In our last episode, we delved into one of the crucial phases of the creative journey, assessing and acknowledging. This stage involves not only evaluating specific pieces of our creative work, but also reflecting on ourselves and our creative lives as a whole. It’s about understanding our growth, recognizing areas for improvement, and acknowledging the progress we’ve made so far. As we explore the different phases of the Creativity Quest, we draw parallels to the five seasons, examining how each stage aligns with the changing landscapes of our creative experiences.

In this episode, we return to the topic of assessing and acknowledging, focusing on its connection to the season of fall.

In the season of fall, things start to quiet down. It’s a time of reflection and assessment, a period to discern what holds value and what’s ready to be released. Just as trees shed leaves to prepare for new growth, we too must let go of what no longer serves us. It’s a challenging process, entailing honesty and, at times, grief.

As we dive into the conversation, Melody highlights the significance of healthy assessment and its importance to both personal growth and creative work. KimBoo underscores the value of self-awareness, which helps break the cycle of insecurities and self-doubt. Gina emphasizes the connection between assessment, perfectionism, and imposter syndrome. She emphasizes the practice of self-compassion and treating oneself with the same kindness as a trusted friend.

As we explore the assessing and acknowledging phase in our creative journey, we invite you to reflect on your own growth and creative process. Join us as we navigate this essential stage with self-compassion and insight, bringing enlightenment to your creative path.

Resources

• Fall season of writing:

  • Ep. 10 (part 1)

  • Ep. 11 (part 2)

• Critiquing

  • Ep. 12 (part 1)

  • Ep. 13 (part 2)

  • Ep. 16 (part 3)

• Releasing: Ep. 20

Ep. 26: Critiquing Your Inner Critic: Healthy Self Assessment

Dave Hogan, Gina’s Pop
0:02
Welcome to Around the Writer’s Table, a podcast focusing on the crossroads of creativity, craft, and conscious living for writers of all ages and backgrounds. Your hosts are Gina, Melody, and KimBoo, three close friends and women of a certain age, who bring to the table their eclectic backgrounds and unique perspectives on the trials, tribulations, and the joys of writing. So pull up a chair and get comfortable here around the writer’s table.

Gina Hogan Edwards
0:43
Hello, listeners. It’s wonderful to have you back with us. I am Gina Hogan Edwards. Welcome around the writer’s table. I’m here with my co-hosts KimBoo York and Melody, A Scout. Let’s do a little bit of introduction before we dive into our topic for today. I am an author, an editor, a creativity coach, and I host writing retreats for women on the beaches of St. George Island in Florida. And I have with me as I said, my two buddies, I love these conversations that we get to have with each other several times a month. And so let’s pass it off to you first, Melody. Introduce yourself.

Melody, A Scout
1:23
Hi everyone. I’m Melody, A Scout, and I help my clients find their sense of home by restoring balance and harmony to their lives through plant spirit medicine and my book Soul of the Seasons.

Gina
1:37
Thank you, Melody. And KimBoo.

KimBoo York
1:41
Ah, yeah, hey y’all, it’s KimBoo, KimBoo York. I’m an author and a former project manager. I help writers and solopreneurs find time, energy, and motivation to create, including their own writing and their businesses and lots of other things in life. So that is me. I’m still nursing my coffee also. 

Gina
2:07
I’m with you. So in our last episode, ladies, we spoke about one of the stages or phases of the creative quest that we call Assessing and Acknowledging and in a nutshell, that is looking at not only a specific piece of our creative work, but looking at ourselves and our writing life as a whole, and just looking at, where are we? What do we still have to learn? Where do we still want to go? And how far have we come? What do we have behind us that has led us to where we are right now? 

So we talk about each of these phases of The Creativity Quest and relate them—after each episode where we do a deep dive into the phase itself—relate them to the seasons and the seasons of our lives, which is the topic of Melody’s book Soul of the Seasons. And so we’re going to be spending this episode revisiting the topic of Assessing and Acknowledging and how it relates to the seasons. So Melody, I’m gonna let you take it from there.

Melody
3:16
Thanks, Gina. So we spoke a little bit earlier about, maybe, the season of Summer, but—because there’s a lot of reflection and assessment of our work as an ongoing process during the Summer time, which is very productive—but really, this Assessing and Acknowledging topic that we’re talking about in the creative cycle lands squarely into the season of Fall. And we’re going to list in the podcast notes which episodes you can go back to, to re-listen or listen for the first time about the season of Fall. And there’s another one on critiquing that we had. It was really good. 

This season is the time of year in our inner cycle, in our inner landscapes, where things start to quiet down. We’ve done all the productivity. We’ve done a lot of the work. We’ve made our drafts or revisions. Now is the time that we assess what we have done. We take a look, a discerning look, and with precision, we assess what is of a value, with the most value, in what we’ve created and within ourselves. And, also with precision, then we decide what we’re going to release. And this requires, as we talked about in depth in our previous episode, rigorous self honesty. 

Also included in this season is the emotion, the core emotion of grief, which is a natural result of letting something go that is of value to you. Even when we go through our revisions, and we know it’s time, we can’t just keep every single word that we have written, although we may often want to. Every single word was hard won and feels precious to us. We can’t possibly keep them all and make our work, the finished product, the result that we want it to be. 

So in our lives, the same is true. And usually, this is a result of a loss in our lives that we take this harsh inner—it can feel harsh, certainly—inner assessment of ourselves. The organ systems within the body and Chinese medicine that this is associated with this season is lungs, that is breathing in, receiving divine inspiration and the colon, letting go of those things that no longer serve us. The letting go is super important. We’re going to talk about that more: letting go, and why that’s a value to us in this part of the process. Because without that we can’t, you can’t receive anything new into your life if you’ve hung on to every single thing from the past. 

This dovetails wonderfully into the Assessing and Acknowledging part of the creative cycle that Gina talked about in Episode 26. So I’d like to go around our circle, and I would love your feedback. Let’s start with you, KimBoo. Why . . . why is healthy assessment important to you personally and to your work?

KimBoo
7:12
Ooh, such a good question. Such a good question. I think, well, its importance is pretty obvious. You have to know where you are to get an idea. Even if you have a goal, a big goal, a small goal, you have to know where you are in order to set the steps on getting to the next stage. And I guess that’s the project manager in me talking. Yeah, you got to know where you are, you got to make a list, you got to have a checklist. That’s really my way of approaching most things in life. If you just have a checklist, everything will be fine. But unfortunately, especially when it comes to creativity, nothing’s really that simple.

When I talk about healthy self assessment, I did mention in the previous episode that, for me, therapy did a lot along those lines. I know people have . . . I don’t want to sell therapy as a fix-all. It does work for some people; it doesn’t work for other people. Whatever your comfort level is with that. But for me, it helped me get an objective opinion about what was going on in my life, because one of the things, certainly with my anxiety issues—and you talked a little bit about this, in the last episode as well, Melody, about getting caught in the loop of assessing; just really, assessing and assessing and assessing, assessing, and never getting out of that, because of insecurities and fears—and being able to see that I’m in that loop, not even see a solution out of it. Just being able to see that I’m in that loop has been the most important growth process for me.

It’s related to acknowledging but it’s really self-awareness. It’s saying, Oh, yeah, you’re kind of in a loop. Oh, you’re being perfectionist. Oh, you’re being self-defeatist and dragging yourself down, may not give me the answer to how to change that behavior right away, but at least knowing that that’s what I’m doing and being able to see it objectively even though it’s my own behavior. Kind of like we were talking about with self-coaching; you have to be able to step back and really look at yourself a little bit. Getting those skills has helped me as a person, obviously, but as a writer, because it takes me out of the highs and the lows. I mean, Gina, I’m sure you’re familiar with this with the writers that you’ve worked with, is that there’s the high of being creative and then there’s a low of thinking that what you’ve created is terrible and awful. And that can be its own cycle, dirty cycle. 

So, yeah, I know that’s kind of a rambling answer, but I think that’s really where it’s at for me, is having had to learn those skills, which took a long time for me. Wasn’t easy. But learning that skill of self-coaching in the sense of being objective about where I actually am, that assessing where my story is, where I am as a writer, where I am as a person, and then from there, understanding what the problem is and being able to work our way out of it.

Melody
10:24
Nice. Gina.

Gina
10:27
I will get to your question, but there’s something that I want to touch on before I do because you brought up something really important, Melody, that I want to make a little bit more clear to the listeners. We’re talking about this creativity quest in terms of these 10 stages that I’ve seen writers and myself go through, and we’re equating it, or seeing whether it parallels with, the seasons of our inner landscape. You brought up the idea of releasing and letting go and how vital that is a part of the assessing stage. And in The Creativity Quest, the cycle that I’ve created, Releasing has its own separate standing. I identify it as its own separate stage. This is one of the things that makes it a little challenging to put language around The Creativity Quest, because we can actually be in several phases or stages at the same time. And so while we’re doing the Assessing and Acknowledging, and we’re deep in that stage, we may also be doing the Releasing. So I just wanted to touch on that so that the listeners could follow along with where we are in terms of comparing these two sort of templates for living the creative life. 

So to your question, why is healthy assessment important to our work? Well, the most obvious answer to that is that it’s important to our work in terms of helping us not only improve individual pieces but just improve overall. Where it gets challenging for me is that loop of assessing that both of y’all were talking about, is I get stuck in the idea of perfectionism. And so I just keep on recycling through that over and over and over again. And then sometimes what keeps me, what won’t let me out of this phase is my imposter syndrome. Those two things, the perfectionism and impostor syndrome, are definitely related to one another. So I kind of see the season as practice for me to learn how to get beyond the idea that someone is going to call me out as a fake and to get beyond that churning of the perfectionism.

I’ve had multiple reminders lately, in various aspects of my life, that I need to treat myself as I would treat my BFF. I think that that becomes really critical at this stage or this season, is reminding myself about being compassionate with myself, being kind to myself, and even using the language with myself that I would use with a really good friend. I think that those are things that can help us move forward, that can help us navigate through some of the more challenging parts of assessing where we are, and being honest with ourselves, and acknowledging what is it that we still need to work on, and being sure that we place some value on the things that we’ve done to get where we are.

Melody
14:16
Hmm, yes, I could just say ditto to that for my own life as well. I actually like, and can be pretty good at, assessing. I had the teenage son of a friend, I was over for dinner, and we happened to be talking about, we were doing some very good assessment of someone else who was not in the room and the son said, as children will often do, Wow, you guys sound like you’re really judging this person.

KimBoo
15:00
Ooo, from the mouths of babes.

Melody
15:06
I said, But we’re so good at it. Yeah. But (a) not everyone, including ourselves, need to be judged all the time. And I do find it useful, because it helps me set or reset my sights on where it is I want to go. Is that the Cheshire Cat that said, If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else. So if you are not taking regular assessment of yourself in your work, you may not end up with what you have intended, or what your desires were, what your dreams were. And so that part is really important to me. 

It brought up, as well, the acknowledgment part of this, and I’d like us to go around again and talk about how acknowledgement, not only just acknowledgement of your work, but acknowledgement of yourself and your value. Part of the season of fall is valuing, valuing who we are, what we do. what are our abilities and talents, and owning that. So let’s go back to KimBoo. What are your challenges, and also, what are the rewards of acknowledging—self acknowledgement, especially?

KimBoo
16:44
I joke a lot that I’m a throw-away writer. I write something and then I throw it out the window and wherever it lands, it lands. So I don’t really have any problems putting it out into the world. One of the reasons that that’s so easy for me is because I have, ironically, a lot of trouble acknowledging the successes I’ve had. My friend Kim, I’ve talked about her before, Kim McShane, she and I joke a lot about the fact that once we’ve accomplished something, no matter how difficult it may have seemed prior to our accomplishing it and no matter what other people may tell us about having done that thing, to us it just seems obvious that that is easy to do because we did it. There are so many levels of self depreciation and lack of acknowledgement in that kind of statement.

Gina
17:36
Do you discount yourself much?

KimBoo
17:39
Discount? Oh, my gosh, absolutely. I felt it the other time, where was it? Services? I’m part of a new congregation and so talking to people who don’t really know me, and I tell them I’m an author, and they’re like, Oh, what do you do? And I’m like, Well, I write books. And they’re like, Well, have you written any books? And of course, the answer is Yes. Because, as I said, I just write books, and I just throw them out in the world. But then they get this kind of starry, glassy look on their face, and they’re like, Wow, that’s just amazing. I could never do that. And I’m like, If I could do it, anybody can do it. Which may be true, maybe not true. 

But the point is that I’m just floored by the idea that anybody thinks anything I do could be special or unique or impressive at any level. So the discounting and the acknowledging of the work that I’ve put into something, I’ve literally been writing since I was old enough to start reading—and for me, that was six, and that’s a lifetime of writing. I may not be the most gifted, the most skilled writer on Earth. We have many people that fit that model. But I’m not too bad and I’ve been at it a long time. So why don’t I acknowledge that? Why don’t I accept that? 

I think it’s the opposite between somebody who just eats all the harvest versus somebody who cans the harvest and puts things up for later. And I’m just eating it, and what I don’t eat, I’m just throwing out the door because I don’t respect it. And that’s problematic for me. I don’t have a solution, by the way. This is a monologue that’s going nowhere. 

But that does, when you were talking, that’s what came to mind about acknowledging is, yeah, I can acknowledge that I’ve been a writer. You just heard me say that I’ve been a writer all my life, since I was a very young child. But can I acknowledge that anything I do is worthy, is valuable, is special, is unique, is uniquely nine. That’s a horse of a different color.

Gina
19:48
Well, that monologue did go somewhere because I think you just exponentially increased your self-awareness. I mean, I know that this is something that you have talked about before, but I think just putting the language around it and making it this very defined thing, by being able to talk about it, you’ve now got it in a place that you can look it in the face and do something about it.

KimBoo
20:15
Darn it. Why did I open my mouth? I’ve got work to do some work now. That was not in the agreement.

Gina
20:24
Ain’t that why we’re here?

KimBoo
20:28
I’m here to drink coffee and know things, I don’t know.

Melody
20:32
Oh, and you do well at both of those things. Gina, what about acknowledgement is challenging and rewarding for you.

Gina
20:43
This springs to mind an article that I recently wrote on Substack that I called “Recalibration” and I see how this is, this Assessing and Acknowledging and the season of Fall, to me, feel sort of like an opportunity to recalibrate, to check where we are, and to make sure that we’re in alignment with all of the things that we want to be following along with. I think it’s really easy for all of us to remember the bad. So, like when we share a piece of writing or do anything in our lives and get feedback on it, we might have 10 people talk about how fabulous that it was and how wonderful we are, but if there’s one person that says something negative, then we’ve got that tendency to remember that one person above the 10. And so I think that’s one reason that this phase, this stage in our life, this season in our life, can be so challenging for us is because we put so much weight, emphasis, and importance on that negative thing, thinking that somehow it means more than the good things do. 

That’s been something that I’ve tried to be really aware of, and in my efforts to assess and acknowledge and recalibrate and realign, I have noticed that when I am kind and honest with myself about that process and get to the end result, we’ll say—being able to reflect back on what I’ve done—that I can tell that I’m in a good place when I pay attention to how I feel in my body. Because there is this, I don’t know how to describe it other than ‘alignment.’ It just feels like I’m in the right place. I may certainly still have a ways to go in terms of doing things better, whether that’s writing or other things in my life, but I feel like when I am in alignment with my beliefs and with my intentions, and with what I stand for in the world, especially when it comes to my writing, that I have this very settled comfort in my body. And I’ve learned to pay more attention to that.

Melody
23:39
Wow, that is a lot to be thankful for, honestly, and I understand that. One of the things that I receive personally from acknowledging my value in myself and my work is this state of gratitude for what I have, what I’ve created, what I’ve been giving, how I’ve been supported through the process, and it grounds me in that self-knowing of that about myself, the value of myself, and it brought me around to something you said earlier, Gina, about the imposter syndrome: somebody’s gonna call me out and say you’re an imposter. Well, you know what, that very well might happen. This world is full of a lot of unkind people and someone might say that to you, but when we’re grounded in this acknowledgement of our own value and the confidence in our work, what we know about ourselves, yeah, that stuff stings. That shit’s gonna sting when we hear it, but it doesn’t throw us so far off course. We are easily able to regroup and go, Yeah. Okay, that is one opinion.

KimBoo
25:09
You know, it’s interesting that we’re talking about how the body fits into this because when, in times when I’ve been less certain about myself, that kind of criticism, I can feel that. It feels like a gut punch. There’s a reason that we say, Oh, that was a gut punch, because you can feel it in your body. I think, now that we’re talking about it, I think one of the things that I’m going to start looking for is my physical reaction to not just criticism by others, but criticism of myself. Because if I’m giving myself that same feeling that I feel when other people say something bad, then I am not in that place that you were talking about, Gina, of feeling balanced, of feeling very set on your feet, and like the Tai Chi where your energy is flowing into the ground and comes up from the ground and cycling and you’re just very solid. And when your gut punched, you’re falling over, and it feels painful. So I don’t know, that was just the insight I was having as you guys were talking because I was thinking about what that kind of criticism feels like in my body, and that is something I need to keep in mind.

Gina
26:20
I have a question for you. Do you think that that feeling in your body, when you either receive the feedback from external sources or from yourself feels different when you’re able to recognize that that feedback is true versus it being harsh criticism that isn’t true?

KimBoo
26:45
That’s a very good question indeed.

Melody
26:47
Or harsh criticism that is true.

KimBoo
26:52
That’s also a thing. I’m gonna have to pay attention to that. I think my instinctual answer is that when it’s true, or I feel like there’s a valid reason for that, I can acknowledge where they’re coming from with that particular opinion, it doesn’t hurt it. It may make me feel uncomfortable, because nobody likes criticism, right? It’s just like ick, but it doesn’t hurt. But when I’m unstable, and I’m feeling uncertain, and I’m feeling unbalanced in my body then it physically hurts.

Melody
27:31
Or hungry, angry, lonely, or tired.

KimBoo
Right, yeah. That as well.

Melody
Not good times to receive criticism. Just saying, even if it was well intended. 

Gina
27:43
Well, and I think that both of those, whether it’s something that is thrown at me that’s true or something is thrown at me that is not true, I think they can both feel like gut punches. But it’s the microsecond after I feel the gut punch that tells me whether it’s true or not, because if it is true and I’m being honest with myself about that, that gut punch sort of transforms into . . . I don’t know the word for it, but it transforms into something that might still sting, but it doesn’t hold the same force that the other kind of gut punch does.

Melody
28:31
And to be honest, the element of the season of Fall is metal, and the reason it’s metal is because metal is used with precision to cut away all that is not a value. When something is cut away, it does not feel good. That’s why criticism often does not feel good. When we can give some balanced self assessment, and sometimes it takes more than that microsecond, if I’m not in a good space, it may take a week or more to get some perspective on it. 

I have long ago had a tendency to go over the conversation and assess. Is there any part of this this can be true about me? Do I need to change something in my life? Sometimes I do that to access but I think it’s a good review for me. Is there some element of truth about that and is there anything in me that needs changing or adjusting as a result of that? And sometimes the cutting away, the loss, the things is significant. Relationship, death of a loved one, death of a beloved kitty, a beloved pet. That is a real gut punch. And it is often the time that sometimes we may either gather everything around us and try to hang on to everything for fear of losing more, or we let go of everything and we forget to hold on to those things that are precious to us. 

So depending on your level of reaction, and what you happen to be going through at the time, I would say, give yourself plenty of time to receive that criticism and see if it applies to you. Is this really of value and honest own that. Yeah, I’ll take that under advisement. 

KimBoo, you also brought up another really important aspect about the harsh criticism, that criticism without compassion or kindness is as much an imbalance as either over-criticism or none at all. Well, I know in myself, if something is just thrown at me out of anger or retaliation, I want to reject all of it and say that you’re just, yeah, you’re just— That’s your deal. You’re having a hissy fit. It’s got nothing to do with me. And so I will fail to take in anything that might be of value with that. It’s not saying we have to accept abusive behavior to find some truth in ourselves. That is not at all what I’m saying. Not everyone has learned how to be kind in their assessments, and maybe a conversation later on how delivering hard information—we could do a whole podcast about that—how to deliver hard information in a way that doesn’t shred somebody’s soul in the deliverance of it.

KimBoo
32:03
I actually just went through that, because I’m not an editor, unlike Gina. But I am doing sort of a beta reader for a friend of mine who’s writing a book. And she sent me the book, and it’s great. It’s wonderful. I can’t wait until she’s at the point where she’s releasing it because the characters are amazing, the setting. It’s a solar punk romance novel, it’s just delightful. And the pacing was completely off. The thing was, she was very open to criticism. It was my own fears of being harsh or being mean, or being critical that was throwing me off. She literally had to drag it out of me, and so I apologized to her for that. But I think there has to be willingness on both sides, I guess, is what I’m getting at. And so it’s easy to get misaligned there.

Melody
32:53
And being as gentle with yourself as you would have been with a friend, a friend that’s in a vulnerable position. Because if someone is coming to you with their work, they are putting themselves in a vulnerable position. Here’s my baby. How do you like my baby?

KimBoo
33:14
It sucks. That’s not the right…

Melody
33:17
Real cute baby. Got a few boogies there on the nose. Need a little clean up.

KimBoo
33:22
Oh, gosh. You can tell which one of us was the mother.

Melody
33:30
So, yeah. Ah, man. This is such a great conversation.

KimBoo
Yes, we could go on for an hour.

Gina
33:37
I wanna share one more quick, lightbulb moment. As I’ve been listening to you all, and thinking about acknowledgement and this whole stage of Assessing and Acknowledging, I realized that this has not been—when it comes to my craft, the craft of writing—has not been a particularly challenging stage for me. I think that it’s because, as my dad likes to say, I’m a lifelong learner. It’s like, I love to learn new things. And so it is not daunting to me to recognize that I still have things to learn. I just like to dive in and learn them. So I just, I had never really thought about it in terms of why this particular stage—I’m not applying this to every aspect of my life by any means, in terms of being easy. But when it comes to my craft in particular, I think that this stage or this phase has been not as challenging for me because of that aspect of loving to learn so much.

KimBoo
34:45
It makes total sense. 

Melody
34:48
It does, and that’s a good point because I find that in myself. I actually love critique groups, and I’m not particularly thin skinned about my work. However, I have been, and I talked about this in earlier episodes, where I gave it to somebody to critique too early in the game. And I really wasn’t looking for critiquing right then. I was looking for a cheerleader. And if you feel like that’s what you need—this is more about self awareness—know what it is you need when you go to someone else.

KimBoo
35:24
Which leads into acknowledging where you’re at in your craft and assessing what you really need at that point. So it all comes back around.

Melody
35:32
Absolutely, absolutely. And then go to someone who you know can deliver that, has the capacity to deliver that. Oh, I love this subject.

KimBoo
35:46
Which subject. We love all of them.

Melody
35:49
It’s true! This is my favorite. No, this one’s my favorite.

Gina
35:52
But you know what? We have so many more episodes that we can do. We get to keep talking. Isn’t that fabulous?

Melody
36:01
Gina, what’s the next part of the creative cycle?

KimBoo
36:04
Yeah, we’re going back to the quest.

Gina
36:06
Yeah, so the next phase or stage in The Creativity Quest is Taking Ownership. And that’s all I’m gonna say. You gotta tune in.

KimBoo
36:23
You tease. Yeah, that’s gonna be Episode 27, for everybody who’s playing along. Also, at this point in time, just want to let everybody know that our podcasts are slowly becoming available on YouTube and YouTube podcasts. We have it on all other platforms. We did not have it previously on that one, so I am slowly uploading our backlog, our back catalog there. So if you prefer that platform, then fortunately for you, it will be there soon. And I’m trying to get all the backlog uploaded as quickly as possible. 

As always, you can find the transcripts for this episode on our website, for the episode webpage for this on our website, which also has any downloads that we’ve talked about. Resource links will be available there. And as Melody is always reminding us, because I forget, a comment section, so if you want to leave a comment for us, whether it’s just to let us know what you think, let us know any insights that you have, or topics that you would like to have us talk about in the future.

Gina
And that web address is . . .

KimBoo
Right. I knew I was gonna forget something. Fortunately, the web address is very simple. It’s www dot around the writers table dot com. And that is all one word, no dashes AroundTheWritersTable.com. And you can find all of our episodes there, as well as on major streaming platforms like Spotify and Google podcasts and everywhere else. 

Gina
Apple. 

KimBoo
Apple. Thank you. That’s one I always forget. Yes, Apple. So if you do listen on those platforms, please leave us a thumbs up or heart or like, whatever the heck, a review if you can do that as well. It helps us get the word out about our show. So we will see you next time in Episode 27. And I think I finished my coffee, so I guess that means we’re done.

Gina
38:22
Bye, listeners. 

Melody
38:23
Thank you for sharing your precious time with us.

KimBoo
38:27
Yes, definitely.

Dave
38:31
Thanks for joining us around the writer’s table. Please feel free to suggest a topic or a guest by emailing info@aroundthewriterstable.com. Music provided with gracious permission by Langtry. A link to their music is on our homepage at AroundTheWritersTable.com. Everyone here around the writer’s table wishes you joy in your writing and everyday grace in your living. Take care, until next time.

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Around the Writer's Table and its co-hosts, Gina Hogan Edwards, Melody, A Scout, and Kimboo York own the copyright to all content and transcripts of the Around the Writer's Table podcast, with all rights reserved, including right of publicity. ​​You ​are welcome to share an excerpt from the episode transcript (up to 500 words) in media articles​, such as ​​The New York Times, ​Miami Herald, etc.; in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., ​​Medium); and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided you include proper attribution and link back to the podcast URL. No one is authorized to use the Around the Writer's Table logo, or any portion of the transcripts or other content in and of the podcast to promote themselves.