Writing Through Grief: How Loss Fuels Stories with Meghan Riordon Jarvis | Ep. 36

Have you ever felt like your story deserves to be shared but don’t know where to start? 

Allison Lane sits down with Meghan Riordan Jarvis—a psychotherapist, two-time TEDx speaker, podcast host, and author of two powerful books, The End of the Hour and Can Anyone Tell Me?. Meghan shares her personal journey of navigating profound grief and how it became the driving force behind her writing.

From coping with the unexpected loss of her parents to using writing as a tool for healing, Meghan explains how grief can transform into creativity and purpose. Whether you’re a writer, an aspiring author, or someone trying to process loss, this episode offers a wealth of wisdom, practical tips, and heartfelt encouragement.

What You’ll Learn:

• How grief impacts the brain, body, and creative process.
• Meghan’s experience of writing a memoir and nonfiction book while grieving.
• Why writing is a powerful tool for healing and self-discovery.
• The importance of community and connection in authorship.

🎧 Hit play now to discover how YOU can bring your book to life, no matter where you’re starting!

Resources Mentioned:

• Meghan Riordan Jarvis: https://meghanriordanjarvis.com/ 
• The End of the Hour by Meghan Riordan Jarvis: https://bookshop.org/a/55773/9781958506202 
• Can Anyone Tell Me? by Meghan Riordan Jarvis: https://bookshop.org/a/55773/9781649632593 
• Zibby Owens Book Club: https://www.zibbyowens.com/ 
• The Grieving Brain by Mary-Frances O’Connor: https://bookshop.org/a/55773/9780062946249 
• Allison Lane’s NEXT Chapter Membership for Authors: https://www.lanelit.com/offers/bzACbCjB/checkout 

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 No matter how you're publishing, you need to launch your book like a pro. Join me 7-week guided program: Bestseller Launch School. Live trainings start April 30. Grab your seat NOW!  https://lanelit.com/bestseller  

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Transcript

Meghan: 1:34

It is not a random egoistic event to want to write your story. There is a reason why you are being called to do that. And if you're being called to do it, try to surround yourself with people who say, here's just 1 percent more possibility for you today.

Allison: 2:13

Welcome back. If you're new around here, I'm Allison Lane. I'm here for you. I am your literary sherpa and I am a book coach and book marketer and I am here to make your path of to authorship and within authorship easier, smoother, more enjoyable, more sparkly, more confetti all around. We are here for you to give you practical tips that you can use to market yourself, build your brand, build your audience, find speaking gigs, market your work, and get ready for the next chapter of your work and your writing life. Today's guest is Meghan Reardon Jarvis. She is an author, a podcast host, two time TEDx speaker, psychotherapist, educator, specializing in trauma, grief, and loss. She is a full time psychotherapist. And the reason why I asked her on the show is because she's like most of my clients and most of the people listening today, none of us is a full time writer. We are doing the thing that we're drawn to do and then at some point we feel like we should be sharing what we know or the lessons we've learned from the experience we've had. And Meghan Jarvis is no different. So, today, you're going to hear us talk about how she came to write her memoir,'The End of the Hour.' And how she came to write her second book,'Can Anyone Tell Me?' Essential Questions About Grief and Loss. Both, I highly recommend. Both, you'll find in the show notes. You'll hear us talk about a lot of resources and other books. All of those will be in the show notes. But for right now, let's start by welcoming Meghan Reardon Jarvis. Welcome. Welcome. This is so exciting. Megan Jarvis, Jarvis, I want you to start by telling us, how did you end up here?

Meghan: 4:36

Well, thank you so much for having me. How did I end up here? I asked myself this question. How did I end up here talking to people about books that I have written? So, my dad was actually a publisher when I was a very young child. We grew up in a house full of books, children's books. my mother's obituary, we wrote that she had jokingly read every single nonfiction book in the our local library. I grew up reading. I still read. I love reading. I had never intended on publishing a book. It was not an ambition of mine. It wasn't as I think for some people, it feels like, oh, my God. That's such a hard thing to do. I grew up with people who had published books. I think, if anything, I was sort of like, yeah, that's one of the things that people do. More, I think what I felt was sort of like, I'm just a normal person. What would I have to say?

Allison: 5:26

You you don't know, but then it happens. That you have enough to say, and book itself, can you talk about how you came to be a published author?

Meghan: 5:37

Sure, yeah. So, what actually happened for me, which I think is true for a lot of people who are memoirists, was that I was using writing as a way to sort of Manage an experience in my life. So, I wasn't writing for the sense of the product of writing at that time. I was really just waking up early in the morning and that sort of liminal space when my thoughts were really racing and I had a lot of poetic language kind of talking to me. And the experience that I had had, so I'm a trauma therapist, I have worked in the field of poetry, Grief and loss, pretty much my whole career, more on the end of helping people sort of manage their symptoms. And my dad died in 2017 of small cell cancer, which was a very sad and hard event. Two years later, my mom died very unexpectedly in her sleep while I was on vacation with her. And that was a wholly different event. That when my dad died, it was something that I had to integrate into my life. When my mom died, it felt like the entire like circus tent fell. And I treat people who have really serious symptoms. I had PTSD symptoms and that meant that I had to check myself into an inpatient facility where I send a lot of my clients because I wasn't eating, I wasn't sleeping. And I really wasn't able to physically move very much. My body just like did not have any energy in it. So, when I was in treatment, I started writing, they gave me a journal and they were sort of like write things down. One of the things that writing does, there's a neuroscientist and author, penmaker who talks about this, it's almost like when you write a grocery list. If you write down bananas, salt, and milk, then your mind doesn't have to think about it anymore. Because what was so hard for me in my, you know, with my mental health, was that I couldn't stop thinking, and I couldn't stop remembering. I had these things called ruminations. I started writing them down, and it was really helpful. And it became the thing that followed me when I came out of treatment. When I came out of treatment, I really didn't want to talk anymore to people about what I was going through. I was really angry, not angry necessarily that my mom died, but just sort of like angry as a life force reaction. Like I just, everything irritated me. Everything felt hard. Everything was really uncomfortable. But I would wake up at about four or five o'clock in the morning with words sort of talking to me, more poetic than anything. I started putting those things, those writings on a blog because my experience was it was really helpful for me to come to know myself. But when someone else said like, yes, I totally get what you're talking about. And the way that you put that makes perfect sense to me. It almost like quieted in my soul. Like I could sleep better when somebody else said like, Oh God, thanks for writing that. So, I just started putting things out on Facebook. I had like nine friends on Facebook because I wasn't at the time a social media person. Most of them were like, I was related to them. But I was at my husband's parents house in England. And I wrote something on Christmas Eve. I was in so much grief. I was so lonely and felt really isolated. And I wrote something pretty kind of intentional. That was like a very short snippet, like a quick chapter of something that had happened when my mom died. And pretty much immediately two people that had not been in my life for a long time wrote back and said like, me too, I get it. Won't always feel this way. Keep going. So, I did. I kept writing. I would share the writing with them. I would share a little bit on Instagram or I mean, on Facebook. And ultimately, what led to my becoming a published writer, which is going to sound a little bit like, Oh, so your fairy godmother came down while you were like crying in the basement with the mice and said, Ta da! Here you go. Was that I joined, and this was during COVID because my mom died six months before COVID. So, this was during COVID. I joined Zibby Owens, a woman named Zibby Owens, who's a publisher and many other things, book fairy. Too many of us, I joined her online book club. And most of what they were reading were memoirs. And most of the minutes were people talking to the actual author about their memoirs. And a friend of mine from high school, who's no longer alive, actually, she sent me a link and said, Hey, I saw you're reading this Danny Shapiro book, Inheritance. That author is going to be at my book club. You want to join. And I was like, sure, so I didn't know who Zibby was. but the book club was like being back in college. These were not scatterbrained people. These were writers and they were readers and they had page numbers and they were talking about stuff. So, it became this online little like life saving community of people who wanted to talk about writing. And wanted to talk about grief, because grief is sort of the backbone of most memoirs. There's some tremendous loss in the story. And ultimately, during that time, Zibi's mother in law died of COVID. And so, she reached out to me as a professional, and we became friendly, and she started reading my writing. And then, she decided, unbeknownst to me, that she wanted to start an imprint. And so, she wrote me a note. It was like six days before Christmas. I got this email from her and all it said was, Do you think you have a memoir in you? And I turned to my husband and was like, what do you think this means? And he was like, I think it means what you think it means. Like, it sounds like she wants you to write a memoir. So, I called her and she said, Yep, I'm doing this thing. And ultimately, that is not what happened. She didn't start that imprint, but it started the ball rolling. And so, I worked with editors from her team for a year, writing what became the first draft. So, I didn't do the hard thing. That's not that what I did wasn't hard. But I didn't do the thing where it was like I created the mess myself. And then, brought the whole thing to somebody else and said, Does this make any sense? I had people with me all along sort of saying like, Hey, what about a chapter about this? Or I think you're focused too much on that. Or this is really long. Or what if we cut half of it? I had two different extraordinary editors, who basically taught me how to write. And ultimately, I wrote a draft, and then by the time I was done writing my very first draft, Zibby had started a publishing company. And my book was one of the first ones that she bought. It was July 4th, weekend, and I was in England. And she said, hey, can you call me? And I called her. And she said, we'd like to buy your book. And that is how all that started. So, I didn't have an agent. I really didn't know anything about the book world or how books get bought or sold or any of that stuff. I had to learn. And from that, I ended up getting an agent, Joy Tutola at David Black, who's the most extraordinary human, and such a good friend. And pitched a second book, which is a clinical book, something that Zibby's team, they don't do at Zibby Books, but she was just a very, you know, again, a fairy godmother, a real believer. The clinical book that I wrote, which is called,'Can Anyone Tell Me?' Okay, so this is End of the Hour, so everything about this, the cover, how the title was written, all of that was Zibby and her team. It's just a little bit over a year old. And this book,'Can Anyone Tell Me?,' came out this past November. It's new. I have all these tabs on here because I'm teaching a class that's based on this book. So, this is 35 questions about grief and loss. And one of the reasons I wrote this book was that Zibi asked me, After her mother in law died, she was like, my brain is like Swiss cheese. I have this fog in my brain and I can't remember anything. And I was like, do you want me to tell you the neuroscience of why that's happening? And then, I did what I had often done with clients which is I told her, hey, listen, here's what's happening. This part of your brain is swelling. It's cutting off the electricity to this part of your brain. And she was like, you have no idea how helpful it is to know that. And I was like, actually, I do know. And just that conversation really became kind of like the grit for, what else is it that people should get to know? They should have the basic education about. But don't because we kind of act as though grief and loss is like a thing that people are doing that's bad, like they're failing at life somehow. And we need to kind of set ourselves away from it. So, this really is, and I use this with companies. We teach this book in corporate settings. It really is like the core grief curriculum that we've never gotten before. And this was published by Sounds True Media. And Sounds True is the large incredible conglomerate of like every self help, guru, scientist. All the people I would love to sit next to at a dinner table also published with Sounds True. So, they're two very different experiences both in how you promote the book and how the book gets published. But now, I mean, this is the weirdest thing. I sit here and say, like, yeah, I've published two books.

Allison: 14:28

Okay, that was amazing. And so, much I want to pick apart. Number one, nobody talks about grief,

Meghan: 14:34

Mm hmm. We do not.

Allison: 14:36

And they shy away because they don't know what to say. You and I share a friend, Jessica Fein, whose podcast, I Don't Know How You Do It.

Meghan: 14:46

It's amazing.

Allison: 14:47

And her book, Breathtaking, a memoir of family, dreams, broken genes. It's gorgeous and lovely. And I'm so glad that it's the world. People don't talk about grief. And that's how you started your podcast too.

Meghan: 15:05

Yeah, it is. Yeah. So, Grief is my Side Hustle, is my podcast. And it is really just deep conversations with people who are grieving or know about grief. So that's sort of the tagline. It was called in the beginning, Grief is a Verb. Because when I think about what it is that we have not taught people to do, it's the actual actioning. You know, when you say to somebody, what do you think grieving is? They say crying, but like crying is one portion of what, or people will say, I didn't grieve my mother. And I'm like, what do you mean about that? Like you spent hours putting her estate in order. Like that's a grief activity. You wouldn't be doing that if she hadn't died. And so, a lot of what I do on grief is my side hustle. And I have to say, if you're really deeply interested in a topic, go get a podcast because people will come on and talk to you about it for an hour that you wouldn't even dare approach in a bookstore. I mean, I've gotten to have the most extraordinary conversations with people, but generally my soapbox is the one thing that we will all do as humans, absolutely guaranteed, is grieve a profound loss. We will all lose someone that we feel as though we can't live without them. And what we do with that is we send that person to a therapist's office. And here's the like terrifying truth. I don't know the percentage, but most therapists, when I'm doing training for therapists, I say, raise your hand if you've taken a class on grief and loss. And I've never had it be more than 3 percent of the people in the room. And I've talked to rooms where there are thousands of people. Even our therapists are not trained in what does it mean to as a verb, as an action item. When you're not in your therapy office for the one hour a week, the 23 hours and the rest of that day, and then the rest of all the days. What are you doing to navigate in this space to become a person who can live without their mother, or their son, or their best friend, or their marriage, or their health, or their job? I mean, it's not just a person that we lose, and I really get fired up about it because I actually think it's a social justice issue. We know the physical impacts that grief, it drives addiction, it drives ill health. But we don't talk about it, and by not talking about it, what we do is we leave people who then, a year out, or they still can't sleep, and they're like, I don't know what it is, maybe it's my hormones. Well, it might be your hormones, but those hormones might have shifted and changed because the body is dramatically impacted profoundly by loss. So, what I try to do and what I do with Can Anyone Tell Me, As I teach Grief 101, we start with the brain and the body. Here's what happens to the brain when it goes through a trauma like a profound loss. Here are the signals that it sends to the 12 systems in the body, your reproductive tract, your respiratory tract, your digestive tract. So that people walk away almost like the class that we give 10 year olds and 11 year olds before they go through puberty. We're like, listen, Lots of weird stuff's going to happen. So, we start with the body, but we go all the way through the things, right? Like, also, why do you hate all your friends and family? That's a chapter of my book. Also, why do you think that butterfly suddenly is your mother? That's a chapter, you know, spirituality is an issue. That becomes a chapter in my book. Why do I want to move to Arizona? Like the notion of inner grief being the energy that's created in the body. And it makes us want to do stuff is something that we act as though we don't know. And then, what we do is we say, well, the only person that can really help you is another griever. But if that griever has not learned how to grieve, they offer and do terrible things that really can send you in the wrong direction. It happens in companies, somebody will say like, well, Marsha from HR, she lost her dad, so we'll send her in. Like, well, if Marsha from HR doesn't want it, talk about her dad dying. She is not the person to send in. And so, what we're trying to do is encourage companies to become grief informed. So that everybody goes through the same professional development. So that when you have to lay off the San Francisco office and you lose 1, 200 employees in one day or your executive director or the accountant or whoever it is drops dead on vacation. You know that the entire culture inside your company knows the bioscience and the neuroscience of what's going to be going on for people and they know how to make space for that. And my experience with companies is they often have three to five days of bereavement leave when we start our classes. And what I say is if you have three to five days off and you are calling that bereavement leave, you need to stop. Because that is like calling a lemon meringue pie a cheesecake. That is not what that is. Nobody bereaves a person in three days. What you have is flexible time off that they can use to go to a funeral or over a long weekend. Bereavement, if you want to address that inside a company is about education and about flexibility and about offering actual resources that support people when they are going through a loss. And I've had really extraordinary opportunities to work with wellness companies that mean it. They are happy to have the information and they want to make the shift in the change. Which is extraordinary to me. So, the book is really designed,'can anyone tell me' is the short little chapters? My youngest is in sixth grade, he was part of the editing team was like, do you understand this, Nicholas? Is this clear enough for you. What don't you get? And I mean, he's a smart sixth grader. But it is not dumbed down. It's just written simplistically because people's brains are compromised when they're grieving. It's hard to read. It's hard to understand. And I want people who are supporting grievers to also pick this book up because I'm talking to them. I get that you have your opinions and your feelings and you wish. But here's what you need to do if you're gonna show up for someone who just lost a child. And a lot of it is put everything that you think you know out the window. And step into that spot with the tools that we offer that come from the experience of 22 years of people telling me what help was helpful, and my own personal experience. You know, and a lot of the grief theories and sort of wisdom of people who've been studying this for a long time.

Allison: 21:59

Wow. I have three questions based on what you just said. One, I want to point out that you said something that I say a lot. And I think that it goes back to you lost your mom in a totally, unexpected way. My mother died six months before your mom, I think. She had stage four breast cancer for nine years, which is very uncommon. And she was a super survivor. It was the year before COVID.

Meghan: 22:31

Yeah.

Allison: 22:32

She passed away. And I couldn't find the meaning in life. And I knew that I was at the top of my field, lifelong marketer, and I couldn't give two hoots anymore.

Meghan: 22:44

It's terrifying when that happens. When the day before you were like, I'm walking down this path. I've got clarity. I'm moving forward. It all feels great. And then, this irrevocable, a tree falls, right? Your mom dies. I'm so sorry. And nothing. I mean, I would put clothes on and be like, do I even like this?

Allison: 23:04

And do you care?

Meghan: 23:04

Is this even mine? Do I care? And listen, I have to be honest. My mom died five years ago. It sounds like we're in the same sort of wheelhouse. There's a lot of stuff that I don't care about. I had a lot of people, I had a lot of disruption in my friendships. I had a lot of people who were like, would say to me, and they didn't, mean it to be painful. But they'd be like, we're just waiting for you to like, come back. Listen, I have never come back. I'm not coming back. I don't go to back to school night at school because I think it's bullshit. I don't know what it's for. I have seven minutes to learn from my kid's English teacher. If I've got questions, I understand people like it. I don't go anymore. Because I don't think it's for me. It's not, I used to go because I felt like I should go. But there's a lot of stuff where I'm like, you know, what? I have a limited amount of energy to show up into the world with. I'm not driving 30 minutes out of the way to take 15 minutes to try to park, to be judged by other parents, and learn nothing about my kids classrooms.

Allison: 24:02

I rushed into my daughter's back to school thing. She's a straight A student, but I only went because she begged me to. She wanted to hear what her teachers would say about.

Meghan: 24:13

Sure. Sure.

Allison: 24:14

And I forgot to wear shoes.

Meghan: 24:16

Yeah.

Allison: 24:16

I wear my slippers.

Meghan: 24:17

One of the things that's true about profound loss. So, again, when my dad died, it impacted my life. And it was very sad, and there were elements that were very hard. But my life stayed my life. When my mom died, all the furniture in the house got rearranged. And in fact, I moved out into the shed for a while. And when I moved back, there were some rooms I don't even go in anymore. And we had to make an addition. So, I do not have the same life that I had before my mom died. And what I think is really tricky about that is that there's a period of time where you have to become that, right? So, it's almost like walking into a restaurant when you're hungry and then being like, Yeah, you can have a meal, but you got to be the sous chef and the chef. So, good luck!

Allison: 25:04

And the server.

Meghan: 25:05

And the server. And you're like, well, it's going to be bad because I don't know how to cook this. And it is. it is. And it is bad for a while. It's kind of bad. And there are people on the outside that are like, are you sure you're doing it right? And it's like, no, I'm not sure I'm doing anything right. Nothing feels right. Nothing tastes right. Nothing looks right. Nothing. And it's so important to me, and part of the reason I wanted to take the path to publishing a book was that I think those books are the like callback from the people that are a little further down the road. You know, there are some statistics like most people do survive profound loss. Even though, like we were talking about Jessica Fein, in her beautiful book like everyone in her family dies, including one of her children. It is impossible. And people say it all the time. And it's so hurtful when they say it like, Oh, I could never, I don't know how you survived it or whatever. Like, nobody knows how to survive it. We are all winging it. It's like we jumped into a 17 wheeler truck without a license. And we're just trying to get all the stuff, all of ourselves down some highway, but we have no idea where we're going. And that shifts and changes, but it's hard to know when that's going to shift and change, and some of it stays with you forever. And I still have mornings where I wake up and I'm like, what am I even doing? What is the purpose of any of this? And I feel really lucky that my soapbox is what I am so deeply passionate about. I had so much trouble with the loss of my mother and I have two master's degrees and decades of experience and really complicated certified trainings in working in the space of grief and loss. And I still went down as hard as you could go down. So, to me, I feel like there should be rolling classes at every community college, every workplace, synagogue, church, grocery store, YMCA, every hospital, everywhere you go. There should be a basic grief education class.

Allison: 27:05

Which you need before you're grieving.

Meghan: 27:07

You need it before you're grieving. That's exactly right. Because when you're grieving, and this is what I teach a lot about, your brain is deeply compromised. So, when you are in trauma, it's like those old Roadrunner cartoons. Where like, one of them gets hit by a frying pan and they're like, that is actually more similar to the experience than you're having than what you look like, which is you look fine, your sweater's buttoned. But the way the brain is compromised is similar to having a concussion. I happen to have a son who is a goalie. He's had two significant concussions in his life. And when we went to the doctor, we walked away with leaflets of what to do. Here's what you do. You keep the lights low, you don't do electronics, you make sure you drink lots of water, you don't wake up from sleep, you stay sleeping. I mean, there's a protocol.

Allison: 27:57

And you got a whole leaflet?

Meghan: 27:59

I got a whole leaflet. Look at that. But in grief and loss, what we say is like, oh, I'm so sorry. But that's not what I say. What I say is, are you sleeping? Are you able to eat? Is there anything that anyone's doing that's feeling supportive or helpful? Is there anything that is like too overwhelming? How are you with like noise and light? And I'm just trying to get a sense of like, what's it like to be in your body right now? And when people are able to read, I often recommend to them, Dr. Mary Frances O'Connor, who's a good friend. She wrote a book called The Grieving Brain, which really just talks about how profound loss. Is this overwhelming? Meaning, you got to do it really fast. I equate it to being like, my dad was dying. It was like every time I saw him, he looked smaller and less well. And so, my brain was taking that information He went from being like 250 to 140. And so, it was like this man is dying in front of me. And so, it was like little sips of grief every time I saw him. When I went to sleep, woke up, and my mother had died. It was like being waterboarded, like gallons of grief that I was supposed to be choking down and integrating into my system. But what Mary Frances really teaches us is that the brain has to learn. That this attachment, this thing that you, at the moment, don't know how to live without. You've got to learn how to live without it. And it's really, really disruptive. It feels terrifying for some people. It feels exhausting to other people. But what my job and my team's job is, is to help people figure out how to actually do it. I have something called the Grief Mentor Method, and we give people six core components. So, it's like, if you woke up in the morning and you said, I want to become a vegan. And I was like, great. Today, we're gonna add more plant based products. We're not gonna take the meat out yet because that will be too hard for your system. This is like that. You want to become a griever. Actually, you don't want to. Nobody wants to, but you need to. What are you going to do today? And so, we give people sort of like six core components, and then they get to decide. You know, people talk a lot about yoga and yoga being supportive. People who talk about yoga don't often know that yoga has like 16 different core types of yoga, like Bikram yoga is not the same as Vinyasa flow. But people will try yoga and they'll come back and be like, why does anyone say that yoga is a good thing? It's the worst thing. I never want to do yoga again. And when I say is that is such great data for us in your grief practice, yoga's out. So, should we try meditative on a mat practice that doesn't involve any movement? How does that sound? Because people have instincts and they'll say things to me like, I don't know what's going on. My sister died and I haven't played the violin in 12 years. But I just like found myself pulling the violin out from underneath my bed. And I'm like, yeah. Because your grief would like to use movement to move it through your body. So, let's go. Go get that thing tuned. And when people don't often have instinct, the people who I think are challenged the most are women. And maybe women in their 40s and 50s who have been raising children, who maybe are caring for parents.

Allison: 31:10

Taking care of everyone else.

Meghan: 31:13

Taking care of everyone else. And so, when you say to them, what do you want for dinner? They're doing this math in their head, like, well, I have a chicken and I could cook. Or I think Peter's going to want pizza. They're not answering what do they want for dinner. They're answering what is going to be possible and easy and simple for everyone else that doesn't work in grief. You cannot make your grief convenient for other people. You got to do it for yourself. And so, there are some people who really need these guideposts.

Allison: 31:39

Personally, you and I have never met, never talked, but clearly we to because I now love you. After my mom passed five years ago, and it took me a whole year of feeling like I was going to burn down the world. And I just could not care one poo about anything.

Meghan: 32:00

Zero.

Allison: 32:00

And I quit my big time, comfy, great healthcare PR leadership job two weeks before COVID.

Meghan: 32:09

Oh, mercy.

Allison: 32:10

I just couldn't.

Meghan: 32:12

You were all done.

Allison: 32:13

And I had started helping women in their 40s, and 50s, and 60s, and 80s, pitch books, land book deals, launch their books. Because I felt like it should easier. I want to talk about how you're feeling like this should be easier to learn about. Drove you as an author.

Meghan: 32:36

You know, it reminds me, and I take a lot of heart in what I'm watching with the menopause movement right now. So, the menopause movement is finally getting the backing of people like Mary Claire Haver. A doctor who has been treating clients, she's stepping out into the front and she is saying, Hey, I'm going to tell you all the things. I mean, I remember listening to a webinar and hearing that you lose teeth in menopause. And I had never heard that before. I called my sister because both of us we have fake teeth. And I was like, oh, guess what? That's a menopause thing.

Allison: 33:09

You're full of great news. I have five Crowns.

Meghan: 33:13

Yeah, I know.

Allison: 33:14

I don't think I can lose anymore.

Meghan: 33:16

But I didn't know that before. I didn't even know that. So, it's not like you can do anything about it. But my sister had had a lot of energy. Like I used to take good care of my teeth. I don't know what happened. She had all this shame and blame. And there's such a parallel line in grief and loss because when you don't understand how physical and how emotional and how spiritual and how disruptive to your behavior and your energy. I have never been more rageful in my life than when my mom died. I couldn't believe that people expected me to do things for them. Didn't they know that I was grieving my mom? And my husband would say things like, Well, no, because you look showered and you look like who they remember. And I was like, well, I'm gonna go downstairs and tell them about themselves. But just being able to say to other people, Oh my God, I just thought I was going to burn everyone alive, and other people being like, Oh yes, I also. One of the things that I teach about is like, listen, anger is a fight response. And that what we, our biggest threats in life we respond to with fight, and flight, and freeze. And so, first I hated everybody. Then I got in the car with my SUV with my three kids and my husband and we drove across the country and we didn't stop. We drove around for five months. And people would say to me, Oh, you're such a good parent. You're taking your kids during this really hard time to national parks. And every single time I would say, this is me grieving. This has nothing to do with that. I cannot sit still. I cannot stop moving. This is what grief is. And I have heard this story from so many people. But you know, what happens? Even with therapists, because we were trained this way. Particularly, when you're working with somebody who's getting sober, let's say. We say things, no sudden movements. Your mother died, but you know, what? I know you want to leave your husband, but don't do it. Or I get, you've always wanted to move to England and your mom died and you're like really thinking about it, but I think you should wait a year. And I cannot describe to you how much I understand from a cellular level what kind of baloney that is now. Grief is the energy that is created in your body on account of loss. Who is to say that you are supposed to sit still with that? I get that people don't want more chaos and they don't want more, but it's energy. It's energy so.

Allison: 35:41

You feel like you're boiling over.

Meghan: 35:44

Yes.

Allison: 35:45

The cover is not going to stay on.

Meghan: 35:46

Don't tell me to sit still. Now, there are people who are like, I just need to sit still. And sometimes the work that we're doing with them is like, okay, but can you get up and take a walk around the block? Because when you're sitting still, you're still with your thoughts, and you're still with your ideas. And they can sometimes haunt you and tell you the wrong things, or they can create isolation and disconnection and make you feel like people don't care about you. So, part of what I wanted to do when I started writing books was to say to people, we do know these things. We act like we don't, but we do. And I have to say, the sort of public persona part of it is uncomfortable. It's less uncomfortable now. But in the beginning I was like, I'm just going to read all the books there are. And I'm going to find the book that says the things that I know are true, and I'm just going to get behind that book. I'll just be like a PSA for that book. But because I'm a trauma therapist, so trauma being a bad event like COVID. But remember, some people would tell you that COVID, they lived their best life ever. So, trauma doesn't mean you get traumatized. I worked with people who were traumatized, so they were mugged, they were in a car accident, they were fired. The impact inside their life was something lasting that made their life less than it had been before. And for grievers, our goal is for that not to be the case. Our goal is that the bad thing happens and you have to feel all the bad and you've got to move through it and you're going to learn to carry the bad by growing the emotional muscles. But what we don't want is your mother's death to be the last good day of your life. And David Kessler talks a lot about this. That transformation of becoming a griever. We often can't look at, we have no perspective, we can't be like, oh and that was the moment when I totally understood that like I needed to have a child, or I needed to start my passion project, or I needed to leave that relationship. A lot of what happens for us in that moment is I'm just trying to get by today, and I'm trying to get by tomorrow, and I'm trying to get by the next day. And then, when I look back, I see and I'm like, wow, look at the path I created and look how much meaning. And when we write books, that's what we're writing about. We're writing about the full arc. Here's who I became. Here's what I learned. Here's what is possible. And I think for some grievers, I mean, listen, I read 188 books about grief and loss, and I probably threw 65 to 70 percent of them across the room. Because I was like, oh, this person has totally personally betrayed me in the story that they told. Because I would never do that. I know people throw my memoir across the room, and I am for it. There's nobody else that can tell you how your story is gonna go. The stories of others allow us hope that it's not going to only just be terrible. And that is why I think particularly memoir. But there's also some really great fiction out there. People are giving us a gift that we should be able to have in a Zoom class that gives us the nuggets that are going to quiet our souls and help us go to sleep. Much more readily, without having to get so personally invested in each story, there should be lessons. Your brain is going to feel like this, your body is going to feel like that. Your soul is going to feel like that. That people can say, oh yeah, no. In menopause and your teeth broke, that's normal, you know. Oh, you can't sleep, Meghan, because your dad died seven months ago. It's really typical for people to have disrupted sleep for a pretty long time. That is what we need. And then, maybe even people saying like, have you tried stuff? Like, do not come to me with the melatonin. Everybody has tried melatonin. Everybody's tried melatonin. Right. Everybody's tried that, right? What we need is grief informed interventions so that people are able to move that grief through their body, not just add melatonin to their system.

Allison: 39:40

I want to point out for the person who's listening who says, well, I had an extraordinary experience and it really moved me and writing. Writing about it helped my heart beat again, whatever that was. And I say that as someone who's 7 on the ACE scale. If you don't know what that is, listener, that's Adverse Childhood Experience.

Meghan: 40:02

And I write about it in here.

Allison: 40:04

Yeah. I know I look shiny and very European. But you know.

Meghan: 40:10

Your childhood had a lot.

Allison: 40:12

And my father killed his girlfriend. Which we were not allowed to talk about.

Meghan: 40:16

Wow.

Allison: 40:17

And then, the assorted assaults. When I serve people, they are writing about that usually they whisper about first to warn you. And I have to say, you will not shock me. I'm there with you. My experience is different, but that's why I do what I do now because this path to get your book in the world, should be easier to learn about.

Meghan: 40:43

I agree.

Allison: 40:44

Like you, saying, going through, not even through, but experiencing grief and the waves of grief, like the tide, shouldn't be a shock. For the author, and the aspiring author out there who's saying, fill in the blank topic should be easier. We all feel like the thing that we're writing about is a gift. It's not just for us. Otherwise we'd keep it in a bow under the bed.

Meghan: 41:11

That's right. Yes. And you know, just something that's sort of an interesting aside. So, like I've worked as a trauma therapist at a pretty elite level in DC for a long time. I've had clients whose faces, you know. The thing that gets the biggest reaction in my life now is when I say, Oh, I've written a couple of books. People are like, Oh my God, have you written a books? I mean, it's like I just said, like I saved this person from cancer. So, what I know is people really value books. They really value that you took your knowledge and your understanding. So, it's not like, Oh, you did nothing. And then, why is it so hard when you barely made any effort to put anything, everybody should just get published. It is an unbelievable honor to be able to take your words and put them out into a bookstore or a library for people to have. And for the small percentage of people who they go to bed at night and wake up in the morning with that desire, it should be easier. There should be more classes, explanation. I mean, when I learned about the New York Times bestseller list and how it's not actually a bestseller list, I was like, wait a minute. What are you talking about? I felt like someone had just told me that there was no Santa Claus. That was actually, we took that class. Zibi actually offered us a whole bunch of classes about publishing, and like, we learned how you make a book, and how you typeset, and why there are so many pages. All of that should be something that you could learn in college where there's a fine arts program about how do you publish materials. The gatekeeping is insane. And I also think people act like, I don't know, kind of like when they go to a great college, they're like, I went to a great college. But what did it take to get you into that great college? Did you take six SAT courses and your Uncle Dan helped to get you in? Like, I think sometimes with authors, we make it seem like, well, I'm just one of the lucky people that got into the kingdom. And what I will say from my own experience, which really was, I was still in such a state of, like, stunned ness. When someone says to me, like, how did you make that happen? I just said, will you help me? And yes. Do you want to do this? Yes. Did I know that I could? I mean, there were multiple times where I was like, I mean, writing my memoir triggered a lot of my PTSD. I wasn't even sure I was going to be able to do it. And it wasn't always great for my mental health. It certainly wasn't great for my ego. I'm well known in the world of grief and loss specialists. I am not well known in my own local bookstore. So, when they were like, no, you're not well known enough to have a book event here. I was like, wait, what? Like, I don't know who that person is and they have a book event here. But I think being able to find the people just cause one of them for me who are like, Oh my God, I read your book. Your book meant something to me. How about I introduce you to this person? And before it becomes a book that there are people, there's your English Lit teacher who really believed in your writing. There's your best friend who, you know what, they want to go through every chapter and say, I really liked this and I didn't like that. And so, there are people that are gonna help you take the next right step. And some of that next right step might mean, paying the ticket and going to a writer's conference so that you can be amongst other writers and see what they know. Or paying for an hour of somebody's time and getting their advice and not liking their advice and not taking their advice. And realizing, well, that's one way to go, but it's not my way to go. And I think that's tricky. I think we think, well, we did the hard thing, which was write the book. But there's a second hard thing for so many people. Which is then you got to go get that book a sponsor. You got to get somebody else to fall in love with your work. And work with somebody that is gonna help you get it out there in the world. And then, once it's out there in the world, you got to do all this other stuff to like get people to know it and to buy it. And it can be really discouraging. But I think again, if you think about it as a parallel line to grief and loss, you are not failing when this past Christmas, five years in was the worst Christmas I've had ever since my mom died. I was on the verge of tears. I could probably cry now still every single day.

Allison: 45:35

Yes, every single day.

Meghan: 45:37

I was kind of like, well, no, I've done pretty well during the holidays. I had done pretty well till this year. And this year, every single day was hard. It's still a little hard. But I'm not failing at grief and loss. That's just the way it is. It's just the way it is. I'm not doing anything wrong. It's just this year is hard. And that I think is also true about publishing. You're not necessarily doing anything wrong. It's just people aren't buying books today. Or nobody's calling you back this week. Or the process is taking longer to get people interested in this than it did for your friend.

Allison: 46:09

I want to say something to the person out there saying, but it is hard. And I don't know anybody like Allison or Meghan. And what I would say to you is, but you can.

Meghan: 46:20

Yeah.

Allison: 46:21

You can join my next Chapter membership. It's$37 month. have live Q& A. I help people put together their book proposals, get agents, get published, do media, set up their websites. And I know Meghan, you're a part of Zibby's book club. I'm a Zibby ambassador. I love Zibby Owens. I've been published in Zibby magazine about grief, which I don't think you probably, knew.

Meghan: 46:51

I didn't know that. I didn't know that. Yeah. That part that you're talking about which is really critical is again, I think we don't reach out. And we don't spend the money. And we don't send the DM. And we don't ask because we think it's supposed to be easier. We think, well, if it was meant to be, or if I was doing this right, or if my writing was any good, or if I was meant for this work, then it would be less hard. And what I will tell you is. The thing I think about a lot is this documentary I watched about, I'm not joking, about Beyonce. It's probably, actually, about Destiny's Child. And you can look at Beyonce and be like, wow, you know, she just happens to be a good singer. That girl has been working since she was like nine years old. Her mom's been making costumes, she's been taking dance, and I don't mean she's been like in a local dance class. I mean, she's been trying to find incredible choreographers to learn from since she was like 11. So, do we have to all work as hard as Beyonce? No, but when we look at all the things that then tapped her when they tapped her. She was ready because she'd been working. And that's the piece that I think about a lot, which is like, I really kind of believe that the universe is rooting for you. Like, why wouldn't the universe want your story out there for other people to learn from? Why wouldn't it see value in the gift that you're trying to give, which is hope and possibility to other people with your story? Why wouldn't it want that for you? But it may not want it exactly on your timeline, and it may not be. There's a beautiful poem by Naomi, Shihab Nye which is called Missing the Boat. And it's all about this person who's like, checking, looking at the train tracks and checking the timetable and wondering where the train is. And then, suddenly they hear the boat horn and the boat has left without them. Because if you get it in your mind that you have to go to one of the big six publishers and you can't publish yourself. Because that's I don't know, what shameful. And that really reminds me of online dating. I've been doing my therapy work for a really long time.And so, I am part of that world that, that like crossed over from you have to meet somebody in a bar when you're 20 to like, no, you can do online dating. But in the beginning, online dating was this thing that was like, Oh, I'm not going to tell anyone. We're going to say, we met in a cornfield. Like what? Just tell them you met on an online date. And now, people are like, what do you mean you're not online dating? You're never gonna meet anyone this way. There's hybrid publishing and there's self publishing. I'll tell you, I have a friend she posts publishing her self published numbers the other day and I was like, she sold so many more books than I did. She made so much more money than I did on her books. So, I think part of it is being open minded to whatever way in which the process is going to show up for you. Rather than deciding there's one right way. And I think publishing would tell you there is one right way, but you know, it's a dicey field.

Allison: 49:48

There is always a way.

Meghan: 49:50

Always a way.

Allison: 49:51

There is always a way to get your work into the world, but starts with you. You cannot sit in your basement all by yourself and think someone is going to knock your door and come drag you out. You have to lean forward. If today, you, listening in your car or while you're mowing the lawn or you're planting your tulip bulbs as I like to do just once a year. If you're thinking, well, what am I gonna do today? Go to Meghan's website.

Meghan: 50:21

Yeah.

Allison: 50:21

Meghan, can you share your website?

Meghan: 50:23

Yeah. So, it's just my name. And my name is a little bit hard to spell, so it might be easier to Google. Meghan Riordon Jarvis, come there. You'll see all the stuff that I'm doing. I don't have a writing class that I'm offering right now, but I do have writing prompts that you can come. And you'll get them in your inbox on I think it's Monday mornings. And it's just something to, mine are grief related, but it's just something to get the juices flowing. I will say this, so I went to a book party for somebody else once, met somebody. When they told me their name, I was like, God, your name is like weirdly familiar. And then, of course, I went to the bathroom and googled them, and they were like a, you know, a best selling author, like a Reese's Book Club author. But I didn't know them immediately, and We were chatting and I said, Oh, yeah, you know, it's so hard and I'm trying to work on this other thing and she said, Oh, well, I have a writer's group if you want to be in the writer's group. I mean, it was that casual. She didn't know anything about me. Invited me into this group and then in that group, those people shared about when their agents dropped them or when their advance wasn't what they expected or when the book that they had a three book deal, but they were being dropped for the third book. Being amongst people who have already succeeded but are still struggling, does a lot for helping you understand that actually the work of publishing just is a hard job. That there is a very small percentage of people that have ongoing contracts. You know, I think about like Ellen Hildebrand or Stephen kang or something.

Allison: 51:49

Well, those people full time writers.

Meghan: 51:51

Full time writers that have contracts and have researchers. There's a whole mechanism behind them. For most of us, what we are looking to do is finish a book, get somebody to care about that book, sell that book, and walk past that book in the airport one day. That's the game plan.

Allison: 52:08

And continue to share the wisdom that you have. And that, I think is go to Meghan's website, get those prompts. Go to my website, lanelit.com/content, get some content ideas of what could be sharing with the world. Make easy. It's free. Or join my membership, the next chapter because if you're being told you have to build your platform, what's your pre order campaign going to look like and you have no idea. Don't worry about it. I have templates. I have templates for everything.

Meghan: 52:41

So, you will hear things, right? It's like, I don't know, when you're trying to apply to college or get your kid into college, people will be like, well, if he doesn't have a 1600, he's not getting in. Nobody else knows your story. So, I barely have a social media presence. And I have heard so many authors say to me like, Oh, well, if you don't have at least 100, 000 nobody likes or followers or whatever, nobody's going to look at you for it. That is noise. That is noise. Keep doing the next right thing. And if what you need to do right now is write, then find a place to do that writing. If what you need to do right now is find an agent, then find people who are looking for agents who can give you ideas about that. If what you need is editing, find the language. I mean, I had never heard of a structural editor before. I was asking for the wrong thing. Find the structural editors, put some money behind it, get somebody to give you some really concrete feedback. There's a lot of free material. You're offering free and really, really reasonably priced material. And really what those things do is they just get us back into the energy of feeling like it's possible, often when we're feeling kind of hopeless. And I am a really big believer, like when I wake up on a day or something happens, I get a no and I'm like, well, I'm probably gonna fail at everything for the rest of my life. I love to open a bag of popcorn and like, just sit let the day go. I don't fight it. I'm like, I know enough now to know that feelings shift and change over time. It doesn't take much to make me hopeless. It also does not take much to make me hopeful. So, I just sort of am like, I'm gonna let this weather system pass, and I'm gonna watch The Sopranos, and I'm gonna just let it be. As long as you take the information in, but don't assume anyone is telling you your story. Your story, you are literally writing it and living it. And there is no reason why the universe would not want your story to be included in this whole sort of series of hopes that we get when other people write their books. Because listen, there are plenty of people out there that they're never going to write a book because that is not what the universe is calling them to do. They're going to go save lives and they're going to work on cancer and they're going to paint houses and they're going to work with kids. It is not a random egoistic event to want to write your story. There is a reason why you are being called to do that. And if you're being called to do it, try to surround yourself with people who say, here's just 1 percent more possibility for you today.

Allison: 55:06

Yeah. Megan, I always like to ask writers, what are you reading right now?

Meghan: 55:12

Oh, gosh. I have trouble reading when I'm writing. So, I am writing a novel right now, which is it's in its second round of edits. I actually wrote these three books all at the same time. Don't recommend that for people. It was actually, I think, part of my mental health issue was that I couldn't stop writing. But I wrote a novel that I dreamt. I dreamt the novel, and then I wrote it. And it's had some structural editing, it's been seen by a couple of people in the publishing world who gave me really great and generous suggestions. So, I am editing and it is so much better on account of those suggestions, but I have a really hard time reading. So, what I have instead of a book that I'm reading is a stack of books that I can't wait to read and pictures of You is on the top of that list. So, Bluebird Day, I'm not just saying this because these are my, under the same publishing house as me. These are friends of mine. Megan Tatey wrote an incredible book for Zibby Owens. Her second book is Bluebird Day and it came out. So, I am reading that one very slowly, like 10 pages before I go to bed. And Pictures of You, which is Emma Gray. And she wrote another really beautiful book that has grief in it. That is sitting on my nightstand and was a Christmas present to me. Once I finish editing these next 80 pages and send this back to the team, that's my treat. It's like my little bag of M& M's in the movies. I'm going to pick it up.

Allison: 56:35

Literary M&M. I will put all the links, including a link to Zibby Owens newly branded podcast, Fully Booked with Zibby. Which I love. And your books, and your prompts, and I've got got everything. Let's end with this. What's one tip you have for the listener today? What can they do today?

Meghan: 57:00

This is gonna sound really dumb, but you know, drink some water. We are in the winter months. Everything hard that we go through emotionally, the writing that we want to do, the conversation we want with our spouse requires literal energy inside our body and that energy flows. based on how hydrated you are. So, when people say to me, Hey, what are the interventions that you love the most? I mean, I drink four or five of these every day. Drink some water. Drink some water, get outside, take a little walk, move your body and get back at it.

Allison: 57:35

Awesome.