The Writers Circle with Judith Lindbergh

Adam Sockel: You’re listening to Passions & Prologues, a literary podcast for each week. I’ll interview an author about a thing they love and how it inspires their work. I’m your host, Adam Sockel, and if this is your first time joining in, so happy to have you here. If you’ve been here since the beginning, thanks for coming back. This is a really wonderful conversation I had with Judith Lindbergh. Judith is the author of a book that is coming out in a bit of a while from now. It’s called AKMARAL, but that is not what we discussed today. Judith is also the creator of the Writers Circle, which is a really phenomenal creative writing community. They build out workshops, both in person and online, for people who are in the writing community, who have been writing for years and years and years, or have never written even a poem or a story and they want to try. It is for all ages. It is extremely inclusive and it really tears down those gatekeepy walls that people can feel about the writing community. In this discussion, we talk about the creation of the Writers Circle, what creative writing really has meant to this community, and how it got started, and how it really got started was her discussions with a number of young children about being creative and not setting boundaries on yourself and just learning how to build out stories. In keeping with the theme of recent episodes, this discussion is all about just those different ways that stories can come from anywhere. I think you’ll really, really enjoy this discussion. Before we get into that, I want to remind everybody, you can always email me at [email protected]. I can give you book recommendations if you leave a five-star rating or review wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also send me the things that you are passionate about. I love seeing all of the responses that you’ve sent in so far. As a reminder, I give out a randomized bookshop.org gift card at the end of every month to one random person who sends me an email with their passions. Again, it’s just something that I’m really, really loving reading. Thank you all who have done that already and thank you all in advance for anyone who will do it moving forward. There is something that I will, something, there’s a book that I would like to tell you guys all about before we get into this and my book recommendation for this week is actually going to be Red Rising by Pierce Brown. The Red Rising Series is very, very popular. It came out a while back. I believe there’s like six games now. It is honestly really perfect for anyone who loves, it came out around the time of ender of the Hunger Games, so the way that it was promoted was like for fans of the Hunger Games or Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, but really it is this really phenomenally, interesting, fantasy/sci-fi. I guess it’s more science fiction for sure, but it is a story. The first book is set on Mars and it’s this kind of intersperse of this caste system and this legendary institute that kind of provides the caste system for all these different characters. Our main character, Darrow is what is known kind of very, very close to basically a slave. They live under the ground. They are toiling, trying to make Mars a livable and sustainable place for people to live for future generations. The twists in this book are just incredible. I really think you’re going to love it. Yeah, so that is Red Rising. It’s a perfect book for the end of the year because it is a series. If you have, like me, some time off coming up for the winter holidays, you can dive into the Red Rising books, really cozy up by a fire with a nice mug of tea or coffee or eggnog and enjoy Red Rising by Pierce Brown. Okay. That is all the housekeeping for me. Again, I am so excited for you to hear everything about the Writer’s Circle from Judith Lindbergh. I will put links in the show notes if you are interested in checking out some of their workshops and classes. Really interesting stuff. You can learn all about their instructors, any events that they’re doing. Yeah, I highly recommend it. I hope you enjoy this discussion with Judith Lindbergh on Passions & Prologues. Okay, Judith, kick us off by letting me know what is the thing you’re super passionate about that we’re going to discuss today.

Judith Lindbergh: I am super passionate about creativity in all its incarnations. I mean, I’m here because of the Writer’s Circle and writing, but actually my life has always been based in creativity. I started my professional career as a dancer and I did that for about seven years and thought I would do that for my whole life, but dance doesn’t work that way, not even a little. Then, I was an actor for several years in New York City, which was more challenging because my life was filled with dance credits and theater. They’re like, “Oh, you want to do Shakespeare but you can do pirouettes? I don’t understand.” Then, I started writing. Writing was, the wonderful thing about writing is that you can do it anywhere and you don’t need someone to hire you to do it. You can just pick up a piece of paper and a pen, you can be in the woods or you can be sneaking writing at your desk when you’re in an office job, which has happened and you can own it. It can be yours no matter what. I felt like, wow, that was really a different experience when I started writing basically on the job. I found myself discovering the power of being able to be creative without anybody else needing me to do it for them.

Adam Sockel: I really love that because you’re absolutely right. It’s along the same lines as one of my passions in addition to writing is running. I love running and there’s this concept about it that I’ve always enjoyed where it’s like, if I have a pair of shoes, I can go do the thing I love. I don’t, like you said, from a sports standpoint, I don’t need a team, I don’t need a ball, I don’t need a hoop, I don’t need anything. I have a pair of shoes, I can go do this. I think where I want to start is you mentioned being a dancer and then getting into acting. The nice thing about writing, like you said, once you start, you are writing. You’re a writer technically. How does one go from, okay, I want to begin writing and then having a blossom out into a very integral part of your life? How did you go from I’m going to start writing to, it’s something that I’m going to spend a lot of time with?

Judith Lindbergh: Well, going back to those clandestine typing opportunities, back in when I was doing that, I started by writing to all my friends, and this is a while ago, and they were actually letters with stamps and envelopes, the whole deal. I would write letters to my friends and I would go on for pages and pages and then I’d run out of all the friends that I had not written to recently. I started writing poetry and I started writing little stories and I was like, “Oh yeah, this is kind of fun. It keeps me busy while I’m sitting here being bored.” Honestly, one of the stories kept growing and growing and growing and growing and I was like, “Oh, what is this? I think I’m writing a novel.” I had no expectation. There was no, that was not the plan. I was not setting out to make this new career change literally. I sort of kept following that crazy track until I wrote a novel and took quite a few years and it was a terrible novel and it never got published. I’m very grateful that it never got published, but I learned how to write. That’s sort of all of a sudden an idea for me just blossomed.

Adam Sockel: It’s so interesting because I’ve interviewed hundreds of authors and I always, I used to wonder, years and years ago before I started pursuing becoming a published author myself, that was the part where I was, how do you find an idea that you want to stick with? For so long and I ended up, wrote 80,000 words of a manuscript and abandoned it because thankfully, I [inaudible 00:08:55].

Judith Lindbergh: Eighty thousand words?

Adam Sockel: Eighty thousand words, but I realized kind of like what you said about, you finished a novel and you’re like, this is not good. This is not. I kind of realized that before I’d fully finished it. Then, I started working on the second one and I loved it and I finished it and I’m clearing it now. You’re right, it is one of those things where people, actually, my mom who listens to this, so I’m sure she’ll hear this, she read my completed book and she’s like, “How did you have ideas like this in your brain? How do you have all this in your brain at night?” I was like, "Well, honestly, I don’t have all of it in my brain at once. It’s like that morning’s 1,200 words I had in my brain. It then figured out from there. Yeah, it’s-

Judith Lindbergh: Yeah.

Adam Sockel: I know. I definitely know what you mean about, “Oh, I just kept going and going.”

Judith Lindbergh: Yeah, exactly. You don’t have it all in your brain.

Adam Sockel: Right.

Judith Lindbergh: I mean, honestly, the story tells you what it wants to do a lot of the time, although I have to say that first novel, and I’m a very OCD kind of person. I organize everything and everything has to be planned back then. I’m much looser now. I outlined, when I figured out that I was writing a novel, I said, “Okay, wait. Stop. Figure out what this book is.” I outlined the whole thing almost down to the scene. It was obscene though, the crazy thing I did. Then, I would go and I’m like, “Okay, now I know what the novel is. I’m going to write the first chapter, the next chapter.” I’d write and would do things that I hadn’t planned. I’m like, “Wait a second.” Then, I’d go back and I’d revised the outline. What an idiot. I spent so much time that I was literally understanding the process through this, sort of. It wants to do what it wants to do and you have to listen to it. Then, over many years, and I’ve written four novels now and two, anyway, the thing I’ve learned is you do need those guideposts, you need those anchors along the way, but you don’t need an outline. If you detail outline, I think you just sort of strangle your creativity. When I teach, I often teach kids on the floor, and we have this crazy multicolored rug and I’m like, “Okay, on the crazy multicolored rug over here and this flower is the place this story begins. Over here on this tree on the rug, that’s where the story’s going to end. There’s all these other spots on the rug that you know have to get to, but you don’t have a road. The road is what you’re going to figure out while you’re writing.” I find that that’s a much better approach than what I just do.

Adam Sockel: Yeah, well, because I feel like when you’re sitting, at least for me, it’s like when I couldn’t sleep in the middle of the night, I’m not thinking, like you said, I’m not thinking like these two characters interact and have this conversation for two pages. No, it’s, you think about these big tent poles that you need to get to. Then, when you wake up in the morning or when you sit down to write, you do, like you said, you write the journey and if you amble and you wander around, you can tighten it up after the fact, but you just have to get from point A to point B eventually. Speaking of point A to point B, how does one go from wanting to write, wanting to be creative, starting to write to creating your own writing community, the Writer’s Circle, which we’re going to get into, how does one go from that point to point B?

Judith Lindbergh: Okay, first novel, terrible. Didn’t get published. Thank you universe. Second novel, many years, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of work, did get published and rather spectacularly at the time. I got this really lovely editor at Viking who took on my book and did a wonderful job with it. Also, the advance was enough that I could quit the job that I was clandestine writing it. That was really freeing because I could get out of the day job sort of cycle. It went on for quite a few years, but because I’m a slow, careful writer and tend to write historical fiction, which requires a great deal of research, I’m not kind of popping out a book every year and a half. Eventually, the advance ran out and I said, “Oh dear, I have to make a living.” At the time, my kids were little and I was at home and I didn’t want to have to commute back into New York City, which is where I used to work. I said, “Hmm, what can I do that’ll keep me close to home and keep me involved in writing and still make a little bit of money?” I had already been working once a week teaching a class at a local community school for adults, mostly because I was desperate to talk to other adults about something other than where to get great deals on diapers.

Adam Sockel: Sure.

Judith Lindbergh: It was just sort of like, “Okay, I’m leaving the house for two hours. I’ll see you guys later.” I thought, but at the same time, my kids were growing into very active young children and there was a lot of imaginative play in my house. I was a kind of mom that let her kids wear costumes everywhere no matter what time of day or year.

Adam Sockel: Sure.

Judith Lindbergh: Yeah. See? See? I don’t think it’s weird either.

Adam Sockel: I have nieces and nephews. Many of them have worn the same princess dresses and things like that everywhere they go.

Judith Lindbergh: Yeah.

Adam Sockel: Absolutely, 100%, fully support this.

Judith Lindbergh: Yeah. We had knights in shining armor and we were superheroes and we just walk around town and all the kids would come in the backyard and play these crazy games. Then, school came along and my kids started to get the homework assignments that required them to follow instructions. One of these is, one my sons came home with an instruction to write an essay. The first sentence had to have very specific information and the second sentence had to have some other specific, and it was sort of like a fill in the blanks thing. I said, this is a writing assignment? This is not how writers think. This is not how writers work.

Adam Sockel: Right.

Judith Lindbergh: It’s not asking for any inquiry. It’s not asking for any creativity of thought or engagement. I talked to a lot of his friends and his parents, his friends’ parents, and they all said, “Yeah, my kids hated writing once they got to school.” When they were little, they loved it and they make up stories and draw pictures. Then, they got to school and they’re like, “I can’t do this. I have to do it their way.” I said, “Oh, I can fix this.” I took the crazy kids in the backyard and I sat them down on the floor in my house or eventually I rented a little space nearby and I said, “We’re going to take all those crazy adventures you’re having in the backyard as superheroes and knights in shining armor. We’re going to write a story.” That was how the Writer’s Circle started because I wanted to teach them how to be creative.

Adam Sockel: See? You are the right kind of teacher. This is fantastic. You’re absolutely, it’s the same thing of why don’t kids like to read? It’s because you’re handing a 12-year-old the Canterbury Tales as opposed to a Jason Reynolds novel. Let them read what they want to read. Let them write the stories they want to write. Instead of, I understand why it’s important to learn how to write a research paper eventually and…

Judith Lindbergh: Exactly.

Adam Sockel: … how to cite things.

Judith Lindbergh: Exactly.

Adam Sockel: To structure a young kid’s mind, the expansion of you should write stories. I’m getting in a soapbox in agreement with you here. It’s like you should write stories that expand your world. Do not narrow them to, well, this is the way that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote this. You, an eight-year-old needs to focus on. Yeah.

Judith Lindbergh: Yeah, exactly. I mean, also there’s so much emphasis on argumentative writing or various academic requests and kids want to write about explosions and mermaids and magic and dragons. With the kids, in fact, the Writer’s Circle has this freedom of expression policy that all the parents sign when they sign up, when fill out the forms, and we let our kids write about anything that they want to. It doesn’t matter if it’s what schools would call inappropriate or if it’s scatological or if it’s, because you’re right, you don’t want to box their little brains in. They’re so creative and they’re so open to everything and we just keep shoving them down this narrow path of you have to be this way to function in life. Well, life functioning happens all by itself.

Adam Sockel: Right.

Judith Lindbergh: When you give kids permission to express their own thoughts and their own ideas, even if a lot of the time with you little kids, the stories don’t make any sense at all. I spend a lot of time critiquing saying, “Why did your character do that? What were they thinking?” Eventually, they can verbalize and I’m like, “Okay, we need to get all that on the page because you completely skipped that.” But they really do. They have great imaginations. They are so curious. If we just invite curiosity, we can get them to write.

Adam Sockel: Walk me through expanding the Writer’s Circle beyond that first group of little ones, writing whatever’s in their minds.

Judith Lindbergh: Exactly. It did start with kids, because that was kind of where my brain was at. I had little kids, so therefore everyone was focusing on little kids, but about a year in, and I was still teaching them once a week class, about a year in, a woman I really didn’t know named Michelle Cameron who lives nearby, but she was an author that I knew through a variety of different organizations and she called me and said, “I want to hear about the Writer’s Circle because I’m kind of looking for something like that myself.” We got together and had a conversation. She was very clear, right away, she said, “I want to be your partner.” I’m like, “I just met you. Slow down. Slow down.” Within 15 minutes of leaving our first meeting, she had found a location near where she was to hold classes for the Writer’s Circle in her area. Our whole idea was we want a little outlet here, and a little outlet there, and all the local writers can teach 10 minutes from their house and it’ll be much better for us to be able to do what we need to do and still teach. I didn’t want everyone commuting and going through that whole thing. Michelle started working with us and with me. There was no us at that time. Teaching some kids classes. She said pretty quickly, she’s like, “There’s more adult market than you think.” I said, “No, no, no. Nobody spends money on themselves. They all just spend them on their kids. They don’t have time.” Clearly, I’m reflecting my perspective on this. She and I started thinking about bringing on more teachers and teaching more adult classes. In fact, it completely blew up into this massive thing. I had no plan. I thought, “Oh, I’ll just teach until I sell my next book.” Ha, ha, ha. It blew up all by itself through no intention of our own. We had no marketing [inaudible 00:20:35]. We had no business plan. We’re just like, “Oh, this interesting person. Let’s go meet them for lunch. Oh yeah, you want to teach? Let’s-” One of the things about the Writer’s Circle is everybody who teaches for us is a published author, whether they are publishing essays and short stories and poetry or if they are lucky enough to have a big five traditional book published like me and Michelle. Whatever we bring to our work as teachers is from experience. In fact, often we have people who have education and teaching background but no publishing. They come to us and we’re like, “Thank you, but that’s not what we’re looking for.” We really want writers who understand what writing’s about and we really look for creativity and we also look for generosity of spirit.

Adam Sockel: That was the part I was going to ask about because I assume, in chatting with you, I can feel the importance of, like we were talking about before, not hindering creativity and the importance of having writing be seen as an open space without gatekeepers. I imagine you need to be looking for very, not specific, but certain types of authors because there are certainly published authors out there, and I won’t name names to be made, but there are some published authors where they’re just, anything they say about the writing process, it’s like, oh my God, you are, just stop it. It’s not some muse that comes to you at 4:00 in the morning exclusively and you write by candlelight with a quilt. It’s not exclusively that. I’ve imagined you’re looking for specific…

Judith Lindbergh: Yes.

Adam Sockel: … types of people who have that open mind, right?

Judith Lindbergh: Yeah, exactly. I know exactly what you mean and I know some people like that and I admire they’re fortitude to work that way, but we are looking for kind of the diametric opposite. We want people who are loving and warm and embracing. We are a non-exclusive environment. Anyone who wants to take a class can come. We want our teachers to, I want everyone to fall in love with their students and I want all the students to fall in love with their teachers. Not everybody who comes for writing class is going to publish or should publish or wants to publish. That is not the goal. The goal is self-expression and discovering that you have something to say and maybe a really fun and interesting way to say it and just learn the joy of creativity. Our method, if there is a method, is to bring the best out of every student you have, now that best is unique to each person and each, whether it’s a little kid who barely can get any words on their page or an adult who publishes regularly. We have people who are doing amazing things after we’ve been in business for 13 years. I hope we have something to show for it after all this time, but there are people out there with novels and lots of short stories and regular gigs at various news outlets or publishing outlets, people who are winning prizes and all the rest.

Adam Sockel: I’ll put the link to the Writer’s Circle website so that you guys can go see it and you can, because there are, I think the thing that I love about your website is if you go to look at the workshops and then they’re broken out by age, but then they’re also broken out, when I want people to understand the scope of Judith, that you’re being very modest, but I want people to understand the scope of, if you go to the workshops, it’s not like, “Oh, we have an adult class with 10 people that get together once a month.” No, no, no. There’s stuff for exploring memoir. There’s stuff for poetry. There’s science fiction. There’s all these different ages, where to begin. There’s all of these incredible courses and layouts. I’m wondering, this is a terrible question, how do you go about determining what a course can look like? Is it entirely up to the teacher? Because it’s almost like you’ve basically created both virtual and in-person secondary university type of a concept here. How do you go about, I don’t know, vetting the courses and looking at that type of stuff, if that makes sense.

Judith Lindbergh: It does. It does. We are honestly very open. When we do our interviews in our teacher engagement, we tell right up front, we want you to bring your creativity to this class. We want you to, if you want material, we have countless curricula and exercises and prompts and materials all over the place, but if you have always wanted to teach and you know you want to teach this way and have this kind of approach, bring it to the clasp. As long as it’s presented with love and affection and not, we always are like, you don’t criticize. You critique. Critique is a very different thing. It’s an invitation to dig deeper and to find richness where you know it’s just under the surface. The other last month for some reason, I was like, “You got to dig into your pockets and find those things that you can pull out of the story that you don’t really realize they’re there.” We’re always looking for this richness of generosity. In the course curriculum, I mean, yes, for the little kids’ classes, we have a bunch of things that we say, “Okay, these really work.” With the kids, we do crazy things like alien archeology, which is, I go into my kitchen and my various places and I find whisks and weird things that nobody remembers what they’re for. I put them in a box and I say, you’re an archeologist and you’ve just landed on the alien planet and you don’t know what a stuff is. You have to figure out what this culture and these species was and what they did with all this stuff. Then, they go wild. They’re shaking the whisk like it’s some sort of an instrument. It’s really fun. With our adults, it’s not wild and crazy like that, but it’s very open ended. I teach a memoir class on Thursday nights that I love with these people and everybody’s coming in with lots of stories and you don’t take a memoir class unless you’ve got something that’s happened in your life.

Adam Sockel: Yeah.

Judith Lindbergh: You want to be really gentle because we’re dealing with very emotional personal things. You have to draw them out in gentle ways. Today, I’m doing my workshop this evening is about music. I’m sure you saw the news that Christine McVie passed from…

Adam Sockel: I did.

Judith Lindbergh: … Fleetwood Mac.

Adam Sockel: I did. Yeah.

Judith Lindbergh: I’m of the age that I was little, but I was listening to the Rumours album and dancing.

Adam Sockel: Oh yeah.

Judith Lindbergh: I’m like, “Okay, just putting on that album,” which I did this morning on Spotify. I said, “Oh wow, I am now a kid again and I am that child. How can I help my memoir students come to that same realization? What’s music might trigger that kind of experience for them?” For my class, I developed curriculum. Michelle develops her own curriculum for her classes. Everybody comes in with their own objectives. We give only enough guidance as the teacher needs. If they have a student who needs particular help and they want to talk to us, that always is what we’re there for, but we don’t have a rubric. We don’t have a goal other than that each student grows across the courses’ length of time. Some students stay with us for one class, one session and then they’re gone. Other people I’ve known since I started this, in fact, one of my students in one of my classes just this week, brought out a story that I remembered from a while back and he’s like, “Yeah, this one I wrote in 2012.” I’m like, “Oh, I remember.”

Adam Sockel: That’s wild.

Judith Lindbergh: Yeah. It’s insane.

Adam Sockel: We’ll be back with more Passions & Prologues after this break. Now, back to Passions & Prologues. I’m curious. Obviously, like I said, when people go, and the link’s in the show notes, when people go to look at the different workshops, there’s very, there’s things that are a little bit more focused, like I said, in specific genres or things like that, but something that I really love at the very top of the page, it says, “Where do I begin?” The reason that I love that so much is because I think about there’s so many people out there who they’re not even ready to say, “Okay, well, yeah, I want to be in a science fiction workshop.” There’s this people will say, “Well, I wish I wrote more, but I don’t know how to get started.” I will say, for me, the thing I struggle with is every day that I write, it makes it easier for me to write the next day. I just have to get into that habit for me. When I wrote the novel that I’m querying, I wrote every single day for, I don’t know, it was five months and it was done and that was it. Then, I said, I took a little break and edited it and all that fun stuff and did a querying process. It’s like I’ve gotten away from writing every single day. Now, every day when I wake up in the morning to try and write, it is more challenging for me because I am not writing the day before. That’s my thing is I just say, the easiest way to write every day is to write every day. The other piece of advice that I really, really love is [inaudible 00:30:07] from Seth Rogan, the actor and comedian, but he’s also a screenwriter. He writes the majority of the movies that he’s in and he has a whole publication house at this point, but his thing that he always tells people about writing, he’s like, “Write a hundred ideas down.” He goes, “They can be absolutely terrible, but write 100 ideas down.” He goes, “Because what you’re doing is you’re dispelling the notion that writing needs to be some precious thing because if you write a hundred ideas down, they’re almost all going to be awful,” but you’re writing. You’re doing something where you’re putting things on the page. Those are two things that I think of where I try to write every day. I try not to care so much about what I’m writing because the longer I keep from writing, the more it does feel precious to me and holier than now. This is all to say, is there something for you that you think about it that you tell people when they say, “Well, how do I get started?” Is there a journey of a thousand miles starts the first step? Is there a first step that you tell your students in the writing process?

Judith Lindbergh: Yeah, it’s very similar. In fact, I like that idea of writing a hundred ideas. One of the first exercises I do and where do I begin is I have a bag of words. This is an exercise, actually, one of my very first writing teacher was Madeleine L’Engle who wrote A Wrinkle in Time.

Adam Sockel: Yeah.

Judith Lindbergh: Yeah, I know Madeleine L’Engle. Oh yeah.

Adam Sockel: Wow.

Judith Lindbergh: Anyway, yeah, she really was one of the very first people who I ever studied with. One of the early classes she passed around, it was a bowl of words that was cut out in little strips of paper and everyone closed their eyes and picked three. It didn’t matter which three and you couldn’t put them back. You had to just take whatever three you have. Each of us looked at our three words. We didn’t tell anyone what they were, and we had to use those three words in whatever it was that we were writing in the 10 or 15 minutes she gave us in class. I still do this today. The words don’t have to be what the story is about, unless you want that to be. They just have to show up somewhere. If you have to change the grammatical structure of the word to make it fit into how you’re using it, you can do that, but what happens when you pick those three words is your brain makes these subconscious connections. If it was apple, candle, and coughing, I don’t know. You could do something with that.

Adam Sockel: Yeah.

Judith Lindbergh: Yeah. Your mind subconsciously connects those words and creates a setting and a relationship and it’s that subconsciousness that starts to breathe onto the page. I also do the whole thing of Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones, where she’s like, “Keep writing.” I have my very favorite pen. It’s a Uni-Ball Signo, a little micro. She’s like with really fast paper and a really fast pen, or in my case, if you’re using the computer, type really fast and don’t correct your spelling. Don’t cross anything out. Just type, type, type, type. No editing. No critiquing. Shut the editor off. All of a sudden, all this stuff starts flowing. One of the things Natalie Goldberg’s a quote I use from her is, “Writing practice is the whole ocean and everything that’s in it. Writing craft is directing that water into a canal and making it go a certain way.” When you’re beginning, you need to work in that ocean. You need to just float around and let things toss you here and there, and things drift by and not critique, and not say, “I’m going to write a novel,” even though I did that in the beginning. Stupid. You really, because by allowing yourself to be less judgmental, less demanding, and less, the way we’re taught in school, you have to fulfill this assignment and hit all these requirements to get a good grade, that chokes you up and leaves out all the possibilities that your subconscious can bring to the service when you start writing that whole ocean. Then, eventually you got this bunch of, I call it spin on a page. With the little kids, I’ll have a notebook and I’ll say, “Okay, pretend,” because I want this disgusting. I’m like, “Pretend I just spit on this page.” They said, “Now, there’s this gross glob of spit in the middle of this page, but if you hold it in the sunlight at just the right angle, there’s a bubble with a rainbow on top. That’s what you’re looking for when you write all this stuff.”

Adam Sockel: Another way to think about it is if you are trying to write a story of any length, you can’t edit and pare down until you have it all on the page.

Judith Lindbergh: Exactly.

Adam Sockel: You’re going to go back and you’re going to change stuff anyway. Don’t be so judge… Look, other people aren’t going to probably judge it at some point. Don’t be judgmental about yourself in that zero draft. Just get the words down.

Judith Lindbergh: Exactly. It’s the shitty first draft and [inaudible 00:35:16].

Adam Sockel: Yeah.

Judith Lindbergh: Yeah, exactly.

Adam Sockel: Exactly.

Judith Lindbergh: People think it’s going to come out right the first time. I’m like, “No. It’s never going to come. That’s years of work and editing and revision and polishing.” Then, other editors hopefully, if you’re lucky, come in and help you with it.

Adam Sockel: Along those lines, and it is a bit out, but I do still want to talk because Judith has a book coming out. It’s in 2024. We joked that we’ll circle back eventually in a year or two to year, year and a half to talk about it, but I do want you to talk about it. You have a book coming out.

Judith Lindbergh: I do.

Adam Sockel: People can learn more about it at your website and I’ll put the link in the bio there, but sort of tell me about the book that you have coming out and how it came about.

Judith Lindbergh: Okay, in order to tell about that book, I should tell a little bit about the first book.

Adam Sockel: Sure.

Judith Lindbergh: My first novel was The Thrall’s Tale and it was published by Viking and it’s about three women in Viking age, Greenland in the 10th century. It is very, very, very literary and dark and difficult and beautiful. I love that book very much, but it was a challenging book and I think the expectations that it was going to become a big seller were a little overblown. After I wrote that book, I wanted to do a followup and I did. The book that’s coming out now is that follow up, but it took a really, really, really ridiculously long time to get published. The market changed and my editor retired whom I’ve still very good in touch with, and we’re friends and it’s nice to have her because she’s fantastic. The new book is similarly an obscure location. I love what I call invincible landscapes and the people that live in them because I always think I could never live that way, and therefore, how do they do it? Then, it just makes me go down the rabbit hole of how do they do it and who are these people and what do they have that I don’t. Then, all of a sudden I start to write a novel. The new book is called AKMARAL and the name is Kazakhstani. It means white deer. The book takes place in 500 BC. It’s about an ancient woman, a nomad woman warrior on the Central Asian steps. It’s based in the archeology that actually has been discovered in that area, Kazakhstan, Southern Siberia, Mongolia of these burial chambers of women who were, many of them clearly in battle. They have battle wounds and all. They were buried with weapons. Essentially, they are the descendants of the Amazons who fought Trojan War. It’s actually historically proven and there’s DNA and don’t get me started on the archeology stuff.

Adam Sockel: Amazing.

Judith Lindbergh: Yeah. AKMARAL is a part of small clan of warriors that are living in a nomadic setting in this beautiful landscape, which you can see on my website, it’s really pretty and things happen where, things happen that’s not good. They encounter people who are much more powerful than them. Overtime and through the trials of loss and the challenges of war and the understanding of what her loyalties are to her people, she becomes the leader of much greater confederacy. That’s basically what it’s about.

Adam Sockel: The only problem with this is it sounds so good and it’s not coming out.

Judith Lindbergh: I know.

Adam Sockel: [inaudible 00:39:14] but…

Judith Lindbergh: I know, I know, I know.

Adam Sockel: … I know it sounds so wonderful. I love deeply researched stories like this and it makes me so excited. Honestly, I feel like something that people can take away from this is understanding you as an author being someone who has done so much research for these novels, that’s the stuff from the Writer’s Circle. That’s stuff that you can learn, as long as you’re willing to write, as long as you’re willing to keep writing, and then be willing to do a little bit of research. The research for novel writing is fun because it’s stuff that you’re clearly interested in anyway.

Judith Lindbergh: Yeah.

Adam Sockel: I feel like that’s something that people should be excited about, taking a workshop because of how interesting that stuff is.

Judith Lindbergh: Oh yeah. Well, the rabbit hole of research, especially in historical fiction, it’s both fantastic and truly a dangerous place because you can end up researching for years and not get around to the book but-

Adam Sockel: That’s my favorite thing to joke with my author friends about is who are historical fiction or non-fiction writers. I’ll be like, “When do you know when to stop?” They’re like, “I don’t. I just started writing and hope, I don’t know when to stop researching because I always want to do more of that.” Yeah.

Judith Lindbergh: Yeah, exactly. Then, they find something out about your, either area of research after the fact and you’re like, “Oh no. Do I have to change everything?” Actually, the woman, one of the, there’s two burials that my main character AKMARAL is based on, but one of the burials, they recently found out that she died not from battle wounds but from cancer. I’m like, “Ugh,” but it’s okay because the other one definitely was a warrior. I’m like, “Okay, I’m just going to ignore that and use that for a talking point.”

Adam Sockel: Totally.

Judith Lindbergh: Then, I’m like, “I can write a whole another story about the cancer woman. Okay, I’ll do that.” No, not this week.

Adam Sockel: File that away. Yeah.

Judith Lindbergh: Yeah.

Adam Sockel: Okay, last question. I always end each discussion by having the author give a recommendation of any kind. It could be a book. It can be a TV show. It could be a place you think people should visit or a food they should eat. Anything you want to recommend, the floor is yours.

Judith Lindbergh: Okay. I am a passionate hiker and I have a small stretch of the woods in a park up the hill from me. Almost every day I go out hiking and I only go three or four miles because I have to get back here and get to work, but I recommend that everybody, no matter how disinclined, spend some time in nature and ideally in some place that is less than civilized, as in not just a park but in the woods on a trail or if you live in the desert, go out into the desert or wherever you live, sit, stand by the ocean. Nature is not just obviously the world around us, but it is where we are, we come from. We are nature too. I think that as writers to still the busy brain of all the things we have to do to survive in our lives and to get our work done, you have to step away from the construct that humanity has put on the world and remember where you come from and listen to the whispers in the leaves, in the wind, in the trees, in the ocean, and you’ll find voices speaking to you if you do that on a regular basis.

Adam Sockel: As an avid hiker with my senior dog who’s sleeping basically next to me, I wholeheartedly agree and such a perfect one. This was so delightful, so informative. Again, as a reminder to everyone, links in the show notes. I’ll make sure you’re all aware of where you can find the Writer’s Circle links so you can go check it out. Judith, thank you so much for joining me today.

Judith Lindbergh: Thank you for having me. It’s been an honor.

Adam Sockel: Passions & Prologues is proud to be an Evergreen podcast and was created by Adam Sockel. It was produced by Adam Sockel and Sean Rule-Hoffman. If you are interested in this podcast and any other Evergreen podcast, you can go to evergreenpodcasts.com to discover all the different stories we have to tell.