing some free writing or Morning Page styles and make sure you’re also doing some structured writing for publication. And that will help you develop your craft into a well-rounded craft.
Terri Connellan: I love that. And the other thing that came to me from what you were saying too, is that it’s a continuing sort of self-development, self-growth such as you went through with your meditation, which is about the mindset of writing too, isn’t it? It’s about , how we see ourselves as a writer and how we respond to our calling, which I think you’ve mentioned a few times today as we’ve spoken. Yeah, just so important.
So this is the Create Your Story podcast. So a question I’m going to ask people each time on the calls is how have you created your story over your lifetime? For me ‘create your story’ is that idea of being active. Active self-leader, active creator in our story and the decisions we make, turning points. It’s a big question. I know, but just what pops up for you around, how have you created your story over your lifetime?
Penelope Love: How fun to dance with you in this question, Terri especially knowing that this will be the podcast question that everybody gets asked. It’s beautiful one. You know, I think I struggled the most when I tried to create my story. And we could look at that literally with the years of struggle that I experienced in trying to write my memoir and get it to a publishing point prematurely.
And that was really, really painful. It started in the book in Wake Up in Love when I said I’m going to write my book of love and my husband questioned, maybe I wasn’t ready yet. And that was my first time turning inward with this process, but that was not the only time I had to turn inward about the idea of wanting to have my writing out there in the world.
And when it wasn’t happening, I’d really have to take it back inward to that question of like, who’s doing the writing, who is the creator of my story. And when I merged with that which is creating the story through my meditations, then I could become the instrument. Like the body mind Penelope could become used and played as an instrument in order to write and show a story and show one perspective of the human experience.
So I would say that’s how I created my story, but really without creating my story, with surrendering to that, which is creating the story.
Terri Connellan: Oh, that’s so beautiful. Yeah. And I think that it’s often that tension again, we’ve used the word tension a lot, but life’s a lot of tensions between what we want to do. And then also allowing, like that, being/ doing tension too, isn’t it?
Penelope Love: Yeah. I love the word tension. You know, I used to be so afraid of the word tension and you know, my counselors and anxiety. And I mean, I can’t believe I didn’t even touch on this yet. Although I did a little bit with the idea that editing is a great outlet for the type of hypervigilant upbringing that I had, but also OCD. I had OCD and depression and these types of things that create a lot of tension in one’s life. But when you look at even sexual energy, that leads to orgasm is full of tension. And like, I love tension because when it releases, it’s freedom. And so why should we fight with tension? And when we stopped fighting with tension and we actually are able to find the joy, the peace, the bliss, the orgasm, a lot easier. Yeah.
Terri Connellan: That’s wonderful. Yeah. I think that’s great. It’s about that, again, reframing of what we go through and just shifting our mindset to, to embrace something rather than fighting it all the time. So I think that’s a valuable insight.
Penelope Love: Yeah. So I’m happy we played with the word ‘tension’ today and I love it. And I don’t even mean to take the tension out of tension. Well, you can’t, but the idea is like if tension is there, let it be there. Like enjoy it because it is part of the human experience to love, to relish, to be like, frustrated that something’s not coming to terms yet or coming into being yet, because you know, when it does, it’s going to be so much more joyful than you can ever imagine. And that I know from publishing the book.
Terri Connellan: I can relate to that. I can relate to that too. The many times I nearly gave up because of that tension. And I think it’s that sort of pushing through and that Yeah, that just desire for completion and commitment to ourselves is really important.
So, you know my book Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition very, very well because you’ve been on an intimate journey with me and you know about some of the tips that I recommend, but what are your top wholehearted self-leadership tips and practices, especially for women.
Penelope Love: You know, it’s an honor to be asked that question by the woman who wrote the book on wholehearted leadership, because I’m like, Hmm, what else could I add to that book? Or what else could I add to that body of wisdom? And I’ll have to reach back into my early experience of Sadhana again, spiritual practice. And I make reference to this in Wake Up in Love as well. I was given a tool by my teacher called the conscious daily planning sheets. And that is a process of setting your daily agenda with intentions. So you’re not only writing down what you have to do, but the feeling of completion or the feeling of connection that you want to have when you’re doing those activities.
So you’re spending your time at night, doing your daily agenda for the next day. And you’re practicing those feelings before you go to bed and you’re taking them into sleep with you. So that the next day, when you wake up and you go through your day, your day’s already played out in your subconscious mind as you’ve been sleeping and it becomes the way you wanted to feel the night before it starts to happen and unfold in an effortless way.
And the practice of this daily sheet actually ultimately removes the doer, the sense of doership or volition, from your daily activities. And that’s where you find a sense of surrender and freedom and more creativity in your life when you practice this. So in addition to the daily agenda part of the sheets, it has a daily review where you’re looking at, and as a Virgo, you’ll love this, a checklist. Did I exercise today? Did I do conscious reading? Not only reading, you know, the tabloids, but did I read a book by an awakened Sage? Did I let that highest consciousness, Rumi poems, did I let those poems slip into my heart today?
Did I eat consciously? How present was I when I was working? There’s a whole checklist on these sheets. And there’s also a walkthrough of the self-inquiry and it’s broken down into the questions of the process that eventually becomes an automatic happening as you practice inquiry. But the sheets are like training.
So they go through each of the steps of the inquiry and you will take anything that made you upset during the day. And you would use the self-inquiry process with that to get behind the sense of I that has the problem and to find the solution. And then to go in forward into the communications you need to have with the people who were involved in the upsetting situation to clear the space and keep the space clear so that you can move forward with your life in a productive way.
And so these sheets, they took about an hour to do every night. And then at the end of the month you’d have 30 sheets. And you would take a log of all the things that upset you and you would write them down again. And you could look and see, do I have repeating patterns of upset? Are things continuing to upset me? Because if they keep coming up, you know what, you’re not getting clear. You’re not taking that inquiry piece all the way home. And so it was a really beautiful process that I was given by Nick, my husband, my teacher. And in the context of the conscious living center that we had, and everybody who lived there did the sheets and you know, the communal center where we lived, this came in really handy because in our communications with each other, and if something upsetting happened during the day, we would resolve it right then in there. And if it wasn’t resolved on the spot, it was at least resolved by the end of the day, before we went to bed and those problems were not carried forward into the day. And it created an efficient and beautiful and loving organisation. And I feel I applied those skills that I used and learned, the muscles that I built from the sheets, in my life. And that was a very wholehearted practice for me that I did for many years. And I affectionately now call them the holy sheets because the idea of doing and cataloging all of these things about your everyday. It takes somebody with a dedicated mind, who really wants to wake up to the truth. But when you commit yourself to that process, there’s no limit to what’s possible.
Terri Connellan: Well, thank you for sharing your practice with us and something that’s been honed over a long period of time too which I’m sure has made a huge difference to how you live and how you create your story. So thank you for sharing that with us.
You just spoke about poetry. Is there anything you’d like to read us from Wake Up in Love before we close?
Penelope Love: Sure. You know, my book is a tapestry of poetry and prose, and it’s funny, I didn’t know I could write poetry until we started, I hopped on Instagram about 2014 and you know, there’s some newsletter and I got an account and people started posting the challenges and I started taking photos with my phone and then these little beautiful ideas would come to me as I was taking the photos or looking through my photo album and they started to come to me as poems. And I taken poetry in college. I got a C, and I was pretty much a straight A student and it was really upsetting to me that I had gotten a C in poetry. I had to get that doer taken out of the way. That one who thought it was writing the poetry and just allow these, these ideas and words to come. And so it was a very beautiful addition to the book that came later that had I published the book three or four years into the writing, it would not have the poetry dimension.
I’d love to share one. And I think the best one to share is, this one is called, Take a Backward Bow.
All the exploration is preparation
for the moment the wind blows just so –
you forget everything you know
and fall in love with the endless show
as you take a backward bow
to the miracle of how
The One you’ve been looking for
finds You
and the exploration begins
anew
Terri Connellan: Thank you. That was just magical.
Penelope Love: I love that one because it’s not only about meeting a soulmate in life, but it’s also about the creative process and ultimately about meeting yourself.
Terri Connellan: Beautiful. Thank you. So I thoroughly recommend to people to seek out Wake Up in Love. We’ll put the links in the show notes. Penelope, can you tell people where they can find out more about you, your book and your work online?
Penelope Love: Yes. Sure. I have a website that is accessible through PenelopeLove.com and I am also active on Instagram. My username there is @penelopelovely
Terri Connellan: Wonderful. And it’s been such a joy to connect with you over many years on Instagram, as the editor of my book and and through our blog writing together. And, just so many beautiful conversations. It’s been such a joy to share those with others today. Thank you so much.
Penelope Love: Yes, Terri, thank you. It is a joy to add to our body of conversation and I look forward to many more years of our friendship going forward.
Penelope Love, MA, is a publisher, speaker and winner of the International Book Awards as author of Wake Up in Love. In 2000, her career launched in the editorial department of the University of Michigan Press, followed by Barnes & Noble, and the original publisher of Chicken Soup for the Soul. As she expanded into book design, production and business management, it was a natural evolution into the role of publisher. In 2016, she founded Citrine Publishing based on a visionary publisher-author partnership. Penelope passionately supports people in writing the books that only they can write, while also sharing the memoir only she could write, about sexual trauma healing and marriage to her spiritual teacher along a united path of Tantra and Self-Inquiry, illuminating these essential steps on the journey to liberation.
