“Unhiding” with Dr. Kelly Flanagan

When I started this podcast in 2019, Dr. Kelly Flanagan was one of my inaugural guests, and his episode, “The Gifts of Creativity,” remains one of my favorites. Kelly has just published his first novel, The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell, and I wanted to talk to him about how that experience differed from writing nonfiction, and about the book itself. We delve into those questions and various subjects raised by the book, including how we look outside ourselves (and sometimes to our creative work) to find our worth, the value of letting out our wild sides, how the things we do for security often actually undermine us, and how Kelly sees the intersection of spirituality and creativity. As an added bonus, we have a copy of the book to give away to a listener—stay tuned to hear those details at the end.

The amount of energy that people spend trying to convince their family members that their true self is good, worthy, and acceptable—that’s all energy that’s meant to be going into creativity.  

Dr. Kelly Flanagan

Episode breakdown:

00:00 Introduction

03:34 Discussion on humanity and humility

07:18 Kelly shares parenting challenges

11:47 Meaning of true love and societal influences

15:29 Creative fulfillment vs. external validation

18:54 Creating from joy amidst struggle

22:35 Letting go of security and embracing vulnerability

26:02 Kelly references “The Matrix” on safety illusions

29:17 Creativity and spirituality intertwined

32:41 Writing fiction and personal transformation

36:58 Characters taking on their own voices

40:05 The beauty of wild creativity over control

43:26 Kelly’s experience with his novel’s unexpected twists

47:03 Announcing book giveaway details

50:48 Nancy reflects on changed interview approach

Show Links:

More about Kelly Flanagan:

Kelly Flanagan’s Website

Follow Kelly on Twitter: @drkellyflanagan or on Facebook

The Loveable Podcast (and wherever you get your podcasts)

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Nancy Norbeck [00:00:06]:
Welcome to Follow Your Curiosity, where we explore the inner workings of the creative process. I’m your host, Nancy Norbeck. When I started this podcast in 2019, Dr. Kelly Flanagan was one of my inaugural guests, and his episode, The Gifts of Creativity, remains one of my favorites. Kelly has just published his first novel, The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell, and I wanted to talk to him about how that experience differed from writing nonfiction and about the book itself. We delve into those questions and various subjects raised by the book, including how we look outside ourselves and sometimes to our creative work to find our worth, the value of letting out our wild sides, how the things we do for security often actually undermine us, and how Kelly sees the intersection of spirituality and creativity. As an added bonus, we have a copy of the book to give away to a listener. Stay tuned to hear those details at the end. I think you’ll really enjoy this very rich conversation with Dr. Kelly Flanagan.

Nancy Norbeck [00:01:09]:
Kelly, welcome back to Follow Your Curiosity.

Kelly Flanagan [00:01:12]:
Thank you for having me back, Nancy.

Nancy Norbeck [00:01:14]:
I’m I’m excited, and I’m I’m not gonna lie. I finished your book this morning.

Kelly Flanagan [00:01:19]:
You did?

Nancy Norbeck [00:01:20]:
I did. Yeah. Kelly Flanagan, you made me cry, and you did it a couple of times.

Kelly Flanagan [00:01:26]:
Well, that’s feels really good to hear. As a as a new novelist, I

Nancy Norbeck [00:01:31]:
appreciate it. Yeah. That that means you did what you were trying to do. Right?

Kelly Flanagan [00:01:35]:
Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck [00:01:36]:
So since you’ve been here before, I’m not gonna ask you how you got started writing. If people wanna find that out, they can go check out your your other episode. But I am curious to know what what convinced you that you should try to write a novel and how that experience went for you compared to the writing that you had done before?

Kelly Flanagan [00:01:59]:
Wow. Yeah. So it’s interesting that you say what convinced you to to write a novel because this is the irony. And we talked about this a little bit in our last conversation. I have in one way or another wanted to write a novel for at least 25 years, going back to graduate school. And my I was I started like a half a dozen novels back then life got busy. So I wanted to do that for 25 years. And so in the process of the current project that you just finished in the process of it evolving, the publisher, I I basically sent them a proposal for a nonfiction project, and they replied with, we think this would be better as a novel or as a fictional book.

Kelly Flanagan [00:02:45]:
And I literally said, no, you must have misunderstood me. Like, let me re propose this. I tried to convince them to let me write another nonfiction book. They came back again, and said, Well, here we think this would be better as even more so now we think this would be better as as fiction. And I said, well, talk to my agent. I said, what are they? Do we need to just they’re clearly not understanding. Do we need to pitch an entirely different concept? And Kathy is so great. She just said, well, spend a month with it and see where this goes, this idea of writing fictional story.

Kelly Flanagan [00:03:20]:
And it went some pretty amazing places, and I over the course of about 6 or 7 months, I wrote a novel. And the day after I finished the manuscript, I was out for a walk with a friend. And I and and I told them I said, I finished the the novel. And he said, so have you sent it to your agent or your editor yet? And he said, No. And I’m thinking about not sending it. Because I think I really need to write a nonfiction book right now about following your passion. And he looks at me and he goes, How can you write a nonfiction book about following your passion if you’re not following your passion for becoming a novelist? Right? And I was like, yeah, this is hard to look in the mirror if I didn’t send this one in. So I did.

Kelly Flanagan [00:04:06]:
And you you got to read the, the fruits of all that labor.

Nancy Norbeck [00:04:11]:
But how how did it feel when you when you sat down to actually play with it? I mean, was it The was it what you expected writing fiction to be, or were you constantly having to try to pull yourself out of nonfiction mode?

Kelly Flanagan [00:04:27]:
Good question. So I think part of the process for me was surrendering to the direction I’ve been going in my writing already. So, you know, my blog post and my first book, Lovable, are very story oriented. Like, there’s a story and then there’s a teaching point based on that story and pretty much alternate. By the time I published true companions, when you look in it’s a nonfiction book, but there’s at least 3 scenes where I’m just 3 whole chapters where I’m just imagining something in my one of the it’s the book starts off with me imagining joining my younger self on his wedding day and sort of telling him kind of the advice I’d have on his wedding. But then there’s a chapter in the middle of the book where I imagine my younger self doing me a particularly lonely night, and I’ll leave a dialogue about that. And the book concludes with me imagining all my lost loved ones sort of gathering together in me. And it’s like, I was, I was writing fiction within a nonfiction book in a lot of ways.

Kelly Flanagan [00:05:23]:
So, so clearly, that yearning was in me I had to sort of acknowledge that I had that learning to I needed to pursue it. I’ll tell you the biggest difference between the two, forms of writing was I feel like with writing nonfiction, you have a lot of control. Like, you’re you you have a you have a point that you’re trying to make for the reader over the course of the book, and you’re you’re sort of like engineering to get the reader to that conclusion. So it feels like it’s a lot about controlling the arc of the book, whereas with writing fiction, it was about learning to let go of control, to think that you know where the next few scenes are gonna go and then the watch the characters do something totally different, which is why for me writing fiction is x number of times more joyful than writing nonfiction. It was like I was getting I was getting to be the 1st reader in a way like, oh, my gosh, I can’t believe he did that. I didn’t see that coming. And that happened over and over again. And so one of the things that I’ve already shared with several people is that like.

Kelly Flanagan [00:06:35]:
This is transformative for me. I started to I started to realize that Mr. Brian, if I’m if I’m struggling to let my characters sort of be in control of themselves and become who they wanna be, like, how much more am I doing that in my life to my people, Like, struggling to let them have control of their own life and become who they wanna be. And so it’s been really transformative at a personal level too to to try to live the way I write, just to allow the people in my world to do and be what they wanna do and be.

Nancy Norbeck [00:07:03]:
Yeah. That is. I wrote my novel long enough ago that I don’t think that I had the clarity to see it that way, but I know, you know, for a lot of people who are writing fiction for the first time, the minute that a character does something that they didn’t expect or talks back to them or, you know, just plain says, uh-uh. Nope. Sorry. You want me to turn left? I’m going to the right, and you can deal. They think they’ve lost their minds. And so, you know, it’s a really freaky experience.

Nancy Norbeck [00:07:35]:
And I remember when it happened to me, it’s like, okay, I’m going completely nuts because I’m having an argument with this character about where he’s from, and he’s not listening to me.

Kelly Flanagan [00:07:48]:
Oh, good. Well and you’ve read the story, so I can remember that specific moment. You know? I love the way you are just articulated that. It was, and I won’t ruin no spoilers, but, Elijah is leaving his dad’s law office after having remembered that the experience he had there. And I had it plotted that he was supposed to go from there to have another sort of deep conversation with the grandparent. He’s like, I’m not going to talk to anybody. I got too much to process right now. I need to go find a quiet space and just sort this out.

Kelly Flanagan [00:08:18]:
And that’s he ends up in a park and becomes sort of a pivotal scene in the book, which I hadn’t planned at all. Mhmm. And the person who shows up in that scene, I hadn’t planned for them to show up. So, so, yeah, like, that really resonates with what what you just said. Like, I’m he I had been planning to do a totally different thing. Like, nope. Not gonna go do that.

Nancy Norbeck [00:08:40]:
Yeah. I think that that moment is when the characters really become real. You know? When they start to talk with you and talk back to you and have their own views on things, it’s like, wow. Now we’re now we’re really cooking with gas. You know? It’s like, now let’s see where this is gonna go. I always worry when, you know, when they stop talking to me, usually means that I’ve taken a break that was a little bit too long. And, you know, hi. I’m back.

Nancy Norbeck [00:09:05]:
No. Really. Come talk to me again. You

Kelly Flanagan [00:09:06]:
know? Right.

Nancy Norbeck [00:09:08]:
But but, yeah, when they start with that, they they take on a life of their own in a way that I had occasionally heard people talk about before I really started writing fiction. And then, you know, in fact, when I was in high school, I did a a paper on an author that I didn’t really care about. It was assigned right now. And I remember reading something about I wanted to do this, but my characters wanted to do that. And in my 16 year old infinite brilliance, my response was,

Kelly Flanagan [00:09:39]:
what

Nancy Norbeck [00:09:39]:
are you talking about? You’re the writer. You can make them do whatever you want. And that day that I was having that argument with that character, I was like, like, yeah. Okay. I guess you can’t actually Alright. Give me that.

Kelly Flanagan [00:09:49]:
Seems that I didn’t know everything when I was 16.

Nancy Norbeck [00:09:51]:
What were the odds? Right?

Kelly Flanagan [00:09:54]:
Right. Precisely. Yes.

Nancy Norbeck [00:09:57]:
But that, that actually brings to mind a quote that really struck me. And the interesting thing about this quote was that in in the moment when I read it, I thought, wow. I really I think there’s so much truth to that. But it felt almost not like a throwaway line, but, like, a line that was just there to be observed and move on. And then it clearly grew into something more, especially by the end of the book, where, Elijah says, I think it’s Elijah, we humans try to make things more beautiful by making them more ordered. Maybe God makes things more beautiful by letting them grow more wild.

Kelly Flanagan [00:10:39]:
Yeah. And

Nancy Norbeck [00:10:40]:
I think, you know, because I as I thought about it, as I went through the book, I thought, yeah, the order how much of order because I I am not anti order, but I wonder sometimes how much order is more about control than about peace and how much we use it to avoid letting ourselves become more wild.

Kelly Flanagan [00:11:06]:
Yes. Oh, I you you picked up on a theme that definitely, that’s not the characters don’t just do what they want to do. They also tell you more precisely what the theme is, right? You have greater clarity by the time you’re you’re done with it. And that is certainly developed into one of the themes of the book that, you know, the title of the book is The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell. So, you know, the the idea that Elijah was definitely keeping secrets for good reasons because he was trying to protect his people and trying to love them well, but also that selfish desire to be be in control of his life. Right? And to make sure it’s going the way that he wants it to go. And, and his trajectory is definitely one from beginning to recognize that his controlled life is not nearly as beautiful as a life where he’s beginning to let go and and let it be and let people be and sort of settling into the expansiveness and the beauty of that scene that you’re just described, was one where he is returning to an old banded golf course, and he remembered that the field of flowers were beautiful. But now that the course has gone wild, they’re even more beautiful.

Kelly Flanagan [00:12:21]:
And, the first time sort of in his story that he’s actually contemplating really letting go of control and letting his life grow more beautiful. So, yeah, I appreciate that you’ve you’ve put your finger on that sort of hinge and that theme.

Nancy Norbeck [00:12:36]:
Yeah. I didn’t know that it was gonna be such a a theme at the time, but I just Me either.

Kelly Flanagan [00:12:41]:
You know? As you point out.

Nancy Norbeck [00:12:43]:
Funny how that happens. Yeah. But I think I think there’s really something in that, you know, especially, like, you know, I live in New Jersey where even now, somehow they are finding more places to build on.

Kelly Flanagan [00:12:56]:
And think,

Nancy Norbeck [00:12:57]:
can we have can we have a little something that’s still green and has dandelions and, you know, thistles and all the things that we think are bad growing in it, just, you know, plus all of the stuff that’s pretty and nice. Can can we have some place that’s still like that? I mean, even the park next to my house is largely lawn.

Kelly Flanagan [00:13:18]:
You you know? Manicured.

Nancy Norbeck [00:13:19]:
It’s manicured. It’s got some areas that aren’t so much. But, you know, aside from the deer that come in to roam around a little bit, it’s it’s largely controlled.

Kelly Flanagan [00:13:30]:
It’s interesting. Yeah. You know, we were vacationing or visiting friends in Madison, Wisconsin this summer, and we observed that, like, a if the landscaping trend or like decades long cultural sort of norm, but, a lot of the lawns and landscaping around homes have like large areas of just wild flower or wild, you know, and how much we enjoyed that rather than just sort of the manicured grass everywhere. There’s a special beauty as you drive around that city that you don’t see in a lot of cities. Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck [00:14:02]:
Yeah. Yeah. No.

Kelly Flanagan [00:14:03]:
We have we have 0 grass just so you know. 0 grass. Literally don’t need a lawn anymore. We love wild things growing around their house.

Nancy Norbeck [00:14:11]:
That’s fantastic. I actually saw someone local had posted on Nextdoor maybe a month or so ago trying to explain what they were doing with their lawn, that they wanted to make it more more wild. And it was fascinating to watch that conversation, especially the comments from the neighbor across the street.

Kelly Flanagan [00:14:29]:
Oh, I bet people have strong opinions.

Nancy Norbeck [00:14:31]:
Such a good idea.

Kelly Flanagan [00:14:33]:
Yes.

Nancy Norbeck [00:14:34]:
Yeah.

Kelly Flanagan [00:14:34]:
Yes.

Nancy Norbeck [00:14:35]:
Yeah. But it it also made me think kind of, you know, of what we were just talking about, the fact that the more you try to control your creative work, the more you’re kind of forcing it to contort itself into something that it doesn’t want to be, which may even be how you get stuck and you get blocked because you’re not realizing that, no, no, it doesn’t wanna be this thing. It doesn’t doesn’t wanna be a nonfiction book, Kelly. It wants to be a novel.

Kelly Flanagan [00:15:04]:
Right. Exactly. Exactly. It’s you know? And maybe as a as a growing artist, I think so much of it is about realizing that you’re not creating the beauty. You’re creating space for it to to sort of surface or manifest. And and so you don’t have to be real order in order to make that happen. You just have to show up and sort of be a conduit. And there’s a I think that’s another one of the joys of it.

Kelly Flanagan [00:15:36]:
It’s deepening of faith that, oh, like reality is beautiful in and of itself at its foundation. And, and we can allow it to to sort of take place. We don’t have to be constantly controlling it to make it beautiful. We actually started the initiative for trying to do that. So, I definitely learned that while writing the book, and I think Elijah works that well living through the book. Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck [00:15:57]:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s a huge it’s a huge theme, and I found myself loving it, but also wrestling with, okay, it’s easy to read about a fictional character doing this, but it’s totally different to try to do it in your own life. You know? The the moment where he’s having the conversation and security comes up and the idea of clinging to security. You know, like, all of our conventional wisdom is about clinging to security. You know, you buy the house because that’s more secure. You don’t leave one job without another one because, oh, you know, the end of the world might happen, you know? And so we’re kind of trained to do that. And then when you encounter the idea that security is not something you can hang on to forever.

Kelly Flanagan [00:16:49]:
Yes.

Nancy Norbeck [00:16:49]:
And a lot of security, I think, is an illusion. But even when you realize it’s an illusion, it can still be really hard to let go of the illusion.

Kelly Flanagan [00:17:00]:
Yeah. I mean, it makes me think of I mean, makes me think of that movie, The Matrix, right? Where?

Nancy Norbeck [00:17:06]:
Oh, yeah.

Kelly Flanagan [00:17:07]:
There are characters in the movie who prefer the illusion of the stability and security and the Yeah, I guess it ties in with that idea of the wild thing. Can you think of like, maybe half of life is actually safe and half of it is totally unpredictable and vulnerable, scary and risky and dangerous and all of that? Well, if you’re trying to stay in security, you’re, like, only getting to live, like, half of life. And, there’s something really beautiful about living it all. You know, taking your taking your bumps and your bruises and pain, and living it all sort of like that being the goal rather than just the safe stuff, which is again exactly what Elijah learns to do over the course of the book.

Nancy Norbeck [00:17:54]:
Yeah. And I think, oh, I didn’t copy this quote, but there’s a there’s a moment in in the book that goes along with that conversation about security where, you know, it’s like, no, heaven is knowing that whatever happens to you, you’re gonna be okay.

Kelly Flanagan [00:18:13]:
Yes.

Nancy Norbeck [00:18:13]:
Which was just like, yeah. Yeah. I can see that. I can feel that as I read it. And yet it’s still so hard to let go of that idea that if you don’t know what’s gonna happen to you, which is crazy because you can’t ever know what’s gonna happen to you. Right?

Kelly Flanagan [00:18:31]:
That’s right. That’s right.

Nancy Norbeck [00:18:32]:
That that, you know, you’re doing something wrong, and it’s gonna kill you. It’s gonna ruin you. You know, all of these horrible, you know, nightmare monsters come up in your head. And, yeah, I mean, you can you can just feel the release of the idea of being like, whatever happens, I’m gonna be okay. You can feel it when you hear it, when you say it, when you read it, and yet it still feels so elusive.

Kelly Flanagan [00:19:02]:
As you’re sort of pinpointing that, I’m realizing how how much of that conversation is influenced by, you know, my my day job as a therapist, therapist to parents and teenagers and kids and that kind of thing. And just like, how, how much more valuable it is to develop resilience than it is to preserve safety. You know? And so and and and they’re almost mutually exclusive. Like, if we keep our kids in a perfectly safe environment where they never go through hardship, never feel pain, never learn how to get back up, they can’t develop resilience because resilience is just the awareness that I can I got what it takes to get through even when things are hard, essentially? And so that scene is really trying to articulate that that, resilience is a much more valuable human experience to cultivate than safety. Actually, the safety is temporary and transient and mostly an illusion, but resilience is something you can believe in.

Nancy Norbeck [00:19:57]:
Yeah. I think most of us have have learned to be attached to safety, maybe even addicted to safety to the point where we don’t even realize how much we’ve boxed ourselves in by it, which is kind of the theme of the whole book.

Kelly Flanagan [00:20:11]:
Yes. Well yeah. I’m I’m a recovering safety addict myself, so I I could I know the feeling.

Nancy Norbeck [00:20:18]:
So what helped you recover from that safety addiction?

Kelly Flanagan [00:20:24]:
Well, probably like any recovery, I’m going periods of sobriety and relapse all the time. I wouldn’t wanna pretend that I’m anywhere, arrived. That’s another conversation, right? The book about not thinking you’re ever going to arrive. But what has helped me? I think I think it’s like so many things. There comes some point where the coping method met or the defense mechanism or the protective instinct actually starts to create more suffering than it’s preventing. And you start to question it and go, oh, like my efforts to be safe, keep life sterile, keep things in control. It’s doing damage to my relationship with my kids, It’s doing damage to my relationship with my wife. I’m not I’m not writing as well.

Kelly Flanagan [00:21:18]:
You know? I think it’s it’s when the thing that worked for so long quits working. You start to ask bigger questions, and that’s another one of the themes of the book, right? And that the the ways that we survive, eventually start to harm us more than helping us to survive. So we have to call them into question and find new ways to find new things we’re pursuing. So I think that’s for me, and it probably started, 14 years ago now. Finally calling into question the value of keeping everything safe and controlled and secure and going. You know what? You’re, you’re hurting a lot of people with all the efforts to do all that. I remember I I ruined almost every Monday morning trying to make it just the right thing. I would ruin it, though.

Kelly Flanagan [00:22:06]:
I’d be so frustrated that the kids weren’t participating and it wasn’t going to the plan, you know? And it turns out, they end up doing a lot of damage with that effort to control everything. So I’m on a 14 year year path of recovery. So

Nancy Norbeck [00:22:19]:
It is ironic, though, that it’s the thing that you’re doing to try to make something great that’s

Kelly Flanagan [00:22:24]:
Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck [00:22:24]:
Ruining it.

Kelly Flanagan [00:22:26]:
It’s ruining it. Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck [00:22:28]:
I think it takes us a lot of times more time than it feels like it’s shorter that we wish it would before it dawns on us that that’s what it is that’s screwing things up.

Kelly Flanagan [00:22:39]:
Well, another version of that, you know, work with people on all the time is, have you ever tried to force a loved one to be happy? Does that ever work for you? Like, it turns out trying to force or convince someone to be happy makes them less happy. And so you actually eventually have to call in to or you could keep doing the same thing and getting the same results and making everybody miserable or you go, Maybe I can’t force people to be happy. Maybe I can’t make that happen. Maybe I can do something different with my time in this room. Maybe loving doesn’t look like making them happy, and maybe it looks like holding space for their unhappiness. And so you start to just have different questions about better ways to gain.

Nancy Norbeck [00:23:14]:
That’s such a what you just said about maybe loving is more holding space for their unhappiness. That is because one of the things that I’ve been thinking about since I finished the book like 4 hours ago, The whole idea and and I have, you know, kind of been asking myself this question for a while. You know? I think about what I saw as a kid, what I watched on TV, the books that I’ve read, the movies that I’ve seen, and I find myself, a lot of the time, saying to myself, do I actually know what love is? Because I think it’s the things that I’ve seen in all of these places that we put on screens and we write in books and and, you know, there’s that moment in your book where, you know, Elijah has to face the fact that hanging on, he’s confused for love, and maybe that’s not what it is. And I thought yet again, okay. I’m, you know, do I really know what this is? I mean, I have 2 little nephews that, you know, I would take a bullet for without a second thought. That’s as close as I get to what it actually is. And even that, I don’t think really covers the whole thing.

Kelly Flanagan [00:24:30]:
Alright.

Nancy Norbeck [00:24:30]:
You know? It’s like there are things that I know that I love, but what does real love actually look like as opposed to the idea that we are sold all the time? And I have a feeling that I am far from the only one who feels a little bit like, maybe this thing I was sold isn’t the real deal. So then what is the real deal?

Kelly Flanagan [00:24:51]:
That’s a great way to put it. This thing I was sold is not the real deal. Because then that’s precisely what Elijah starts to realize over the course of the book is is that I do think we go around sincerely sincerely going on, loving you, not anyone can, but that depends upon what your definition of love is, so that could mean something very different from person to person. And so we were sold this sort of experience. We called it love. And maybe it’s more than that. Maybe it’s different than that. I know for me, like, one of the insights that’s come out of writing this book is I was sort of sold on the idea that love is agreement.

Kelly Flanagan [00:25:25]:
Like, if we love each other, we’ll all find a way to agree. I suppose you could say that’s what’s happening in our country right now. Well, I mean, our world, we would if we all, you know, we’re all gonna be together, we all do agree. But love can be holding space for disagreeing. There’s nothing more loving than that to go in a different opinion and difference of belief, and I still hold space here with you, be present to you. So I’m learning that the capacity to be in disagreement, actually, and to still be with Michelle. So, yeah, I think it’s a it’s a worthy question for all of us to ask. What’s what’s my definition of love? What snuck its way in early on, and how might I start to question that and expand that a little bit?

Nancy Norbeck [00:26:07]:
Yeah. And along with that, I I love I love the scene where Elijah is talking to his uncle and his uncle explains to him what proxies of worth are because I thought about that not only in how we relate to ourselves, but how so many creative people look at their worth in terms of how much people like what they created, which can go so far wrong in so many ways. You know? If you’re showing your work to people who just don’t like that kind of work, it doesn’t mean your work is bad. It means they just don’t that kind of work. But if you take it as your work is bad, you should stop doing this, you’re a terrible person, you’re a terrible creative person, you’re never gonna be an artist or whatever flavor of creativity you’re gonna be. It’s gonna really mess with you in really big ways.

Kelly Flanagan [00:27:07]:
Yeah, it is. It is so tempting. Yeah. Right. Book sales, royalty payments, all these, these number of things. I’ll tell you, one of my favorite, probably the one of the greatest moments of grace over experience was right after we got the 1st quarterly royalty report from my first book lovable. And you know, as a first time author, you’ve got these wild numbers. Like that you have decided those are that would be successful.

Kelly Flanagan [00:27:38]:
That’d be a nice proxy. I’d feel worthy as an author. And it was not even half of that. And so I’m on the phone with my agent, Kathy. And I said, and she seemed really happy. And I was like, Kathy, these numbers are long like and she said to me, she was, well, Kelly, if you wanted to fill your trunk full of books and tour the country and neglect your family for a year, oh yeah, I think you could have sold more books. But for an introverted psychologist who loves his family and lives in the woods, I I think you did pretty good. Right? And it was like my it was like my agent who was supposed to be concerned with dysproxis for work was just going, hey, you are who you are.

Kelly Flanagan [00:28:15]:
Embrace that. Keep making earth that reflects who you are and let the rest take care of itself. And so since then, my my main goal for any project is to spend that I measure success as, whether or not I get to make something else out of it. Right? And so far, I keep getting to make something else. And that’s up to us mostly, not other people. Right? We can keep making things. Right. So as long as we’re committed to that process, our creative craft is a success.

Kelly Flanagan [00:28:44]:
I think that’s that’s where I landed these things.

Nancy Norbeck [00:28:47]:
Right. I mean, no one can stop you from writing another book, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction or writing another blog post or whatever, even if your agent says, sorry. We’re done. Like, nothing nothing can stop you from continuing to do that if you decide that that’s important to you and there’s stuff that needs to come out of you.

Kelly Flanagan [00:29:05]:
That’s right. Well and and Kathy cautioned me, my agent. So they did ask for fiction. They didn’t ask they did not ask for a novel. They said fiction. They were thinking more of some shorter form situational sort of fiction for the concept. And I came back to Kathy and said, you know, you told me to sit with it for a month, and I’ve got this I’ve got this idea, and I think I need to to go with it. And she said she said most authors have 3, 4, 5 novels in the drawer before they can ever get one published.

Kelly Flanagan [00:29:31]:
It’s a hard it’s a hard thing to do. But what that’s telling you is that most published authors out there kept going at their crap even when the proxies for work weren’t there. The numbers weren’t there. The reactions weren’t there. So, yeah, I I’m I’m grateful you’ve named that today because I think anybody’s creative and listening needs to just be encouraged, keep making things. Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck [00:29:53]:
And it’s not about the numbers. It’s not about the likes and the shares and the follows and all of that. It’s about it being important to you to make what you make and you doing that.

Kelly Flanagan [00:30:03]:
Yeah. And, I mean, if you wanna have this goes to the conversation, the book about joy and happiness, you could say happiness is related to the numbers. Joy is related to the making. Right? Happiness is transient. It depends on circumstances. A lot of it’s good luck and bad luck. But but joy is the process of taking something that wants to come out through you and and putting it into the world and manifesting them. Most creatives understand the joy of that.

Kelly Flanagan [00:30:30]:
So keep being joyful.

Nancy Norbeck [00:30:32]:
Right. I mean, that’s why you started creating something in the first place because it gave you joy to do it. And and I think it’s so easy to lose track of that in terms of how many did I sell, or how many people liked it, or, you know, who said what about it. And it’s not it’s not fundamentally about that. It’s about the joy of actually creating the thing.

Kelly Flanagan [00:30:53]:
That’s right. Well and I think I think one of the significant ways that happiness and joy are different as well is that happiness doesn’t have room for unhappiness. And as soon as somebody becomes unhappy, they’re no longer happy. But I think joy has room for sorrow and struggle. Like, I think I think you can make something out of joy, and and there’s a lot of hard work that goes into that. There’s a lot of struggle. There’s moments of disappointment, but it doesn’t necessarily diminish the joy. And actually, there’s a there’s a richer joy that that that happens when you say I’m dedicating myself to this thing.

Kelly Flanagan [00:31:24]:
I’m gonna keep making this thing even though it’s a struggle at times. So so, yeah, I I that to me is the that’s the reason to make things so that those products is for work for sure.

Nancy Norbeck [00:31:35]:
Yeah. Well and and I also was thinking this morning, you know, obviously, unhiding is a pretty big theme of the book. It ended up in the title. But Right. You know, all of all of those things that Elijah hides, that we all hide, seem to me to different degrees to kind of relate to the shadow concept of, you know, the stuff that we tuck away about ourselves because we don’t think that it’s good enough, and sometimes we know what those things are and and sometimes we don’t. Yes. But there’s there’s also, you know, in addition to the idea that when when you stop doing that, you allow for more joy in your life. There’s also a great deal that you can do with all of those things creatively

Kelly Flanagan [00:32:20]:
When you

Nancy Norbeck [00:32:21]:
let those shadow things and those hidden things out onto the page or your sculpture or your music or whatever. Yes.

Kelly Flanagan [00:32:31]:
So one of the ideas that I’m sort of taken with recently is that a definition of joy is, the experience of freely allowing life to flow through you. And it doesn’t matter if this the life is easy stuff to feel and to experience our hard stuff. If you can let it freely, flow through you, that feels joyful. And and I think that’s what you’re getting at. Like, when we have a shadow side, all the stuff we’re ashamed of, we think is unacceptable, can’t bring out into the light. We’ve literally stopped letting light flow flow through us. It’s sort of stuck in. And so to create art, allowing that shadow stuff to to flow again, I think that’s part of what the joy is.

Kelly Flanagan [00:33:13]:
It’s life is flowing through us again. It’s not all stopped up and contained in there and festering. So I think that’s as as art can be healing in that way in addition to just joyful in that way. So I think that’s a great word.

Nancy Norbeck [00:33:29]:
Yeah. And and that reminds me of something else that actually made me stop reading for a second. Toward the beginning of the book when Elijah has a session with his therapist, and his therapist tells him that anxiety and anger can’t exist at the same time. So if he’s ever feeling really anxious, fright is to get really mad about it?

Kelly Flanagan [00:33:48]:
Yes.

Nancy Norbeck [00:33:48]:
I stopped and I thought, wait. Does that mean that the cure for my stage fright is to get really mad about it? Then I started kind of picturing that because I thought, you know, I’ve dealt with this my entire life. I think I could get pretty mad about it.

Kelly Flanagan [00:34:05]:
Uh-huh. It’ll it’ll work. I can tell you as a psychologist, it will work. They’re they’re just these mutually I mean, you think about, like, when you’re faced with a threat, we we all know about the fight or flight. Right? It’s not fight and flight. We can’t do both at the same time. We can’t fight the thing, the threat, and flee it. The flight is anxiety.

Kelly Flanagan [00:34:23]:
It moves me away from the thing I fear. The anger is I move towards it and attack it. Right? And so, yeah, you can’t move in 2 directions at once. So, it’ll work. I promise.

Nancy Norbeck [00:34:32]:
I I’m definitely gonna have to give it a whirl because I was so fascinated by that. And it reminded me of what I’ve heard about you can’t be in fear and curiosity at the same time too.

Kelly Flanagan [00:34:42]:
Yes. Absolutely. Yes. Because, again, curiosity is an unangry way of moving toward the thing. Yeah. Whereas fear is always moving away from the thing, resisting it, trying to run away from it. Absolutely. Yep.

Kelly Flanagan [00:34:54]:
Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck [00:34:54]:
It was just just that one little moment, but I was like,

Kelly Flanagan [00:34:59]:
oh. Oh, I can use that. That’s great. I’m glad it was practically useful.

Nancy Norbeck [00:35:05]:
Trying to imagine singing while angry. It’s like that that could lend a whole different angle to so so many things.

Kelly Flanagan [00:35:15]:
Oh, yeah. It’s good.

Nancy Norbeck [00:35:18]:
So many things. I mean, there there are just so many things buried in well, not buried, but but, you know, little moments like that. Like, that is not one of the larger revelations that it there’s not a moment where I cried, you know? Sure. But but it still is like, oh, look at that. That’s kinda cool. I never I’ve never heard that one before, you know, and and other little things that that there’s you you throw a lot of stuff into this book.

Kelly Flanagan [00:35:48]:
Well, one of my favorite things I’ve heard so far from readers is that I read it the first time for the story, like the story to swept me along, and I just needed to know how it ended. But I’ve gotten back to read the second time to go to slowly and sort of absorb. Because, yeah, one of the concepts here is that, Ellie goes through his healing trajectory by having these conversations with lost loved ones in his memory and information. And each one of those conversations, I think, is just really rich in some sort of principle idea around transformation and healing. And, and so, I mean, I’ve read I’ve read it countless times now, obviously, through all of the, all the revisions, but I’m actually reading it one more time. I’m about 2 thirds of the way through. I think I’ll finish today Just to to do exactly what you said, pull out quotes, you know, for sharing purposes and that kind of thing. And, yeah, and there’s just there’s a lot of meaty quotes in there that you could sort of camp out on and Yeah.

Kelly Flanagan [00:36:48]:
Sort of journal on for a while. But I do think the story itself keeps you from getting bogged down when that was the first time

Nancy Norbeck [00:36:56]:
through. Yeah. Yes. And it does I mean, it really does move. And, admittedly, I mean, I have read this a little bit more quickly than I might have otherwise, though, you know, the the longest chunk of time that I spent with it was yesterday, and it certainly was not like I wanted to put it down. It was it was just like

Kelly Flanagan [00:37:14]:
Thank you.

Nancy Norbeck [00:37:15]:
You have to keep going, or at least I did. I I told a friend it was like a freight train. Once it starts up, it’s taking its way because because here it comes. And when it when it hits you, you’re you’re gonna cry. But, you know, there there was another quote that that really struck me because this was another thing I had never heard before. Regret is really just a way of denying our ordinariness. It’s a way of pretending we aren’t, all of us always growing and evolving and learning. It’s a way of insisting we should be finished when in reality, all of us are always in process.

Kelly Flanagan [00:37:52]:
Mhmm.

Nancy Norbeck [00:37:53]:
And that was kind of another moment where I thought, oh, wow.

Kelly Flanagan [00:37:57]:
Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck [00:37:58]:
That’s just so much better a way of looking at these things because, again, it’s a control thing, right? Like we think that we have to be done, we think we have to be ready, and how can we possibly I mean, it is my 51st birthday today, and I can tell you that I Thank you. That I certainly, the things that I thought I knew when I was 25 or 31 or 41 or even a couple of years ago don’t look the same way now. And how could they? You know, you think that, you know, you think you know everything when you’re 16 and you’re writing that paper about the order.

Kelly Flanagan [00:38:37]:
Yes. You do.

Nancy Norbeck [00:38:38]:
But but you don’t, and you but you somehow, I think, human beings continue to think that we know everything that we need to know. But I think as we get older, we start to realize how much we don’t know too and start to ask more questions of it anyway. But, yeah, you know, that that thing that I wrote in 4th grade could not possibly be like the thing that I wrote when I was 40.

Kelly Flanagan [00:39:02]:
Right.

Nancy Norbeck [00:39:02]:
There’s no way. You you are at that place, and you do what you can with what you have at that place. And then the next time when you know more, you do something different. And, again, why does no one tell us this when we’re done?

Kelly Flanagan [00:39:18]:
Right? Exactly. I hope young people will pick up this book. My my 18 year old read it and liked it.

Nancy Norbeck [00:39:25]:
That is high praise from an 18 year old, especially when it’s a child.

Kelly Flanagan [00:39:29]:
It is and and he did not feel the same way about my nonfiction works. He definitely, I think, appreciated the story here. Well, it makes me that that paragraph about, you know, regret is just sort of denial of our ordinary. Certainly, it’s helped that that concept has helped me through the last couple of months because we we just launched him, And he has been telling us for 5 years that he has no interest in college. He’s going to Chicago, and get a job and try to make it as a comedian in in the city. We really launched him into adulthood a couple years ago. And in that transitional moment, I think 10 years ago, I would have just been torn apart by regret. Like, why didn’t I do more of this with them? Why didn’t they do more of that with them? Why didn’t I? And and the answer is because I’m ordinary.

Kelly Flanagan [00:40:18]:
Because I was figuring it out as I worked. And then hopefully get another candidate someday as a grandfather, no more and prioritize better. And, but but the things that I regret are just signs of, yeah, I was just an ordinary dude trying to figure out how to be a dad. Another one another one of the ways I’ve been thinking about that recently is, like, I just I tried so hard to be the greatest, best dad, you know? And yet my son, Aidan, sort of probably treats me a lot like I think about my dad with all my, you know, disappointments and frustrations and all of that. So what I say these days is, I’m not becoming my dad, but I’m definitely becoming Aiden’s dad. You know, I am an ordinary dad no matter how hard I’m trying to curse to him. I’m his only his only version and there’s going to be disappointments and frustrations and that sort of thing. So, so yes, this this concept of regret is denial of our ordinariness is it’s been it’s been freeing.

Kelly Flanagan [00:41:20]:
It’s been graceful. Doesn’t mean you quit trying. Doesn’t mean don’t give it your all, but it just means that you’re always gonna be probably somewhere in the ordinary at most things.

Nancy Norbeck [00:41:31]:
Yeah. Yeah. And I think the the the quote about humility comes shortly after that one, that humility is just realizing that you’re not ever gonna get there. And and those two things, again, it was one of these moments of, okay, so I don’t actually have to regret stuff if I if I give myself a little freedom to be human and ordinary and not know any better because I just didn’t know any better in that particular moment, and now I do. And so next time, that’s not what I’m gonna do.

Kelly Flanagan [00:42:04]:
Yes.

Nancy Norbeck [00:42:04]:
Yeah. That’s right.

Kelly Flanagan [00:42:07]:
Yeah. Yeah. To to give yourself the I just don’t know too many people who aren’t doing the best that they can. And it’s like, it’s, you know, maybe there’s a few out there. But yeah, whoever’s listening, you’re giving yourself the benefit out. You’re probably doing the best you can, and that comes with all sorts of trial and error. No need to regret. Just keep going.

Nancy Norbeck [00:42:30]:
Yeah. I remember hearing an interview with I think it must have been the director Jim Sheridan when the movie In the Name of the Father came out, And it was another similar moment, actually, now that I’m thinking about it when he said, you know, people most people do not set out to do the wrong thing.

Kelly Flanagan [00:42:51]:
Right.

Nancy Norbeck [00:42:51]:
They set out to do what they believe is the right

Kelly Flanagan [00:42:55]:
thing. Mhmm. That’s right.

Nancy Norbeck [00:42:57]:
And and so, I mean, it certainly is true that plenty of people have done horrible things in the name of doing what they thought was the right thing. So that’s just not me letting people off the hook, but it really gave me a different way to look at some of the things that I had experienced, some of the people that I had known and said, okay. But they were they were doing what they genuinely believed, what the what was the right thing or they wouldn’t have done that.

Kelly Flanagan [00:43:21]:
Well, I mean, in the and probably even even greater tragedy is a person who knows at some level, they’re doing the wrong thing, and it’s still the best that they can do. Right? Because now they’re living, the best that they can do is to live in the reality of doing something that they know is wrong. So you can almost find a greater sort of empathy for that person. They’re they’re living a little bit of a hell of their

Nancy Norbeck [00:43:45]:
Yeah.

Kelly Flanagan [00:43:45]:
That’s sense, but it’s still the best they can do. Right?

Nancy Norbeck [00:43:48]:
Right. And that’s so incredibly human too. I think we all have those moments where

Kelly Flanagan [00:43:53]:
We all.

Nancy Norbeck [00:43:53]:
1, you know, we lose it more than we wish we would or, you know, we just can’t bring ourselves for whatever reason to do the thing that we wish we could do.

Kelly Flanagan [00:44:03]:
And see, last night, my 15 year old drove the car for the first time. Actually, it was it was the 4th time, and he thought he could pull into the garage, and he did great pulling into the garage. And then when he got in there, he didn’t accelerate. Yes, he did. And I was not on my back. Except except I think I actually was on my desk. I think the way I handled it good as I could do it. I mean, I hope that it was enough for him to not be heard by, but did the best I could.

Kelly Flanagan [00:44:39]:
But it wasn’t didn’t look great to tell you that.

Nancy Norbeck [00:44:41]:
But that’s also why the next morning exists. Right? So you can go and say, hey. You know, I did the best I could last night, but I’m not gonna lie. I was having a hard time, and I wish I had done better.

Kelly Flanagan [00:44:51]:
I still haven’t seen them, but I think my line I think my line is gonna be okay. So just for now, I’ll be clear. There are 2 petals, and they do different things. Is that too and then I’m gonna say, is that too soon? And we’ll see how he handles that.

Nancy Norbeck [00:45:06]:
Oh, I’m also Oh, I’m also imagining the his own horror at, oh, dear god, what have I just done? You know, the entire world is going to collapse on my head, and I can’t believe what I just did.

Kelly Flanagan [00:45:21]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thankfully, it was actually relatively safe way to learn particular lesson. So

Nancy Norbeck [00:45:27]:
Yeah. Wow.

Kelly Flanagan [00:45:30]:
We’re doing the best we can.

Nancy Norbeck [00:45:32]:
Well, I wanted to make sure that we have a couple of minutes to talk about the spiritual side of creativity since you are obviously a deeply spiritual guy. This is a a more Christian oriented book, though I think anyone could read it and, you know, substitute in whatever their particular idea of the divine or God happens to be and get just as much out of it. I I don’t think the label is as important as the idea behind it myself, but I I’ve been interested in how how spirituality and creativity intertwine because I think that they they really overlap a lot, and I’m wondering what you may have noticed with this book and with with the other ones or or just in general?

Kelly Flanagan [00:46:18]:
So, gosh, we should start another hour right now.

Nancy Norbeck [00:46:21]:
That’s part of why I asked

Kelly Flanagan [00:46:22]:
you how much time you had. Yes. Because this is a conversation I could have all day.

Nancy Norbeck [00:46:28]:
And we Well, maybe we’ll have to do part 2.

Kelly Flanagan [00:46:31]:
Maybe we could. And well, and what would be fun about it is we’ll both discover new things, and I Mhmm. You spend enough time on it. You know? So I would say thank you for sort of naming that. So I was, I was raised in Christian faith. The Christian faith that I practice now is almost the opposite of the one that I was raised in. So there’s not a monolithic thing. And the way I say it these days is that my Christian faith is more lens than agenda.

Kelly Flanagan [00:47:02]:
Like it just it helps me to see the world in a way it is most, most loving, for me. And, but I don’t have an agenda for anybody. That’s why I think you say that about the book. Like, my lens is there for sure, in some of my language, but no one will feel any sort of pressure. Spirituality and creativity, I actually can’t disentangle the 2. I think creativity is one of the purest expressions of spirituality. I believe we talked about this with Lovell. I believe that we’re coming to the world with a true self, a soul, and that that that soul is sort of the source of all of our creativity.

Kelly Flanagan [00:47:40]:
But we that soul gets banged up. It gets hurt. It gets wounded. The way I’ve been thinking of it is the soul is like the sponge, and it’s supposed to soak up love and then squeeze that love out in the form of love and creativity everywhere it goes. But a lot of times when we were young, sponge soaked up pain. And so when that happened, we started to create a protective layer on the sponge and false self or ego. And that part of us can use the soul to create, but it’s not it’s not creativity in its purest form. So as we spirituality is about reconnecting with what is most original, most true, most innocent in us, which is our soul, and then allowing that thing to express itself through making something.

Kelly Flanagan [00:48:26]:
So I just I had this conversation. I I told a church going person of which I am, less regularly than I thought with a lot of them with a kid, but, I told them that I was just writing something on a Sunday morning, and they’re like, why weren’t you at church? I was like, I wasn’t church. I wasn’t from the keyboard. I’m never more connected with the divine than when I’m doing that. Like, I’m taking orders. I feel like at that point and surrendered. And that is deeply spiritual. So anyways, that’s a long winding kind of introductory answer to your question about That’s what comes

Nancy Norbeck [00:49:02]:
to mind. Yeah. Yeah. I I think that’s so interesting, the idea of spirituality equals being in a particular building at a particular time doing a particular thing rather than no. I am communing with whatever divine thing is is putting this idea in me and making me want to get it out of myself Yeah. Is amazing and also reminds me of the scene in the book where father Lou comes and and sees Elijah and says, shouldn’t you be in church? And he’s like, oh, wait, you are in church because he’s outside in this beautiful place. And, yeah, I think I think there are so many ways to to see that time of creativity as, oh, you’re gonna go write your little story. You know, I mean, that’s kind of what I heard as a kid was not that condescending.

Nancy Norbeck [00:49:58]:
But but it kind of boiled down to that. Right? Oh, she’s downstairs writing a story. You know? Or yeah, you have to go and play your guitar or whatever. And and we don’t realize, you know, we we’ve we’ve left it on the margins, and we don’t realize that it really is a central part of who we are as human beings. We’re here to create. Right? You know, I mean, yeah, a beaver will build a dam, but beavers are pretty much stuck with the dams. Right? They’re not out building houses. They’re they’re not playing songs.

Nancy Norbeck [00:50:32]:
They’re you know, we’re the ones who have this wide range, and we decide that it’s just a hobby or it’s not important, and it gets left at the bottom of the to do list until it falls off of the to do list, and then we wonder why we’re not happy one day. And I think it’s because we’re not interacting with that really divine creative part of ourselves that connects us with everything else.

Kelly Flanagan [00:51:01]:
Absolutely. Well, and again, in my Christian tradition, there’s that Genesis story about creation. And that can get used in all sorts of ways. But the tradition that I’m part of now sees creation is unfinished. That, that God created up to a point in that Genesis story then created human beings and said, keep start naming. Right? Start putting words to it. Start co start cocreating with me. And so, like, to me, that’s that’s the calling for each of us is to be to be creative in our own way and to recognize that we are all, in one way or another, creating in any given moment.

Kelly Flanagan [00:51:40]:
We’re creating a better space that we’re in, or we’re creating a a more difficult space that we’re in. And so just to be to be recognizing that we’re sort of inherently creative beings, we’re called to create, and that we are at our most joyful when we are creating intentionally with love, essentially. And, for me, it’s like, remember The Lion, The Wish, and the Wardrobe? Mhmm. They see us lose. Right? They they open up the wardrobe, and there’s this whole world in there. To me, that’s what it’s like when especially when I was writing fiction, because I would sit down with this little idea about the wardrobe and what I was gonna be doing for that day. The writing session just opened up into this big world where things were happening that I didn’t it’s so weird. It’s in there somewhere.

Kelly Flanagan [00:52:28]:
Like like but there’s this space in there that is way bigger than I could possibly imagine. I did something magical and spiritual about about entering into that wardrobe and discovering the world in there. So I just, yeah, I just can’t I can’t think of spirituality apart from that for the creative experience.

Nancy Norbeck [00:52:48]:
Yeah. And I don’t know if if you’ve had an experience like this when you’re writing yet. I’m gonna bet you probably have at least come close, but I I when I first started writing my own original fiction again, I had been doing some fan fiction stuff for a while, and I was like, I wanna, you know, do something on my own. I found a first line online and decided, okay, that sounds interesting, and threw it into my word processor. And the next thing I know, I had, like, 3 paragraphs. And I sat there looking at it going, I have no idea where that came from. And over the course of a weekend, it kept happening like that. I’d go back, I’d read what I had already written, and 3 more paragraphs would pop up.

Nancy Norbeck [00:53:26]:
And it kind of turned into this game, like, wow, what’s gonna happen next? I don’t know. And I still don’t feel like I wrote that story because the whole thing was literally, I have no idea where this is coming from. And so, yeah, it’s like you’re channeling something that came from somewhere else. It happened to me in the middle of writing my novel, in a similar way where it just was like this river of words that flew out, and an hour later, I was like, okay. Yeah. They are.

Kelly Flanagan [00:53:55]:
And well, in in everywhere. I mean, in so many other places in life, if we like, feeling passive in that sense would feel terrible. And yet in the creative space, feeling like a passive sort of recipient or conduit of the creative material feels it’s creating, it’s like the epitome of joyful surrender. Right? And, so to get to practice, joyful surrender is a spiritual practice. Right? And here we are as creative doing that, hopefully, as many times as you can sitting down to create, right? Yeah, I only have a couple minutes. I have to ask the question.

Nancy Norbeck [00:54:32]:
Okay.

Kelly Flanagan [00:54:33]:
Nancy,

Nancy Norbeck [00:54:34]:
Yes, sir.

Kelly Flanagan [00:54:34]:
If I was to pick up one piece of work of yours, where should I start?

Nancy Norbeck [00:54:41]:
Wow.

Kelly Flanagan [00:54:43]:
I know this is like being this is like being a therapist and they ask you a question, you’re not just answering the questions. Right?

Nancy Norbeck [00:54:48]:
It’s I would love I’d

Kelly Flanagan [00:54:50]:
love to start.

Nancy Norbeck [00:54:50]:
It’s sort of like asking, you know, which of your children is your favorite.

Kelly Flanagan [00:54:55]:
Right. I know.

Nancy Norbeck [00:54:57]:
Well so I have the one novel.

Kelly Flanagan [00:54:59]:
K. If you

Nancy Norbeck [00:54:59]:
want a novel, that’s that’s your thing.

Kelly Flanagan [00:55:01]:
Okay.

Nancy Norbeck [00:55:02]:
There are a bunch of, articles on my website.

Kelly Flanagan [00:55:05]:
And Got it.

Nancy Norbeck [00:55:06]:
And so, oh, I don’t know. I kinda wanna say listen to the podcast because that’s really what what I’ve been doing, you know, for the last few years

Kelly Flanagan [00:55:16]:
ago. Creativity.

Nancy Norbeck [00:55:17]:
It’s almost exactly 4 years since you and I had our first conversation when I started the podcast, which is amazing. But, you know, there’s there’s so much in there, and I don’t know if I could pick a particular episode because I love so many of them.

Kelly Flanagan [00:55:31]:
I I love that answer. And let me just say, like, I can I can sense in our conversation just how present and the the energy and spirit you brought to this conversation? Like, I can feel like that this is a creative thing for you.

Nancy Norbeck [00:55:47]:
Well, and I’ll tell you the truth.

Kelly Flanagan [00:55:48]:
Beautiful. Thank you.

Nancy Norbeck [00:55:50]:
That’s something I learned from you the first time we talked.

Kelly Flanagan [00:55:54]:
Oh, no way.

Nancy Norbeck [00:55:55]:
Because I had a list of questions, and we went through them in about 15 minutes.

Kelly Flanagan [00:56:03]:
Okay.

Nancy Norbeck [00:56:04]:
And I sat here thinking, oh, what do I do now? Yeah. And I thought, well, you’re gonna have to pay attention and listen and keep the conversation going, and that’s I

Kelly Flanagan [00:56:16]:
do love that.

Nancy Norbeck [00:56:17]:
That’s what you’re gonna have to do. And the rest of that conversation was so much more interesting than just I have these 10 questions to ask you

Kelly Flanagan [00:56:27]:
Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck [00:56:28]:
That I have never done a conversation any other way since then. And I I laugh sometimes because people will say, You’ve researched your people so well. Like, there are people I’ve talked to that I’ve really known nothing other than their name and what they do, and it’s just listening and asking questions about what they say and paying attention, and I’ve learned how much we don’t listen well.

Kelly Flanagan [00:56:54]:
Yeah.

Nancy Norbeck [00:56:54]:
One of the big things I learned that day with you, but it changed it changed the way I I do these all the time.

Kelly Flanagan [00:57:02]:
But to bring it full circle, somewhere in the middle of our first conversation, you had to wander into the water, and it was more beautiful.

Nancy Norbeck [00:57:08]:
Yes. It was. Yes. It was. And I don’t think I have ever admitted that out loud on this podcast, but if ever there was gonna be a moment, it’s this one. So

Kelly Flanagan [00:57:17]:
Thank you for sharing that.

Nancy Norbeck [00:57:18]:
Well, thank you for going through questions that quickly. That’s

Kelly Flanagan [00:57:22]:
it. Sure.

Nancy Norbeck [00:57:24]:
But but and thank you for coming back because, I mean, I loved our first conversation. I love this conversation. You’re always welcome to come back anytime you want. So ping me. Awesome. And we’ve got a book giveaway that I will tell people about in the in the outro because I know you have to go, but anytime.

Kelly Flanagan [00:57:43]:
Totally delightful.

Nancy Norbeck [00:57:45]:
That is our show for this week. I am always so grateful to Kelly Flanagan for joining me and to you for listening. I promised details about the book giveaway at the end of the show, and here they are. Kelly’s publisher has graciously offered a copy of the book to one lucky winner. If you are in the US, that will be a physical book, and if you’re elsewhere in the world, it’ll be an ebook. To enter, share my Twitter or Instagram post about this episode between now and midnight on November 16th Eastern Standard Time. That’s New York time. I’ll do my best to get these links into your podcast app ASAP to make it super easy for you, but if you don’t see them yet, come back and check later or go take a look at my accounts.

Nancy Norbeck [00:58:27]:
Now, this is important. You must tag me to enter because otherwise, I won’t have any way of knowing that you shared the post and won’t be able to add you to the drawing. So make sure you tag me. Multiple shares will not result in multiple entries only because, alas, there is only one of me. I will collect the entries in a spreadsheet and use a random number generator to select a winner, and will notify the winner via the account they used to enter. If I can’t make contact with the winner after 3 days, I’ll choose another winner. I’ll do my best to take care of all of this and notify the winner by December 1st. Maybe sooner if we get lucky.

Nancy Norbeck [00:59:06]:
I hope you’ll enter to win a copy of the book. If the winner ok’s it, I will share their name in a later episode. Thanks for participating, and good luck. If this episode resonated with you, don’t forget to get in touch on any of my social platforms or even via email at [email protected]. Tell me what you loved. And if you’re feeling a little bit less than confident in your creative process right now, and you haven’t yet signed up for my free email series on 6 of the most common creative beliefs that are messing you up. Please check it out. It’ll untangle those myths and help you get rolling again.

Nancy Norbeck [00:59:45]:
You can find it at fycuriosity.com, and there’s also a link right in your podcast app. See you there, and see you next week. Follow Your Curiosity is produced by me, Nancy Norbeck, with music by Joseph McDade. If you like Follow Your Curiosity, please subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And don’t forget to tell your friends. It really helps me reach new listeners. Thanks.