“Being a writer is being a one-woman business…”
Jeanna Kadlec joins Cave of the Heart and answers 6 questions on self-trust
Welcome to Cave of the Heart, an interview series where writers trust-fall into the depths of inner-knowing, creativity, and the craft of writing. Are you ready to get curious about the cultivation of self-trust, give a warm nod to our child selves, and celebrate inspiration in all forms? Come with us into the cave of the heart.
Describe the setting where you’re answering these questions.
My partner and I are both writers, and we both work from home in our NYC apartment, and so have made sure to create a lot of separate nooks for working that serve different purposes. I think I worked on my answers at all of them — at the spacious wood desk in the office overlooking our neighbor's house in the office; at the dining room table, surrounded by my many beverages; and also, of course, on the comfy pink velvet couch, snuggled under a blanket.
Childhood
Q: As a child, were you allowed to have differing opinions from your family/caretakers?
This is a very hard question. I want to say that, about the little things, yes. But then, I also know that my parents — my mother, especially — were exceptionally hard on me, really pushing me to be the ideal, obedient oldest child. As my mother later put it, and I’m paraphrasing a bit here, you wanted to please us so badly, so I just pushed you as far as I could.
But about the big things, like God or how the world around me worked — a differing opinion wasn’t even an option. I wasn’t just raised in a conservative, Republican home; I was raised from infancy in a very devout evangelical Christian home where God was baked into nearly every aspect of daily life.
And couple that with my natural temperament, which is historically very much to follow the rules and to people please rather than to challenge authority, and you have a pretty solid recipe for someone who stays in the tradition they were raised in until it almost kills them. Which is exactly what happened, and is the subject of my memoir, Heretic.
I didn’t get out of that stifling evangelical world until it was absolutely necessary for my survival as a queer woman in my early twenties who was, by then, married to a man. And the process of divesting from it, of unlearning it all, was painfully slow — and very much still ongoing, even now, 10+ years later.
Influences
Q: If you had to choose one person from your past that most influenced who you are today, who would that be and why? This can be a person from history, an animal, a fictitious character in a book, TV or movie.
The obvious answer for me here is the Christian God, or Jesus, because even though I do not believe in him anymore, that belief so informed my development as a person and my daily life for so long. The Bible is, by far, the book that shaped me the most.
But. I am going to cheat and list a few more, because I was a voracious reader as a child, and so there were definitely characters who were clear glimmers and Queer Roots for me, lighting the path, however dim, along the way.
Catherine in Karen Cushman’s Catherine, Called Birdy, who survives brutal child abuse and very explicitly interprets her intelligence as a God-given gift that means she should question the world around her, was a very important book for me in elementary school. As was Ella in Ella Enchanted, for similar reasons: she’s cursed with obedience and learns how to circumvent it. Those two characters were so vital for baby Jeanna.
I recently commented on Gail Carson Levine’s IG thanking her for Ella Enchanted, and for inspiring so many of us with that book years ago, and she congratulated me on the publication of my own book, and I will truly never recover.
Up next: A video listening tour of my favorite writing from the last week or so, a special poem, and Tips & Take-Alongs from Ask an Editor. Subscribe here.
Creative Spark
Q: What was the last creative spark that you were really excited about, but it ultimately fizzled out? What do you do when something doesn’t come to life like you’d imagined?
Oh my god, most of my projects from the last year, honestly! I had a whole plan for the next book I was going to publish after Heretic, and plan after plan just collapsed in on itself. I wrote a whole newsletter about it recently, on how to walk away from a book. (tl;dr: my agent shot down my first project, and then I came up with a new memoir idea, which would have been terrible for me in the long run emotionally, even though my agent was excited about it.)
There were two big things that helped. First, giving myself permission to just not write in between projects. Trying to force it doesn’t help anyone. And like, I was still writing, in a sense — I have my newsletter, which is weekly, and my journal. But I wasn’t writing anything that was long-form, or anything that had any intention to become something. I was just like fuck it, I’m going to watch reality TV and play video games for a few months. And that was good. I had just spent six, seven years on a book, and publication is a fucking grind. Rest was important.
Second, my writers’ group. I so strongly believe in being in community with other working writers who will ground you, hold you accountable, and also just be there when shit happens and you feel like you’re never going to write anything good ever again. You are all going to have bad days, and sometimes your partner or other friends just aren't going to understand that.
My writers’ group has been together for more than five years. We have such intimacy with each others’ creative processes and professional lives at this point. We know what it looks like when one of us is in a slump or having a bad moment and needs a pick-me-up. I don’t know what my writing life looks like without them, and frankly, I don’t want to know.
I am now, thankfully, on the other side of all that! I have a few book projects that have begun stirring. But only because I gave myself the necessary space. Only because I had the necessary support, so that I didn’t stay down at the bottom of the well for too long. I had people who helped pull me back up. And, at this point, trust in my practice that, eventually, another idea would come.
Writing Process
Q: What does your writing life look like today, and can you compare/contrast it to 10 years ago?
My mindset about living a creative life has totally changed. You could say it’s the difference between 35 and 25: maturity, having lived more life, having gone through a Saturn Return. I’m not nearly as steeped in shame and guilt, in the “I should be writing,” “why am I not writing?” So much of my work these days, at my newsletter and in the classes and containers I teach, has to do with holding space for other writers who are divesting from their own ideas about productivity and output, which are often these insidious white supremacist, Ivory Tower-informed capitalist commitments and mindsets.
I’m more disciplined, but I also play more. (See: less shame.) I’m self-employed now, but I’ve worked enough that I understand so much better how to manage my time. 10+ years ago, I was still living through many of the events that I talk about in my memoir Heretic. I was still in a PhD program, still thinking the only way to be a writer full-time was if I was a tenure-track professor.
Since then, I’ve moved to New York, opened (and closed) a lingerie boutique, worked in marketing for too many startups. Along the way, I was freelancing and studying astrology. I ended up working full-time for a number of different astrology apps you probably have on your phone before committing to the self-employed life.
I just know more now. I have a lot more life under my belt, a lot more professional experience that helps me just run my business better. Because ultimately, being a writer (and teacher, etc.) is being a one-woman business. And so I have to take care of myself accordingly. Not just the admin and taxes and all that, but also the rest. Setting hours for myself. Taking vacation. Treating myself like I would someone who was working for me. How would I want them to be treated? Would I work them to the bone, or would I want them to have a fucking weekend?
Resources
Q: What’s one surprising or unlikely resource that you turn to again and again to bolster your writing life?
I’m obviously known for being an astrologer, but it may be surprising to others just how foundational my spiritual practice is to my everyday (and creative) life. When I say creativity is spirituality is creativity is spirituality, I mean that quite sincerely.
Bonus! Neurodiversity
Q: Did being diagnosed neurodivergent affect how you see or interact with your writing life?
In retrospect, I have been a high-functioning person with anxiety (or what my we-don’t-talk-about-mental-health-family colloquially calls “the angst”) since I can’t even remember. I definitely had depressive episodes as a teenager, which increased in severity in my early twenties during my marriage to a man and coming out years, but since I came out, I haven’t had one. Shocker.
The anxiety, though. The anxiety is always there, a treadmill in my brain or body or whatever getting turned to varying speeds. Medication helps, of course. Exercise used to, but the last few years have largely wrested that from me: there’s the pandemic, but I had a rather severe health crisis and subsequent hospitalization and surgery that have left me rebuilding my muscles and endurance from the ground up. It was during those years, of course, that my book came out. And so I once again found my anxiety at an all time high, with my preferred coping mechanism — walking around Central or Prospect Park for miles, going to Pilates or a high-intensity spin class — profoundly unavailable to me.
So if I’ve learned anything these last few years, especially, it’s that mental health is variable to both internal and external factors, that having been medicated and therapized for well over a decade does not make me immune to a need for radical shifts in my treatment plan, and also that coping mechanisms sometimes have to change because of outside forces. Like, god, I wish I could go to a spin class right now. I really do. But my body still couldn’t handle it.
And so I have had to engage other things that give me that same sense of endorphins, that sense of play. Video games have been incredibly helpful for anxiety management. I play Fortnite every day. All credit to my friend Melissa for patiently teaching me last summer, before my book came out, and to my partner Meg for encouraging me to play every day.
Chime in below in the comments!
Do you have any questions for Jeanna about how (or why!) a newbie could apply astrology to a writing practice?
Jeanna mentions characters like Catherine from Catherine, Called Birdy and Ella from Ella Enchanted as influential in her early life. Can you recall any book characters from your childhood or adolescence who had a profound impact on your worldview or personal development?
Does reading about Jeanna’s journey to self-trust illuminate anything about your own? Do you feel any closer to the cave of your own heart?
Confession: That first question above is really from me/for me. I'm really interested in hearing how writers can let the nourishment of astrology come into our writing practices, especially if we were raised in more (ahem) skeptical environments. :)
Jeanna, I enjoyed this so much! Thanks, Amanda, for facilitating this. As an astrologer, Jeanna will understand this-- THANK GOODNESS that Capricorns age backwards. What a relief it is to age into that, finally.
I was such a voracious, escapist reader as a kid. Meg in A Wrinkle in Time taught me that you could be angry and awkward and still deeply, deeply loved. Mary in A Secret Garden taught me about the incredible healing power of the natural world and getting your hands in the dirt. And Pecola Breedlove of The Bluest Eye taught me that I wasn't alone.