January 7, 2025 • 36 mins
In Episode 6 of Bridging Worlds, Resilience Through the Written Word, Malcolm and Amanda explore the transformative power of writing as a tool for resilience and self-discovery. Amanda, an award-winning writer and entrepreneur, shares how her life experiences—including activism, personal challenges, and creativity—have shaped her journey as a storyteller and consultant. Together, they discuss the emotional depth of her novel-in-progress, the nuances of teaching and mentoring writers, and the importance of embracing imperfection to turn life’s toughest moments into meaningful stories.
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Get ready to bridge worlds and elevate your understanding of growth, resilience, and the
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power of connection.
Welcome to episode 6, Resilience Through the Written Word.
Welcome back to Bridget World.
I'm Malcolm, your co-host joined by my lovely wife Amanda, the award-winning short story
writer, former professor, thriving entrepreneur, and the only person who can proofread me missentence.
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Thank you, question mark.
Today we're diving into resilience.
How Amanda's life experiences shaped her journey and how she's helping others through
her business.
Amanda writes, edits, and consults wonderful business.
She also happens to be, of course, my lovely wife.
What a coincidence.
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Before we jump in, let's take a moment to remind everyone about the heart of Bridging
Worlds.
This podcast is about bringing Amanda's world and my world together, creating a space where
we explore personal and professional growth with our listeners.
Whether we're discussing resilience, leadership, storytelling, we want to connect with the
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moments that matter in your life and work.
We're here to bridge the gap between the personal and professional, helping you navigate both
with a little insight, inspiration, and maybe a laugh or two.
Absolutely.
Don't forget to visit us at www.BridgingWorldsPodcast.com to share your thoughts and ideas.
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Amanda, are you ready to talk about resilience, writing, and maybe your undercover FBI factory
farm story?
Always.
Let's talk about Amanda's journey.
Your upcoming novel about the FBI infiltrating a factory farm.
Seriously, where did this idea come from?
Was there any emotional aha moment that inspired it?
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There were two articles that I read that made me think that some of my obsessions, the themes
and the subjects that I always became obsessed with going down that rabbit hole could be
turned into an actual novel length project that could not be easily categorized into
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a genre.
One of the articles was in Harper's, and the other one was in the New Yorker.
One of them was an expose of an undercover animal rights activist that infiltrated a
poultry farm and described in gross detail what the chickens, what their life was like,
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their brief life, the hormones, the fact that they couldn't stand up in their cage or turn
around.
They were sleeping in their feces.
They were deformed.
They were pumped through of chemicals, which kids in cafeterias were eating, the eggs that
came from these animals that were pumped through.
I was always involved in animal rights activism and ethical treatment of animals.
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I've always been a vegetarian, which I discovered wasn't quite enough a lot of the time.
So the expose really sort of opened my eyes to factory farming.
And then there was another article, and it was detailing an FBI agent or the equivalent
of what the UK has as an FBI agent.
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They used to, and we used to send our FBI agents out for months of not years.
So that was called deep cover.
And what would happen, as you might imagine, is that close personal ties form between the
undercover agents and the domestic terrorists whom they're trying to infiltrate.
So there was this one undercover operative who had a family, wife, kids, went undercover
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for months, fell in love, started another family undercover with a wife and a child.
And so it's really about masks, and it's really about the different personas that we have
and how we categorize the different sides of ourselves to survive, whether it's a result
of dealing with trauma, or if you're code switching, or if you have to protect yourself
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from micro or macro aggressions at work.
So it was sort of the perfect melding of animal rights of exposing the atrocities of factory
farms and in creatively dealing with my own fractured self.
I love you talking about the FBI.
As you know, I'm obsessed with FBI CIA shows.
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One of my favorite ones was the Gangs of London, which I watched, I guess it was two seasons
of it so far.
On AMC Plus, we got a free week through Prime, and we just binged on that show.
There are so many undercover TV shows and series out right now, which I think is extremely
(05:26):
interesting, this plays in time politically, how the theme keeps coming up, having to or
needing to pretend that you're someone that you're not until that pretending becomes real.
Yeah.
And I know someone who lived that double life too.
I know that that's real.
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He had two families, and it shocked me that he was living this life for so long.
And when I first met you and you were sharing about this book, I was so into it, I'm like,
oh my God, I have to read this.
And not only that, this has to be turned into a show on Apple TV Plus or HBO or something.
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Max, excuse me.
Well, that's the fantasy of being a writer.
It's no surprise that there are no movies, or there aren't a high number of movies made
about writers because it's so freaking boring.
We sit there and we think and we type and we pull out our hair and we make more coffee
and we pet our cats.
So at the early parts of conceptualizing a book, starting a book, starting and stopping,
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I think that it's important for people from the very get-go to practice their elevator
pitch to have one sentence ready for cocktail party conversations, for over the Thanksgiving
dinner table, because I think that if you are literate, you are a writer.
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I think that one needs to create and practice this elevator pitch so you can say it in your
sleep or when you're distracted or when there's a lot of noise going on around you.
I think that it's great.
Why are you writing in the first place?
It's because you have an active imagination.
So who would be your ideal main character?
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Like who would I want to play Bobby?
And you know who I want to play Bobby?
Right.
I know Zach.
Mr. Phoenix.
Yes, Joaquin.
So, and then I have Joaquin's real partner in mind for the love interest.
And I've been saving photographs for years and years that would be like a perfect, maybe
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a perfect photograph for my book cover.
I've been through countless titles, the first one was Agent Provocateur, which I soon found
out is like a high priced lingerie line for escorts and The Other Woman.
And then I wanted to call it Deep Cover, which was like a film with Wesley Snipes in it or
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something.
That was a couple of Deep Covers.
Yeah.
So very prevalent theme.
So, and then I just stripped it down to The Undercovers, which just is very basic.
And so I think it's fun to sort of daydream about this stuff.
And I think it is good for me to print my pages out and to buy them, to the whole punch
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them and to buy them in like a three ring folder that I got at Staples.
So it became a real thing and to even carry it around with me.
So I would edit it everywhere.
I'd edit it in the adjunct room at work, I'd edit it on the train.
So I think that your passion and your obsession needs to be made a real thing as soon as possible.
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Something you can reference easily, something that makes you pedigree to call yourself a
writer.
I never want my clients or students to apologize to start out anything with, oh, but I'm not
a writer.
Oh, but I'm not a good writer.
Those are all lies that we tell ourselves because of fear.
So that's sort of how I leaned into writing my book.
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Yeah.
Some of my favorite times in watching you with your book is back in your old apartment in
Harlem and how you would have stuff scattered all over the floor.
And it was organized in your mind.
I kind of looked at it like, oh my God, what is going on here?
But it was your book.
It was what you passionate.
Yeah.
I really believe in it.
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I'm a dual learner and teacher, so I would storyboard, which is more for TV film, but
I would print out my entire novel when it was like a big, big edition revision.
And then one of the biggest overhauls that I did was I completely changed the order of
the chapters.
So I literally like rearranged the chapters on my living room floor in Harlem and then
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put them back into the three ring binder in absolutely totally completely different order
than they had started out.
Yeah.
I love that.
I love that.
Amanda, how do you channel life's curve balls into creative storytelling?
Well, curve balls are nonstop, right?
So they're nonstop when they're happening to us.
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So they really should be nonstop in fiction as well.
Fiction is not autobiographical, but there is always going to be the reader that projects
that onto the woman, especially the woman storyteller.
So I think that for women or people of color specifically, it's a little bit trickier to
navigate the waters of, you know, like I've been in poetry readings where someone has
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raised his hand and sort of demanded of the female poet, you know, does your husband know
that you're writing about sex?
Does your husband approve?
My characters are divinely flawed, as we all are.
The main character, the female main character is what we used to call an unreliable main
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character, an unlikable, which is mainly prescribed to women, female characters.
And so all of this is sort of like going on at the back of our minds.
These are our own personal psychological curve balls.
And then there's life curve balls.
You're unemployed.
You have chronic illness.
You have a special needs child.
You're unhoused for a short period of time.
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So I'm going to use an example of a short story that I wrote, and I was working on this
story about young mothers, single mother who lived in a Chelsea hotel.
This is sort of a result of having worked in the Chelsea hotel for six years as a personal
assistant to high profile client and their partner.
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And so I had all these incredible personalities swirling around my brain, the ghost in the
Chelsea hotel, Sid Vicious, the knifing Nancy to death.
I cat sat, I walk dogs, I house sat in famous people's apartments that I won't mention.
But it was fantastic.
I did go to work early and hang out in the lobby with all these actresses walking through
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and artists who were giving the owner at the time paintings in exchange to stay in a Chelsea
hotel for free for a month.
And there were communal bathrooms upstairs.
And sometimes somebody would nod, nod off or be in a little k-hole and the police would
have to be called or someone was turning tricks.
And this, it was just a mess.
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And I loved it.
So I was trying to make that into a story.
And I just, I was having a lot of trouble.
So after a Saturday morning class at the new school, I went to Tripoli to get vegan burrito
and love my class.
I was sort of in this little blissed out state of how lucky I am to have this privilege in
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New York City.
And I looked down and someone had stolen my purse.
And my purse was my backpack and my backpack had my books, my journal, my cards, my keys,
my phone, my license.
By the time I realized this, the person had already charged a bunch of stuff.
I walked to the nearest police station.
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Believe me, they were very busy doing other things and very understaffed.
And so I was locked out of my house.
Some sort of thief had my house keys, my address.
I didn't have any money.
I couldn't use my phone.
So that was a bit of a disaster.
So what do we do as writers?
So I made the main character of my short story montage lose her bag.
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And it was in grumpy's coffee house instead.
And her background was different.
And she was a parent to a college-aid student.
But this is almost two on the nose.
But I wouldn't have that story, which one first plays in a fiction prize in normal school
magazine a number of years ago.
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But that's how we can.
It's a choice that we have to turn our agonies and our misfortunes into something that's
not happy and good, but so that we can transform it and we can control it through our characters
and our plot lines.
I had no control over having something stolen from me.
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And as you might imagine, you can extrapolate that put me back years into other things
I couldn't control that happened to my body, that happened to my life circumstances.
So with that sort of refreshed insight, I had a new perspective on the story.
And it sort of like became alive again.
There was more at stake.
There was more of me in it, but at the same time from a safe creative distance.
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Yeah, that's a great, great point there that people should listen to.
I don't think I ever shared this with you, but when I used to work for the Mosaic Company,
I was a consultant for about seven, almost eight years, I think.
And I started writing a story.
And the story was a fictional story based on my life.
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And at that time I was traveling 100% for work.
First I was in Detroit for about 10 months and then I was in Houston for two and a half
years and I'm traveling all these places, San Francisco for six months, all over the
place.
And I had all these friends and things kind of going on.
I said, why not just make a character?
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So it reminded me a lot of that, but people can get into their own lives, create stories
about what they're doing, write it down, whether it's fictional or non-fictional, and have
fun with it.
What do you think?
Yeah, I definitely agree with that.
And I've always been sort of closeted and being jealous of my students.
And when I hear other people, they're like, oh, I just wrote this book for fun.
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And I'm agonizing here about something for the well better half of a decade of trying
to wrap this first novel up.
So I think that this also is concept ties directly back to the seed of the undercover
and how we have divided selves.
And I really encourage whomever is interested to try their hand at the craft of writing
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because you can get a lot out without it being creative non-fiction, without it being memoir,
without naming names.
You can have composite characters like Anne Lamarczak if people are worried what you're
going to write about them.
They should have treated you better.
So all of this I find therapeutic when coupled with the hard work that goes along with writing
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revising.
And listen, you've been a professor, right?
A writer and now an entrepreneur with your business.
What made you decide to launch Amanda Wright's edits and consults?
And more importantly, how do you balance helping others with their writing while you're working
on your own book?
For me, and this is when I get a little woo-woo, is it's all about energy and balance.
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Certain people can always been envious of this, can teach five classes of comp one every
semester for five or seven years or whatever.
However long it takes to get the next salary bump up and teach hundreds of students and
grade hundreds of papers and we're not paid for the grading.
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We're not paid for the prepping.
I can't do that.
I wanted to do that.
I was sort of encouraged to do that or explicitly encouraged to do that and I couldn't do that.
That's not how I'm wired, unfortunately or fortunately.
What I did was just stay with two or three classes at a time and then I went down to
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two and then COVID hit.
And then my mental health was really suffering because what I wanted to accomplish with my
students and the realities of how many students I had, how big the classes were, the fact
that I wasn't saving any money, it became impossible.
And if I was in my 20s or 30s, I would have willingly and happily drank the Kool-Aid and
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climbed my way up that academic I retower.
But in my late 40s, I didn't have the energy to do that and I also was sort of energized
in feeling this is wrong and I will not be taken advantage of.
And it just got to a point where my resentments were the overarching thing, not my joy, not
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my ability to help my students.
So what I started doing as an experiment is what would happen if I took individual clients
and charged them a whole lot more and worked with them one-on-one with the same skill and
experience and attention.
It works.
I mean, it's hit and miss sometimes as far as clients come and go.
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I have steady clients.
I have big projects.
I have little projects.
But I think that especially for something as subjective as the creative arts and education,
that everybody is different.
And I just learned sort of the hard way when my body just completely shut down and it really
affected my mental health.
And at the time, I didn't have a lot of responsibilities outside of my rent and my friends and kids
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keeping up with classes and it was just still way too much for me.
So I think for me or I know for me that I was able to charge more per student one at
a time.
The most important thing for me was decreasing stress.
And I love absolutely every moment of what I do.
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My own boss, I've I see clients that call it an asshole tax.
If I see they're going to be a little bit more demanding, I charge them more.
I have very clear boundaries.
If I make a mistake, I'm clear about that too.
I would much rather have fewer clients that are higher paying clients than many clients
that are lower paying clients.
So out of all your projects so far, what's been the most interesting or even more meaningful
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project that you've worked on lately?
So I'm not going to answer that question directly.
Not because I'm argumentative, but because I can't answer it.
So I'm going to like give you a cop out answer and say I'm going to give you a few because
they're all so different.
So I have worked on mother of the bride speeches, a matron of honor, father of the bride speeches,
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and I really focus on storytelling and keeping the writing in their own voice.
This goes for a detective cop novel that I'm about to start working on in earnest police
procedural, I guess is what we used to call them crime fiction.
I've edited a manuscript of poems that were set in the Pacific Northwest by Native American
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writer I never met that I never talked to who's fantastic.
And he vetted me.
He screened me really hard, which was like a little annoying.
But then when I read his work, I was like, I'm privileged to work with this young man.
I have worked on, I have been working on a couple longer memoirs or creative nonfiction
for young men that have never written anything before.
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So they said that are terrible, terrible writers in their own words.
And so it's really been fun to boost them up.
Like I graduate continuing ed person of therapy.
So I really did not expect to have this sort of be my be like a creative therapist or I
don't know, somehow like midwife to these people with their creative process.
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So I can help this young man who's black and ex military and renegotiating his relationship
with addictions and relationships and maleness.
And then I can work with another woman who just lost a baby.
And it's sort of holding space if you welcome that sort of language.
But all of those different things and different genres, it's the same.
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One thing that surprised me the most was I've been working on a lot of personal statement
essays.
Which I did for hundreds by Kotat with very, very gifted teachers at John Jay every summer
and every winter break for years.
And so it's crafting the best two page double space times new Roman personal statement you
can have to get into grad school to get into Ivy League schools to get to apply for scholarships,
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grants, awards.
So a great number of my clients are either high school students applying to colleges,
people applying to masters programs for social work or literature, English education, some
students applying to PhD programs.
It's a two page document.
And there's a formula that I was sort of taught how to teach personal statement writing at
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John Jay.
And I've adapted it and sort of turned it into my own.
And it's really this scientific process.
I know it's sort of exactly what these people on the reading panels that are the judges
are looking for.
And so I ask a lot of questions and I never do the writing myself.
I'm not a ghost writer.
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I'm not helping people cheat.
They can use AI for that if they want to.
It's a lot cheaper.
But it's such a privilege.
It's so much fun to just, you know, like take somebody from I'm a really bad writer to,
oh my God, I have so much to say about my two moms and being diagnosed neurodivergent
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as a young woman of color.
And it's like I can shine the light on how special they are and how unique they are and
how they're unlike every other candidate there.
So those are just a few of the things that the different genres and styles of writing
have been working on.
And it's just, it's fun.
It's not teaching the same comp one on one class every year in and out.
That's for sure.
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Yeah.
And sometimes I think you get excited, at least from what I see and what I hear after
you get done with a client from time to time, I know you don't share everything with me,
but your excitement because you're able to use your creativity in how you work with clients.
I know you have a couple of young people that you work with on a regular basis and being
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able to help them out and you get creative with what you're doing every single week with
some of these people.
It's, it's a lot of recycled material having taught this work and it's well tested.
It's well vetted.
I've, I've adapted and changed, you know, depending on what was working, what wasn't working for
my students at John Jay.
And so I have identical twins that are from Salt Lake City and they have so much to write
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about being identical twins, being young women, being Chinese American, all this stuff going
out, being in adolescent bodies and you know, where do I differ from my twin?
One is a debater.
They both practice ballet.
So just getting to know them and their mother reached out to me because they wanted their
daughters to be more emotionally expressive and bless her heart.
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She saw that even though they were really, they are fantastic writers, that that was
a doorway.
And so I'm able to use all the author interviews with Tony Morrison, Maxine Honkengston, et
cetera, et cetera.
And I can show them little clips and I have a lot of templates and I have a lot of peer
reviews and I have enough experience to know when something's working, when I need to change
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my lesson plan.
And so it's like the perfect segue from teaching 147 students with 28 students in a class sometimes
to two.
And it's calm and I'm energized afterwards and I'm confident as I'm doing it and I'm
flexible and I'm generous.
It was just, it was the perfect transition from what I was doing previously.
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And everybody's benefiting from it.
Yeah, that's great stuff there.
Listen, I'm very proud of you and the work that you're doing.
And I know that people that you're helping have also benefited from the magic that you
bring.
Let's talk about writing as a tool for resilience.
Do you think writing itself could be resilience or is it more like controlled chaos and challenging
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everything life throws at you into something productive?
I want to break that down a little bit into my core belief system that other people might
not believe with, but I really push against the cult of busyness and the hustle culture
and this need to be productive, blocking out periods of time.
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And I've been dealing with a chronic illness, I guess, for two and a half months now.
And I really think especially as artists, we have to lean into listening to our energy
levels and the constraints of our bodies at times or the needs of others who are depending
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on us.
And so I think of course writing, writing does build resilience.
I think it is chaotic.
I don't think there's such a thing as controlled chaos.
It's by definition, chaos is chaotic.
But I don't really subscribe and I used to the channeling everything life throws at you
into something productive.
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I think that that's too much pressure to put on an experienced writer, a beginning writer,
a human being.
So I think that the key is slowing down.
I'm very into sleeping as much as I can, trying to speak more slowly, reading for pleasure
at a slower rate.
I don't do to-do lists like I used to anymore.
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I think that, and it's not like cheesy, oh, appreciating the moment.
It's a necessity for my mental and physical health right now.
So I think that the real secret of resilience is easing up the pressure and perfectionism
and the inner critic that we all put on ourselves.
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Great.
Thank you.
And when you're working with clients, how do you help them navigate their challenges?
I'm talking about writer's block, the imposter syndrome, or the dreaded blank page.
So again, I'm going to push against this stereotype of the writer.
I don't personally believe that there's writer's block.
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I believe that we are afraid of certain things.
We may not be ready to write about certain things.
Maybe we need a little bit more therapy.
Maybe we need a little bit more distance because something just happened to us.
If your fingers work, you can hold the pen, you can type on a keyboard.
There's no such thing as writer's block.
Imposter syndrome is for real, yo.
That is killer.
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That is something that...
Preach.
Like 15-year-olds have, 18-year-olds have, 50-year-olds have, 80-year-olds have.
That we...
I can work on with my clients because I experienced that from the moment I walked into a classroom
and the moment before I kept walking into classrooms for 10 years, it gets your juices
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flowing but you don't want to be emotionally dismantled by it.
So that we can work with, we can unpack that.
But no such thing as writer's block.
I tend to work more with clients and students on procrastination, why are we procrastinating,
why are we putting it off?
Perfectionism.
We want it to be perfect.
So there you go, hand in hand.
Want it to be perfect so it'll never be perfect, so I'll put it off.
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Or we put it off until the very last minute and then has to be perfect and it's just not
going to be perfect the last minute either.
So those are sort of, I don't really believe in grit per se.
I think that grit in education is very important.
I think that grit in the creative arts can be a little bit of a handicap.
I don't believe in picking ourselves up from the bootstraps.
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I think that whatever blockages we have needs to be broken down psychologically and with
a lot of compassion and empathy.
Yeah, and I think with people with different personalities, look for me for example, certain
parts of my life grit work.
And I used to be a high school coach, my coach football, basketball, girls fast pitch, soft
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ball and grit worked.
I mean, helped me win championships, right?
But then as a PhD student, right in my dissertation, I had imposter syndrome.
I was like, do I deserve this?
Should I have my PhD?
And that's family stuff.
That's intergenerational trauma.
Oh my God.
That is, you know, race, class, gender.
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That is, do I deserve this?
Oh yeah.
I mean, my father had his doctorate and, you know, he was always with me, but it was still
kind of scary.
If I didn't have Amanda with me to help me through this, and then my chair Jody, I know
Jody listens.
Thank you Jody so much for helping me get through my imposter syndrome.
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I'm better for it.
I mean, I think there is such a thing as like fake it till you make it and you pretend to
be it and you become it.
So I think we just all have to try out a lot of different tactics to see what works best
for us.
Yeah.
Creative writing classes must have been full of surprises.
Can you share a moment where a student's work or experience taught you something about
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resilience?
Yes.
So this started out being like one of my first failures in the classroom and, you know, this
talking about imposter syndrome.
So my very first day, I was hired 24 hours before someone, they needed to fill this slot
of literature and Valerie hired me, one of my very good friends.
(31:29):
Valerie.
Interviewed me over the phone.
24 hours later, I was standing in front of 38 college upperclassmen teaching literature
and I couldn't choose any of the texts.
So I thought I was doing amazingly well.
I felt like I was like channeling like the positive energy and spirit of my dead mother,
who was a masterful teacher, especially with that age group.
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And all of a sudden I have to teach Bartleby the Scrivener by Melville.
A very long short story about nothing, about not a lot of happens.
Like there's this guy who works in a law firm and he decides he doesn't want to work anymore.
So the story is sort of about now it's a year since I read or taught this.
But this guy doesn't want to do any work and the people that he works for are trying to
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figure out why not, but they're also trying to figure out why you won't go home, why he's
spending nights in the office, why he's eating weird things and losing weight.
Like, you know, they try to fire him and his refrain is I prefer not to.
So when they're like, why are you working so late?
I prefer not.
Why don't you tell us why you're working so late?
I prefer not to.
Well, this brief is due by 10 a.m. tomorrow.
(32:36):
Are you sure you can get that done?
Well, I prefer not to.
So everything was I prefer not to.
It's not my favorite short story to teach by far, but I was doing an okay job for a
beginning teacher.
And then I got this long email from one of my students saying how he hated the class,
he hated the text.
Why the hell was he supposed to read this and what did that have to do with college
(32:58):
education, blah, blah, blah.
So I was at home with a girlfriend who was also an English professor.
She's trying to calm me down.
I'm hyperventilating.
So she gave me really good advice, which was make him stay after class or invite him to
your office hour and make sure it's private and just talk to him about it.
Everybody is a keyboard warrior.
(33:19):
They hide behind their keyboards.
So I did that.
My heart was beating into my throat and he just sort of opened up about he was in the
army reserves and so, you know, he was training every weekend and he had two part-time jobs
and he is the caretaker for his grandmother who had Alzheimer's, just like all this stuff
that was going on.
And so I also stuck up for myself and I was like, you know what, when I was in school,
(33:43):
I had to take classes in biology and algebra and I had to do a lot of stuff that I didn't
want to do.
You just have to, I said, would you say to your sergeant, I prefer not to.
And I was like, it's kind of funny that you're basically telling me what Bartleby was saying,
like, I prefer not to.
And so we just sort of like laughed about it because even so I'd call him Bartleby like
(34:04):
from then on.
And so it turned out from like that to he just kept taking my classes.
He took other literature.
Clay took my blacklit class.
He took my women's lit class.
He took the intro to creative writing.
And you know, we're LinkedIn acquaintances at this point.
So he let me know when he was invited to ring the bell for the stock exchange one day for
(34:27):
Veterans Day or something like that.
So it's about resilience.
It's about humor.
It's about turning something negative, I suppose, into something positive.
But it's really, again, about slowing down and not jumping to conclusions about the
other.
Yeah, listen, thanks for sharing your story, Amanda.
(34:47):
It's incredible how you turned your life's toughest moments into opportunities and help
others and tell just amazing stories.
Thank you.
Thank you for asking.
You're welcome.
And for anyone looking for help with their writing from essays to novels, et cetera, all
the many things that Amanda mentioned, visit www.amandawritesconsults.com.
(35:11):
Yes, that's plural in terms of rights, consults.
Again, it's www.amandawritesconsults.com.
Trust me, she'll change the way you think about writing and maybe some commas in there.
Semi-colons.
That's a semi-colon.
I'm a semi-colon wisp.
(35:33):
And don't hesitate if you just want to reach out to me and schedule a five-minute call
to see if we could be the right match or if you're curious or anything like that.
Yeah.
Join us next week for another episode of Bridging Worlds.
Until then, remember, resilience is just editing's life's rough draft.
Keep building your story.
(35:54):
Bye, everybody.
Bye.
Thanks for watching.
Get ready to bridge worlds and elevate your understanding of growth, resilience, and the
(00:24):
power of connection.
Welcome to episode 6, Resilience Through the Written Word.
Welcome back to Bridget World.
I'm Malcolm, your co-host joined by my lovely wife Amanda, the award-winning short story
writer, former professor, thriving entrepreneur, and the only person who can proofread me missentence.
(00:45):
Thank you, question mark.
Today we're diving into resilience.
How Amanda's life experiences shaped her journey and how she's helping others through
her business.
Amanda writes, edits, and consults wonderful business.
She also happens to be, of course, my lovely wife.
What a coincidence.
(01:07):
Before we jump in, let's take a moment to remind everyone about the heart of Bridging
Worlds.
This podcast is about bringing Amanda's world and my world together, creating a space where
we explore personal and professional growth with our listeners.
Whether we're discussing resilience, leadership, storytelling, we want to connect with the
(01:29):
moments that matter in your life and work.
We're here to bridge the gap between the personal and professional, helping you navigate both
with a little insight, inspiration, and maybe a laugh or two.
Absolutely.
Don't forget to visit us at www.BridgingWorldsPodcast.com to share your thoughts and ideas.
(01:54):
Amanda, are you ready to talk about resilience, writing, and maybe your undercover FBI factory
farm story?
Always.
Let's talk about Amanda's journey.
Your upcoming novel about the FBI infiltrating a factory farm.
Seriously, where did this idea come from?
Was there any emotional aha moment that inspired it?
(02:18):
There were two articles that I read that made me think that some of my obsessions, the themes
and the subjects that I always became obsessed with going down that rabbit hole could be
turned into an actual novel length project that could not be easily categorized into
(02:38):
a genre.
One of the articles was in Harper's, and the other one was in the New Yorker.
One of them was an expose of an undercover animal rights activist that infiltrated a
poultry farm and described in gross detail what the chickens, what their life was like,
(03:01):
their brief life, the hormones, the fact that they couldn't stand up in their cage or turn
around.
They were sleeping in their feces.
They were deformed.
They were pumped through of chemicals, which kids in cafeterias were eating, the eggs that
came from these animals that were pumped through.
I was always involved in animal rights activism and ethical treatment of animals.
(03:26):
I've always been a vegetarian, which I discovered wasn't quite enough a lot of the time.
So the expose really sort of opened my eyes to factory farming.
And then there was another article, and it was detailing an FBI agent or the equivalent
of what the UK has as an FBI agent.
(03:49):
They used to, and we used to send our FBI agents out for months of not years.
So that was called deep cover.
And what would happen, as you might imagine, is that close personal ties form between the
undercover agents and the domestic terrorists whom they're trying to infiltrate.
So there was this one undercover operative who had a family, wife, kids, went undercover
(04:14):
for months, fell in love, started another family undercover with a wife and a child.
And so it's really about masks, and it's really about the different personas that we have
and how we categorize the different sides of ourselves to survive, whether it's a result
of dealing with trauma, or if you're code switching, or if you have to protect yourself
(04:39):
from micro or macro aggressions at work.
So it was sort of the perfect melding of animal rights of exposing the atrocities of factory
farms and in creatively dealing with my own fractured self.
I love you talking about the FBI.
As you know, I'm obsessed with FBI CIA shows.
(05:03):
One of my favorite ones was the Gangs of London, which I watched, I guess it was two seasons
of it so far.
On AMC Plus, we got a free week through Prime, and we just binged on that show.
There are so many undercover TV shows and series out right now, which I think is extremely
(05:26):
interesting, this plays in time politically, how the theme keeps coming up, having to or
needing to pretend that you're someone that you're not until that pretending becomes real.
Yeah.
And I know someone who lived that double life too.
I know that that's real.
(05:47):
He had two families, and it shocked me that he was living this life for so long.
And when I first met you and you were sharing about this book, I was so into it, I'm like,
oh my God, I have to read this.
And not only that, this has to be turned into a show on Apple TV Plus or HBO or something.
(06:10):
Max, excuse me.
Well, that's the fantasy of being a writer.
It's no surprise that there are no movies, or there aren't a high number of movies made
about writers because it's so freaking boring.
We sit there and we think and we type and we pull out our hair and we make more coffee
and we pet our cats.
So at the early parts of conceptualizing a book, starting a book, starting and stopping,
(06:34):
I think that it's important for people from the very get-go to practice their elevator
pitch to have one sentence ready for cocktail party conversations, for over the Thanksgiving
dinner table, because I think that if you are literate, you are a writer.
(06:55):
I think that one needs to create and practice this elevator pitch so you can say it in your
sleep or when you're distracted or when there's a lot of noise going on around you.
I think that it's great.
Why are you writing in the first place?
It's because you have an active imagination.
So who would be your ideal main character?
(07:17):
Like who would I want to play Bobby?
And you know who I want to play Bobby?
Right.
I know Zach.
Mr. Phoenix.
Yes, Joaquin.
So, and then I have Joaquin's real partner in mind for the love interest.
And I've been saving photographs for years and years that would be like a perfect, maybe
(07:39):
a perfect photograph for my book cover.
I've been through countless titles, the first one was Agent Provocateur, which I soon found
out is like a high priced lingerie line for escorts and The Other Woman.
And then I wanted to call it Deep Cover, which was like a film with Wesley Snipes in it or
(08:02):
something.
That was a couple of Deep Covers.
Yeah.
So very prevalent theme.
So, and then I just stripped it down to The Undercovers, which just is very basic.
And so I think it's fun to sort of daydream about this stuff.
And I think it is good for me to print my pages out and to buy them, to the whole punch
(08:23):
them and to buy them in like a three ring folder that I got at Staples.
So it became a real thing and to even carry it around with me.
So I would edit it everywhere.
I'd edit it in the adjunct room at work, I'd edit it on the train.
So I think that your passion and your obsession needs to be made a real thing as soon as possible.
(08:48):
Something you can reference easily, something that makes you pedigree to call yourself a
writer.
I never want my clients or students to apologize to start out anything with, oh, but I'm not
a writer.
Oh, but I'm not a good writer.
Those are all lies that we tell ourselves because of fear.
So that's sort of how I leaned into writing my book.
(09:10):
Yeah.
Some of my favorite times in watching you with your book is back in your old apartment in
Harlem and how you would have stuff scattered all over the floor.
And it was organized in your mind.
I kind of looked at it like, oh my God, what is going on here?
But it was your book.
It was what you passionate.
Yeah.
I really believe in it.
(09:30):
I'm a dual learner and teacher, so I would storyboard, which is more for TV film, but
I would print out my entire novel when it was like a big, big edition revision.
And then one of the biggest overhauls that I did was I completely changed the order of
the chapters.
So I literally like rearranged the chapters on my living room floor in Harlem and then
(09:54):
put them back into the three ring binder in absolutely totally completely different order
than they had started out.
Yeah.
I love that.
I love that.
Amanda, how do you channel life's curve balls into creative storytelling?
Well, curve balls are nonstop, right?
So they're nonstop when they're happening to us.
(10:15):
So they really should be nonstop in fiction as well.
Fiction is not autobiographical, but there is always going to be the reader that projects
that onto the woman, especially the woman storyteller.
So I think that for women or people of color specifically, it's a little bit trickier to
navigate the waters of, you know, like I've been in poetry readings where someone has
(10:37):
raised his hand and sort of demanded of the female poet, you know, does your husband know
that you're writing about sex?
Does your husband approve?
My characters are divinely flawed, as we all are.
The main character, the female main character is what we used to call an unreliable main
(10:58):
character, an unlikable, which is mainly prescribed to women, female characters.
And so all of this is sort of like going on at the back of our minds.
These are our own personal psychological curve balls.
And then there's life curve balls.
You're unemployed.
You have chronic illness.
You have a special needs child.
You're unhoused for a short period of time.
(11:22):
So I'm going to use an example of a short story that I wrote, and I was working on this
story about young mothers, single mother who lived in a Chelsea hotel.
This is sort of a result of having worked in the Chelsea hotel for six years as a personal
assistant to high profile client and their partner.
(11:43):
And so I had all these incredible personalities swirling around my brain, the ghost in the
Chelsea hotel, Sid Vicious, the knifing Nancy to death.
I cat sat, I walk dogs, I house sat in famous people's apartments that I won't mention.
But it was fantastic.
I did go to work early and hang out in the lobby with all these actresses walking through
(12:06):
and artists who were giving the owner at the time paintings in exchange to stay in a Chelsea
hotel for free for a month.
And there were communal bathrooms upstairs.
And sometimes somebody would nod, nod off or be in a little k-hole and the police would
have to be called or someone was turning tricks.
And this, it was just a mess.
(12:27):
And I loved it.
So I was trying to make that into a story.
And I just, I was having a lot of trouble.
So after a Saturday morning class at the new school, I went to Tripoli to get vegan burrito
and love my class.
I was sort of in this little blissed out state of how lucky I am to have this privilege in
(12:48):
New York City.
And I looked down and someone had stolen my purse.
And my purse was my backpack and my backpack had my books, my journal, my cards, my keys,
my phone, my license.
By the time I realized this, the person had already charged a bunch of stuff.
I walked to the nearest police station.
(13:08):
Believe me, they were very busy doing other things and very understaffed.
And so I was locked out of my house.
Some sort of thief had my house keys, my address.
I didn't have any money.
I couldn't use my phone.
So that was a bit of a disaster.
So what do we do as writers?
So I made the main character of my short story montage lose her bag.
(13:30):
And it was in grumpy's coffee house instead.
And her background was different.
And she was a parent to a college-aid student.
But this is almost two on the nose.
But I wouldn't have that story, which one first plays in a fiction prize in normal school
magazine a number of years ago.
(13:50):
But that's how we can.
It's a choice that we have to turn our agonies and our misfortunes into something that's
not happy and good, but so that we can transform it and we can control it through our characters
and our plot lines.
I had no control over having something stolen from me.
(14:12):
And as you might imagine, you can extrapolate that put me back years into other things
I couldn't control that happened to my body, that happened to my life circumstances.
So with that sort of refreshed insight, I had a new perspective on the story.
And it sort of like became alive again.
There was more at stake.
There was more of me in it, but at the same time from a safe creative distance.
(14:37):
Yeah, that's a great, great point there that people should listen to.
I don't think I ever shared this with you, but when I used to work for the Mosaic Company,
I was a consultant for about seven, almost eight years, I think.
And I started writing a story.
And the story was a fictional story based on my life.
(14:59):
And at that time I was traveling 100% for work.
First I was in Detroit for about 10 months and then I was in Houston for two and a half
years and I'm traveling all these places, San Francisco for six months, all over the
place.
And I had all these friends and things kind of going on.
I said, why not just make a character?
(15:22):
So it reminded me a lot of that, but people can get into their own lives, create stories
about what they're doing, write it down, whether it's fictional or non-fictional, and have
fun with it.
What do you think?
Yeah, I definitely agree with that.
And I've always been sort of closeted and being jealous of my students.
And when I hear other people, they're like, oh, I just wrote this book for fun.
(15:44):
And I'm agonizing here about something for the well better half of a decade of trying
to wrap this first novel up.
So I think that this also is concept ties directly back to the seed of the undercover
and how we have divided selves.
And I really encourage whomever is interested to try their hand at the craft of writing
(16:07):
because you can get a lot out without it being creative non-fiction, without it being memoir,
without naming names.
You can have composite characters like Anne Lamarczak if people are worried what you're
going to write about them.
They should have treated you better.
So all of this I find therapeutic when coupled with the hard work that goes along with writing
(16:30):
revising.
And listen, you've been a professor, right?
A writer and now an entrepreneur with your business.
What made you decide to launch Amanda Wright's edits and consults?
And more importantly, how do you balance helping others with their writing while you're working
on your own book?
For me, and this is when I get a little woo-woo, is it's all about energy and balance.
(16:56):
Certain people can always been envious of this, can teach five classes of comp one every
semester for five or seven years or whatever.
However long it takes to get the next salary bump up and teach hundreds of students and
grade hundreds of papers and we're not paid for the grading.
(17:16):
We're not paid for the prepping.
I can't do that.
I wanted to do that.
I was sort of encouraged to do that or explicitly encouraged to do that and I couldn't do that.
That's not how I'm wired, unfortunately or fortunately.
What I did was just stay with two or three classes at a time and then I went down to
(17:36):
two and then COVID hit.
And then my mental health was really suffering because what I wanted to accomplish with my
students and the realities of how many students I had, how big the classes were, the fact
that I wasn't saving any money, it became impossible.
And if I was in my 20s or 30s, I would have willingly and happily drank the Kool-Aid and
(18:00):
climbed my way up that academic I retower.
But in my late 40s, I didn't have the energy to do that and I also was sort of energized
in feeling this is wrong and I will not be taken advantage of.
And it just got to a point where my resentments were the overarching thing, not my joy, not
(18:21):
my ability to help my students.
So what I started doing as an experiment is what would happen if I took individual clients
and charged them a whole lot more and worked with them one-on-one with the same skill and
experience and attention.
It works.
I mean, it's hit and miss sometimes as far as clients come and go.
(18:43):
I have steady clients.
I have big projects.
I have little projects.
But I think that especially for something as subjective as the creative arts and education,
that everybody is different.
And I just learned sort of the hard way when my body just completely shut down and it really
affected my mental health.
And at the time, I didn't have a lot of responsibilities outside of my rent and my friends and kids
(19:08):
keeping up with classes and it was just still way too much for me.
So I think for me or I know for me that I was able to charge more per student one at
a time.
The most important thing for me was decreasing stress.
And I love absolutely every moment of what I do.
(19:28):
My own boss, I've I see clients that call it an asshole tax.
If I see they're going to be a little bit more demanding, I charge them more.
I have very clear boundaries.
If I make a mistake, I'm clear about that too.
I would much rather have fewer clients that are higher paying clients than many clients
that are lower paying clients.
So out of all your projects so far, what's been the most interesting or even more meaningful
(19:52):
project that you've worked on lately?
So I'm not going to answer that question directly.
Not because I'm argumentative, but because I can't answer it.
So I'm going to like give you a cop out answer and say I'm going to give you a few because
they're all so different.
So I have worked on mother of the bride speeches, a matron of honor, father of the bride speeches,
(20:16):
and I really focus on storytelling and keeping the writing in their own voice.
This goes for a detective cop novel that I'm about to start working on in earnest police
procedural, I guess is what we used to call them crime fiction.
I've edited a manuscript of poems that were set in the Pacific Northwest by Native American
(20:39):
writer I never met that I never talked to who's fantastic.
And he vetted me.
He screened me really hard, which was like a little annoying.
But then when I read his work, I was like, I'm privileged to work with this young man.
I have worked on, I have been working on a couple longer memoirs or creative nonfiction
for young men that have never written anything before.
(21:03):
So they said that are terrible, terrible writers in their own words.
And so it's really been fun to boost them up.
Like I graduate continuing ed person of therapy.
So I really did not expect to have this sort of be my be like a creative therapist or I
don't know, somehow like midwife to these people with their creative process.
(21:26):
So I can help this young man who's black and ex military and renegotiating his relationship
with addictions and relationships and maleness.
And then I can work with another woman who just lost a baby.
And it's sort of holding space if you welcome that sort of language.
But all of those different things and different genres, it's the same.
(21:50):
One thing that surprised me the most was I've been working on a lot of personal statement
essays.
Which I did for hundreds by Kotat with very, very gifted teachers at John Jay every summer
and every winter break for years.
And so it's crafting the best two page double space times new Roman personal statement you
can have to get into grad school to get into Ivy League schools to get to apply for scholarships,
(22:15):
grants, awards.
So a great number of my clients are either high school students applying to colleges,
people applying to masters programs for social work or literature, English education, some
students applying to PhD programs.
It's a two page document.
And there's a formula that I was sort of taught how to teach personal statement writing at
(22:39):
John Jay.
And I've adapted it and sort of turned it into my own.
And it's really this scientific process.
I know it's sort of exactly what these people on the reading panels that are the judges
are looking for.
And so I ask a lot of questions and I never do the writing myself.
I'm not a ghost writer.
(22:59):
I'm not helping people cheat.
They can use AI for that if they want to.
It's a lot cheaper.
But it's such a privilege.
It's so much fun to just, you know, like take somebody from I'm a really bad writer to,
oh my God, I have so much to say about my two moms and being diagnosed neurodivergent
(23:19):
as a young woman of color.
And it's like I can shine the light on how special they are and how unique they are and
how they're unlike every other candidate there.
So those are just a few of the things that the different genres and styles of writing
have been working on.
And it's just, it's fun.
It's not teaching the same comp one on one class every year in and out.
That's for sure.
(23:40):
Yeah.
And sometimes I think you get excited, at least from what I see and what I hear after
you get done with a client from time to time, I know you don't share everything with me,
but your excitement because you're able to use your creativity in how you work with clients.
I know you have a couple of young people that you work with on a regular basis and being
(24:02):
able to help them out and you get creative with what you're doing every single week with
some of these people.
It's, it's a lot of recycled material having taught this work and it's well tested.
It's well vetted.
I've, I've adapted and changed, you know, depending on what was working, what wasn't working for
my students at John Jay.
And so I have identical twins that are from Salt Lake City and they have so much to write
(24:25):
about being identical twins, being young women, being Chinese American, all this stuff going
out, being in adolescent bodies and you know, where do I differ from my twin?
One is a debater.
They both practice ballet.
So just getting to know them and their mother reached out to me because they wanted their
daughters to be more emotionally expressive and bless her heart.
(24:49):
She saw that even though they were really, they are fantastic writers, that that was
a doorway.
And so I'm able to use all the author interviews with Tony Morrison, Maxine Honkengston, et
cetera, et cetera.
And I can show them little clips and I have a lot of templates and I have a lot of peer
reviews and I have enough experience to know when something's working, when I need to change
(25:12):
my lesson plan.
And so it's like the perfect segue from teaching 147 students with 28 students in a class sometimes
to two.
And it's calm and I'm energized afterwards and I'm confident as I'm doing it and I'm
flexible and I'm generous.
It was just, it was the perfect transition from what I was doing previously.
(25:37):
And everybody's benefiting from it.
Yeah, that's great stuff there.
Listen, I'm very proud of you and the work that you're doing.
And I know that people that you're helping have also benefited from the magic that you
bring.
Let's talk about writing as a tool for resilience.
Do you think writing itself could be resilience or is it more like controlled chaos and challenging
(26:01):
everything life throws at you into something productive?
I want to break that down a little bit into my core belief system that other people might
not believe with, but I really push against the cult of busyness and the hustle culture
and this need to be productive, blocking out periods of time.
(26:25):
And I've been dealing with a chronic illness, I guess, for two and a half months now.
And I really think especially as artists, we have to lean into listening to our energy
levels and the constraints of our bodies at times or the needs of others who are depending
(26:45):
on us.
And so I think of course writing, writing does build resilience.
I think it is chaotic.
I don't think there's such a thing as controlled chaos.
It's by definition, chaos is chaotic.
But I don't really subscribe and I used to the channeling everything life throws at you
into something productive.
(27:05):
I think that that's too much pressure to put on an experienced writer, a beginning writer,
a human being.
So I think that the key is slowing down.
I'm very into sleeping as much as I can, trying to speak more slowly, reading for pleasure
at a slower rate.
I don't do to-do lists like I used to anymore.
(27:28):
I think that, and it's not like cheesy, oh, appreciating the moment.
It's a necessity for my mental and physical health right now.
So I think that the real secret of resilience is easing up the pressure and perfectionism
and the inner critic that we all put on ourselves.
(27:49):
Great.
Thank you.
And when you're working with clients, how do you help them navigate their challenges?
I'm talking about writer's block, the imposter syndrome, or the dreaded blank page.
So again, I'm going to push against this stereotype of the writer.
I don't personally believe that there's writer's block.
(28:10):
I believe that we are afraid of certain things.
We may not be ready to write about certain things.
Maybe we need a little bit more therapy.
Maybe we need a little bit more distance because something just happened to us.
If your fingers work, you can hold the pen, you can type on a keyboard.
There's no such thing as writer's block.
Imposter syndrome is for real, yo.
That is killer.
(28:30):
That is something that...
Preach.
Like 15-year-olds have, 18-year-olds have, 50-year-olds have, 80-year-olds have.
That we...
I can work on with my clients because I experienced that from the moment I walked into a classroom
and the moment before I kept walking into classrooms for 10 years, it gets your juices
(28:51):
flowing but you don't want to be emotionally dismantled by it.
So that we can work with, we can unpack that.
But no such thing as writer's block.
I tend to work more with clients and students on procrastination, why are we procrastinating,
why are we putting it off?
Perfectionism.
We want it to be perfect.
So there you go, hand in hand.
Want it to be perfect so it'll never be perfect, so I'll put it off.
(29:14):
Or we put it off until the very last minute and then has to be perfect and it's just not
going to be perfect the last minute either.
So those are sort of, I don't really believe in grit per se.
I think that grit in education is very important.
I think that grit in the creative arts can be a little bit of a handicap.
I don't believe in picking ourselves up from the bootstraps.
(29:35):
I think that whatever blockages we have needs to be broken down psychologically and with
a lot of compassion and empathy.
Yeah, and I think with people with different personalities, look for me for example, certain
parts of my life grit work.
And I used to be a high school coach, my coach football, basketball, girls fast pitch, soft
(29:58):
ball and grit worked.
I mean, helped me win championships, right?
But then as a PhD student, right in my dissertation, I had imposter syndrome.
I was like, do I deserve this?
Should I have my PhD?
And that's family stuff.
That's intergenerational trauma.
Oh my God.
That is, you know, race, class, gender.
(30:21):
That is, do I deserve this?
Oh yeah.
I mean, my father had his doctorate and, you know, he was always with me, but it was still
kind of scary.
If I didn't have Amanda with me to help me through this, and then my chair Jody, I know
Jody listens.
Thank you Jody so much for helping me get through my imposter syndrome.
(30:43):
I'm better for it.
I mean, I think there is such a thing as like fake it till you make it and you pretend to
be it and you become it.
So I think we just all have to try out a lot of different tactics to see what works best
for us.
Yeah.
Creative writing classes must have been full of surprises.
Can you share a moment where a student's work or experience taught you something about
(31:07):
resilience?
Yes.
So this started out being like one of my first failures in the classroom and, you know, this
talking about imposter syndrome.
So my very first day, I was hired 24 hours before someone, they needed to fill this slot
of literature and Valerie hired me, one of my very good friends.
(31:29):
Valerie.
Interviewed me over the phone.
24 hours later, I was standing in front of 38 college upperclassmen teaching literature
and I couldn't choose any of the texts.
So I thought I was doing amazingly well.
I felt like I was like channeling like the positive energy and spirit of my dead mother,
who was a masterful teacher, especially with that age group.
(31:50):
And all of a sudden I have to teach Bartleby the Scrivener by Melville.
A very long short story about nothing, about not a lot of happens.
Like there's this guy who works in a law firm and he decides he doesn't want to work anymore.
So the story is sort of about now it's a year since I read or taught this.
But this guy doesn't want to do any work and the people that he works for are trying to
(32:14):
figure out why not, but they're also trying to figure out why you won't go home, why he's
spending nights in the office, why he's eating weird things and losing weight.
Like, you know, they try to fire him and his refrain is I prefer not to.
So when they're like, why are you working so late?
I prefer not.
Why don't you tell us why you're working so late?
I prefer not to.
Well, this brief is due by 10 a.m. tomorrow.
(32:36):
Are you sure you can get that done?
Well, I prefer not to.
So everything was I prefer not to.
It's not my favorite short story to teach by far, but I was doing an okay job for a
beginning teacher.
And then I got this long email from one of my students saying how he hated the class,
he hated the text.
Why the hell was he supposed to read this and what did that have to do with college
(32:58):
education, blah, blah, blah.
So I was at home with a girlfriend who was also an English professor.
She's trying to calm me down.
I'm hyperventilating.
So she gave me really good advice, which was make him stay after class or invite him to
your office hour and make sure it's private and just talk to him about it.
Everybody is a keyboard warrior.
(33:19):
They hide behind their keyboards.
So I did that.
My heart was beating into my throat and he just sort of opened up about he was in the
army reserves and so, you know, he was training every weekend and he had two part-time jobs
and he is the caretaker for his grandmother who had Alzheimer's, just like all this stuff
that was going on.
And so I also stuck up for myself and I was like, you know what, when I was in school,
(33:43):
I had to take classes in biology and algebra and I had to do a lot of stuff that I didn't
want to do.
You just have to, I said, would you say to your sergeant, I prefer not to.
And I was like, it's kind of funny that you're basically telling me what Bartleby was saying,
like, I prefer not to.
And so we just sort of like laughed about it because even so I'd call him Bartleby like
(34:04):
from then on.
And so it turned out from like that to he just kept taking my classes.
He took other literature.
Clay took my blacklit class.
He took my women's lit class.
He took the intro to creative writing.
And you know, we're LinkedIn acquaintances at this point.
So he let me know when he was invited to ring the bell for the stock exchange one day for
(34:27):
Veterans Day or something like that.
So it's about resilience.
It's about humor.
It's about turning something negative, I suppose, into something positive.
But it's really, again, about slowing down and not jumping to conclusions about the
other.
Yeah, listen, thanks for sharing your story, Amanda.
(34:47):
It's incredible how you turned your life's toughest moments into opportunities and help
others and tell just amazing stories.
Thank you.
Thank you for asking.
You're welcome.
And for anyone looking for help with their writing from essays to novels, et cetera, all
the many things that Amanda mentioned, visit www.amandawritesconsults.com.
(35:11):
Yes, that's plural in terms of rights, consults.
Again, it's www.amandawritesconsults.com.
Trust me, she'll change the way you think about writing and maybe some commas in there.
Semi-colons.
That's a semi-colon.
I'm a semi-colon wisp.
(35:33):
And don't hesitate if you just want to reach out to me and schedule a five-minute call
to see if we could be the right match or if you're curious or anything like that.
Yeah.
Join us next week for another episode of Bridging Worlds.
Until then, remember, resilience is just editing's life's rough draft.
Keep building your story.
(35:54):
Bye, everybody.
Bye.
Thanks for watching.
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