The start of something NEW (again?)
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
Michelle's New Substack page
Nancy Schnog's Writer's Digest article on what to do with your old journals
Nadine Kenney Johnstone and Melanie Brooks' workshop Writing Hard Stories
Listen to audiobook samples, sign up for Michelle's Daring to Tell newsletter, The Re-do, and listen to other Daring to Tell episodes at michelleredo.com
I feel like it's an experience I have all the time, that I'm trying to grasp at something that I can't quite describe. I feel like Maine is that way very much. This is Daring to Tell, the podcast where writers read their true stories of personal daring, then we talk about writing and life, I am Michelle Radow. Ineffable in the Oxford English Dictionary is defined as "too great or extreme to be expressed in words" and in the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, ineffable is "to speak". How is that for a conundrum of a word? Today, my whole episode is one giant step of bravery for me. The idea of starting a sub-stack has been on my mind since last year. I love the idea of it, and mostly what I am keen on is making a commitment to my writing. I will also confess I don't have a new book to discuss today, I am behind on my reading, I do have a few memoirs I am working on, and that I really want to share with you, but I am just not there yet. I will proudly repeat what I said on my last bonus episode that I have put out my third, yes my third audiobook production, a hard silence, one daughter remaps family, grief, and faith when HIV/AIDS changes it all, narrated by its author, Melanie Brooks, now available from pretty much anywhere you find audiobooks, my first two productions are, and always one more time, a memoir, narrated by its author, Margaret Mandel, and also Sushi Tuesdays, a memoir of love, loss, and family resilience, read by its author, Charlotte Maya. I am so proud of all of these books, and so if you love audiobooks, I really hope you will check one or certainly all of them out, you can hear a sample from each one of them at my website, michellerado.com. That is a decent part of what my year so far has been about audiobook production that is, and why today I am offering some low-hanging fruit of an episode which is to say something by me. The reason that Substack has been on my mind for an entire year is because July is the month when Phil and I moved from Boston to Maine. As each subsequent year has ticked by, something has tugged at the back of my mind. I have missed a little practice that I began shortly before we moved, and that was sending out a private newsletter observing our time here in the Pine Tree State. Last year I thought about starting it up again, and I have kicked it down the road for a full year until now, it is July yet again, and the tug inside of me still pulls. It says something like, "You're not putting down what's happening. You will forget your life if you don't write it down. Remember your newsletter? That was a good practice." So here I am, and for this little declaration, I wanted to invite someone to have a conversation with me who I know understands the magical pull of Maine, and that is my dear friend Nancy Schnog. She is a writer whom I've mentioned a few times on this podcast for the connections that she has brought me. She has so much kismet about her because it was she who stumbled across another writer in Maine, Eliza Walton, who I spoke with about her very brave and beautiful book, The Colors I Saw, which was about her experience of having rectal cancer, a topic which was very close to my own gut-wrench journey. Nancy also met the writer Nina Lichtenstein when they were both in Tel Aviv, only to discover Nina also lives in Maine. You heard Nina read from an essay she has in the anthology called Awakenings, Stories
Transcription truncated.