[00:00:01.200] – Rachel Thompson
Welcome. I’m Rachel Thompson, and this is Write, Publish and Shine. It’s good to be back. This episode comes after a longer pause than I planne,d and I want to start by talking about that big gap in time where I dropped this labour of love. When I decided it was time to start again, I was surprised to find it had been so long since I hit record here.

[00:00:21.920] – Rachel Thompson
Time had flown. I guess sometimes you need to hit pause, I found. So I want to share what shifted for me. I’m coming back changed, really. So I’ll share a bit more about how I want to do this work and speak to you here.

[00:00:34.220] – Rachel Thompson
A little hint is that I didn’t deliver this episode exactly as promised last week and that was hard for me. Who tries to keep every promise through rain and sleet and stormy weather. This is a bit of the change I’m talking about. It’s also long overdue and such a pleasure to share. A little bit behind the making of my most recent issue at Room, where I rotated into the lead editor position for 48.3 rest unrest.

[00:01:01.460] – Rachel Thompson
Our theme was so so apt. And you’ll learn more about why that was. And because of our theme, where I’m at and what is on my heart at this time of seemingly never-ending nervous system engagement, I’m passing on some grounded ways you can support your writing right now. Adapted from a piece we created leading up to inviting submissions to 48.3. It’s from an article I co-wrote with my colleagues at Room.

[00:01:29.160] – Rachel Thompson
It was called Six Ways to Rest and Resist this season, although I’ve trimmed it down, lost a bit of alliteration in doing so, but to four ways. So we’re easing back in here with this shorter mini episode that is both reflective and practical. I’m reaching out to you, the writer who is paying attention to your limits, who still wants to stay in relationship with your heart’s work of creative writing. As always, you can find links and a written version of this episode, and in particular, the practices I mention at racheltompson. Co podcast.

[00:02:04.160] – Rachel Thompson
So, where did I go on what happened during my pause? This podcast went quiet for quite a while because other parts of my life needed to be prioritized, including a family health situation and my own body was done pretending I had a margin there to fit it all in. Why I’m even sharing this is because I know a lot of you are paying attention to your limits too. I found over the years, somewhat to my surprise, but it shouldn’t have been a surprise, that I’ve attracted a community in my writing courses, in particular of writers who live with limitations and disability, and it’s part of why in the past I recorded a whole series of interviews with writers on those topics. But the idea of coming back here all rah rah onward and upward felt really dishonest.

[00:02:52.010] – Rachel Thompson
Without acknowledging that I had to pay attention to my limits and to affirm I will continue to do so because I think it’s better when we acknowledge this openly and honestly and create space for ourselves and for everyone else. I’m really happy to be back, because coming back now doesn’t feel like resuming something I dropped. It feels more like returning with clearer information about myself. I’m less interested in keeping things moving at all costs, so see above re not delivering the episode as promised for the first comeback episode, and I’m just more interested in work that actually fits the body and the moment we’re in, less interested in output for its own sake, more interested in attention, where it goes, what it costs. That shift in me also changed how I think about teaching writing and how I think about publishing, and it’s one of the reasons it felt right to come back with an episode centred on Room 48.3 Rest/Unrest the issue of Room that I edited recently. Editing that issue was challenging, meaningful, slower than expected.

[00:03:57.210] – Rachel Thompson
There were delays. There was an internal incident at Room that required care, repair, and so much reorientation around our values. And all of this happened against the backdrop of ongoing global violence and instability. Rest and unrest are not, were not, probably never have been, abstract ideas, and they certainly weren’t while we worked on the issue. They were the conditions of our work.

[00:04:21.690] – Rachel Thompson
The Magazine, established in 1975, faced not its first crisis, but a significant one. We were in a bit of a crash across a few issues, where the timeline slipped, capacity got thin, and the work asked to be held more gently than our systems were built for. But we adapted and made them work. I’m naming this because I think so many writers recognize this pattern in their own lives and in the small communities and institutions we’re part of. The work we love runs on real bodies, real relationships, and real limits.

[00:04:53.230] – Rachel Thompson
And sometimes the most radical thing is to keep pending it. Anyway, what I’m proud of is not just the finished magazine issue, but how the Room magazine collective stayed in relationship through uncertainty, how care and accountability shaped the process as much as Deadlines did. So sharing this now feels less like promotion of the issue, which I always planned to do after the issue came out, although I certainly encourage you as well to check it out and get a copy. It’s up at roommagazine.com, but it also feels a bit more like passing along something that sustained me, and that might sustain you. In my editor’s letter for Room 48.3, I wrote: “We created this issue because, amidst our institutional denial of ongoing violence, rest is often imposed on us through intentional exhaustion to maintain the status quo.”

[00:05:41.550] – Rachel Thompson
I’m bringing that context with me into this episode and the coming podcast episodes. One more behind-the-scenes thread, because it matters to me. As we built the issue, the theme wasn’t only something we assigned, it was something we heard over and over in conversation as we arranged the work, discussed passionately what should sit beside what, and tried to make a whole out of many parts. We as our practice, we keep an order of contents document open beside us like a living map. It’s part logistics and part intuition.

[00:06:12.170] – Rachel Thompson
And we keep asking questions that were both editorial and nervous system questions. Where does the issue need a breath? Where does it need a jolt? What motifs are echoing across pieces? And how do we let different genres speak to each other without flattening them?

[00:06:27.580] – Rachel Thompson
And as we moved things around, certain sub-themes kept braiding themselves through the issue. Retreat and nesting, ancestors and family, the natural world, leaving, and migration. Conflict in the body. The more we listened, the more the order started to feel like a conversation instead of a pile of excellent work. And I’m lingering here for a minute because this is the part of editing that’s hardest to describe from the outside, and also the part that feels most like art.

[00:06:55.340] – Rachel Thompson
And honestly, why I keep coming back and have been doing this for so long, as I think possibly the longest running editor, the person who sits in the lead editor position at Room magazine currently. So, on paper, ordering an issue is a spreadsheet problem. Page counts where a two piece page has to land so it doesn’t break in the gutter. Where you need a buffer page because something might run long, where you need to give the reader’s eyes a rest after something dense. Or you want art on an odd page because it hits differently on the right-hand side of a book because it is a physical, tangible artifact that we produce in the end.

[00:07:32.340] – Rachel Thompson
But in practice, it’s also kind of listening. You’re asking if a reader enters here, what’s the first emotional temperature they meet after three pieces about the body, does the issue need a window? Something with the natural world? Something with air? If we’ve been in conflict and rupture for 10 pages, what is the first place we let tenderness show up without making it sentimental? Where do we let the issue breathe?

[00:07:57.620] – Rachel Thompson
And where do we deliberately refuse to let the reader look away? Sometimes that breath was a small act of moving one poem, so it ended on an odd page with blank space around it, so it could act like a pause. Sometimes it was pairing two pieces because they were speaking to each other across genres, and at times it was spacing out work with similar themes because we wanted the repetition to feel like a motif instead of a relentless pile on. And if you’re a writer who wants to publish, here’s the thing I wish more people understood: this kind of ordering is part of the editorial care. It’s one of the ways a magazine says we’re not just printing your work, we’re holding it in a container that’s built to help give it the best place to land.

[00:08:40.080] – Rachel Thompson
I also want to talk about why this theme matters so much for writers, especially in the Rest Unrest issue, where we kept circling a few questions. A lot of us are exhausted, so the question became how do you rest in a world that treats exhaustion as normal? And then there’s the question of staying present. How do you stay awake to injustice and grief without shutting down? For writers, they show up as maybe smaller, more intimate questions, like how do I write when I’m tired?

[00:09:06.470] – Rachel Thompson
How do I stay in a relationship with my work without burning myself out or going numb? The answer I keep returning to is rest and unrest aren’t opposites, but they’re in conversation. Maybe that’s how the slash works so well in this issue. The Rest Slash Unrest Rest gives you the capacity to stay present with what you care about. Unrest gives you the reason to keep writing.

[00:09:30.420] – Rachel Thompson
By the way, that idea didn’t arrive to me as a neat insight. It arrived as a kind of reluctant, long-dragged-out learning. During my pause from this podcast, I kept thinking rest would make me less responsive, less awake, less useful. Like if I softened, I would lose my edge and the world would go on burning without me. What actually happened is, when I let myself rest in small ways, I could feel again.

[00:09:53.940] – Rachel Thompson
I could read one article without tuning out, disassociating. I could write one paragraph without trying to outrun my own body or self. And during the making of the Rest Unrest issue, I watched the same tension show up in miniature. We were working in conditions that asked for urgency, and we were also working in a collective that needed repair, and pacing and care. The only way to keep going was to let rest and unrest speak to each other, to let rest be the thing that made integrity possible, and let unrest be the thing that kept the work from turning into a decorative performance of caring.

[00:10:28.800] – Rachel Thompson
When we let them inform each other rather than choosing one and rejecting the other, our writing tends to become more honest and more sustainable. With that in mind, I want to share those concrete practices I mentioned earlier. Again, these are adapted from the lovely alliterative six Ways to Rest and Resist this season, a short listicle created collectively at Room when we were first imagining this issue. So I’m tilting them specifically toward your writing life. It’s now four ways to rest resist as you write.

[00:11:00.020] – Rachel Thompson
The first is to focus on what’s generative, not depleting. This is from Chimedum Ohaegbu, managing editor at Room. Chimedum suggested: instead of asking how to do more, try asking what actually gives me energy. Right now, that might be reading one poem slowly, free writing for 10 minutes, working in a notebook instead of on a screen. So to try this, you might name one writing adjacent activity that feels genuinely nourishing and then ask what could I step back from this week to make room for it?

[00:11:34.220] – Rachel Thompson
Some small example would be I stopped trying to solve my week and just walk slowly enough to notice things. Branches, waves. Something in that repetition settles me, and when I sat back down at my desk, I could actually hear my own sentences again. This is rest, and it’s also resistance that is choosing where your attention goes instead of letting it be claimed. Number two in this four-point list is to schedule a no-goals day for your writing.

[00:12:02.230] – Rachel Thompson
This is from my contribution to the piece and inspired by do nothing days that I do with my family and young children in the Rest Unrest article I wrote about those do nothing days that aren’t measured by output, and your writing life can have those too. A no-goals day might include reading, walking, napping, or just letting ideas sit without trying to shape them. This is the being of being a writer rather than the doing of being a writer. And if you want to test this, you can choose one day in the next couple weeks and name it your No Writing Goals day. You don’t stop being a writer that day.

[00:12:36.600] – Rachel Thompson
You’re just allowing your attention to rest or your intentions to rest. Maybe one note from experience is the first time I tried this for my writing. I spent half the day bargaining with myself, and that was the tell. I needed that. I needed the rest as much as I needed the writing.

[00:12:53.520] – Rachel Thompson
Often what comes after that kind of pause is clearer and kinder and a kind of a reset toward the orientation we have to our words. The third item on our four-point list is to let Community do some of the work. This is from contributions from Holly Lamb and Tara Preisl at Room and Holly, by the way, was the assistant editor for the issue. Amazing to work with Unrest, Unrest. That role helps pick all the pieces that go into the issue.

[00:13:19.590] – Rachel Thompson
And it was just so great to have that meeting of the minds when we were choosing work collectively. All right, so here’s Let Community do some of the work from Holly Lamb and Tara Preisel. In the original piece, Holly wrote about gathering around food, and Tara wrote about gifting as a way of saying I see you together, they offer a simple reminder that you don’t have to do your writing life alone. Community can look like inviting someone over for a simple meal and talking about what you’re reading or thinking about writing. Sending a short note about a line you loved in a friend’s draft, sharing a submission call that made you think of someone offering to read three pages as someone’s work.

[00:13:56.970] – Rachel Thompson
It doesn’t have to be 30. Just say, oh, send me over a few pages. That’s what I’ve got the capacity for. So there’s no critique circle required. You might not be in a season where Big C Community and Writing Group is in it for you, but there are these smaller ways that you can connect a small experiment for this is to think of one writer you admire or feel curious about and offer them one small, specific gesture of attention this week be a message, a shared link, an invitation to talk about books over food.

[00:14:26.390] – Rachel Thompson
And I want to give you a lived version of this because it’s easy for quote-unquote community to turn into a vague virtue. And I have been thinking a lot about how I use that word a lot with what I call my own community. The people who’ve maybe taken courses with me or been on my newsletter for a while and been in conversation with me about writing. One of the most helpful forms of community I’ve ever had was embarrassingly small, really. A friend who didn’t ask me to explain myself, who didn’t fix anything, who just said, send me one paragraph of what you’re working on.

[00:14:55.410] – Rachel Thompson
And when I did, they replied with three sentences: what they saw, what they felt, and one line they wanted more of. And it took maybe four minutes all in all, and it really just changed my whole week and how I thought about writing that week just to have that little ting. And the fourth and final point in our list is to let your values quietly shape the work. From Natalie Wee, who’s Room‘s marketing lead: Art can be a form of rest. And it can also be a way of staying awake.

[00:15:22.210] – Rachel Thompson
You don’t have to write manifestos, as Natalie put in the original article. You can let what you stand for enter the work. And I would suggest that could be through image, tone, or attention. One way in to doing this is to finish the sentence one thing I stand for is and write for 10 minutes from there, with no audience in mind. Here’s a small lived moment from my life. I’ve had mornings where I sat down determined to write something, quote unquote important, and all that came out was petty, overly online-sounding rants in my notebook until, in the middle of it, my pen slowed and I wrote one plain sentence about an ordinary object in my house and its significance.

[00:16:03.970] – Rachel Thompson
And suddenly I could feel what I was actually grieving, what I was actually defending, what I was actually trying to protect. And that’s values right there. Not the manifesto version. The version where your attention stops lying and you get really deeply honest with yourself. So if you do try this, notice what shows up.

[00:16:21.620] – Rachel Thompson
Images, memories, questions. All of that is material, and your values don’t have to be loud on the page to be present. They can simply guide where your gaze lingers and what you choose to name. That’s a peek into our collectively written article on ways to rest resist as you write. And that’s everything I’ve been holding, or important parts of what I’ve been holding during this quieter stretch that gives me a clearer sense of what’s sustainable in my writing life.

[00:16:48.490] – Rachel Thompson
Room 48.3 Rest unrest asked how we keep making art when the world is unsettled and when we are too. And I asked that question when we put together the theme for the issue as much because I needed to know the answer then that I had the answer. And I think the writers and contributors for that issue and the artists for that issue really brought together a really beautiful collective response to that, along with all the support of my colleagues. Again, I mentioned Holly Lam was the assistant editor, and we had Hamda Shabir as our shadow editor for the issue. And of course, the support of our fairly new at the time, our still kind of newish managing editor, Chimedum Oheagbu.

[00:17:31.320] – Rachel Thompson
And I’m just really grateful for all of their support and the support of the entire collective in putting that together and allowing us to produce this art form, the lit mag that I love so much, or certainly the Room magazine, lit magazine. Coming back to the podcast now feels like continuing that question with you, REST might look like doing less, yes, but I also want to offer one concrete picture. Because for me, lately it looks like stepping outside for 10 minutes at a time without trying to solve anything, letting my eyes land on one small, ordinary detail mentioned branches moving in the wind, the edge of a wave pulling back, the stubborn shape of a rock.

Often, I walk and run out on a seabed, or what was a seabed many centuries ago, I assume, and I find the fossil remains and stones from that seabed and just stay with it long enough that my breath changes, long enough that I remember I belong to a world that keeps moving even when I’m scared. And then when I come back to the page, I try not to ask for brilliance or breakthrough.

[00:18:30.950] – Rachel Thompson
I just ask what’s the smallest thing I can say today that gives this draft a little breath, that keeps me in relationship with what I care about, and that doesn’t require me to go numb in order to keep going? If you want to take this as a question you can carry with you this week, maybe it’s what does rest actually look for you and your writing right now, wherever you are? I’m glad you’re here, and I’m glad to be back in conversation with you. The Write, Publish and Shine podcast is hosted by me, Rachel Thompson, with sound editing by Adam Linder. To learn more about my work supporting writers, visit racheltompson co and sign up for my weekly writerly love letters packed with encouragement for your writing journey.

[00:19:10.660] – Rachel Thompson
Before I go, I want to say this plainly. When I talk about rest here, I do not mean disengagement. I mean, refusing the conditions that grind us down and keep us compliant. I record this podcast on the lands of the El Muzina Bedouin in South Sinai, in solidarity with occupied peoples and with those enduring ongoing occupation and siege, and with a commitment to justice and care. And next time I’ll be back with a longer episode, more on rest and unrest for writers, including interviews and conversations, and a little more of what it looked like to work on this issue up close.

[00:19:44.850] – Rachel Thompson
Until next time, take the rest you need, and if you can, let some of what’s unsettled find its way onto the page. Continue to write, publish and shout.