65 // Empathy & POV with Naomi J. Williams

SPEAKERS:

Meli Walker, Naomi J. Williams, Rachel Thompson

Rachel Thompson:  00:01

Welcome luminous writers to the write, publish and shine podcast. I am your host, author and literary magazine editor Rachel Thompson. This podcast explores how to write and share your brilliant writing with the world. In each episode, we delve into specifics on how to polish and prepare your writing for publication and the journey from emerging writer to publish author.

00:26

Hi, and welcome luminous writers! This episode is the first in a mini-series of three episodes on the theme of empathy for writers.

00:35

In my membership community for writers, called Writerly Love, we have monthly themes that we look at in terms of writing. Last month it was Sensitivity, i.e., being sensitive, engaged people in this era of numbingly desensitizing media.

00:53

And from our discussion on sensitivity, came the word empathy, which then I chose for the theme for this month in Writerly Love.

01:05

I approach this and every theme in a spirit that both celebrates and remains open to critique, examination.

01:14

So, I really believe that empathy has limits as we see in in-group out-group behaviors often with deadly consequences when it comes to who gets our empathy and who doesn’t.

01:24

Still, it’s definitely something writers I speak to talk about when they say why they write, it gives them greater empathy, and why readers read, to feel with other people, a Brené Brown definition of the term. Empathy is feeling with other people.

01:42

And by the way, Brené Brown definition of the term. Empathy is feeling with other people does come up a little bit in this conversation and not in the way that you might expect.

01:48

So, we’re going with this theme and this month we also have a series of workshop where empathy is the connective tissue.

01:56

Our workshops are open to you, dear listeners, whether you’re a member or not, and offered with a pay what you can model.

02:05

You can learn more about the three workshops and sign up at rachelthompson.co/workshops

02:13

So, my guest today is presenting one of those workshops this month, author and creative writing instructor Naomi J. Williams.

02:20

So, of course I asked her in our upcoming interview about the importance of empathy when it comes to writing fiction, her primary genre, the benefits and the downsides of empathy, and her hilarious love-hate relationship with people from the white women wellness leaders in Northern California to Dickens to Murakami.

02:41

In fact, I first found Naomi J. Williams because of an essay she wrote that both lovingly takes down the braided essay and also provides an brilliant example of the form.

02:53

So, listen to my conversation with Naomi J. Williams.

02:58

Welcome to the podcast, Naomi J. Williams. I’m going to start with your bio, which describes that you were born in Japan and you spoke no English until age six. How do you think that experience informs both your writing and your experience of empathy when it comes to writing in life?

Naomi J. Williams:  03:17

I think I share with most writers this feeling of being an outsider, right. No matter who you are or what your background is, most writer say that they felt like an outsider growing up, and they still feel like an outsider in different ways, and that’s part of what draws them to writing. Right. But I feel this outsider status profoundly. I’ve never felt quite American, despite living here for most of the last half century.

03:43

I certainly don’t feel Japanese, which I’ve recognized when I’ve gone back there. I’m not quite white, but I’m often not really Asian enough. Right. And despite the fact that I’m, like, a published author, I actually always feel like I’m still learning English.

03:59

Also, I grew up in a very strange, strict religious community where we were told that we were supposed to be outsiders. We were not supposed to live like other people. We were not supposed to feel like we belonged to the larger society. We were supposed to resist it. Right.

04:18

So that really made me feel like an outsider, and that was something to be prized in many different ways. I feel like an outsider. And has that kind of permanent outsider status helped me develop empathy as a person and as a writer? Like, I really hope so. I’ve certainly tended to write about people who, whatever their background, end up being someplace that is not home and where they do not belong.

04:44

And I’m very obsessed with travel. I always have been. And it seems like most of my stories end up being about people who cross some kind of boundary, whether it’s a political boundary or some kind of social boundary, but often it’s some sort of geographical boundary. Right. Or cultural boundary. Linguistic boundary. I’m really interested in what happens to people when they go out the door and end up someplace where they’re uncomfortable and very interested in discomfort.

Rachel Thompson:  05:16

What books did you read—if any—in childhood that you felt empathy from for you and your experience?

Naomi J. Williams:  05:24

I have this freakish intimate familiarity with the King James Bible, which I was exposed to as soon as I moved to the United States, actually. So I kind of learned English and learned how to read around intense exposure to that book. Right. Early 17th century English.

05:45

Also, even though I read a lot of the books that were popular with kids my age, I think the saving grace in my family was that we were allowed to read anything we wanted. We had a very extensive library, and I was allowed to go to the public library and check out books, and anything I wanted to read, I was allowed to read. But the really approved books at the church I mostly grew up in were books like The Pilgrim’s Progress, which is like another 17th century, deeply religious allegory right.

06:16

And Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe was another book that was on the approved list. All these books are about journeys, so I used to line up my stuffed animals and play Pilgrim’s Progress with them when I was in elementary school because I just love this idea of leaving home and then encountering these various tribulations on your way toward in that book, it’s the celestial city, which is like an allegory for heaven, right? A metaphor for heaven.

06:42

Robinson Crusoe is about a shipwreck that got deeply into my head. My novel is about a shipwreck. Right. Again, discomfort. Discomfort, leaving home, et cetera.

06:51

I certainly never saw myself in anything that I read. Right. There aren’t a lot of books about little mixed-race Asian Baptist girls. I think there still is not such a book. But even the kind of popular, problematic children’s books like the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

07:09

When I read those to my kids later, I kept stopping and saying, okay, let’s talk about the racist, anti-environmental underpinnings of this character’s phobia, about the Native Americans whose land they are encroaching on, or about wolves and their desire to eradicate nature. Right. Nevertheless, when I was a kid, that idea of moving from place to place really did reflect my childhood. We moved a lot, and then every time you move, you got to set up house all over again. You got to make friends all over again, and you’re uncomfortable and out of place all over again. That spoke to me very deeply.

07:46

And then even the fantasy stories like The Narnia Chronicles, which were on the approved list because they were written by CS. Lewis, who was a Christian writer. Right. It’s about these kids that get thrown into this fantasy world full of danger and stuff. I loved that stuff. And then when I got a little older, the Lord of the Rings series with that, you know, nearly impossible, traumatizing journey to eradicate the evil ring. Like, you know, I was pretty obsessed with that for a long time. But also, in my earliest childhood, my mother read to me and later I read to myself because I actually taught myself how to read a child’s level of Japanese before we left the country.

08:27

There were these really strange Japanese stories, old, old stories like The Crane Wife or The Snow Woman, just about these dangerous non-human female entities, powerful female entities who then try to live as human women and fail or end up leaving because there’s some spell that gets broken. Usually because the man and the man, the human man in their life, like, screws things up, right? I was obsessed with these stories. I’m still very obsessed with these stories. But again, these were not dignified versions of old stories.

09:02

They were bleak also back then. So this was in, like, the mid 60s, mid to late sixties. The Japanese translations of things like Hans Christian Anderson were not Disney-fied versions of, say, The Little Mermaid. The one I grew up with was the sad version where she, like, turns into foam on the ocean and doesn’t get the guy. So I grew up with all this melancholy in my in the stuff I consumed.

09:28

And I think I did have developed, like, a deep set of sense of empathy for doomed tragic figures, right. And especially this idea of these female entities who were forever outsiders and could not be part of the human world. I kind of related to that.

Rachel Thompson:  09:48

When you’re writing fictional characters, from any point of view, how much are you empathizing—i.e., feeling with—characters?

Naomi J. Williams:  09:59

I don’t think I can write a character without empathizing with them pretty intensely, even if they’re mostly antagonistic characters on the page. So I have this character in my book.

10:06

He’s based on a real person, a scientist, who was on this doomed French expedition, right? His name was Lamanon. He was very smart and really a pain in the ass. Right. And on Twitter, a few fans of the novel were having an exchange where they talked about how much they hated this character.

10:30

And honestly, they were engaging in a public forum about my book, and I was thrilled about that. And they were engaged enough to have really strong feelings about this character. But it really hurt my feelings that they hated him because I ended up loving him. I really did. Even though he was just such a thorn in the side of some of the other more sympathetic characters.

10:54

And also, he has a tragic end. A really tragic end. Well, they all do. But he had a particularly tragic end. And I cried when that happened.

11:04

And yet I thought, people are cheering when he dies. Oh, no, that’s actually really sad. Like, he had so much potential.

11:12

So, he’s a problematic character that I found myself really loving, as if he were a family member or something. So, yes, I came to love him, warts and all. I obviously did not hide any of those warts because people hated him. But yeah, anyway, yes, empathy plays a big part in my writing.

Rachel Thompson:  11:34

What would you say, are both the benefits and the downsides of empathy when it comes to fiction writing? If you think there are benefits and downsides to that.

Naomi J. Williams:  11:43

Well, I saw this question in advance, I thought, well, there are no downsides to empathy. But actually, I think it’s possible for a writer to identify so completely with a character that they lose some distance from that character, right. Or they engage in a kind of hero worship of their own characters that can actually muddy their task at sort of the invisible Narrator behind this, and I’m actually thinking of a specific book I just read, and I’m not going to say what it is because I don’t want people to pile on to me about what’s actually considered a classic. Nevertheless, when I was reading this book, for the first time, recently, I thought, the author loves her main character too much, too much. And now we just have hero worship on the page, and a kind of hagiography of this entirely fictional character. And the thing is that I really had some serious questions about this character. And so did some of the other secondary characters in the novel, who kept questioning this main character. And those were the people I identified with like, yeah, yeah, this main character always had an answer to everything, and always fixed everything. And I stopped believing in the main character, because I felt like the narrator, and perhaps by proxy, thought writer simply felt, it wasn’t just the love, I think we need to love the character. There was a kind of infatuation going on. And I was disappointed. So, I’m not going to name a book. But I do want to give an example of a series of books actually, where I felt like the empathy was so on point, and so instructive, and this is not the kind of fiction I write at all, and that I normally don’t teach. But a student of mine actually said that they wanted to read one of these books. So we read the first in the series, and then we ended up reading the whole series together because they were so great. And this is Martha Wells, Murderbot series. It’s straight up hard science fiction, hilarious. Moving, the main character is the kind of cyber creature created a part human parts in all these robotic parts, and is trying to come to terms with what it means to be a self a thinking self, when you’re not fully human. Just on point, genius, empathetic writing. That’s all I have to say.

12:50

And those were the people I identified with, like, yeah, yeah, what about that? But this main character always had an answer to everything and always fixed everything, and I stopped believing in the main character because I felt like the narrator and perhaps by proxy, the writer simply fell to it wasn’t just love. I think we need to love the characters. There was a kind of infatuation going on and I was disappointed. I’m not going to name a book.

13:19

But I do want to give an example of a series of books, actually, where I felt like the empathy was so on point and so instructive. And this is not the kind of fiction I write at all and that I normally don’t teach. But a student of mine actually said that they wanted to read one of these books, so we read the first in the series and then we ended up reading the whole series together because they were so great. And this is Martha Wells Murderbot series. It’s straight up hard science fiction, hilarious moving.

13:50

The main character is a kind of cyber creature created of part human parts and all these robotic parts, and is trying to come to terms with what it means to be a self, a thinking self, when you’re not fully human.

14:07

Just on point, genius, empathetic writing. That’s all I have to say.

Rachel Thompson:  14:13

So, as you mentioned, I sent you these questions in advance to give you time to think about them a bit. And one of the things I sent was a quote from Indigenous author Alicia Elliott wrote,

“Writing with empathy is not enough…Empathy has its limits—and, contrary to what some may think, it is possible to both have empathy for a person and still hold inherited, unacknowledged racist views about them.”

Elliot suggests that writing with love is more important. So, having introduced that quote, I’ve sent you that quote, and in anticipation I’m asking this question, which is, what do you think about writing with empathy versus writing with love?

Naomi J. Williams:  14:54

Well, I thought this was a really interesting quote. Thank you for introducing it to me. I hope these things are not mutually exclusive to me. I almost think that empathy is a form of love, or is part of the practice of love.

15:07

But I’m not even sure love is sufficient to expose and unravel what she calls the inherited, unacknowledged racist views that many of us just have. I mean, that stuff is so hardwired by the time we’re into adulthood, it’s so hardwired. It’s hard to even find never mind, like, excise. Right. That work, I think, is just an ongoing thing for all of us and needs to be motivated by love.

15:33

But I don’t think love is enough to I just know even in my own relationships, personal relationships, I’ve had to contend with other people’s racism and my own even in my own family and even among loved ones and even among trusted friends.

15:49

So, I think that work is ongoing and we need to be both diligent about it, but also patient with other people who are also doing that work. My book is going to be eight years old this year, I think. And I think if I were writing it now, there are things I would do differently based on stuff I’ve learned and unlearned in the last decade. Right. And I still love that book, but it would be a different book today, written by a different person with slightly different perspective.

16:21

And I mean, I think by all means we need to write out of love, but we also need to think and read and listen to other people.

16:30

I think bubbly, warm, affectionate feelings is also insufficient. I think that love needs to motivate us to actually educate ourselves.

Rachel Thompson:  16:40

I’m interrupting this discussion on writing and empathy with Naomi J. Williams, for just a moment to invite you to work with Naomi J. Williams, and two other brilliant instructors.

16:53

In a workshop series we’re holding this month, you can join the Writerly Love community this month for three hands-on craft writing workshops. These workshops are alive on zoom but won’t feel too zoom like I promise. They’re 1.5 hours long and include instruction, guided prompts and feedback if you want it.

17:13

So, the first workshop is sharing the camera, playing with unusual points of view with your instructor Naomi J. Williams, that’s held on Monday, February 20.

17:24

The next is the Empathetic Object, you can see the ding, ding, ding the theme there of empathy for writers, and that instructor is Lyndall Cain. And that workshop is held on Sunday, February 26.

17:37

And then the third and final workshop this month is Lyric Prose: Experimenting with Form from instructor Christina Brobby, who writes beautiful hermit crab and other lyric essays. And that will be held on Tuesday, February 28.

17:53

All workshops are offered in the pay what you can model. Pay what you can, which means you pay what you can starting at 10 bucks per workshop, or 25 for all three.

18:03

You can learn more about the three workshops and sign up at rachelthompson.co/workshops

18:10

So, you have written tongue-in-cheek essays that explore a love-hate relationship with both the author Haruki Murakami and with the braided essay (the must-read for braided essay writers called Braids: A Braided Essay About Braids & Braided Essays) which is actually how I first I found you and we connected the first time. So, can you tell our listeners more about the challenges and objections you raise in these essays, full of love for both the author and the form?

Naomi J. Williams:  18:39

Yeah. So I think maybe this is one of my niches, like the affectionate parody or take down, if you will. Right. I do have this ongoing love hate relationship with the work of Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. And if people want to read about that, there is that essay at Lit Hub, which I had submitted with the title, My Love Hate Relationship with Haruki Murakami.

19:02

And they renamed it: I Will Be Thrilled When Haruki Murakami wins the Nobel Prize and Thrilled when he doesn’t. something like that. Right. So, yeah, every time one of his novels comes out, I run to the store and buy it, and then I compare it to eating a bag of potato chips, which I don’t even really like, but the first one I eat is so awesome, and then I eat the whole bag, and then I’m filled with self-loathing.

19:26

Like, why did I do that? I don’t even feel good now. And I often feel that way after reading his novel. They’re really compelling. I’m turning the page, turning the page, and at the end I’m like, Wait, what?

19:38

And I know this is kind of a heterodox opinion and that many people love him and they love that what just happened feeling. So this may say more about me than it does about Murakami and his genius, but I keep going back. Right. There is something really compelling, but I have a super dysfunctional relationship with this man’s work, and I wanted to explore that in kind of a humorous way.

20:05

My relationship with braided essays is a little bit similar. I’ve read many wonderful braided essays. The really good ones take you someplace you don’t expect at all, help you make connections between things that seem disjunct, right? Is that a word? Disjunctive not connected. Make your mind feel, like, expanded.

20:24

But I found that I was encountering essay after essay, and often these were drafts of essays, right? Like works in progress that just felt superficial and even, dare I say, lazy, where they would just take some item, some experience of their life, extract one object out of that, go to Wikipedia or the dictionary and talk about that, and it just sort of bounces around in this kind of formulaic way. It didn’t do the hard, unexpected sort of excavating work that I think a really good personal essay should do. Right. And so I started, in my mind, coming up with what would be a really jokey essay that did some of the things that I found so vexing and frustrating in other people’s essays.

21:10

But then I found that I ended up doing some excavating myself that I didn’t quite expect. And then when I got to the end of the essay, I thought, would anybody enjoy reading this or would they just feel like I was trashing their favorite art form? Right? So I sent it to Brevity, to the blog, and I was very surprised when they published it and then very surprised that it actually had some legs. I mean, it led to my first appearance with Writerly Love.

21:36

A friend of mine taught a whole class on the braided essay that was the subject of the class, which sounds great, I wish I could have taken it where she actually assigned my essay. And I said, Are you kidding? It’s kind of mean. And she said, no, it’s actually kind of a love letter to the potential of the braided essays. So, anyway, yeah, I feel like this is one of my hats that I wear, is taking something that I have a fraught relationship with and then sort of exposing it in a funny way.

Rachel Thompson:  22:07

What are some other subjects for which you have that love-hate relationship? Naomi?

Naomi J. Williams:  22:12

I’m actually a very testy person and rant all the time about things. So, yes, I have love hate relationships with very many things, with Northern California, for instance. Just kind of the culture here. It’s been my hope for 35 years with it MSA programs, which have helped provide my livelihood for the last five or six years. I had some mixed feelings about that also, like the mostly white wellness women and their industries, the kind of Brené Browns and Glennon Doyles of the world.

22:50

I both love these women, and I’m just made by them and the messaging.

22:54

Yeah, I listen to their podcasts and then I kind of have this face.

23:00

But I have a deeply ambivalent and long, decades long, almost lifelong love hate relationship with the work of Charles Dickens. I grew up consuming those novels like they were candy. I’ve probably read half of his novels, which is a lot because the man was very prolific. And my favorite, which I’ve reread many times but had a very fraught relationship with, is his final complete novel, which is Our Mutual Friend. I was obsessed with this book when I was a teenager.

23:31

I had a deep, weird crush on one of the main characters who, when I reread the novel in my thirties, I thought, this man is a predator. He’s an upper class gentleman preying on a working class woman whose virtue he is trying to take. And he’s kind of redeemed in the end. But I’m very interested in the way that deeply problematic cross class relationship comes across as so romantic.

24:02

And it spoke to me so intensely as this kind of repressed young Baptist girl in this really strange religious community being racially and culturally different from the people around me. And yeah, I wanted to explore that for a while. I think there may be an essay in there about Our Mutual Friend and its discomfort.

Rachel Thompson:  24:27

What are you writing right now and how is empathy present in your writing?

Naomi J. Williams:  24:32

For the first time ever, I’m writing a story about where I live, which is Sacramento. I’m writing a kind of noir crime story set in Sacramento in the 1950s. So, this is not where I’m from. Right. I don’t know where I’m from, various places, but I’m not from Sacramento.

24:54

I’ve just lived here for the last few years. But I became aware of a really interesting bit of Sacramento history, which is that we used to have one of the most thriving Japan towns in the country before 1960. We had the fourth largest Japan town in the United States after, I don’t know, L.A., San Francisco, Seattle, probably. And it was destroyed by the Sacramento Redevelopment Agency.

25:17

So this was a community that was hollowed out once by the war when everybody was sent to internment camps during the Second World War. Many of them came back. Most of them came back and rebuilt the community. And ten years later it was destroyed by redevelopment. And I live right near this area now.

25:33

I really can’t walk in those areas now, which is mostly filled with state buildings, office buildings and parking garages and part of the arena. That where the Sacramento Kings (yay Kings!) play now without thinking about what used to be there, which was thousands and thousands of mostly Japanese citizens and other immigrants and other minorities. There were a lot of black Americans there, too, who all got evicted after 1955 so that they could level like 17 city blocks and then build all these mostly really ugly buildings and really ugly parking garages. And some of the land has never been developed.

26:13

This seems like a perfect setting for a noir story. There’s kind of municipal corruption, rampant racism and a hopeless fight against the man. So I was asked to write a story set in Sacramento and this was where my mind immediately went. I didn’t know I was waiting to write this story. But the research has been great. It’s the first time I’ve done research in English.

26:41

Such a blessing to do research in English. And it’s 20th century, so I’m sort of more comfortable with the setting. It’s not quite done yet, but it’s been very fun to work on.

Rachel Thompson:  26:50

I’m excited that you’re going to be offering this workshop with us and the Writerly Love community on point of view, can you tell us a bit more about the offering what you’ll be doing in that point of view workshop? And what is it that you hope writers will take away from the experience and the 1.5 hours that they’ll be spending with you?

Naomi J. Williams:  27:07

Yeah, well, thank you. I’m looking forward to it too, because point of view is honestly one of my favorite things ever. And when I sit down to write a story, I often go through many, many drafts where I’m trying to figure out exactly that question point of view. I feel like if I can land on the right point of view, which isn’t just whether it’s 1st, 2nd or third person, but who is holding what I call the camera and when, right. Are they looking back on an old memory?

27:35

Are we looking through this camera right as it happens? Does that camera get shared around, et cetera? So there’s a version of this workshop that I taught at Ashland University a few summers ago. It’s just a one-off afternoon craft session, and I’m revising it for this group. But I thought, what about if we look at really unusual points of view?

27:57

Not necessarily to advocate for people writing from, say, the point of view of an inanimate object, which is not always useful, but it can be a useful exercise to try to adopt that unusual POV just to see what it feels like and to see what you see when you adopt that camera. Right. So, I share it around. I asked people to come up with a situation, and then I go through several different iterations of, like, well, what if a child were holding the camera? What do they see?

28:28

What if an inanimate object in this space is holding the camera? What do they see? And I have kind of funny examples of all of these things. And after I taught this workshop, I wasn’t expecting this. I thought this would be more kind of generative and help kind of expand people’s vision of what point of view could be.

28:49

And I didn’t think it would necessarily generate useful real fiction. But two people who took that class have since published stories that came out of that workshop, and one of them was a first time publication for that writer, and I could not be more thrilled. So, it turns out it actually does not just expand people’s horizons, maybe, but even lead to stories that they’re willing to share. So I hope that happens for some people in this workshop. But mostly it’s just, like, come with an open mind, come planning to write something you didn’t expect and get ready to play.

29:22

I think we need to think more about playing in our writing and less of it as a chore. And I’m speaking to myself so much right now, so that’s what the purpose of this is. I wanted people to have fun thinking a little bit outside the box or maybe even way outside the box, or thinking as the box. Right. Anyway, that’s where it came from, and I can’t wait to do it again.

29:47

I’m really grateful for this opportunity. I had so much fun the last time I was with the Writerly Love community. It attracts, I think, very sort of interesting, engaged writers. And I’m just happy to sort of be with the group again. So, thank you.

Rachel Thompson:  30:04

Join the Writerly Love community this month for three hands-on craft writing workshops. You can work with instructors like my guest today, Naomi J. Williams. These workshops are live on Zoom, but won’t feel too zoom-like I promise. They’re 1.5 hours long and include instruction, guided prompts and feedback if you want it.

30:23

You can learn more about the three workshops and sign up at rachelthompson.co/workshops

30:28

So, that was a conversation with the brilliant and funny Naomi J. Williams.

30:34

All the books and people mentioned in this episode can be found in our show notes up at rachelthompson.co/podcast/65 (this is episode 65).

30:46

And as we discussed in the episode, Naomi was a guest previously in my membership community and I appreciated getting to know more of her origin story as a writer, about that outsider feeling that so many of us who write have and her take on the many problematic books we read in childhood and ones I hadn’t read, like the sad version where she, like, the Japanese translation she had of the Little Mermaid where she turns into foam on the ocean and doesn’t get the guy.

31:18

I think it comes across in this episode that Naomi is a great teacher, so I am thrilled that she will be leading a workshop on February 20 as of this recording. The workshop is called SHARING THE CAMERA: PLAYING WITH UNUSUAL POINTS OF VIEW.

31:37

And the description for that workshop is we’re all pretty familiar with first-, third-, and even the oft-maligned second-person points of view. But it can be fun and instructive to try your hand at some less-common takes on narrative perspective. In this light-hearted generative session, you’ll write multiple versions of a situation from some unusual and even wacky viewpoints. Come prepared to write something new while having some laughs.

32:03

I for one cannot wait to see what these wacky viewpoints will be. And if you want to sign up for that workshop, or look at the whole series of workshops that we have this month, you can do so at rachelthompson.co/workshops

32:18

The Write, Publish, and Shine podcast is brought to you by me, Rachel Thompson. Meli Walker co-produced this episode and I’m grateful for her support and help with recording Naomi. Thanks, Meli!

32:29

You can learn more about the work I do to help writers, write, publish, and shine at rachelthompson.co. When you’re there, sign up for my Writerly Love letters, sent every-other week and sometimes more often, and filled with support for your writing practice.⁠

32:43

If this episode encouraged you to embrace your love-hate for anyone or anything and write a loving takedown, I would love to hear all about it. You can email me at hello@rachelthompson.co

32:54

Please tell other luminous writers about this episode. You can do this by sending them to the podcast at rachelthompson.co/podcast or searching for Write, Publish, and Shine wherever they get their podcasts.

33:06

Thank you for listening—I encourage you to embrace empathy and interrogate it, too!

33:20

My guest Naomi J. Williams shares an acknowledgement of the lands she spoke to us from:

Naomi J. Williams:  33:24

I live in Sacramento, California, which was and still is the tribal land of the Nissan people. It had also been home to the Southern Maidu in the plains of New York.

Rachel Thompson:  33:24

And my co-producer for the episode, Meli Walker shares her land acknowledgement, too:

Meli Walker:  33:42

This is Meli Walker recording from unceded with St. niche territories.

Rachel Thompson:  33:46

I am a guest in the South Sinai, Egypt, on lands historically and presently occupied by the El Muzzina Bedouin.