February 5, 2025 • 25 mins
Essayist Mary Laura Philpott talks about how to approach the creative process with curiosity, rather than a sense of hustle
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. This
episode is going to be a longer one part of
the series where I interview fascinating people about how they
take their days from great to awesome and any advice
(00:23):
they have for the rest of us. So today I
am delighted to welcome Mary Laura Philpott to the program.
Mary Laura is the author of two books of essays,
I Miss You When I Blink and Bomb Shelter. She
lives in Nashville. So, Mary Laura, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Hey Laura, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Yeah, thanks for doing this. So why don't you tell
our listeners a little bit more about yourself.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Okay, I live in Nashville. As you said, I'm a
brand new empty nester, which has thrown all of my
routines just completely out the window and upside down. I'm
a writer, so you know, there's some portion of my
day or my life that's always been typing and kind
of putting my thoughts into words. I'm an outdoorsy person.
(01:07):
I'm not in like a you know, camping kind of way,
but then I like to look out the window at
birds kind of way, which is what I'm doing while
I'm talking to you right now. On the other side
of my screen, there are birds on the roof outside
my office. And yeah, I'm just like a happy, little
middle aged hermit right now. It's great.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
I love it. I love it. So maybe you could
talk a little bit about how your career has evolved.
I know you've always been writing in some capacity, but
you've done a couple other different things.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Yeah. Yeah, So early early on, like in my twenties,
I did corporate communication, so that was how I had,
like a job with health insurance, was writing for companies
or organizations. Probably my favorite of those jobs was I
worked for the American Cancer Society's national home office for
a while, and I love that, you know. It felt
like I had a sense of a mission. But I
(01:56):
was also getting to kind of do that good, brain
crunchy work of working with words every day. And I
transitioned sort of out of that and into freelance writing
when I had my first baby, and it was I
just couldn't figure out how to do the childcare and
the corporate life at the same time, and I wrote
for again, mostly writing for other people companies. I did
(02:17):
a lot of speech writing, I did some ghost writing,
and then kind of throughout my thirties, I started tilting
the balance more toward writing in my own voice about
things that I cared about and publishing those things in magazines, newspapers,
that kind of stuff. And that led to books of
essays and memoirs and writing personal nonfiction, which is what
(02:38):
my last two books have been. I Miss You When
I Blink and Bomb Shelter.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Yeah, and you did a brief stint in a actual bookstore, Yes,
I did.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
I did when before I Miss You and I Blink
came out for about well and kind of during for
about six years, I worked for Parnassa's Books, which is
an indie bookstore here in Nashville, and I sort of
was I don't know, I guess I was kind of
their marketing director. We didn't really have titles back then,
but I've sort of got their social media started up
(03:10):
and it was really fun. It was a really fun job.
I love, you know, I love bookstores.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
As you know, bookstores are the best ever. I just
hang out there all day. Yeah. So, you know, both
of your books have just been incredibly well reviewed. But
I know that can always make it a little difficult
to try to do the next thing, you know, like
what am I going to do next? So you wrote
in a recent social media post, though, that you've had
(03:37):
what you called a nice gentle year creatively since your
last book has come out. What does that mean to
have a nice gentle year creatively?
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Oh? Man, it's it's something that is really new to
me in my life. I mean, I think one of
the things that makes you and my friends is we
both love like preductivity, hecks, and we like to be
you know, we like to figure out how to maximize
our time, and we both balance a lot of things.
You know, we've balanced like parenthood and working and our
private lives and our public lives and our interactions with
(04:09):
you know, I don't want to say strangers, but you know, readers, audiences,
that kind of thing. And I've done that for so
long that really crowded balance that when I hit this
period of Okay, so my last book has come out,
the book tour is over. You know, there's always that
lull where it's like, now what are you going to do?
(04:29):
And like you said, that book had been really well reviewed,
so there was a kind of a natural tendency in
my type a brain to be like, how am I
going to outdo that one? You know, where do you
even go from here? And at the same time in
my personal life, I was reaching this moment where I had,
like the last year with a kid under my roof,
(04:50):
My youngest was in her senior year of high school.
It was it was truly the end of raising children
in my house. And so I I kind of a
moment in my my grand timeline of life where I
had an opportunity to do things differently, and I wanted
to do things differently, Like I really wanted to have
(05:12):
a shift away from public facing life, away from you know, hustle, hustle, hustle,
you know what idea do I have next? How can
I pitch it? Who can I pitch it to? And
just kind of focus on what was here and around me.
And that meant that the creativity part of my life,
(05:32):
which of course creativity and productivity are tightly related when
you have a creative job. It quieted down and it
got slow, and I let myself neglect work some in
a way that I wouldn't have at any previous point
in my life. And it turned out to be kind
of fun, and I enjoyed it and it felt like
(05:54):
a vacation and I just kept it going and it's great.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Well, that's exciting. So just and have you been able
to like tell yourself like it's okay. I mean, I'm
very curious because when you're used to yah doing the
like why I got to get up and do something? Yeah,
you know, and then you don't do something necessarily that
looks like what you've been doing.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Right, and you feel like you're feeling Yeah, you feel
like you're breaking the rules, Like when you had a
sick day in school when you were little and you're like,
I shouldn't be home during the day. It's that same
sort of feeling at first. So it took time. It
took a pro It took prolonged practice actually to be
able to get up and say, I'm not going to
go straight to my desk. I'm going to have my
coffee and then I am going to go read something,
(06:38):
and then I'm going to do some task that is
unrelated to work. You know. One of the things that
made it possible for me to have this prolonged practice
until I could get comfortable with this kind of new
routine in new life was when my daughter was in
her final year of high school. She was she's an
(06:58):
actor and so she's an acting school, and she had
all these auditions that she was flying around for this.
The life of a high school senior applying to BFA
programs is insane, like what they are balancing. And so
I kind of said, hey, this is my last year
having a kid at home. Let me be your assistant.
I will help you book flights, I will help you,
(07:19):
you know, with the logistics of this stuff. I know
you don't want to hang out with me all the
time because I'm your mom, but you know, in whatever
way I can help you, I will help you. And
so I sort of had the practice of let me
serve you a little bit and get my mind off
myself and that, you know, as things go in a
school year, you look up in six months have passed.
Once some time had passed where I had broken some
(07:41):
of those habits of intense productivity. I felt better about it.
But yeah, at the beginning, I've felt like, ooh, I
am breaking a rule. I didn't email my agent today,
I'm going to get in trouble. But you know, I
didn't get in trouble because there's actually no one watching
and monitoring and going how much time did you log
at your computer today? That's not a thing.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
It's not a thing, although that is hard for some
of us to realize. So we're going to take a
quick ad break and then I will be back with
more from Mary Laura. Well, I am back talking with
Mary Laura Philpott, who's the author of two books of essays,
I Miss You When I Blink and Bomb Shelter. She
(08:25):
has been talking about taking her nice gentle year creatively,
which she transitioned to with helping launch her youngest child
out of the nest. But then, you know, you're not
hanging up your hat here, like I don't think you're
planning on retiring.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
No, no, no.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
So how does one then say, well, I'm open to
a new good idea coming to me, but I'm also
just going to be patient.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
That's I mean, you just said it so well. It's
finding a state of openness and for me, a state
of curiosity like I can do anything that I'm curious about,
Like if I if I care enough to wonder, I
can do anything. And I think that's part of what
helped me make this shift from like super productive person
to a quiet or slower pace of creativity and productivity.
(09:11):
I was curious about if I sort of disconnected from
Like if I snipped the wire between my sense of
self and what have I produced lately and how has
it been received? What would happen? Like what would my
brain do if I let it just wander around? And
(09:33):
if I let it consider concepts and even future projects
without any sense that they might actually happen or succeed,
Like I actually am kind of working on something right
now that is new and very different from what I've
done before, and I'm approaching it with the sense of
(09:53):
this is probably never gonna happen, Like the odds of
this actually working out are so low, And that is
so freeing to be, like, I'm just gonna work on this.
It's fun, I'm trying something different, I'm enjoying it, and
it probably won't work. That is so freeing and so
fun to sit down and go I am typing in
maybe no one will ever see this, I wondered, Like,
(10:17):
that's what got me, That's what kind of got me.
There is going I wonder what would happen if I
worked on something with no sense that it would ever
see the light of day. And I wonder what would
happen if I let myself some days go, I'm not
feeling it, I'm not going to sit down. Well, where
will my brain wonder?
Speaker 1 (10:33):
And my brain has wondered to some fun places, so
with a sense of curiosity, then yeah, But I think
what you know, as I'm hearing this, what one has
to kind of do mentally is be like, Okay, I know,
but at some point in the future, yes, I will
produce some wonderful work that I am so proud of
to put out into the universe. It's going to be there.
(10:54):
I could even maybe even see it in my brain
sitting next to the other books, or I don't know,
maybe in the future we're doing some other medium. Who
even knows what this future project is. But so I
know it's there. I know it's there in the future.
I just don't know exactly when. I don't know what
it looks like. I can have total faith that this
thing will be Yes, but I just do not know
(11:15):
the timeline, and I don't have to rush it.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
I do not have to rush it, I think, and
you probably have experienced this as well. You know, there's
this kind of natural life cycle when you've written more
than one book, or you've done more than one thing,
where you see what the time is in between project
one and project two, and then you kind of subconsciously
tie yourself to that timeline, like, Okay, I had a
book in twenty nineteen, and then I had a book
(11:38):
in twenty twenty two, and that means I've got to
have another book in twenty twenty five. Actually, once I
passed enough time after bomb Shelter that it became physically
impossible to have a book by twenty twenty five, I
was like, I've done it. I'm free. I have slipped
the shackles. I'm free from this three year thing I
had in my brain where I, you know, for what
(12:00):
dumb reason, thought I have to have a new thing
every three years. And once I got free of it,
it felt kind of fun. And and but here's the
other thing. It's fun as long as you let it
be fun. Or that's what I tell myself. I think
the way it would not work for me personally is
if I looked at this as a like secret hack,
(12:23):
if I was like, the secret to actually creating something
awesome is telling myself I don't have to create something awesome,
because I would know there was the ulterior motive. You know.
It's like when you I'm thinking back to being like
a very very young single woman and being like, I'm
not going to date anyone because everyone says that's when
you meet the one. If that's your if that's the goal,
(12:45):
well then you're not not looking, you know, So you
I really had to. I mean this has been about
a year and a half, and I would say about
midway into it is when I finally like got really
comfortable with the openness and the gentleness of letting this
creativity be. And I you know, I pulled back from
(13:08):
social media. Every summer, I pull back from social media
and I usually take a break from my newsletter, and
summer before last I did that and I didn't really
come back. I mean I came back a little. I'll
check Instagram every day. I like to see what people
are doing, but I'm not posting all the time. I
still pay the fee to have my mailing list, but
I haven't sent my newsletter in a year and a half.
(13:29):
I'll send it again sometime, but I'm not in any rush.
And it's it's just fun.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
How will you know when it's the right idea, though.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
I have to trust, and I think I'm old enough
not I I just turned fifty a few months ago,
and I think I've lived enough cycles of life and
creativity and lessons learned to trust that I'll just know,
the same way I knew that it was time to
pull back. I will know when there's something it makes
(14:00):
me go, okay, I want to call my agent today,
or you know what, I'm ready to fire this stuff
back up and have more give and take with you know,
public facing stuff. I mean, one of the things I
love about your work is you're so articulate about what
it feels like to have more things going on than
(14:21):
there is time in the day. And I, as a
human being, tend to crave whatever it is that I
don't have enough time to get to. So when I
had little kids at home and a lot of daily
logistical grind stuff happening, what I craved was time alone
(14:46):
and time to do deep work and think. And I
found myself last year when I had that, you know,
my final year with a kid under my roof, As
I saw that time dwindling, suddenly what I I craved
was time at home, and I was like, Okay, you
know what this is about to be over. Now. What
I crave is what I'm about to not have, which
(15:07):
is this, you know, making dinner. Like I remember the
phase of motherhood was like I cannot make another dang
dinner for these people and last day.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Need to eat every day crazy et them once and
they think they can just come right back. They want
another I don't know, five hours later.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
But you know, last year I found myself like making
these not elaborate but like slow cooking dinners and really
cherishing that time because it was about to be over.
And so right now I think I am enjoying and
cherishing what I haven't had for the past several years,
which is a break from public facing stuff and no
(15:49):
sense of impending schedule. And I think there will come
a point where I crave something different and I'll just
have to trust that I'll know when that time is.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yeah, right now, you're sort of in the slow mode
You've got our listeners can't see this, but you have
a poster behind you of your most recent book, which
happens to have a turtle yes on the cover. So turnleye,
is there a tie in of the turtle and how
Mary Laura is sort of operating at that.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
That's right, I'm in slow mode. I'm inside my show.
I mean, the metaphors are all right there.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Shoot, I wish everyone could see the turtle. Then, for
our listeners who maybe haven't read your books, you had
it somewhat of a pet turtle, but he was a
wild pet turtle. Correct.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Yes, yes, he was not our pet, but he has
part of our family and as far as I know,
he is still alive. We've lived in this house for
ten years and there is a There are many box
turtles here, but there's one with a very distinctive shell pattern,
so we know it is him. And he is more
gregarious than the other ones and really took a liking
to the human beings and our family. And when we
would go outside on our back porch, he would come up.
(16:55):
And we named him Frank, which is you know, I'm
sure not with his turtle. Mama named him, but we
had to call him something. And we see him every
now and then, and he's just he's wild. We don't,
you know, we don't like feed him breakfast and build
him a house. He lives somewhere out there, but Yeah,
he's a weird, little wild member of our family. And
he disappeared for a bit. He disappears in the winter.
(17:19):
It's called brewmating. It's like hibernating, sort of the turtle box.
Turtles kind of go under the dirt a little bit.
And so every spring we kind of hold our breath
because he's we can tell he's he's old. Every spring
we're like, is he gonna come back? And so far,
knock on wood, we've seen him late spring, early summer
every year.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
It's like ideas, right, they come back metaphor it, whatever
it is. I'll think about it now.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
I'm brewmaiding Laura right now.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
All right, I love that. All Right, We're going to
take one more quick ad break and I will be
back with Mary Laura. All right, well, I am back
with Mary Laura Philpott, who is an essays writer, author
many things. So let's talk a little bit about daily
(18:06):
routines though, because one of the things I in the
times of my life that have been more open, I
felt like it's been helpful to have some sort of
daily routine lest you feel like time is completely amorphous,
you know, which maybe you don't suffer from that problem,
but I certainly have. So I wonder if you have
any sort of routines that kind of keep you ground
(18:28):
in what a day looks like, even if time is
a little bit more open for you.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
Yeah, I absolutely have that problem where if I don't
have a routine, I'm like, what even is? Like? What
did this day even happen? And in the spirit of
curiosity and wondering what my brain would do if, you know,
loosened up from a routine. I have had some days,
like probably once a week, I have a day where
I just stay in my pajamas and I have my
(18:52):
coffee at ten instead of six, and I think some
interesting thoughts on those days. But I do feel at
the end like I get to six o'clock and I'm like,
that was a weird day. I don't take them off
a time was off. So I do feel better when
there's a routine, And for me, that routine is usually
like have the coffee, read some things, and I mean
like not on my phone, like read a piece of
(19:15):
a book or read like a really good article by
somebody'smart walk. I have to move, like either walk all
around the hills of my neighborhood or go to pilate's
or do something where I move my body and go
out in the world at least once, Like even if
it's just a trip to Walgreens, I could do. It
helps me to leave my house. And I keep my laptop.
(19:37):
These days, I keep it open on my kitchen counter,
like right now you and I are talking and I'm
up in my office because that's where my microphone is.
But day to day now, in this more gentle kind
of unscheduled time, I keep it open and it sits there,
and it doesn't like taunt me. It's not going, it's
not guilty me for not working, but it's there. So
usually by afternoon some thought has bubbled where I'm like, oh,
(20:01):
I'm just going to go jot this down, and I
don't set a timer, and I don't know give myself
any sort of sticker or accountability anything. I just got
it and I sit there for however long I want
to sit. And if it's ten minutes, fine, and if
it's one minute, great. And if I don't sit down
that day, the computer sits there. It's not going anywhere.
It's fine. It's a much looser sense of schedule and
(20:21):
time than I've ever had, and as a brand new
empty nester, it is the first time in twenty one
years where the structure of my daytime isn't cut up
into school time and not school time, and that is
so new to me that I'm trying to kind of
refamiliarize myself with like actual circadian rhythms and actual you know,
(20:42):
three o'clock as a time of day that is just daytime.
It's not go pick up somebody time. And that's new.
So it's it's it's in flux. It's changing.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Yeah, do you have some way where you've decided the
day is over or is there some point where you
transition into evening? Yeah, anything like that.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Yes, it's well. So right now as we record this,
it is winter in Nashville, and Nashville is about five
seconds into the Central time Zone, which means it gets
dark in the in the middle of winter. It gets
dark at like three thirty in the afternoon, which is
really weird. So this is my first winter as an
empty nester in Nashville. So what I was doing for
(21:23):
a while was going, well, when the sun goes down,
it's evening, But then sud started going down me and
I was like, I can't eat. Remember, the evening has
come early. I cannot eat dinner at three thirty. This
is not cool. So I've sort of tied it to
and this is you know, the lovely thing about being
an empty nester if you have a partner is you
(21:43):
get to spend more time together. So I've kind of
tied it to the end of my husband's workday. So
he he works outside our house in an office in
kind of a quote unquote normal job. So when he
comes home at the end of the day, that's when
I closed, you know, flip the lid of the laptop,
and it's like, oh, here we are, let's have dinner,
let's do our you know, whatever we do at the
end of the day. So I've kind of I've made
(22:05):
the end of his work day the end of my
day basically.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Yeah, makes sense, makes sense. And you don't have to
get up at the crack of dawn for somebody's you know,
early morning sports schedule or whatever it is.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Yes, Laura, it's amazing. I can't tell you. I mean,
I am a morning person. I'm not anyone. Even when
I was twenty I didn't like to sleep until noon.
But just not having to get up at six. I mean,
just staying in the bed till seven. It is. It's
a vacation every day. Like every morning, I'm like, I
can't believe I'm in bed and at seven o'clock. This
(22:37):
is insane. It's great, it's great.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
I know, well many years from then, but I will
get there, event you will get there. We have a
lot of years of six am wake up still. Yeah,
but you know it's all good, different phases of life
that it's ahead of you. Yeah, exactly. Well, So what
I always asked guests, what is something you have done
lately to take a day from great too awesome?
Speaker 2 (23:01):
I think the best thing lately has been this. And
this is kind of a new evening routine, speaking of
my husband getting home at the end of the day.
He does travel some for work, and I still travel
every now and then for speaking and things. But when
we're both home at the same time at night, we
have started doing our word games together in the evenings.
(23:24):
And it started out just kind of like I would
do them at the end of the day and then
he would do them before we went to bed, and
then one night, at like you know, seven point thirty,
we were like, oh, let's let's play our word games together. Okay,
let's start with wordle and we would sit there and
do the wordle and they go, I got it in three?
How many did you get it in? And then you know,
and then we would do it world totally, and then
we would do connections, you know, all the different ones.
(23:47):
And now we really look forward to it, Like after
dinner every night, he's like, Okay, I'm going to wash
the dishes and then word games. So like that has
been like the dumbest yet most delightful addition to the day.
And I love it.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
I look forward to it every night.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Well, I was going to ask you, what are you
looking forward to? But apparently you're looking forward to wordle tonight.
So I look for to wordle In a few hours,
I'll tell you what I'm looking forward to.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
I have a wonderful group of friends who have been
just girlfriends for all of adulthood. And next week we
are all getting together for the first time. And quite
some time we had a trip planned. Uh the week
that hurricane is it Helene?
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Yeah, that the week that that hit and basically blasted
the entire Southeast and it had to be canceled, but
we managed to reschedule for a bunch of people, which,
as you know, is a miracle, and I'm really looking
forward to seeing them and just relaxing and enjoying one
another and just appreciating each other for a few days.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
That's awesome. I love it. I love it well, Mary, Laura,
thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for
everyone who has been listening to this longer epis. If
you have feedback about this or any other episode, you
can always reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and
here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for
(25:18):
listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback,
you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts
from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
(25:41):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. This
episode is going to be a longer one part of
the series where I interview fascinating people about how they
take their days from great to awesome and any advice
(00:23):
they have for the rest of us. So today I
am delighted to welcome Mary Laura Philpott to the program.
Mary Laura is the author of two books of essays,
I Miss You When I Blink and Bomb Shelter. She
lives in Nashville. So, Mary Laura, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Hey Laura, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Yeah, thanks for doing this. So why don't you tell
our listeners a little bit more about yourself.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Okay, I live in Nashville. As you said, I'm a
brand new empty nester, which has thrown all of my
routines just completely out the window and upside down. I'm
a writer, so you know, there's some portion of my
day or my life that's always been typing and kind
of putting my thoughts into words. I'm an outdoorsy person.
(01:07):
I'm not in like a you know, camping kind of way,
but then I like to look out the window at
birds kind of way, which is what I'm doing while
I'm talking to you right now. On the other side
of my screen, there are birds on the roof outside
my office. And yeah, I'm just like a happy, little
middle aged hermit right now. It's great.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
I love it. I love it. So maybe you could
talk a little bit about how your career has evolved.
I know you've always been writing in some capacity, but
you've done a couple other different things.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Yeah. Yeah, So early early on, like in my twenties,
I did corporate communication, so that was how I had,
like a job with health insurance, was writing for companies
or organizations. Probably my favorite of those jobs was I
worked for the American Cancer Society's national home office for
a while, and I love that, you know. It felt
like I had a sense of a mission. But I
(01:56):
was also getting to kind of do that good, brain
crunchy work of working with words every day. And I
transitioned sort of out of that and into freelance writing
when I had my first baby, and it was I
just couldn't figure out how to do the childcare and
the corporate life at the same time, and I wrote
for again, mostly writing for other people companies. I did
(02:17):
a lot of speech writing, I did some ghost writing,
and then kind of throughout my thirties, I started tilting
the balance more toward writing in my own voice about
things that I cared about and publishing those things in magazines, newspapers,
that kind of stuff. And that led to books of
essays and memoirs and writing personal nonfiction, which is what
(02:38):
my last two books have been. I Miss You When
I Blink and Bomb Shelter.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Yeah, and you did a brief stint in a actual bookstore, Yes,
I did.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
I did when before I Miss You and I Blink
came out for about well and kind of during for
about six years, I worked for Parnassa's Books, which is
an indie bookstore here in Nashville, and I sort of
was I don't know, I guess I was kind of
their marketing director. We didn't really have titles back then,
but I've sort of got their social media started up
(03:10):
and it was really fun. It was a really fun job.
I love, you know, I love bookstores.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
As you know, bookstores are the best ever. I just
hang out there all day. Yeah. So, you know, both
of your books have just been incredibly well reviewed. But
I know that can always make it a little difficult
to try to do the next thing, you know, like
what am I going to do next? So you wrote
in a recent social media post, though, that you've had
(03:37):
what you called a nice gentle year creatively since your
last book has come out. What does that mean to
have a nice gentle year creatively?
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Oh? Man, it's it's something that is really new to
me in my life. I mean, I think one of
the things that makes you and my friends is we
both love like preductivity, hecks, and we like to be
you know, we like to figure out how to maximize
our time, and we both balance a lot of things.
You know, we've balanced like parenthood and working and our
private lives and our public lives and our interactions with
(04:09):
you know, I don't want to say strangers, but you know, readers, audiences,
that kind of thing. And I've done that for so
long that really crowded balance that when I hit this
period of Okay, so my last book has come out,
the book tour is over. You know, there's always that
lull where it's like, now what are you going to do?
(04:29):
And like you said, that book had been really well reviewed,
so there was a kind of a natural tendency in
my type a brain to be like, how am I
going to outdo that one? You know, where do you
even go from here? And at the same time in
my personal life, I was reaching this moment where I had,
like the last year with a kid under my roof,
(04:50):
My youngest was in her senior year of high school.
It was it was truly the end of raising children
in my house. And so I I kind of a
moment in my my grand timeline of life where I
had an opportunity to do things differently, and I wanted
to do things differently, Like I really wanted to have
(05:12):
a shift away from public facing life, away from you know, hustle, hustle, hustle,
you know what idea do I have next? How can
I pitch it? Who can I pitch it to? And
just kind of focus on what was here and around me.
And that meant that the creativity part of my life,
(05:32):
which of course creativity and productivity are tightly related when
you have a creative job. It quieted down and it
got slow, and I let myself neglect work some in
a way that I wouldn't have at any previous point
in my life. And it turned out to be kind
of fun, and I enjoyed it and it felt like
(05:54):
a vacation and I just kept it going and it's great.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Well, that's exciting. So just and have you been able
to like tell yourself like it's okay. I mean, I'm
very curious because when you're used to yah doing the
like why I got to get up and do something? Yeah,
you know, and then you don't do something necessarily that
looks like what you've been doing.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Right, and you feel like you're feeling Yeah, you feel
like you're breaking the rules, Like when you had a
sick day in school when you were little and you're like,
I shouldn't be home during the day. It's that same
sort of feeling at first. So it took time. It
took a pro It took prolonged practice actually to be
able to get up and say, I'm not going to
go straight to my desk. I'm going to have my
coffee and then I am going to go read something,
(06:38):
and then I'm going to do some task that is
unrelated to work. You know. One of the things that
made it possible for me to have this prolonged practice
until I could get comfortable with this kind of new
routine in new life was when my daughter was in
her final year of high school. She was she's an
(06:58):
actor and so she's an acting school, and she had
all these auditions that she was flying around for this.
The life of a high school senior applying to BFA
programs is insane, like what they are balancing. And so
I kind of said, hey, this is my last year
having a kid at home. Let me be your assistant.
I will help you book flights, I will help you,
(07:19):
you know, with the logistics of this stuff. I know
you don't want to hang out with me all the
time because I'm your mom, but you know, in whatever
way I can help you, I will help you. And
so I sort of had the practice of let me
serve you a little bit and get my mind off
myself and that, you know, as things go in a
school year, you look up in six months have passed.
Once some time had passed where I had broken some
(07:41):
of those habits of intense productivity. I felt better about it.
But yeah, at the beginning, I've felt like, ooh, I
am breaking a rule. I didn't email my agent today,
I'm going to get in trouble. But you know, I
didn't get in trouble because there's actually no one watching
and monitoring and going how much time did you log
at your computer today? That's not a thing.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
It's not a thing, although that is hard for some
of us to realize. So we're going to take a
quick ad break and then I will be back with
more from Mary Laura. Well, I am back talking with
Mary Laura Philpott, who's the author of two books of essays,
I Miss You When I Blink and Bomb Shelter. She
(08:25):
has been talking about taking her nice gentle year creatively,
which she transitioned to with helping launch her youngest child
out of the nest. But then, you know, you're not
hanging up your hat here, like I don't think you're
planning on retiring.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
No, no, no.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
So how does one then say, well, I'm open to
a new good idea coming to me, but I'm also
just going to be patient.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
That's I mean, you just said it so well. It's
finding a state of openness and for me, a state
of curiosity like I can do anything that I'm curious about,
Like if I if I care enough to wonder, I
can do anything. And I think that's part of what
helped me make this shift from like super productive person
to a quiet or slower pace of creativity and productivity.
(09:11):
I was curious about if I sort of disconnected from
Like if I snipped the wire between my sense of
self and what have I produced lately and how has
it been received? What would happen? Like what would my
brain do if I let it just wander around? And
(09:33):
if I let it consider concepts and even future projects
without any sense that they might actually happen or succeed,
Like I actually am kind of working on something right
now that is new and very different from what I've
done before, and I'm approaching it with the sense of
(09:53):
this is probably never gonna happen, Like the odds of
this actually working out are so low, And that is
so freeing to be, like, I'm just gonna work on this.
It's fun, I'm trying something different, I'm enjoying it, and
it probably won't work. That is so freeing and so
fun to sit down and go I am typing in
maybe no one will ever see this, I wondered, Like,
(10:17):
that's what got me, That's what kind of got me.
There is going I wonder what would happen if I
worked on something with no sense that it would ever
see the light of day. And I wonder what would
happen if I let myself some days go, I'm not
feeling it, I'm not going to sit down. Well, where
will my brain wonder?
Speaker 1 (10:33):
And my brain has wondered to some fun places, so
with a sense of curiosity, then yeah, But I think
what you know, as I'm hearing this, what one has
to kind of do mentally is be like, Okay, I know,
but at some point in the future, yes, I will
produce some wonderful work that I am so proud of
to put out into the universe. It's going to be there.
(10:54):
I could even maybe even see it in my brain
sitting next to the other books, or I don't know,
maybe in the future we're doing some other medium. Who
even knows what this future project is. But so I
know it's there. I know it's there in the future.
I just don't know exactly when. I don't know what
it looks like. I can have total faith that this
thing will be Yes, but I just do not know
(11:15):
the timeline, and I don't have to rush it.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
I do not have to rush it, I think, and
you probably have experienced this as well. You know, there's
this kind of natural life cycle when you've written more
than one book, or you've done more than one thing,
where you see what the time is in between project
one and project two, and then you kind of subconsciously
tie yourself to that timeline, like, Okay, I had a
book in twenty nineteen, and then I had a book
(11:38):
in twenty twenty two, and that means I've got to
have another book in twenty twenty five. Actually, once I
passed enough time after bomb Shelter that it became physically
impossible to have a book by twenty twenty five, I
was like, I've done it. I'm free. I have slipped
the shackles. I'm free from this three year thing I
had in my brain where I, you know, for what
(12:00):
dumb reason, thought I have to have a new thing
every three years. And once I got free of it,
it felt kind of fun. And and but here's the
other thing. It's fun as long as you let it
be fun. Or that's what I tell myself. I think
the way it would not work for me personally is
if I looked at this as a like secret hack,
(12:23):
if I was like, the secret to actually creating something
awesome is telling myself I don't have to create something awesome,
because I would know there was the ulterior motive. You know.
It's like when you I'm thinking back to being like
a very very young single woman and being like, I'm
not going to date anyone because everyone says that's when
you meet the one. If that's your if that's the goal,
(12:45):
well then you're not not looking, you know, So you
I really had to. I mean this has been about
a year and a half, and I would say about
midway into it is when I finally like got really
comfortable with the openness and the gentleness of letting this
creativity be. And I you know, I pulled back from
(13:08):
social media. Every summer, I pull back from social media
and I usually take a break from my newsletter, and
summer before last I did that and I didn't really
come back. I mean I came back a little. I'll
check Instagram every day. I like to see what people
are doing, but I'm not posting all the time. I
still pay the fee to have my mailing list, but
I haven't sent my newsletter in a year and a half.
(13:29):
I'll send it again sometime, but I'm not in any rush.
And it's it's just fun.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
How will you know when it's the right idea, though.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
I have to trust, and I think I'm old enough
not I I just turned fifty a few months ago,
and I think I've lived enough cycles of life and
creativity and lessons learned to trust that I'll just know,
the same way I knew that it was time to
pull back. I will know when there's something it makes
(14:00):
me go, okay, I want to call my agent today,
or you know what, I'm ready to fire this stuff
back up and have more give and take with you know,
public facing stuff. I mean, one of the things I
love about your work is you're so articulate about what
it feels like to have more things going on than
(14:21):
there is time in the day. And I, as a
human being, tend to crave whatever it is that I
don't have enough time to get to. So when I
had little kids at home and a lot of daily
logistical grind stuff happening, what I craved was time alone
(14:46):
and time to do deep work and think. And I
found myself last year when I had that, you know,
my final year with a kid under my roof, As
I saw that time dwindling, suddenly what I I craved
was time at home, and I was like, Okay, you
know what this is about to be over. Now. What
I crave is what I'm about to not have, which
(15:07):
is this, you know, making dinner. Like I remember the
phase of motherhood was like I cannot make another dang
dinner for these people and last day.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Need to eat every day crazy et them once and
they think they can just come right back. They want
another I don't know, five hours later.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
But you know, last year I found myself like making
these not elaborate but like slow cooking dinners and really
cherishing that time because it was about to be over.
And so right now I think I am enjoying and
cherishing what I haven't had for the past several years,
which is a break from public facing stuff and no
(15:49):
sense of impending schedule. And I think there will come
a point where I crave something different and I'll just
have to trust that I'll know when that time is.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yeah, right now, you're sort of in the slow mode
You've got our listeners can't see this, but you have
a poster behind you of your most recent book, which
happens to have a turtle yes on the cover. So turnleye,
is there a tie in of the turtle and how
Mary Laura is sort of operating at that.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
That's right, I'm in slow mode. I'm inside my show.
I mean, the metaphors are all right there.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Shoot, I wish everyone could see the turtle. Then, for
our listeners who maybe haven't read your books, you had
it somewhat of a pet turtle, but he was a
wild pet turtle. Correct.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Yes, yes, he was not our pet, but he has
part of our family and as far as I know,
he is still alive. We've lived in this house for
ten years and there is a There are many box
turtles here, but there's one with a very distinctive shell pattern,
so we know it is him. And he is more
gregarious than the other ones and really took a liking
to the human beings and our family. And when we
would go outside on our back porch, he would come up.
(16:55):
And we named him Frank, which is you know, I'm
sure not with his turtle. Mama named him, but we
had to call him something. And we see him every
now and then, and he's just he's wild. We don't,
you know, we don't like feed him breakfast and build
him a house. He lives somewhere out there, but Yeah,
he's a weird, little wild member of our family. And
he disappeared for a bit. He disappears in the winter.
(17:19):
It's called brewmating. It's like hibernating, sort of the turtle box.
Turtles kind of go under the dirt a little bit.
And so every spring we kind of hold our breath
because he's we can tell he's he's old. Every spring
we're like, is he gonna come back? And so far,
knock on wood, we've seen him late spring, early summer
every year.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
It's like ideas, right, they come back metaphor it, whatever
it is. I'll think about it now.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
I'm brewmaiding Laura right now.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
All right, I love that. All Right, We're going to
take one more quick ad break and I will be
back with Mary Laura. All right, well, I am back
with Mary Laura Philpott, who is an essays writer, author
many things. So let's talk a little bit about daily
(18:06):
routines though, because one of the things I in the
times of my life that have been more open, I
felt like it's been helpful to have some sort of
daily routine lest you feel like time is completely amorphous,
you know, which maybe you don't suffer from that problem,
but I certainly have. So I wonder if you have
any sort of routines that kind of keep you ground
(18:28):
in what a day looks like, even if time is
a little bit more open for you.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
Yeah, I absolutely have that problem where if I don't
have a routine, I'm like, what even is? Like? What
did this day even happen? And in the spirit of
curiosity and wondering what my brain would do if, you know,
loosened up from a routine. I have had some days,
like probably once a week, I have a day where
I just stay in my pajamas and I have my
(18:52):
coffee at ten instead of six, and I think some
interesting thoughts on those days. But I do feel at
the end like I get to six o'clock and I'm like,
that was a weird day. I don't take them off
a time was off. So I do feel better when
there's a routine, And for me, that routine is usually
like have the coffee, read some things, and I mean
like not on my phone, like read a piece of
(19:15):
a book or read like a really good article by
somebody'smart walk. I have to move, like either walk all
around the hills of my neighborhood or go to pilate's
or do something where I move my body and go
out in the world at least once, Like even if
it's just a trip to Walgreens, I could do. It
helps me to leave my house. And I keep my laptop.
(19:37):
These days, I keep it open on my kitchen counter,
like right now you and I are talking and I'm
up in my office because that's where my microphone is.
But day to day now, in this more gentle kind
of unscheduled time, I keep it open and it sits there,
and it doesn't like taunt me. It's not going, it's
not guilty me for not working, but it's there. So
usually by afternoon some thought has bubbled where I'm like, oh,
(20:01):
I'm just going to go jot this down, and I
don't set a timer, and I don't know give myself
any sort of sticker or accountability anything. I just got
it and I sit there for however long I want
to sit. And if it's ten minutes, fine, and if
it's one minute, great. And if I don't sit down
that day, the computer sits there. It's not going anywhere.
It's fine. It's a much looser sense of schedule and
(20:21):
time than I've ever had, and as a brand new
empty nester, it is the first time in twenty one
years where the structure of my daytime isn't cut up
into school time and not school time, and that is
so new to me that I'm trying to kind of
refamiliarize myself with like actual circadian rhythms and actual you know,
(20:42):
three o'clock as a time of day that is just daytime.
It's not go pick up somebody time. And that's new.
So it's it's it's in flux. It's changing.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Yeah, do you have some way where you've decided the
day is over or is there some point where you
transition into evening? Yeah, anything like that.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Yes, it's well. So right now as we record this,
it is winter in Nashville, and Nashville is about five
seconds into the Central time Zone, which means it gets
dark in the in the middle of winter. It gets
dark at like three thirty in the afternoon, which is
really weird. So this is my first winter as an
empty nester in Nashville. So what I was doing for
(21:23):
a while was going, well, when the sun goes down,
it's evening, But then sud started going down me and
I was like, I can't eat. Remember, the evening has
come early. I cannot eat dinner at three thirty. This
is not cool. So I've sort of tied it to
and this is you know, the lovely thing about being
an empty nester if you have a partner is you
(21:43):
get to spend more time together. So I've kind of
tied it to the end of my husband's workday. So
he he works outside our house in an office in
kind of a quote unquote normal job. So when he
comes home at the end of the day, that's when
I closed, you know, flip the lid of the laptop,
and it's like, oh, here we are, let's have dinner,
let's do our you know, whatever we do at the
end of the day. So I've kind of I've made
(22:05):
the end of his work day the end of my
day basically.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Yeah, makes sense, makes sense. And you don't have to
get up at the crack of dawn for somebody's you know,
early morning sports schedule or whatever it is.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Yes, Laura, it's amazing. I can't tell you. I mean,
I am a morning person. I'm not anyone. Even when
I was twenty I didn't like to sleep until noon.
But just not having to get up at six. I mean,
just staying in the bed till seven. It is. It's
a vacation every day. Like every morning, I'm like, I
can't believe I'm in bed and at seven o'clock. This
(22:37):
is insane. It's great, it's great.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
I know, well many years from then, but I will
get there, event you will get there. We have a
lot of years of six am wake up still. Yeah,
but you know it's all good, different phases of life
that it's ahead of you. Yeah, exactly. Well, So what
I always asked guests, what is something you have done
lately to take a day from great too awesome?
Speaker 2 (23:01):
I think the best thing lately has been this. And
this is kind of a new evening routine, speaking of
my husband getting home at the end of the day.
He does travel some for work, and I still travel
every now and then for speaking and things. But when
we're both home at the same time at night, we
have started doing our word games together in the evenings.
(23:24):
And it started out just kind of like I would
do them at the end of the day and then
he would do them before we went to bed, and
then one night, at like you know, seven point thirty,
we were like, oh, let's let's play our word games together. Okay,
let's start with wordle and we would sit there and
do the wordle and they go, I got it in three?
How many did you get it in? And then you know,
and then we would do it world totally, and then
we would do connections, you know, all the different ones.
(23:47):
And now we really look forward to it, Like after
dinner every night, he's like, Okay, I'm going to wash
the dishes and then word games. So like that has
been like the dumbest yet most delightful addition to the day.
And I love it.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
I look forward to it every night.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Well, I was going to ask you, what are you
looking forward to? But apparently you're looking forward to wordle tonight.
So I look for to wordle In a few hours,
I'll tell you what I'm looking forward to.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
I have a wonderful group of friends who have been
just girlfriends for all of adulthood. And next week we
are all getting together for the first time. And quite
some time we had a trip planned. Uh the week
that hurricane is it Helene?
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Yeah, that the week that that hit and basically blasted
the entire Southeast and it had to be canceled, but
we managed to reschedule for a bunch of people, which,
as you know, is a miracle, and I'm really looking
forward to seeing them and just relaxing and enjoying one
another and just appreciating each other for a few days.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
That's awesome. I love it. I love it well, Mary, Laura,
thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for
everyone who has been listening to this longer epis. If
you have feedback about this or any other episode, you
can always reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and
here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for
(25:18):
listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback,
you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts
from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
(25:41):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Before Breakfast News
Host
Laura Vanderkam
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