Transcript with Transcript Outline

SPEAKERS:

Shantell Powell, Rachel Thompson

Rachel Thompson:

Hello, luminous writer. Are you ready to draft, revise, and publish with my support? I would love to hold space and deadlines and help you hone and develop your craft this year in the Write, Publish and Shine Intensive.

Do you feel called to write new work and need help staying focused? Do you have drafts ready to revise and polish and don’t know where to begin? Do you have a stack of essays, poems, or stories? And you’re wondering now what?

If you resonate with any of the above, you might be an ideal writer for the Write, Publish and Shine Intensive. And if you already know you will get down to writing with the right combination of accountability, deadlines, and instruction, the course is definitely for you.

The Write, Publish and Shine Intensive is a holistic six month program for writers who want to publish their most brilliant work. Writers who go through this, my most comprehensive course, gain the confidence and know how to revise their writing and make it sparkle. They roll up their sleeves with a professional editor. That’s me who guides them every step of the way. They publish writing that matters and that is read and celebrated. And they build a writing career and connections to bring them to the next stage of their writing journey.

The course is intensive as the name suggests, but also flexible and done at a pace and in a way that works for you. You can work on your own schedule and get one on one support at times that fit your calendar. We start on February 14th and the course runs from February 14th to October 29th. We have scheduled breaks and we also take July and August off. So it’s six months over those eight months. If you want a partner on your writing journey, I’d love to have you join us.

You will get 1-1 coaching with me to get clear on exactly what you were meant to be writing and how to get there. You will have a manuscript review with me where I read your work and give you direct feedback. Writers who complete the intensive come out confident and share about why their writing matters. They also learn how to take their words from idea to publication in their dream journals.

So imagine six months of writing the work you were meant to write with the support you need to revise and complete your writing and publish it brilliantly. You can learn more and sign up at rachelthompson.co/intensive/. And remember that all the love and support begins on February 14. So that’s rachelthompson.co/intensive/.

Rachel Thompson:

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.

Hi, luminous writers. Welcome to the series on writing with disabilities and limitations. It’s a round of episodes that should go for about eight episodes in total. As of this booking, I’m looking ahead of my calendar here.

In this episode, I sit down with a wonderful Writerly Love membership community member, Shantell Powell, a two-spirit author, artist, and self-described swamp hag who grew up on the land and off the grid. Her publication credits include Augur, Solarpunk Magazine, MetaStellar, The Deadlands, and honestly just keep racking up—we talk about how she does this in the episode, and she has a great hack for writers with ADHD to track submissions that I think is brilliant and would be useful to many writers, myself included, and not just those with ADHD.

We get into her often very visceral writing; she reads a piece that I would describe that way, visceral, and speculates a little about why that flavour comes out in her work. And for this series and focus, we talk about how she works with her various limitations and disabilities, which include neurodivergence and now long COVID, among other conditions and limitations. Listen in to hear from a singular writer whose writing practice shows that there is not one way to be a writer.

So I want to welcome you, Shantell, to the podcast. As you know, the series is focused on writers who write with limitations and writers who write with a disability or identify as disabled. And we’ve also thrown in the term spoony neurodivergent. So how do you publicly identify yourself? What’s in your writing bio? And how do you come to this identity or way of expressing yourself within your lived experience?

Shantell Powell:

Well, on my Mastodon profile, I described myself as neurospicy and a spoony. But I never really started identifying as disabled until a couple of years ago. And that’s when I was briefly working with a researcher on the topic of disability pride. But until then, I’d always presumed a disabled person was someone who had it a lot worse than I did. It seemed to me that disabled people were other people, not me. And I couldn’t claim that because that’s only for people who need wheelchairs or something. That’s what I thought. But as I thought about it, I realized that I’ve always had disabilities as far back as I can remember.

For instance, I couldn’t walk properly when I was a small child, and I had to wear orthopedic shoes. And I had severe chronic ear aches and explosive nose bleeds. I was always sick. I had severe pain in my knees due to cartilage damage and couldn’t really bend my knees for them about 90 degrees without pain, 45 degrees, I’ll say. And I’ve also had chronic gut issues and headaches all my life. But somehow I brushed all this aside as more like a temporary inconvenience, even though they’ve always affected me and occasionally left me unable to do things that most people take for granted. And these days being post menopausal and dealing with post COVID brain fog, I’ve only added to my collection of ailments.

But my writing bio doesn’t generally include this stuff unless I happen to be writing for a journal about disability or mental health issues. And it’s not that I’m ashamed of it because I’m really not. It’s just that there’s limited space and author bios. And I really don’t find my disabilities to be the most interesting thing about myself.

Rachel Thompson:

Yeah, I love that, Shan. And you mentioned a bit about how limitations and disability have impacted your life over the span of your life. But then also I’m wondering about how it’s impacted your writing both creatively and in practice.

Shantell Powell:

On high pain days, for example, I find it difficult to impossible to get any writing done. And some days, all you can do is just kind of curl up at a ball and wait for it to go away. The same goes on days when the brain fog is especially thick.

I do have an unusual neurological condition called scintillating scotoma. You know, when you look at a really bright spot and then look away and there is these blind spots just sort of floating around in your vision. It’s kind of like that. But it can include even things like what look like fireworks going off in my peripheral vision. And I always have some variety of flashing blind spots in my vision. But most of the time I’m able to kind of tuck them down into the bottom corner of my vision where they don’t affect me. But when they do flare up, they make me unable to read or concentrate well enough to have a conversation with someone.

As long as my fingers are on the correct keys on the keyboard, they don’t impact my ability to write. So I guess that writing taps into a completely different part of my brain. And I’m really grateful for that.

Rachel Thompson:

Isn’t that you like kind of close your eyes and just touch type your way through it then?

Shantell Powell:

Well, it doesn’t matter if I close my eyes or not, because the spots are going to be there, whether or not my eyes are open, they just kind of flash around. So it’s like a permanent rave going on in my hand.

Rachel Thompson:

I’ve had that before with migraines, I guess, where I get like aural kind of things, they call it an aura, I guess, around my eyes.

Shantell Powell:

Yeah, it’s called migraine status aura. What I have is related to a migraine. But the good thing about it for me is it’s rarely associated with the pain. So I’ll take that as a win, I guess. I do get normal migraines too, but the flashing spots are never really gone for me ever. That goes back to my teens is the earliest I remember seeing that.

Sometimes anxiety gets in the way of a writing project for me too. Like, I learned to use writing as a therapeutic tool to deal with anxiety.So if a terrible thought keeps circling around and around in my mind, it can really get in the way of whatever I was planning to write about. It’s hard to write about little girls playing with their dog when all I can think about is climate catastrophe, for example.

So what I’ll do in those cases is write about what is bothering me. And it feels kind of like an exorcism, I suppose, because I’m getting those frightened thoughts down on a page and out of my head. It doesn’t cure the problem, of course, but it does make it a lot more manageable. It helps me regain my equilibrium. And I’ve ended up with some really interesting writing because of this.

Rachel Thompson:

Yeah, I love that. It’s a way of creating some kind of action around the things that you’re anxious about in terms of the climate sounds like.

Shantell Powell:

Oh, I’ve got all kinds of things. I’ve had anxiety all my life too. That runs in the family as well. I need to do more of that. So you’re inspiring me just by saying that.

Rachel Thompson:

What are some things you’ve done to make the work of writing better than your abilities? I mean, I’m picturing you now, with making sure your hands are oriented to the keyboard while you have your vision intact. But what are other things like that that you do to kind of work around that?

Shantell Powell:

Well, sometimes if my brain is just too scattered to do any writing and I can’t hold my attention, I’ll shift to do something else. So maybe I’ll listen to a podcast about writing. There’s lots of really good ones out there. Or I might go looking for calls for submission. And I might work on revising an old piece too. Sometimes if I just can’t think right, I’ll just tinker around with an old piece that hasn’t been published yet.

Sometimes I also will watch movies or TV shows, not just to mindlessly entertain myself, but I can pay close attention to what makes them work or not work. And I learned a lot about dialogue by listening to Elmore Leonard audiobooks, for example. As someone with ADHD, I don’t have a good sense of object permanence.

So if I don’t see something, I’m likely to forget about it. So I’ve got a wall calendar next to my writing desk. And anytime I send something off to a magazine or anthology, I write it down on the calendar. And if there’s too many empty spots on the calendar, I know it’s time to send off more stuff.

Rachel Thompson:

Yeah, I love that practice of your Shan. I think what you’re doing in terms of the calendar and what you refer to as object permanence, just like if you need to see things in front of you to help you remember what you’ve done and what you’re doing next kind of thing. I see that as something that’s worked really well because you are someone in our community who’s often sharing publishing wins and publications that you’ve gotten into and also sending a lot of work out as well too. So I think that that’s something that you found those great adaptations for yourself that are allowing you to really generate as much as you can.

And I love what you said too about listening to podcasts when just even looking at words on a screen or a page is difficult. In particular, just, you know, I was part of a conversation recently when we did the Lit mag love course ****of people saying they felt a lot of kind of shame about that almost like  they are not a writer because like they can’t read as much and they can’t work on the screen as much. And you know, it’s like here you are being a writer listening to podcasts about writing isn’t that cool. You don’t have to always be engaging with the text format. There’s other formats.

Shantell Powell:

I don’t really go out to coffee shops anymore but that’s a really good way to do it to get an ear for dialogue is to go where there’s people having conversations and just kind of eavesdrop not because you’re snooping but because you want to understand how the flow of conversation works for different people.

Rachel Thompson:

Yeah, it’s just like bringing that writerly, sensitivity and observation to the world. So I’m curious about what kind of writing or writing practices are exciting you these days. Are there certain methods, genres, forms, or places where you feel momentum and excitement about your writing?

Shantell Powell:

Yeah, I love, love, love, generative writing workshops. That’s just my favorite. That really gets a lot out of me. And one of my favorites is one called the fairy tale sessions. And that’s run by Sarah Swathi Sukumar out of England. She provides prompts based on fairy tales which really push me outside my comfort zone. When I do these workshops and others like them, I do a lot of free writing. I just write from margin to margin without stopping or without correcting myself or anything like that.

I’ve got notebooks full of stuff which I wrote as quickly as I could with no time to edit or second guess myself. And I ended up writing things I never would have otherwise written. And some of that goes on to inform much longer pieces. I’ve had quite a few things actually published which were conceived during that sort of workshop.

Rachel Thompson:

That’s wonderful. I love when you’re talking about margin to margin. People can’t see this. I want to describe that you had your hand kind of running like almost like a typewriter back and forth across the picture. I can really picture just a chalk a block full books.

Shantell Powell:

Oh yeah. Oh, I’ve got books everywhere. Like here’s the current one I’m writing in. It’s a purple hardback notebook that my partner got me. It was handmade so it was a special gift. And it’s just filled with my random scribblings.

Rachel Thompson:

I wish people could see this but we don’t do videos on the podcast unfortunately. One of the questions I want to get at with people too when talking about limitations and disabilities is the idea of kind of writer forebears as well too. So are there some writers, artists and people in your life, alive, not alive related or not that taught you through their writing with disability and limitations?

Shantell Powell:

Oh, I’ve got to give a shout out to Amanda Liduk for this one. I first encountered her at the Festival of Literary Diversity or The Fold. And I’ve since worked with her a bit when she was the Mabel Q writer (14:27 unclear) and residence at McMaster University. And she wrote a fabulous book called Disfigured on Fairytale’s Disability and Making Space. And looking back at my older stuff, I don’t really see very many characters with disabilities of any sort. I guess I was thinking, oh, I have to make all my characters perfect and put them in these situations. But these days, disability informs a lot of my writing, even if I don’t necessarily spell it out as such.

Rachel Thompson:

Yeah, it’s not the first time Amanda’s been on the podcast. It’s also not the first time this year. I don’t think that Amanda’s been referenced or not this calendar year, but in the last 12 months. So that’s wonderful to give a shout out to Amanda Liduk. I also, did I meet through The Fold? No, I guess I met through room originally, but met in person at The Fold.

Shantell Powell:

Yeah, I got to meet her last year for the first time. There was AugerCon actually hosted by Auger Magazine in Toronto. And it was a great event too, because it was like no mask, no con. So everyone wore masks in there. And I actually did feel safe.

Rachel Thompson:

Yeah, that’s great. I mean, I think that’s a really important thing to continue bringing up in terms of accessibility to spaces that masking is a mandatory part of that of making our spaces more accessible.

Rachel Thompson:

What do you wish people would sense or know about writing with disability and limitations?

Shantell Powell:

I think there is many ways to write as there are writers, and there is many ways to be disabled as there are disabled people. For some, the disability is going to get in the way, but for others, it’s going to fuel it. So Frida Kahlo became an artist as a way of coping with her disability. And in a way, I became a writer because of mine. My precarious health has forced me to become adaptable. I used to be a professional dancer until a hip disorder took that away from me. Then I switched to being a visual artist until I lost access to my painting studio during COVID lockdowns.

And then menopause hit me really hard in 2020, and I was in constant pain, and I had no idea what to do with myself. Then I remembered I used to write a whole lot in the 1990s, and I decided to give it a try again. And I discovered it’s something I could do and do well in spite of my health issues. Some people are very prescriptive about writing. They say it can only be done one way. And some say you have to write every single day, and some say you have to write everything by hand, and some say that you have to get up extra early to write. But those are going to work for a whole lot of people, whether they’re disabled or not. And as I said before,

there’s just as many ways to write as there are people.

Rachel Thompson:

I think there’s even like shaming sometimes around reading, like listening to audiobooks isn’t the same as reading.

Shantell Powell:

Yeah, I hear that a lot too. Like another thing that often comes up is in a lot of writing workshops, they say, you have to read your work aloud. And I understand that as a person who can hear.

But there are deaf writers who have maybe never heard a word in their life, and that’s going to mean absolutely nothing to them, because the written language is not their first language. It’s a very different language than speaking sign language. So the rhythms are going to be completely different for them. So I think that needs to be taken into consideration.

Rachel Thompson:

Yeah, I would be very curious. We have a bunch of writers in our community coming up, none of whom are deaf writers, but I would be curious how reading out loud, even signing, maybe that would be something that would be useful for them. I’m not sure. I would love to hear if anyone out there listening knows the answer to that question and that thought. But also, I’m going to keep my attention to looking for writers, maybe who would want to share that with us.

Again, I’m coming here, not at all as an expert, but someone who’s wanting to talk to writers about what they’re doing. And then it’s just my own curiosity and trying to figure out how to make more space for people as well. So yeah, I mean, I think that’s good to bring up is nothing to do with us specifically. But as part of the bigger conversation, it’s just how do we bring more writers in.

A lot of people talk about ADHD right now, and there’s a lot of stuff happening on social media about that. And here are the things to do and the things that you should know. And so I wondered if I could bring that question back. Like, what do you wish people would sense or know about writing with ADHD, specifically?

Shantell Powell:

I recently finished the draft on my first novel. And when I first started writing it, my chapters were very, very short. And I had some people say, Oh, why are your chapters so short? And I said, well, because I got ADHD. I just want to write it and they get to the next part because I want to know what happens next. I think that the shorter chapters will actually appeal to other readers who have ADHD too. So I haven’t really spoken to a whole lot of other writers with ADHD to see if they tend to write more flash fiction and short chapters or what. But that being said, I’m currently working on a novella. And it’s very long continuous narrative. It’s no real break. So I don’t know.

That’s the thing about ADHD, short attention span, or hyper focus, right? You can go either way. When I’m writing, and as an example of my novel, a lot of times they’ll say write what you see or write what you hear. And I’m like, well, some of these things aren’t going to really scan. I remember years ago, there’s a book called Perfume by Patrick Susskind. I hope I pronounced that right. A German writer. And the whole book is basically written within the realm of scent. And my partner has no sense of smell. He’s never had a sense of smell. And I would read this book and tell me if it makes sense to you because I wanted to know, and he was able to understand it kind of obliquely.

But he just kind of presumed it was some sort of magic or alchemy that he didn’t personally know. And he was able to appreciate it that way. But it really made me think about including other senses. So when I write, I’m like, maybe I’ve got a blind writer. So I need to write something that’s more tactile or scent based or maybe I’ve got a deaf writer and the sounds aren’t going to make sense. So I’ll put other things. So in my story, I write from the point of view of different characters.

For instance, there’s a snake and I was like, well, how do snakes sense the world? They don’t really sense it. Like they can see heat signatures. So all my vision was related to heat signatures when it was from the point of view of the snake and vibrations and the tastes of different hormones and particles and every character I would approach that way. So I hope that will make it more accessible to a wider range of people.

Rachel Thompson:

Yeah, I love that. Because you know, I’m all about writing through the senses, something that I’m very fascinated about. And I teach a lot too. You think not just about embodying your character for people with access to all biosensors or six senses or however many senses we have, but also you’re making considerations for different abilities in sense. And it sounds like it’s been really great for that perspective coming through your partner’s inability to smell, which because we had some tech problems, I had a little bit of time to look up the term as called anosmia, the partial of full loss of smell. And yeah, I mean, how interesting that someone wrote a book that’s all about the sense of smell because it is one that’s not as accessed in my experience.

Often I’m coaching writers to be like, okay, but what does it smell like? Not just what does it look like? And maybe what does it feel like like getting into other senses, but going all in on one sense that someone can’t access would kind of remove them as a reader for your book.

Shantell Powell:

It was a fun experiment.

Rachel Thompson:

I asked you to bring a piece that relates to your disability limitations, whether that’s indirectly or directly. Would you like to read for us now?

Shantell Powell:

Sure. This is the first part of a story called ‘Sibyl has a heart of gold’, which was published in the Temz Review last year.

Sibyl had a heart of lead. It rested in her belly like a tumor, impervious to stomach acids and digestive enzymes. The heart was heavy within her. A rhythmic stops and starts murmured through the clogged artery of her alimentary canal. Her body kept on trying to reject the heart, but it would not be budged. Wherever she went, the groans of her distended belly preceded her and jeering men pointed or jabbed one another in the ribs. Whenever someone asked her when her baby was due, Sibyl snarled.

Sibyl had a heart of lead. No one believed her. The doctor said the groaning of her abdomen wasn’t the beating of a heart. No heart beats like this. No one has a heart in their stomach. He refused to test her with the echocardiogram, but he gave her pills. She swallowed them and they stuck on her throat. Still came pain like a heart attack, the flutter in the stomach, the knifing wound to the bowels, the browning vision. Sometimes the lead and heart weighed down her digestive system so that it was paralyzed for weeks. Her chest was as tight as her waistband, then bile burned at the back of her throat. She couldn’t sleep sitting down without a river of acid corroding her trachea. So she took more pills and slept sitting up. She ate prunes and bran, but her heart of lead would not pass.

Sibyl had a heart of lead, purple circles beneath her eyes and dull dry skin. Her stomach was a cage for pain. She wore loose dresses and searched for a cure. Emetics didn’t work, laxatives did nothing. The doctor sent her to a shrink, but the heart stayed the same size. She ate ice cream to soothe her throat, chugged pepto bismol for the heartburn. Bucket in hand, she wept on the toilet certain she’d been cursed. In her heart of hearts, she knew it would take alchemy or witchcraft to heal her heartache. She went with black magic. She read in a grimoire bound in human skin that another heart may neutralize this dyspepsia. If another heart were to pulse inside her, it would beat at her vagus nerve, like an angry maid beating a dirty rug. And then maybe the leaden heart would turn to gold.

Rachel Thompson:

Wow, talk about embodiment. I really felt that. My gosh. That was from the fairy tale sessions too. I can’t even remember the story that informed that one to begin with. I enjoyed writing that. I just was like, no, let’s just dig deeper and deeper and deeper and let’s get really into the physicality of this. I love all the loose, like the tight waistband and the maid beating the carpet too. There is something very visceral and I guess in particular the waistband was like really the sense of touch talking, speaking about having different senses evoked in the writing too. So it’s so good.

Shantell Powell:

Thank you.

Rachel Thompson:

What I read of your work, a lot of it has this kind of otherworldly fairy. This definitely felt very fairy tale as I guess I can’t put my finger on it, except for maybe the repetition in it too. So yeah, it brings it into this really cool, what if space or this otherworldly space. So thanks again.

Shantell Powell:

You’re welcome. I get the word visceral very often from my writing and maybe that’s coming from my various disabilities too, because living in this body is very visceral. Let me tell you.

Rachel Thompson:

Yeah, I love that. Thinking of it as, you know, of course it can be very painful, but also that kind of superpower that comes from having those kind of deep feeling experiences. You quoted Frida Kahlo before who also strikes me as an artist who’s very visceral. I’m using air quotes here, but who probably gets that phrase a lot too and clearly also came through a lot of pain and disability.

Shantell Powell:

Uhm-hmm.

Rachel Thompson:

Can you tell me what helps you move, rest, heal, grieve, and celebrate your efforts, wins and losses?

Shantell Powell:

This is one of the questions that I’m not entirely sure I understand. I guess I just keep on keeping on. I’m not really the sort of person that celebrates because I’ve gotten published in a magazine or anything and neither do I get upset if a story is declined. I just send it off somewhere else or maybe I’ll revise it and then send it somewhere else again. But writing is a way of putting my anxieties to work for me and as long as I can keep writing, I’ve got somewhere to put those nervous energies. I’ve had people tell me, oh, you need to celebrate. And I’m like, well, how? I mean, writing is kind of like celebrating to me, I guess, in a weird sort of way.

Rachel Thompson:

Yeah, the writing is the reward. I love that. That’s something I actually heard early on from, I think, Caroline Adderson, who was one of the mentors, not mine, but in a program that I took at the writer’s studio. It was basically like you need to enjoy actually writing because that’s the job. It’s like the only thing you enjoy is the publishing and the celebrity and the readings and the events. I mean, that’s part of the job, but the real job is the writing itself.

Shantell Powell:

Sometimes writing is such a slog, but there’s other times where it feels magical and I’m in the zone. I guess you could call it. I just write and slides out of me and I’ll look and I’ll like, whoa, I wrote that. Wow. My writing is smarter than I am.

Rachel Thompson:

I feel like that’s true, too, though, for all of us. The opportunity of writing means that there’s so much rewriting and it’s like the compounding of all of our intelligence, the layers of intelligence that we have that we don’t necessarily have in those moments, especially thinking of brain fog moments, too, where we can’t really quite… It’s on the tip of our brain, but then the writing allows us to kind of slowly peel back all that wisdom.

Shantell Powell:

I think there’s a French term called L’esprit de l’escalier**,** the spirit of the stairs. The thing you think of, oh, I should have said this. Well, when you’re writing, you get to go and do that. So, you know, like, oh, I forgot to do this thing and you get to do it by going back and revising and editing.

Rachel Thompson:

Oh my gosh, I’ve never heard that term before and I’m adding it to my collection. I love it. Thank you. So, you did mention already your approach to rejection and how you handle feedback both good and bad. I think it sounds like it’s sort of like with a little bit of equilibrium, like, okay, okay, on to the next. But do you have any advice for writers, especially writers, who identify as having ADHD, your chronic illness, disability, on handling good and bad feedback about writing?

Shantell Powell:

Well, first of all, you don’t have to accept any feedback. You just don’t. It’s okay to ignore it. And sometimes the people that are giving you your feedback are really not your target audience. And that’s okay. I wrote an essay a while back about my memories of being a kid whose father was often away working. And one of my workshoppers said it was missing my thoughts on what my dad was doing while he was away. And with my particular flavor of neurodivergence, it meant I never actually considered what he was doing while he wasn’t around.

So the feedback didn’t make sense to me. I wasn’t about to make something up to correct the oversight because, well, that would be writing fiction at that point, and I wasn’t writing a fictional piece. But on a related note, if a character in a story is disabled, you really don’t have to include why they’re disabled if you don’t want to. Disabled characters can simply exist as they are in a story just like they do in the real world. I mean, no one needs a backstory for why the hero is bulging with muscles. So why should they question if the character is missing a leg or has a persistent cough?

Rachel Thompson:

Yeah, that’s a great point. I am curious also what child would be thinking about what the parent is doing outside neurodivergent or not. I like it just seems like an odd request to make up by writing.

Shantell Powell:

I don’t know. I thought it was quite strange myself. And I remember early on, going back to the early 1990s when I very first started getting things workshopped. And I thought that I had to take everything that was told to me as something that I had to work into my writing. And I remember rewriting a story. And I was like, oh, I don’t think this is right. But I’ll do what you said. And it came off so false to me. And then I got it workshop later. And they said, why don’t you do it this way? And it was a way that I had it in the first place. And I think that’s when I learned my lesson.

Rachel Thompson:

And maybe even, I mean, I was asking you for advice for writers and maybe all kind of lean one as well too, which is like, that is kind of the process too. Even if we can tell people, oh, don’t pay attention to everything that happens in workshop. But sometimes you just kind of have to learn it yourself. You’re like, OK, I’m going to try this. And then that experience that you had where it’s like, oops, someone told me to go back to my original way. And so I should listen to myself. It’s hard to know that until you’ve kind of done that. I guess if that makes sense.

Shantell Powell:

Yeah, like I’ve got some work that I’m writing right now is written in non-standard English. And I had some people be like, oh, no, you can’t have the narration written that way. You can only have the dialogue that way. And I was very firmly at the camp of, nope, I want this to be an immersive experience. So for example, there’s a podcast called The Old Gods of Appalachia, which is really recommended if you’re into horror and like backward stories, especially. And the narration of that is done in the same kind of language as the dialogue. And that’s an idea that I wanted to keep in the cycle of stories I’m writing now.

Rachel Thompson:

So I want to ask you to join our quick lit round, if you’d like to, which is where we complete the following sentences. And it’s a misnomer or sometimes correct and sometimes incorrect name, because people can go along or short. It’s fine. It doesn’t have to be quick. But the first sentence to complete is being a writer is?

Shantell Powell:

Being a writer is kind of like being a gambling addict, only instead of spending all your money to win a big prize or spending all your time writing to win a small one.

Rachel Thompson:

That’s probably my favorite answer to that question so far. Literary magazines are?

Shantell Powell:

There is varied as the people who write for them. So there’s good ones and bad ones too.

Rachel Thompson:

That’s so true. Editing requires?

Shantell Powell:

Requires the ability to look at your work critically, as well as with fresh eyes.

Rachel Thompson:

How do you get fresh eyes?

Shantell Powell:

I put something aside for a while. So for instance, I just had a story published last week that I wrote 30 years ago. So that’s as fresh as you get, right? I edited, I revised it a little bit, sent it off and it was picked up by the first place I sent it to 30 years later.

Rachel Thompson:

Oh my gosh, it’s like an old you, like it’s like you publish it on behalf of someone else. Does it feel a bit like that?

Shantell Powell:

Kind of. I remember reading it going, hey, this isn’t bad, but it needs to be modernized just a little bit. So…

Rachel Thompson:

Love that. Oh my gosh.

Shantell Powell:

I don’t say that you have to hold on to things for 30 years before setting them off though.

Rachel Thompson:

That’s not the advice. No, no, no, no. If you have stuff from 30 years ago, maybe take a look at it and see.

Shantell Powell:

Yeah, do that.

Rachel Thompson:

Rejection for a writer means?

Shantell Powell:

I think it means very different things for very different writers. Some people, it’s completely crushing. For instance, I just, I’m on a Patreon for the writer. His name is Billy, but he used to write under the name of Poppy, said bright in the 1990s. And he doesn’t want to write anymore because he received a rejection. And it’s like, no, I’m not going through this anymore because I put my heart and soul into it. So some people, they’re really tie everything into their story. for me, I’m like, all right, on to the next thing. So it’s going to be really different depending on the person.

Rachel Thompson:

Writing community is,

Shantell Powell:

I think it’s great for motivation and for solidarity, like, but wasn’t for writing community. It’d be really hard for me to get anything written. I mean, honestly, I’ve got my partner who is very supportive, but I really value the, like, I’ve got people in regular workshop groups that I meet with. And it’s very, very helpful. Like I feel like I’m helping them and they’re helping me. So there’s a synergy going on that I love. And it makes you feel a whole lot less alone, otherwise, and just sort of sitting in my tiny room. I’ve got my pet Chinchilla, if it wasn’t for him, then I’d be alone most of the time while I’m writing.

Rachel Thompson:

Oh, my gosh, your pet Chinchilla is so cute.

Shantell Powell:

He’s sleeping behind me right now in a box.

Rachel Thompson:

Well, thank you so much, Shan.

Shantell Powell:

Thank you, Rachel.

Rachel Thompson:

You can find Shantell Powell on Mastodon and at her sporadically updated blog, both of which I link in the show notes for this episode. This is episode 91. So you’d find it at rachelthompson.co/91. So that was, as I mentioned, probably my favorite answer for what it means to be a writer spending all of your time for very little reward. It’s true, and yet we often enjoy the time listening back to our conversation.

I want to correct myself when I said something about writers needing to enjoy the essential act of writing. Of course, we don’t need to enjoy it all of the time. And it is sometimes a slog, as Shantell said. I believe writing community is the antidote to those times when it’s a slog, by the way. And I’m delighted to count Shan as a member of my writing community.

So keep track of this feed. Subscribe to get more episodes with brilliant writers who create practices that work for them and their own disabilities and limitations in the upcoming string of episodes. And I hope that you’ll pick up ideas for your practice and how you might work around anything in your life that makes it so you cannot write in the often prescribed formula of writing every day on a set schedule, a wrongheaded and exclusionary prescription.

The Write, Publish, and Shine podcast is brought to you by me, Rachel Thompson. My producer for this episode is Meli Walker who helped with the questions. Thank you! Sound Editing by Adam Linder. Transcripts by Diya Jaffery.

You can learn more about my work to help writers, write, publish, and shine at rachelthompson.co. When you’re there, sign up for my Writerly Love Digest—yes, I’m changing up my newsletter into more bite-sized info with all of the love of my former love letters, but including prompts and craft tips, publication news (the letter going out tomorrow has two recent publications from Shantell Powell). They are still sent every week and filled with support for your writing practice.⁠So you can sign up for that at rachelthompson.co/letters

If this episode encouraged you to get creative about your writing practice or maybe adopt a chinchilla—they are adorable—I would love to hear all about it. You can always email me at hello@rachelthompson.co.

And 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.

Thank you for listening—I encourage you to write in your own time and way.

Shantell Powell Spoke to me from The Haldimand Tract, territory of the Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral Peoples. Kitchener, Ontario.

The Write, Publish and Shine Intensive starts on February 14. Imagine six months of writing the work you were meant to write with the support you need to revise and complete your writing and publish it brilliantly. All the love and support begins on February 14. You can learn more and sign up at rachelthompson.co/intensive.

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