Mr. Troy Ford's inclusive nest

Unfixed interview

Must the alternative to mindfulness be some kind of zombie existence, a living death? That’s not cool. And frankly, I don’t believe that’s how it works—so often we stumble on beauty, grace and insight in our darkest and ugliest moments. It’s ALL life, every minute of it, for everyone, everywhere.

- Mr. Troy Ford, author

Windows and mirrors are often used to describe the diversity, or lack of, found in media and how stories can portray social group characteristics like culture, race, religion, disability, gender, or sexual orientation. After spending a much-too-short hour last week with Mr. Troy Ford exploring everything from writer’s block and mental health to toxic masculinity and creating inclusive narratives, I surmise that his storytelling doesn’t stop with reflective, 2-dimensional portals; Troy builds nests—safe, places of congress, nourishment and growth where humans are validated and upheld in their unique complexity rather than boxed into perpetual stereotypes.

Not dissimilar to himself, Troy’s characters are soft-spoken, gentle, empathic and longing to find their place in this world. Whether he’s sharing through witty (and not uncommon laugh-out-loud) essays, his brilliant, heart-wrenching, serialized novel Lamb, or building QStack—a necessary platform and directory on Substack for underrepresented writers—Troy’s hard-earned wisdom and light-hearted, vulnerable charm are warm invitations for us all to alight in his nest of belonging.

At the end of our interview I only half-joke about wanting to wrestle and drink tea with Troy, and after listening, I’m certain you will too.

Kimberly

Okay, welcome Troy. Yay, we did it. For those that don't know, this is our third try.

Troy Ford

Thanks Kim. So good to see you.

Kimberly

The gods of Wi-Fi are not being friendly to us today. Ha ha.

Troy Ford

No, no, no. And you know, all of the buildings in Spain, for the most part, they don't have any forests here, you know, so they build everything with these big heavy bricks. And so all the buildings, you know, the wifi in between the different rooms and so forth is terrible because there's thick brick walls in between everything, so.

My husband is, was born in Rome, but he immigrated to the Bay Area when he was like three years old. So he's a dual citizen. And so even when we met, this was 25 years ago now, actually, even when we met, we knew we wanted to move to Europe.

Kimberly

So you've been together for 25 years, and I know that you've mentioned to me that you've had a 30 plus year writer's block. Let's jump in a little bit. So it sounds like there's sort of this collision of finding the love of your life and also not being able to put a word on paper. Since that period, obviously what's birthed from that is everything that you've manifested on Substack, including your wonderful serial novel Lamb, which I originally thought was a memoir…

Troy Ford

There's some real life in it, but it is fiction. But I mean, that's how every writer is.

Kimberly

So describe that period. I know we are talking to a lot of writers. What was that writer's block for you? And how did it, what was the catharsis that eventually led you to Substack?

Troy Ford

I think so. I wrote a while ago on Substack. I think the title of the of the post was called Don't Be a Jodie and I described how, you know, very early on, I knew I wanted to write, I read Harriet the Spy, I was a spy, I had a pen name, me and

Holly Starley

just talked all about Xavier Gadfly and Jessica Jane and you know all that.

And I went to a summer school between my junior and my senior year in high school. And it was a science fiction fantasy course. And I just, I had a very, very negative experience with the teachers. They were a husband and wife co-teachers and they should have known better. They were just, they were very unkind and in their comments and I was really, really crushed when I turned in my first story and they later apologized to me. I mean they later admitted, you know, that they were too harsh. And so they apologized and it didn't really help. You know what I mean?

But I think that countered, along with just a lot of things that were going on in my life, the gay thing and the life thing and the family thing, I just became incredibly self-conscious about everything really, but, but about my writing as well. And so I just, I could not complete, you know, I, I wanted to write novels. I still don't feel, you know, a huge affinity for short fiction per se. It's not in my blood as much as, you know, longer stories are. And so I tried writing novel after novel after novel. I'd get 30 to 50 pages in and it would just dissolve. Whatever flame there was would just go out. And then I would set it aside for months or years at a time. And just never quite was able to get through it. And I was working full time and I was working in financial services when I met my husband. And then I went on to do interior design for about 15 years or so. And so I was life, working, house, pets, blah, Bay Area, it's a rat race. So anyway.

Kimberly

But it sounds like there was that undercurrent that started it all, which was sort of this lack of feeling seen or validated or encouraged from those teachers.

Troy Ford

Yeah, yeah, that was a lot of it. And you know, the thing I think I've come to realize is that I was, I was trying to sort of wrap myself in this kind of cocoon, you know, and we talked a little bit about before about you know, fantasy, the fantasy genre, how much it spoke to me and how being in that other world when, you know, the world I was in with a very conservative family, you know, it just wrapped me in this feeling of comfor. And I think that in a way I was trying to replicate that as a writer and in my writing as I was feeling that in my reading as well.

A lot of people say write what you want to read, you know, if you're not finding something that you want to read, write it yourself. You know what I mean? And I think I was trying to do that, but at the same time, it's never a complete thing. You don't find completion in your writing. You know, you find completion in your actual life.

Writing can be so many different things to so many different people. But for me at any rate, it's only been finding a certain amount of groundedness and mindfulness and sobriety in my actual life that just wasn't translating in the writing journey. It wasn't until I switched to writing a realistic story that kind of vibrated on the same wavelength as my actual life that I was able to complete it, and that was my first novel, Watrspout. I started that during the lockdown in 2020. And so that's the story that came before Lamb, and Lamb is kind of in that same sort of vein—Lamb, my serial on Substack has got a lot of similar themes, similar characters, I suppose, while being also completely different.

Kimberly

So it makes me think, you know, your character, Lamb, you created a character who isn't made for the cruelty of this world. I mean, he is such a gentle soul. And I get the sense that maybe that resonated with that part of you that was longing to be seen and validated that didn't get that.

Troy Ford

Yeah, yeah, I think you're absolutely right.

Lamb is a very, very gentle soul despite what he looks like, you know, the cover picture that is of this kid with this crazy mohawk and, I think that's maybe a suit of armor, so to speak, that Lamb puts on to try and blend in with a world which is very...sort of, not always gentle like he is. That does resonate with me. That's how I think I felt for a long time, and so that is a part of me, I think, that I wanted to kind of give voice to and create this character that could sort of say those sorts of things. And I think a lot of people feel that way, you know? I think a lot of people feel just battered by the world. And I mean, look at the world, you know, there's a lot of battering going on to say the least. So I hope, and I think I've found a lot of people are really sort of falling in love with this character who expresses that.

Kimberly

Yeah, they are falling in love with him and you by default because there's a sensitivity and a vulnerability and a fragility that I think we all want to own in ourselves. It's what drew me to doing the unfixed work. It's like, I want to know that there's something redeeming and beautiful and powerful in the frailty.

You said somewhere in one of your essays, it's almost that it's there even more. It's revealed there—where we think that in the gloss and the glitter that that's where we're gonna find all that power and that beauty, but that's just transient.

I want to know in your, we've talked a little bit about unfixed and you've been following the videos and commenting and you shared indirectly and directly about some of your own journey with mental health. But I don't know a lot. Do you, whatever you want to share, tell me a little bit about your relationship to your own mental health and how that's evolved through the years and how that shifted your writing.

Troy Ford

Yes. Yeh, well…

Kimberly

Just a little question.

Troy Ford

A little question, yeh…I was first diagnosed technically, although I had to drag the diagnosis out of my therapist at the time. All therapists will say, you know, Oh, I don't really like to put a label on it, you know, whatever. Um, but this was, this was almost 20 years ago now actually. And so I dragged it out of him basically to say, What is it? What do I, what is this? And so it was a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder. And what that felt like to me, and it had been true since I was a child. And continues to this day, although I had more recently, I had a wonderful, wonderful therapist who I worked with for about a year and a half and she was amazing. But what the feeling is, is just this, this kind of, you know, you've heard of fight or flight, but what is often forgotten, you know, or maybe only more recently has been sort of added to that is freeze. And so that's kind of what, what that experience was for me. It's this kind of constant, I call it a grinding, you know, it's just like this, this constant grinding of gears in your mind about all the different possibilities, all the different, you know, things I should have done, all of the horrible incidents of bullying and harassment and so forth that I ever experienced. I mean, I used to ruminate over things that happened 30, 40 years ago or more.

And when this is always going on in your mind, you're just sort of frozen and stuck, perpetually worrying about those things and not facing life as it as it is happening, and so anxiety, generalized anxiety disorder, I mean those were have been big parts of my life and I think it was sort of part and parcel with my writer's block which had me judging every word I wrote, intending it hopefully maybe to someday to be published or shown to other people, you know what I mean? Judging it for every flaw, every sort of imaginable way in which it could be torn apart and so forth.

Unfortunately, it translated into a drinking problem. So I had a very difficult time with alcoholism. That only has very recently resolved itself, let's say. I mean, you know, two plus years sober now. And, you know, I thank you.

Kimberly

Well, congratulations, and we know alcohol quiets that voice. You know, when we have that intrusive thinking, and we aren't given the tools to help ourselves with that intrusive thinking, how do we escape that noise in our heads?

Troy Ford

Yeah, it more than quiets it. I mean, the idea was it wasn't just quiet the voice. It was just obliterate, you know what I mean? Just completely obliterate all that fear, all of that anxiety, and a lot of internalized homophobia too, you know? So, yeah, so it's actually since we moved here that I finally officially got sober and I'm so glad I did, you know, but it's just an evolving, you know, it's one day at a time as they say.

Kimberly

I was undiagnosed OCD throughout my childhood. I had a lot of that intrusive thinking, a lot of that anxiety. And one of the things that I've learned about more recently is the exposure therapy that is often used with anxiety and OCD, which is just to essentially teach your brain that which it thinks is a danger or a threat in little doses starts to go, Oh, this isn't so dangerous after all. I'm gonna live, I'm gonna survive.

Troy Ford

Yeah. I mean, there are so many different ways to approach it. Um, the, the approach that my therapist told me, talked to me about, and that I think, I'm not sure she specializes in it, but it's DBT, it's dialectical behavioral therapy. And a big, big component of that is, um, is mindfulness.

And so there's a lot of research, there's a lot of different techniques, there's a lot of different methods that we talk about. I actually bought the manual for that, like the training manual for therapists for the DBT because it's got a very robust section on mindfulness. And so there was that component. The idea I think kind of for the for that is just to sort of forgive yourself and sort of honor what you are experiencing. And while at the same time, going forward, trying to imagine ways that you can kind of help yourself, move forward, get past what previously would have been a huge sticking point, or would have been things that kind of sent you into a tailspin and so forth.

Kimberly

That reminds me of the article I just read this morning, the essay called Alive or Something Like It. And when you talk about this experience of being kind to ourselves and having grace with ourselves or forgiving ourselves when maybe we're mindless. And that relates to sort of what you talked about in this essay around the wellness culture for lack of better term right now is very concerned with everybody being awake and alive. And if you're not, then what are you? Then you're not living. You said that some therapists, maybe this is the one that you talked about, but you're noticing this in some of the work that you're doing, where she said “We can't experience the past, we can't experience the future, and if we're living in the past or the future, we're not really living.” And you're, you go on to say again, “We get it, carpe diem and all that, but must the alternative to mindfulness be some kind of zombie existence?”

And I love that you're pointing this out because there are so many people that maybe don't have that immediate choice to just, you know, awaken. And, and I, I just, I, I really feel like you understand sort of the, the essence of unfixed is that we, we have to embrace that darkness and that sometimes the ugliest moments are the ones that carry the beauty and the grace. How did you come to this understanding yourself?

Troy Ford

I don't know, you know, it's just, so in college I studied rhetoric, which is, you know, it's very murky to a lot of people, a lot of people think, you know, rhetoric, like, you know, Socrates, like, you know, Aristotle, classics, that kind of thing. I loved it because I got to study all sorts of different subjects. Like the rhetoric of women's film, for example, was one of my favorite. And we got to watch all these old Betty Davis, Joan Crawford, you know, Gilda, Rita Hayworth movies and the teacher she used to dress in these gowns in class and she was done up as Rita Hayworth, you know, and she insisted that we watch these films on celluloid, like actually projected.

And one of the things that I loved about that, about rhetoric, about that whole process was that it teaches you to kind of find the cracks in things. Find where there's just that little voice in your mind that's saying, What's, what is that? Because that's very often sort of an, IN to understanding something better. And I was feeling that with the, I hate to say it, I hate to lump it all together, but we've said it, so the wellness industry, so to speak, and then this, this concurrent sort of talking about, Are, are you really living with eyes wide open? Are you really wide awake? Even the term “woke” has that kind of connotation. And so the alternative to not being those things is what? Like, do we offer a path for people who are not experiencing that?

For example, somebody who's dealing with mental health issues, someone who's dealing with anxiety or OCD or any sort of different kinds of things where you don't always feel like you can process the information that's coming at you from the world and fit in to sort of normal quote-unquote normal society or whatever.

And so I think it's really, really important that, people be honored for where they are, right, at this moment regardless of their mental health situation or their physical health situation, their economic or, geographic situation.

We talk about privilege, we talk about living your best life and so forth. Well, where does that leave the vast majority of humanity, you know, who don't have the opportunities that maybe we in Northern Europe or the United States or whatever have available to us, and even within the United States, I think that we often overlook how it is for someone to watch TV, watch movies, walk down the street and see people totally enveloped with affluence and so forth and feel to themselves like, What about me? Where do I fall into this? So I think it's really important. And that was what that article was kind of trying to get at.

Kimberly

Yeah, and it lit me up. I just love it when, like you said, you like to find the cracks in things and something so seemingly harmless, like wellness, what could be bad about that and wakefulness, but I love that we need to question that too. We absolutely can practice tools that are necessary in order to breathe through the hard stuff of our lives and maybe live a little bit better but we have to recognize that it's not just like a hat that someone can put on and take off and there's that term Post-Traumatic Growth that—have you heard that term before?—it's a toxic positivity type of thing where inevitably we do grow from our stories and from our traumas but to assume that that's what's going to happen is like a subtle violence towards another's unique experience to assume well What did you get from that? What are you learning from this? And inevitably maybe they will, but I don’t think we have to assume that when somebody is going through shit, that there's gonna be a period where they have this like, Aha, post-traumatic growth afterwards. It might just be really fucking hard. And we need to hold them there and honor that as just as vital as the aha moments that may or may not come later.

Troy Ford

I've had this kind of a little bit of a, I don't know if it's quite an epiphany recently, you know what I mean? But, through this, this therapy, this dialectical behavioral therapy, this mindfulness, sobriety, you know, I, I'll say AA even though, you know, nobody represents it or whatever, but for me, it's been incredibly important to pursue a spiritual path in whatever shape or form that takes for you. You know what I mean? And so I think I've recently just sort of had this sort of, um, this feeling like I want to be a witness, I want to be a witness to other people's experience and their presentation of themselves and their stated wishes for themselves. And that means for me at any rate that I don't have to, I don't have to weigh in on every single demographic issue, politics or whatever, you know what I mean?

It's not for me to speak about anyone else's experience but my own. And I'm kind of feeling really, I'm feeling amazingly powerful recently about this particular issue, I've taken just a great big step back and I I've been trying to just sort of imagine my eyes and my ears are wide open and my mouth is shut, you know, and I'm just trying to let people be who they want to be, say what they want to say and just honor, you know, where everybody is coming from. And, um, it's, it's a big thing.

Kimberly

Wow. Well, the beautiful thing about that is that you, as a writer, through those observations, then you get to represent those characters in a less stereotypical, biased way. I mean, you're not, well, of course it's coming through you. So you have your own history that will imprint itself upon it. But these characters through your observation you are really allowing these voices to be heard. And you're doing that also through your new QStack, which is incredible. And I love that you're finding more and more ways for these minimized or non-existent voices to come forward. For those who don't know about it yet, can you talk about that a little bit?

Troy Ford

Qstack. Actually, I'm glad you mentioned that because that was kind of my next thought as well, you know. So, so yeah, basically, it started out—when I started publishing Lamb, I just sort of tossed off this little blurb that was just like There's really not much queer content on Substack.

And, and then I realized, you know, hold on. I don't really know that that's true actually. So I started looking. And so the first thing that I realized is that there is no LGBTQ+ category on Substack. There's also no women. There's no, uh, there's no category for people of color or people, with disability, there's no, you know, there's strangely no demographic categories for people who want to talk about those kinds of issues or whatever so I originally thought maybe I was just gonna have it as be like a little sort of subsection of Ford Knows but I realized kinda just before I hit publish on that first announcement about Qstack that it needed to be its own entity so I ended up creating that morning I ended up creating and I had designed a logo and I started doing that.

And I'm so glad I did. I'm so glad I gave it the whole, the full force of its own newsletter because the response of people has been absolutely amazing. I've been so, so moved by all of the people reaching out and emailing me and telling me how much they feel like it's needed, how they feel like it's, it's something that can really, you know, bring the community together and allow us to find each other. Because I was just doing little keyword searches, LGBTQ, LGBT, you know what I mean? Queer, you know what I mean? And it's just the, the search function on, on Substack is incredibly clunky and I was finding newsletters that haven't been touched in two years, right next to newsletters with 20,000 plus subscribers.

Meanwhile, for example, George Takei, did anyone, anyone know that

George Takei

has a Substack? He does, you know, but it wasn't coming up, you know, how are we not seeing all of this? So I decided this needs to be its own, its own entity. And, uh, and, and one of those things I'll be, I'll be honest, you know, I, and I'm not a thousand percent up on the, um, on the politics of it or whatever, but I'm very firmly in favor of trans rights, trans visibility, trans agency, and I absolutely do not subscribe to, I'm not even going to use the acronym, but you know the exclusion of trans people is not for me, let's say that.

I was shocked. I watched, I think it was Marsha Washington [sic]* was it? The early trans rights sort of activist who was killed in New York City and they did a documentary about her. And they showed a clip from the very first gay parade in New York.

And there was a trans activist who was a friend of Marsha. And she was booed. She was booed on the stage, you know, by gay men, by other people. But it just, it was terrible. I couldn't handle it really.

I've had friends too, I've ended friendships in the gay community. I'll never forget this one time someone talking about sitting down to dinner at a dinner party, and there was a trans person sitting across from them who was trying to have a conversation. It was a gay couple. And the person was sitting across them was trying to have a conversation with them. And this friend said, him and his partner just turned to each other and said, Why is this person talking to us? You know, and I was just like, Are you, I couldn't believe what I was hearing, you know, like, Are you actually telling me that you refused to speak to a person because they were trans at a dinner party? I couldn't believe it.

Kimberly

Why are we so, I mean, without trying to get too philosophical, obviously visibility matters so that, you know, people can see themselves and we can see each other and we can break down biases and we can really recognize our shared humanity? Why does Hollywood and mainstream media, even Substack, why is this so hard for them to understand the importance of this visibility?

Troy Ford

I don't know. I don't know. I have my theories. Me and my husband were just watching. We just watched, we started watching two movies actually. The first one was Road House with Jake Gyllenhaal. And we're like, Jake Gyllenhaal, Brokeback Mountain. Love Jake. But it was just so, it was just so ultra violent, and it was just this, this horrible sort of, everyone knows the story of Roadhouse, I think, where this ultra capable bouncer comes in and basically, um, does battle with this hyper masculine, toxic masculinity element that's trying tosort of just beat down everybody at this, at this Roadhouse.

We stopped watching it after like 10 minutes because we were just like, this is, you know, what is this? It's just this toxic masculinity narrative, you know what I mean? And yet it's a major blockbuster with a major Hollywood star. And we're being forced to sort of, well, we weren't being forced, obviously, but we we're watching these narratives and not questioning it.

The very next movie we turned to was, was The Grey Man with Ryan Gosling. And it's the same damn thing. You know what I mean? It's, it's in this one, it’s this spy and what I found so interesting was that they showed several clips of his father brutalizing his sons in this kind of rite of passage upbringing that he was hoping to turn his sons into macho man or whatever, and after it was over, I just said, I think I'm done with these kinds of movies and this narrative of, and it's in our politics. You've got Vladimir Putin and you've got Donald Trump and you've just got this, this toxic stew of, bigger, more powerful, richer, you know, it's just, it's a lot.

Kimberly

Well, did you see the Iron Claw yet? Oh, well, it's a, oh my goodness, we cried. It's a true story, but it's about a boxing family and the toxic masculinity of the father, imposing his way on, well, five sons are represented in the movie. It turns out there were actually six sons, and I don't wanna give it away, but it was a downward spiral of all these boys growing up with such expectations and what it actually ends up doing to us.

It's heartbreaking. And I feel like some of the roots of this is just because we all want to belong. You know, we hear this all the time now. Human beings are tribal. And there is a sense of, some of us are more introverted than others so we don't have this deep need to like belong to large, um, friendship tribes. But there is a sense of feeling heard and seen in our world. And I know belonging is a theme in your work. And I know Lamb, he's trying to find his place in this world. I wanna go to something that's a little more personal for you because I know that you were adopted and how this theme of belonging is living through you and how adoption was a part of that.

Troy Ford

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, we talked a little bit about this. So, you know, so you have not an adoption narrative, but you found out later in life that you have a biological father and you have an another father, basically. So, my parents. were very upfront with my sister and I both, you know, we were both adopted and they were very upfront from the get go that we were adopted. They didn't want to hide that from us. They didn't want to, you know, they didn't want to pretend otherwise or whatever. They thought it was important to their credit. They got that I think they did get that right.

However, I found this out and my, so over the course of my life, my mother mainly has sort of fed me little pieces of information that kind of expanded my understanding of that process for me, how I came, you know, to be integrated into this family. And one of the early things that I found out, or I should say, one of the early things that happened that I only found out about much, much later was that my father didn't actually want to adopt me. He only wanted a daughter. And so it took some convincing, apparently on my mother's part, to convince him that, you know, to have to adopt a second child.

And then they knew my birth name, but they kind of obscured it over time. And so I was just kind of given breadcrumbs along the way. Meanwhile, I think, you know, there's a way in which, children, I think, can sense, when their parents are not necessarily proud of them, let's say. And that was a big part of my years later as I, you know, became, you know, a young teen and then older and so forth. And it was, it was very clear to me that my father was very disappointed in the son that he ended up getting.

So it was very difficult. I only found out very recently, just before we moved to Spain actually, I did 23andMe as you did. And so I connected with some people from my biological family.

Not close, not like aunt or uncle. I connected with a woman who believes, and I'm not, we're not a thousand percent sure because it's still a very small portion of the, it's like a 12% connection or whatever. It does sound plausible though, that she was the daughter of my half sister.

So her grandfather was my father and she actually gave me a bunch of information, including some pictures of him. And he had passed away already, even when I discovered all of this, as had her mother, my supposed half sister had both passed away coincidentally of alcohol and drug related problems. And what I found out interestingly was that this was a family, my father was a family, he was one of six children who were taken away from their mother in the, I think the 1950s and early 1950s in Reno, Nevada, because they were living in a car.

So it was, it was a single mother with six children living in a car. And so they were all taken away from her and were kind of scattered to the winds. And I connected with another cousin actually who lives in Texas. And he's the spitting image of me. I mean, we could be brothers. It was very strange to see this face looking back at me and seeing. So when I read about, and I'm almost caught up on your memoir actually, but when I started reading, and then I saw that picture of you and your cousin, and you look so alike. I mean, you look like you could be sisters.

Kimberly

What is this like for you to discover all these unusual bits of your history, your genetic history?

Troy Ford

You know, it's tough, you know, so at this point, I don't really have any family left. Both my parents have passed, all my grandparents have passed. My father only had one brother, and they were estranged for many, many years even before my father died. I'm talking about my adoptive father.

And then on my mother's side, I am actually in touch with my mother's only sister and her daughter. By email, once a year type of thing, you know what I mean? My sister and I are estranged. After my mother died, I think we had some sort of some kind of fundamental disagreements about things and so at this point I have I feel like I essentially have no family other than my husband of course and you know and our dog, who you can see all over here that's Bubba and over here.

Yeah. So I think not ever actually having that really close family as even, even as a, as a child. And then, you know, going through my, my life or whatever, it didn't, it was hard to find out all this information, but then also to find out, you know, that my closest relative, let's say my half sister, she was already dead. And my father as well, you know, already died like 10 years before I even ever found out about any of it, you know what I mean? And so it's been, it's been a very muted sort of feeling on my part about, you know, recovering those familial feelings and I think it's not, I actually have kind of a novel or a story or something in mind that I'm kind of tentatively calling Six Kids In a Car. And it's an imagining of what it must have been like for my father, my biological father as a child living in a car and uh... i kind of started it and then i put aside uh... I think wanting to kind of recover some sense of understanding that and knowing that, even though it's not no longer possible for me to have any kind of connection with them is a little bit kind of like the whole process of writing Lamb, for example, and recovering some of those some of those sort of feelings and ideas. We didn't mention it but the original inspiration for Lamb was also a friend of mine from high school and about 15 years after we graduated from high school, I got a letter from the school that said that he had died. And so I didn't find out for another almost 20 years how it happened. And so that was the original inspiration for starting this story.

Kimberly

I hope you write the Six Kids In a Car story. I feel the connection with that and Lamb and some of your essays. There's this, we're going back to the beginning of our interview with this gentleness and this fragility and how in a way your writing is giving your characters and by default yourself a place to rest, whether that's a community through Q-Stack or whether that's a deep friendship or a sense of being seen.

There is this poem that I found the other day and I shared it with you in our interview questions, but I wanna read this little segment of it because now it's like, I wasn't gonna read it. Now it's like, this is totally you -

Troy Ford

Oh, please do.

Kimberly

This is just a part of the poem. It's by Nikita Gill. And it's called Your Soft Heart. And it reads,

You are still the child who gently places fallen baby birds back in their nest. You are still the soft soul that gets your heart broken over cruel words. This is why you are important. This is why you will always be needed.

And I just like get goosebumps when I read that because this is what you're doing, Troy. I mean, this is what you're doing for your readers, what you're doing for your authors, this is what you're doing for your characters. You're putting them back in their nest. And now that I know more about your own story, you're putting yourself, you're building yourself a nest.

Troy Ford

I think that's, you're right, I think you're right. That is so sweet, I love it. It is.

Kimberly Warner (54:41.779)

It's so beautiful. It's like, and I love too that you know, you, you had this career as an interior decorator too. So you're always building nests, you know.

Troy Ford

Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

So I'm looking forward to finishing your memoir, although it's not finished. You've got still, I think, I don't know…

Kimberly

One chapter left and then an epilogue and then kind of like an author's note. So we've got three weeks left, but it's nearing the finish line. And I feel sad about it because I don't want it to end. That's been such a, just a rewarding beyond, that's a stupid word, it's a horrible word. It's been such an enlivening experience for me to share.

And so I probably will continue writing, but not memoir, because this has been eight years in the making and I don't have the brain capacity to keep it going.

Troy Ford

Well you know put it put it aside and then you know you can have you know you can always write a second one later on in life you know and talk more about that. I mean the work that you're doing with unfixed and the stories that you've been showing us about all these people— Dylan and i can't remember even all their names but there have been so many of them that—and there was one that I watched recently where people were talking about, you know, sex and intimacy and stuff like that. And I, it really, really moved me because it is such an intimate but integral part of our lives. And, you know, and yet it's so hard to talk about and they did it so beautifully and so bravely and, you know, and it's so intertwined with love and, and the most important relationships that we have you know with our partners and so forth so I just admire it so much the work that you do and I love watching all of those stories and reading about them too.

Kimberly

Thank you. Yeah, I was so happy Dylan chipped chimed in on that the sex and intimacy because you know he hasn't moved his body in four years and I thought What's he gonna want to share and he was like Heck Yeah and he quotes Luke Skywalker and talks about how “reaching out with your energy” and it's just been such a fresh perspective to hear.

Kind of like, again, going back to what you said, it's like, I wanna find the crack here. I want to break this open and not make it just, I'm not trying to paint rainbows on it, but I want to broaden the definition of what it means to live well. And I think you and I both in a way are building nests for baby birds.

Troy Ford

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It reminds me a lot of that statue Holly Starley had put, she had added that of the woman in, in Lotus pose, but that, you know, it had the cracks in it and the light shining out of it. That's exactly what that reminds me of. It's. It's absolutely.

Kimberly

Yep. In fact, I have a one episode I'm going to share in a couple of weeks and it's a woman's story who, in fact, I call it Kintsugi Human because she talks about that crack, that all of her brokenness and all this shit that happened to her was just creating more space for light to pour through. And it's quite stunning to bring this conversation into our wellness-washed world. And I'm so thrilled with all of the voices that you're bringing into the world and your characters and Lamb, I just want to sit down and wrestle with him and then have a cup of tea and he's just such a sweetheart. So I think, beware because if I come to Barcelona, I'm probably going to do the same with you.

Kimberly

This is just gorgeous. Thank you, Troy. Thank you for spending time with me, but mostly thank you for just doing the beautiful work that you're doing. I'm thrilled and I can't wait to see what you do next.

Troy Ford

Thank you Kim. Oh, thank you so much. It's been an absolute delight.

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* Marsha P. Johnson