Unfixed Interviews
Unfixed shares interviews with authors and creatives!
While on Substack, I’ve been exposed to a wealth of brilliant writers that explore the messy complexity of the human experience through fiction, non-fiction, essay, and memoir. Reading their work has become an engrossing, educational, and often goosebump-inducing new pastime—from the profoundly attentive Death and Birds essays to a LGBTQ+ serialized novel that always leaves me teary, to weekly laugh-out-loud letters that celebrate and ruminate on mid-life—there is a wealth of wisdom to mine over here. Through this offering, I explore unfixed’s meaning and implication in different walks of life—illness, of course, but also relationships, family, aging, socio-economic challenges, trauma and climate change.
Ben Wakeman's Memory of My Shadow
I think the solve for humanity, if there is a solve, is empathy. If there was a way to put an empathy chip in every single human, so many of our problems would go away.
Mr. Troy Ford's inclusive nest
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.
Chloe's sacred everything
There are times when I'm with someone at the end of their life or I'm with a tiny bird and there is that moment where I'm just like Oh, Oh yeah, I think there's some God here.
Alisa sings the brain electric
You can come to a place in your life where you run out of resilience because you're in such an adversarial relationship with your body. And so it’s about how to recast and reframe and re-narrativize a body that loves you, a body that can speak to you and say, “This one thing that's here is a part of you, and it’s pushing you to be the person you were me…
Mary Tabor's unimaginable lightness of being
By experiencing deeply and profoundly the grief, I floated on this ocean of loss. And I felt saved in my life by that.
Gail Marlene Schwartz isn't afraid of the hard stuff
I love that imagination gives us access to certain kinds of truth that don't exist in the factual world. There is sometimes way more truth we can explore in fiction than we are able to in our very limited lived experiences.
Adam's grand third act
I'm no fan of myself. I've learned to tolerate myself. Like, okay, this is who I am. I don't know if anybody runs around and goes, gosh, I'm so glad I'm me. So, I don't have that, but there is an acceptance, and I think that gets better as you get older, and I think it's easier as you get older… but when I write I get to be my best self.
Nina listens for the heartbeat
What I'm teaching is how to write from the body. If you generate sound and rhythm, that's what the body feels. So you're creating at the sentence level a reality that cannot be denied. I'm feeling it, versus just a bland sentence that's only conveying information or moving the story along. It's a profound difference.
Mary Tabor invites you aboard her Lifeboat
"The splash, instead of a return to surface calm, stays open and splayed. That open water with risen water all around the fallen place is an open hand and palm that takes in the wounded and the lost."
Eric’s fool is wondrous and wise
We’re always asking questions and the outer world is a reflection of those questions being answered, unfolding in linear time so we have the time to experience the answers.
Eleanor Anstruther refuses to judge you—or your inner beast
This book really was born—as most of my work is—it was born out of a rage, really, a raw and a rage around an injustice.
Jonathan teeters on the edge of a mystical abyss
There's a massive sea of nothingness and we are an awareness floating about in it. We create these islands of metaphors and symbolic meaning and internal emotional architecture that we hold onto…and it's a very terrifying and scary thing to say, Well, wait a minute, all that stuff is just a social or psychological creation. And what we really are is jus…
Holly's inner and outer freedom
"To be stuck, for as far back as I can remember, has been my greatest fear... Every decision I’ve made, be it career or relational, to stay or to go, to save or to spend, has been in the name of freedom, mine or theirs, which is, for me, movement, which is, for me, love.”
Veronika trusts our inner wilderness
We have these beings inside us that want to belong. With this practice, we can bring in these vulnerable, immature inner beings and discover their potential.
Rebekah's words take me to the wordless
There are words that are labeling and describing and organizing. And also there are words that are like conduits to our bodies or ways to connect, like tools or little prompts to try to move beyond language. I mean, if that's possible—language that helps us move beyond language.