A Conversation with Laura Davis

We are already a month into the new year!

I had the great pleasure of speaking with Laura Davis, a memoir teacher and author based in the Santa Cruz, California. She is the author of six nonfiction books, and recently published her debut memoir, The Burning Light of Two Stars, about her tumultuous relationship with her mother. It was fascinating to hear about her learning curve as as writer, putting what she knows and teaches into practice and her growth as a storyteller. We talked about everything from how to create a page turner to how to work with a shoddy memory. She also shared about how she reached the tipping point of finally being ready to write and share this story.

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LAURA DAVIS is the author of six non-fiction books that change peoples' lives. The Courage to Heal has paved the way for hundreds of thousands of women and men to heal from the trauma of sexual abuse. Becoming the Parent You Want to Be, a rich resource guide co-authored with parenting expert Janis Keyser, helps parents develop a vision for the families they want to create. And I Thought We'd Never Speak Again teaches the skills of reconciliation and peace building to the world, one relationship at a time.

Her latest book, her first memoir: The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother-Daughter Story, tells the story of her dramatic and tumultuous relationship with her mother. It gives a no-holds-barred peek at the real woman behind the teacher, the facilitator, and the author.

KARIN GUTMAN: Given that you coach memoir writers, what was the learning curve in writing your own memoir?

LAURA DAVIS: When it came to writing my memoir, I understood how to get the raw material out, like how to do the deep excavation, the really painful kind of excavation. But then I had hundreds of little pieces that I'd written over the course of years. I knew the theme was this mother-daughter relationship. Some of them were really good—the individual piece might be polished and powerful—but I really had no idea how to make them into a book. I didn't know about storytelling, how to sustain a story over 360 pages. I had to learn what to leave in and what to cut out, which I think is really challenging in memoir.

The other thing I had to learn, that was really hard, was sequencing—like when to reveal things and when to conceal them. Part of that was learning how to create a page turner. That's my favorite feedback I get, people who said, “I picked up your book and I couldn't put it down.” I hear that every single day. I had no idea how to do that.

KARIN: Can you share more about that?

LAURA: Well, one of the final things I did at the very end of the 10 years of development—the very last edit, after I'd actually shopped the book around for a year and couldn't sell it—I shortened the chapters. Not the whole book, but a lot of it is very short chapters, which I think is good because everyone's attention span is so poor, you know, frazzled. Also, I interjected past, present, and future really fast. So, you're in one situation and then you're thrown into another situation. It doesn't work for every reader, but a lot of people really like that. It creates a very fast momentum.

And then, there was a lot of experimenting with placement. The worst moment between me and my mother—the scene where I tell her I've been sexually abused as a child, and she basically freaks out and attacks me—was a really pivotal scene and was the last straw between us when we became deeply estranged. I tried placing that scene in different places. I wanted to reveal it at the end. But then when people read it, they would say, “I don't understand why Laura is so mean to her mother?” Like, why is she being such a bitch?

Then I tried putting it right at the beginning and it was just way too emotionally intense. People would stop reading. So, I had to figure out how to sequence things. There are a lot of twists and turns, things that get revealed. It's like putting a puzzle together. It was a lot of trial and error.

I also had to figure out, What's the question that I want the reader to be asking?

KARIN: Every memoir needs a story question. What did you come up with?

LAURA: I think for me the biggest question was, “Can I open my heart to this person who betrayed me in the past?” We had reconciled to some degree before she moved out here, but I think our reconciliation was successful because there was a 3,000-mile buffer between us. Suddenly, she was in my town and she had dementia and I got triggered all the time by her behavior.

So: "Can I be the daughter she needs me to be or the daughter I want to be? Am I capable of taking care of her until the end of her life? Can I actually follow through and do this thing?"

Also, "Could I open my heart?" I could go through the motions of being a good daughter. I could do all the activities. I could do the research. I could drive her to the doctor's appointments.

The other thing that was super hard is, I have a really shitty memory. I was dissociative as a child because of being a trauma survivor.

KARIN: How did you navigate that?

LAURA: Well, first I discovered that the more I wrote about something, the more I remembered. So by free-writing, I found that if I really went deep and followed a thread, more memories would come back. I often use the prompt, “I don't remember.” I don't remember this… I don't remember that… and then suddenly, but I do remember this.

One my favorite scenes in the book takes place in a car. My mother and I are in a car together. I knew it was a really critical scene because of the things she talked about for the first time on this car ride. But I had no idea when the car ride was, where it was, where we were going. I just didn't remember anything about it except the conversation. But I did remember that it was pouring rain, and that it was a very long drive, and that the windows were closed. She was chain smoking. So, I built the whole scene around smoking in the rain.

KARIN: That was all you needed, right?

LAURA: It was super satisfying and it's a really good scene. So, it was learning how to work with the things that I did know.

I wrote, “I don't know” at the beginning, like, “I don't know where we were going.” I only figured out it had to be around this time because there were no car seats in the back. I didn't have children yet. If it was too far back, we weren't speaking. It had to be this certain kind of like suppositional writing. I did a lot of that.

And then there were certain scenes I would have liked to have written, but there was just no way to get any traction, and I had to find a different scene that would do the same work.

KARIN: It sounds like you were working on the book for a long time. Did you know the ending?

LAURA: I knew what the last scene would be. But I had to tell myself I wasn't going to publish it for nine out of the 10 years. I had too much history with certain people in my family who had already kicked me out of the family for writing The Courage to Heal when I was 31. I had already spent more than 20 years reconciling those relationships. The idea that I was going to lose those people all over again was just so devastating to me. I hadn't published anything in 19 years because this is the story I wanted to write, and I just felt like it was taboo. I finally got to the point of, I can't not write anymore. I was taking care of my mother, and I knew I needed to write it. And then she died, and it was like, Okay, I really need to write it. But maybe this is just a great project.

KARIN: At what point were you ready to put those relationships at risk to share this story?

LAURA: I think it was a few things. One is that I am an author, and that I really wanted to publish again. I didn't want to go for the rest of my life not publishing, and this was the story I had been given. I felt like if I didn't do this story, I wasn't going to have any other stories. We have a few core stories that are ours to tell, and this clearly was mine.

I couldn't have written it before. But if I had tried to write it before, it would have been a really different book. I'm 65 years old. I needed to be this age, this stage of life. A grandmother, a mother, you know, as seasoned as I am as a human being to be able to touch into the depth of the story in the way that I feel I have. I needed a lot of time after my mother's death to process the relationship in a different kind of way. My relationship to her is still changing. She's been dead for seven years. It's still evolving. If I was to write this in 10 years, it would be a different book again. But I needed that kind of time to have that vaster perspective, more like out in the universe looking at the story instead of at these two personalities. It's looking at her whole history, the epigenetics of trauma in our family, and just so many other things.

KARIN: I’ve noticed a lot of mother-daughter themes in my memoir-writing workshops. I'm imagining that your book is striking a chord with many people. You are probably giving a lot of people hope.

LAURA: I think it does. That's what I'm hearing from people. People are saying things like, “I picked up the phone and called my mother for the first time in 18 years,” or “I've had this box of letters from my mother sitting in the garage for the last three decades. I pulled them out and I'm going to write about them.”

KARIN: You can't get better feedback than that. That's amazing.



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To learn more about Laura Davis visit her site.

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A Conversation with Lacy Crawford

I recently ventured down to San Diego for a literary salon at the home of writer, editor and pie maker extraordinaire Amy Wallen. It was so invigorating to be back in community once again, in real life!

There, I had the opportunity to meet Lacy Crawford whose memoir Notes on a Silencing sent a shiver down readers' collective spine, causing a notable stir even as it was released during the pandemic. It was named Best Book of 2020 by Time, People, and NPR.

At 15-years-old, Lacy was the victim of sexual assault at a high-profile boarding school that covered it up, until the state of New Hampshire opened a formal investigation 30 years later. But as she describes in our interview below, this story is not so much about the assault as it is about an institutional silencing. She details with stunning articulation how imperative it is that we write to the urgency and relevance of the experiences that live in us, breaking through any of the perceived taboos, shame, or dismissive attitudes that may be holding us back.

Please read this important conversation.

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Lacy Crawford is the author of fiction and nonfiction, including the satire Early Decision (Morrow 2013) and the memoir Notes on a Silencing (Little Brown 2020).

Lacy’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Narrative, LitHub, and Vanity Fair and her literary journalism includes interviews and profiles of Frank Conroy, Reynolds Price, Geoffrey Wolff, and Shirley Hazzard.

She lives in California with her husband and three children.

When Notes on a Silencing hit bookstores in the summer of 2020, it sent shockwaves through the country. Not only did this intimate investigative memoir usher in a media storm of coverage, but it also prompted the elite St. Paul's School to issue a formal apology to the author, Lacy Crawford, for its handling of her report of sexual assault by two fellow students nearly thirty years ago.

It was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Notable Book, as well as a Best Book of 2020 by Time, People, NPR, BookPage, Library Journal and LitHub.

“…brutal and brilliant… Crawford’s writing is astonishing… crafted with the precision of a thriller, with revelations that sent me reeling.” —The New York Times

KARIN GUTMAN: You started off, early on, writing a fictionalized version of your personal story. Tell us about that.

LACY CRAWFORD: Yes, I wrote a thinly veiled autobiographical novel about what had happened. I gave my whole self to it. There was an editor who believed in the book and believed in me who sent the manuscript to a very prominent literary agent who otherwise would never have taken an email from me. This was in 2001. She got the manuscript on a Friday, and I spent the weekend wondering if maybe everything was about to begin. She called me on Tuesday morning and said, “Yeah, there are some good characters, some lovely writing and nice sentences, but I didn't love it. And the truth is that date rape stories are a dime a dozen.”

I now know that the fact that this agent even read my pages and bothered to get back to me is extraordinary, and I might have taken a hard look at the manuscript and sent it to a bunch of other agents or maybe thought, I'm not quite there yet; I’ll do some other things, maybe write some stories. Maybe apply for an MFA. But instead, I collapsed. I could not handle that term “dime a dozen.”

First of all, what happened to me wasn't date rape. (I think there's no such thing as date rape. The minute you start getting raped, your date is over.) But I didn't quite understand how to manage the fact that because there's something that happens so often, to women especially, that we shouldn't bother writing about it. I think the things that happen often to women are things that we should write more about, all the time, because they're an expression of our reality and the experience of our society.

I was demoralized, and I quit writing.

KARIN: It really shut you down.

LACY: I was very brittle at that time. I should say, a little bit in my defense, that I had graduated from a college with a fantastic creative writing program, and some writers who are now household names were contemporaries of mine on campus and already publishing, producing this magnificent work, when we were teenagers and in our early twenties. I had the impression that if you're good—whatever that means—it's apparent, you arrive with all of the timpani, and everybody knows it right out of the gate. That there's a kind of magic that happens when somebody has the requisite talent. I had convinced myself of this.

The thing that I continue to learn over and over is that, while talent is clear and powerful, there are a great many truly extraordinary books that don't get published simply because they can't be marketed effectively, and there are plenty of not-so-exquisite books that do get sold, and publishing is not necessarily the pure meritocracy that I for so long believed it was. It just isn't. You get lucky or you don't, you have talent or you don’t, but you do your work.

KARIN: You eventually found your way back to writing and published your first book, Early Decision, which was a satire about the college admissions process. You were ahead of the curve with both books!

LACY: Thank you for saying that.

KARIN: How did you find your way back to what would become your memoir?

LACY: In 2017, the state of New Hampshire opened a formal investigation into my boarding school, which is how I turned my attention back to the experiences that I’d had in high school.

KARIN: Did the investigators approach you, or did you approach them?

LACY: I reached out to them. There had been so many stories of assault and abuse on the campus of St. Paul’s School, including the 2014 assault of Chessy Prout, a freshman, by Owen Labrie, a Harvard-bound senior. When the school threatened to reveal Chessy’s name in court filings, she chose to appear on the Today Show to talk about what had happened to her, at which point her case rose to national attention.

When the state of New Hampshire opened a formal investigation, they issued a call to anyone who had experience of the school having failed to report assaults or abuse on campus, as they were legally mandated to do, or having observed the school to in some way obstruct justice or cover up investigations. Completely privately, I sent the Attorney General’s office an email. I said I was assaulted at St. Paul's when I was 15, in October of 1990, and the school covered it up. They sent back a form email. And then an hour later, my phone rang. It was a detective, and he said, “We pulled your criminal case file off microfiche in the Concord Police Department, and we would like to talk to you.”

I had no intention of writing about this or talking about this or going public about it. I did not want my children to ever have to know this about me.

KARIN: What was the tipping point for you?

LACY: I was prompted when the state investigation was stymied, when my participation was shut down, which was a horrible development that I explain in the book.

As I told you, when I had tried to write this story in my 20s, I was told such stories are a dime a dozen, and I believed the sentiment behind that. I thought, That's right, nobody wants to hear these stories. But once I had documentary proof of how the school had covered up my assault, how they lied to police and to my family and to my physicians, I was on fire to tell what had happened in a way that wasn't about wanting to write a memoir. This wasn't a genre-specific urging, this was not a professional ambition. This was like an iron bar in my heart. I am going to say what happened, and whatever happens next, I can't control. But damn it, I am going to say this because I was a girl. And I'm a mom now. I don't have a daughter. But I have kids who are old enough now that I know what 15 is. And 15 is young. 15-year-olds are kids.

So, I sat down.

KARIN: It feels emotional to hear you say, “I was a girl.” It’s like you're coming to her defense.

LACY: That's right. I was separated from her, and I went back for her. Yes, I did. It is emotional for everyone who goes back to a moment—these moments that we write about that separate our lives into “the before” and “the after,” whatever that moment is. Often these moments are things that happen to a lot of people—a parent dies, for example, and you're shattered. I hear writers sometimes say, “Well, that happens to everyone.” That's why you have to write about it! That is exactly why. Or miscarriage. Or childbirth—even when it goes well, it's a catastrophe. In some way, something is shattered.

When I was drafting, #MeToo was sweeping the globe, so here's Weinstein and all these monsters are falling. And I thought, What I'm going to do is say, as simply as I can, everything that happened. Because I was there and I see it now—she wasn't wrong. I wasn't wrong. The first page of my book is the first page I wrote, and I wrote it almost to the word the way it is. This is what happened. That's all, no value judgment, no particular valence of suspense or ethos or character, just: this is what happened.

And then, how do you make a reader care? Because this happens all the time. Well, that's why a reader needs to care. Why does it happen all the time? Interesting. Now it starts to open up. It happens all the time because girls are held responsible for the agency of boys and men. We let them be presidents and surgeons and astronauts. But when it comes to assault, we're like, “Oh, what did she do? What was she wearing? Did she drink?” He can run the country but he can't control his own... you know. I'm being very blunt and also generalizing and I recognize that. All assault is not heteronormative and all victims are not female and all predators are not male. The complexity of that is everywhere in our communities, and particularly in this community that I was in.

I realized that in order to get this story into the world, I could sue the school, which I wasn't going to do, or I could talk to the media. I actually spoke with a couple of reporters who were ready to go, but then someone else would be telling my story, and I'm a writer. If there's one thing that hasn't gone away, it's that I write. That's what I do. So, option three was: I write the damn thing, come hell or high water. And that's what I did. I wrote it very quickly.

KARIN: How did you find a way to make the reader care?

LACY: I wrote it with the sense that it had to hold a reader to the page. You have to give them a reason to stick around. All the more, you have to make them care about the girl this is happening to. Now, that's an interesting problem if the girl it had happened to is you, and you have a kind of conflicted relationship to her. For me, I hated the girl that it happened to. I have been ashamed of what happened to me all my adult life. It ruined half of my teens. It ruined my 20s. I was in an emotionally abusive relationship with the same man for eight years in my 20s, basically as a way to try to run away from what had happened. In order to write this book effectively, I had to do it in a way that made her likable. So, oddly, I had to animate compassion for myself, but it was a craft problem, not a therapy problem. Does that make sense?

KARIN: Can you give an example?

I was assaulted at an elite boarding school whose tuition is now $70,000 a year or something. I was, in a sense, a rich kid. Not rich the way rich people are now—I grew up in a normal house and my dad went to work every day and my mom went to work once we were in school. But I grew up with plenty of privilege. I'm also white and I'm also straight. I have a lot of advantages that made it such that when bad things did happen to me, as they happen to everyone, I had the resources to survive. So how is it appropriate for me to ask for attention? Why should I speak up, right now when we are not hearing enough from Black, brown, Indigenous, non-binary, non-gender-conforming writers, from all of the people who have been victimized so much more than I was? Why should I claim any space at all right now? That was a real question I asked myself.

The answer that I came to, whether it's right or not, is because I actually have access to the intricacies of an institutional silencing. I have it on paper now, in records and memos. I can show how they do it, because this happens all the time—in schools and churches and the Air Force and USA Gymnastics and all of these institutions. We know that even in families, things are covered up. Abuse is buried. There's a lot of fancy footwork that goes on and lawyers assist with this and priests assist with this and teachers and parents sometimes, and I was able to demonstrate how that happened. What this meant was the book was not about an assault. The book was about an institutional silencing.

In order to tell that story, the reader has to know the institution. How do you introduce a boarding school to people who have never been there? How do you make it a place worth learning about? You have to show them what was seductive. And there was a lot that was seductive, not just Harry Potter-seductive, with the dining halls and the candles and the whole thing, but feeling chosen and feeling that the whole world is your oyster, which is a feeling that to some extent these schools sell. So, it was a constant balancing act between holding what would potentially create resistance or indifference to my story, and finding a way to tell it that opened it up as much as possible for people who hadn't had the experiences I had. I don't know that I would have been thinking about those things if I hadn't felt like I needed to tell this right now, because some people still at that school needed to be fired. That was the feeling of it. It was almost mechanical.

KARIN: You say you wrote it quickly. Did it just pour out of you?

LACY: It did. This is the fourth book I’d written by that point. I do think those years spent working on things that didn't go anywhere, I was teaching myself. I would have thought that was horseshit a while ago, but actually, that's true. For anyone who's a runner, these are your long-distance miles, and they're there when you need them on race day. That happened for me. I wrote it in four months. I didn't have all day, my youngest was in preschool, so I wrote only in the mornings, and then on weekends, which meant I never saw my husband—what it does to a marriage when you never see your husband because you're writing about your sexual assault is not awesome, but that's a different thing.

I wrote that first page, which is the assault. I wanted that out of the way because it's not actually very interesting. It's completely boring and it happens all the time. A dime a dozen, right? What's interesting is how communities permit this to happen. What's our culpability there, all of us? And then what happens next?

I realized that in order for anyone to care about the girl to whom it had happened, I would have to go back, of course, to explain who I was and how I ended up in that room. But the thing I hate in memoir is when you open with something exciting, and then chapter two is: But back in 1986 when I was 11, it didn't feel that way... and the air goes out of the balloon. I was fighting against that all the time. How do you get the backstory in there in such a way that you keep the narrative clock running? The way I addressed this problem was by bringing in what was happening during the drafting, in real time, as I participated in this state investigation that was going nowhere.

In the book, we effectively have three points of time: we have the assault and what happens from there. We have the state investigation, which is me now. And then we have the girl before the assault. All three of these story lines are running simultaneously.

KARIN: Did you have an outline?

I didn't outline it. I did go about four paces ahead of myself where I would scribble down what came next. I wasn't always right. But I did that because I was terrified that I would come to the edge of a cliff and then look down and not be sure where to go. I gave myself track at the end of every day, so that I wouldn't show up the next day and have to do anything other than keep going.

KARIN: Did you find it healing to write out this story?

LACY: I don't think the writing process was therapeutic. I do think the writing process was useful in that, for the first time, I told it exactly the way it felt true to me. Everything. I alienated a couple people along the way. I'm okay with that. It is what it is. I told it as truthfully as I could, with the evidence I have. And that's not something I had ever been given to do. Everyone around me had said, “No, you're wrong, it wasn't like that.” Or, “If it was like that, it was your own fault.” Or, you know, “These things happen all the time. Nobody cares.” Or any of a number of ways to dismiss the fact that I was the victim of a crime and the school covered it up. Full stop. That's what happened. If I had been carjacked on campus and the school covered it up, we'd be like, “What? What's going on up there?” But a girl is sexually assaulted and a school covers it up, and everyone's like, “Oh, it's complicated.” No, it's not complicated. It's really simple. That clarity was really helpful.

KARIN: Did you feel a kind of closure?

LACY: Closure is not my friend. There is a throwing off of shame, which is good. But there's this interesting thing that happens where people say, in a loving way, “You're so brave to tell this story.” It bothers me a little bit, and it bothers me that it bothers me. That's an ungenerous response to a generous comment. The reason it bothers me, I think, is because I don't know why it should be brave to describe having been the victim of a crime, multiple crimes in my case—not just the aggravated felonious sexual assaults, but also the obstruction of justice and witness tampering and also medical malpractice on the part of my boarding school. Why should it be brave to talk about those things? My college roommate got mugged at gunpoint. She told everyone who would listen. There's no shame in that. There's horror. There's trauma. There's fear. But no one says, “God, you're so brave to tell us that happened.”

KARIN: Why do you think people imagine it as brave?

LACY: Because we recognize the taboos about talking about sex and sexual assault and shame. Sexual assault has nothing to do with sex and nothing to do with desire. Certainly not on the part of the victim. It is a crime. What I keep bumping up against is this expectation that I'm not supposed to talk about this and it's brave that I am. I don't walk that line anymore. We should all talk about this all the time. Why not? I don't understand why we would contribute to the veiling of it, which is precisely what's used to keep us quiet, and make it more possible to victimize girls and young people in general. For me, I decided in some visceral way that I really don't care. I don't care to be ashamed. I'm not. I did the best I could. I was a good girl. I tried really hard. I was far from perfect. But I was a good person. I didn't deserve any of that. And that's not how I felt for a long time.




Buy the book

To learn more about Lacy Crawford visit her site.

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A Conversation with Susannah Conway

For over 12 years now, I have been running a heart-centered business. I have been working closely with memoir writers for nearly two decades, but the first Unlocking Your Story workshop took place in 2009, which has now become my signature offering along with one-on-one mentoring.

For much of that time, I have been following Susannah Conway, an author, photographer and teacher who is based in the United Kingdom. Susannah offers a variety of e-courses devoted to personal development—everything from journaling to tarot to how to blog from the heart. Her name may sound familiar as I’ve often passed along the link to her ever popular “Unravel Your Year” workbook at the end of each year.

Six years ago, Susannah created The Inside Story, which offers a behind the scenes look at how she runs her very successful, heart-centered online business. Not only does Susannah share her knowledge openly and generously, but she also draws together an incredible community from around the world. In many ways, they have been my guiding light as I navigate my own organic path doing work that I love.

This Monday, October 4th, Susannah is opening a new iteration of The Inside Story—a 7-week online course ideal for those who want to put more of yourself into what you do!

Scroll down to read my interview with Susannah, where she shares more about The Inside Story as well as a few golden tips on how to think about cultivating your personal brand, which to my mind, is really about sharing your genuine Self as a way of cultivating community.

If you are curious about The Inside Story or have any questions, I'm happy to share my experience!

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SUSANNAH CONWAY is an author, photographer and teacher who’s been sharing her heart online for over a decade. She guides people in knowing, trusting and expressing themselves better by teaching the tools that helped her heal her own heart and live a self-directed life.

Based in the United Kingdom, Susannah now has a range of creative e-courses running throughout the year sharing the tools and techniques that brought such profound change into her life. Thousands of people from over 50 countries have joined together to explore their creativity.

Her upcoming e-course, The Inside Story, takes you behind the scenes, as she reveals how her online, heart-centered business is run, so that you can find the shape of your own!

KARIN GUTMAN: For those who don’t know you, can you share a bit about what you do in the world?

SUSANNAH CONWAY: Yeah, well, the people who I normally have to explain that to are taxi drivers. You know, when you're in the back of a cab. “What do you do, love?” And so, I always say, “I'm a writer,” because that's easy to understand. And then they say, “What do you write about?” And I say, “Well, I write about personal development.” But then I say, “I also run creative courses online. And I teach about journaling, and Tarot, and photography, and meditation and stuff like that as a way to get to know yourself better, and feel more in alignment with what's important to you.” So yeah, that's kind of how I put it.

That always sounds a bit wishy washy. So then I say, “Well, I've been doing it for 12 years. And so far, so good. So, it does work.” People often find the concept of teaching online a new thing. But this has been going for a while now. It is a billion-dollar industry with lots of different layers. I'm definitely a smaller player, but in some ways that feels better, because I'm a bit more nimble. I can change and course correct and make it the shape I want it to be.

I’ve been doing stuff online since 2006. So, I've had time to build community and get to know people online and know how to be online. It feels quite natural now.

KARIN: Let’s talk about The Inside Story! You and The Inside Story community have been my guiding light in running a heart-centered business for many years.

So much of it is about developing a personal brand or platform, which applies to authors, as well. Where do you suggest people start?

SUSANNAH: You've got to get to know yourself really well. That's part of why it's called The Inside Story. In the first module, I talk about doing the strengths finder test. Knowing if you are an introvert or an extrovert. Having self-awareness first, to understand how you want to create your business and how you want it to feel and what you need from it, rather than doing what you think you should do, or what everyone else tells you. So, we start with that piece of self-awareness.

And then we're moving into building a following, building your tribe of people. Because without community, you don't have a business. If you don't have someone to sell to or for someone to buy your book, or come and see your play, or whatever it is… it's not going to happen. The community piece is the biggest piece. And so, I'm going to talk about how to call those people in.

How do you want to show up online? People use the word ‘authentic’ all the time. I’ve kind of gone off that word now because I hear it so often, it doesn't mean anything. But how to get comfortable—I feel like I'm speaking clichés—being yourself online? How do you get to know yourself well enough to feel confident to show up on Twitter or Instagram, whatever it is, just as you are. Not trying to be like that person and not comparing yourself to that person. We're going to do a bit on comparison as well. But just celebrating who you are, and how you are, and what you look like, and figuring out how much do I want to share? What do you not want to do—get really clear on that. That will help you get clear on what you do want to do.

KARIN: You originally created the course six years ago. What’s new in this latest iteration?

SUSANNAH: The new spin is going to be a whole thing on Instagram, because that's my favorite way to share. I'm not on Twitter anymore. I don't like Facebook. I will talk about picking one and doing it well. And do it consistently. Consistency is the most important thing in all of this. Do something consistently. Sharing snippets of your world, I think, is the most seductive thing. You're creating this little legion of fans who want to know your story, they want to know what comes next. You find things that you want to share.

KARIN: Like how you’ve been photographing and sharing about the foxes who took up residence in your backyard?

SUSANNAH: The foxes are going to be an example. The foxes haven’t anything to do with what I teach, although we could argue photography. But what I did is I created a stopwatch. I documented something that was happening in my immediate world, something that I felt quite emotional about. And I shared it with my Instagram family. There were no hashtags, nothing like that. And I got bajillions of comments on there, because everyone got really invested in the foxes just like I was.

Photo courtesy of Susannah Conway.

I was just being in the community, and I wasn't there to sell them anything. I wasn't trying to do anything actually. I was just like, “Oh my God, look at this!” It's almost like social media becomes a show and tell. “Look at this...” and they get invested in your story. And they want to follow because they wonder what happens next. That's what my blog always was—it was telling the story of me and saying, you know, this happened. And then, well, I figured that bit out now and I figured that bit out, and people come along for the ride. Maybe it's just about being a decent storyteller and sharing your story in a way that's moderately interesting. We're not talking Neil Gaiman. Just share. Honestly, truthfully. Decide what you don't want to share. Don't want to talk about your marriage. Great. No one cares. But just sharing enough.

Maybe sometimes you will feel a tiny bit uncomfortable. But that's always when you're going to get the most comments. Anytime I've shared something that was like, “Oh shit, I shouldn't have said that.” Avalanche of comments. It was like, “Me too! Me too! Me too!” I think it's knowing who you are, and then getting comfortable sharing yourself. You get comfortable by practicing it. The more you do it, the easier it gets. But you have to do it consistently. And then do it in such a way that people get a little bit invested. And then obviously, if you're creating something, share your process, share your inspirations.

Social media is like this big storytelling platform, if you think about it, and we're all these unpaid entertainers that are dancing at the front of the room, and everyone's like, “Oh, she's so great. I want to be like her.” Ultimately, that's what it is… you do things and people are like, “I just wanna be like you.”

KARIN: It’s sharing about the things that matter to us, like the foxes were for you.

SUSANNAH: The enthusiasm is infectious. You want people to fall in love with you. It sounds a bit ‘ick’ but actually I mean in the purest way. If you're going to build a following it’s because people like what you're saying or they like what you're sharing or they really relate to your story, you know, it's all of that. I don't know how to teach people how to be charming, but that's what it is. It's you charming people, and you do that by sharing enough that they are interested and a little bit intrigued and they want to know what happens next. I am a constantly unfolding story for people to read and I think that's always what blogging felt like—a blog post literally felt like the next chapter in the book. It was this never-ending book. Now we have much shorter chapters on social media.

The way they've designed the technology with the whole slot machine aspect of Instagram—the addictive quality of it—is quite annoying and I don't like that because I'm on there scrolling. We're all doing that. That whole idea that you never know what you're going to find, you can't predict what it's going to be. And so, every time I shared a fox picture people went bananas. I made a reel of the foxes on Instagram and it got viewed like 190,000 times. The algorithm got it because it was popular. I love that the thing that got viewed the most was just about the foxes. There was no “link in bio,” there was none of that. It was just sharing joy. That's awesome. I can't monetize that, surely, but sometimes you can catch something that feels magical and it's not about money but it brings people to you because they feel your energy. I'm sure I got quite a few followers from it.

So, we have to learn how to be partly entertainers but also partly storytellers. How can you tell your story, whatever it is, in such a way that someone you know wants to give you a few minutes of their time and attention? And then maybe, when they get a bit invested and fall in love with you, they'll give you some money. That's been my experience.

KARIN: What do you say to people who feel anxious about exposing themselves?

SUSANNAH: I would say you’ve got to find your way of doing it that feels comfortable. If it's that bad, do something different. Re-think your job. Because the thing is, if you're doing anything creative, there needs to be an aspect of you finding your fans. Fact. We can't get away from that. I still share the occasional picture of me because I know that if I've ever shared a selfie on Instagram, it gets the most comments because people want to connect with other people. You want to know who you're buying from. Like the old days of Etsy, you're always going to be clicking on the “About” page because you want to know, Who is the person creating this magical shawl? We want that connection. It feels much more authentic and real.

KARIN: For those who are looking to cultivate a personal brand, what are the three most important things to think about?

SUSANNAH: Consistency, honesty… you know, I want to say, humor.

KARIN: That’s awesome.

SUSANNAH: Don't take it all so seriously. It's fun. I hope that comes through. I'm a very serious person, but I'm a sweary. That's just who I am. So, I hope that comes across. I think in my writing online, I probably seem a little bit more serious than I actually am. That is also part of me, but when you meet me in person, I'm just like my mom and my sister. We're the jesters of the family. Whenever we're around people, we're the ones cracking jokes and putting everyone at ease through humor. I think humor is such a lovely way to bring people together. Just to take that edge off. Yeah, bring that in—obviously if that comes naturally. Just a lightness of touch.



To learn more about Susannah, visit her site.

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THE INSIDE STORY

A seven-week online course

Beginning Monday, October 4th!

If you’re a year or two into your business, looking to build your personal brand, or ready to take your side-hustle full time, this course is for you.

In this seven-week online course, Susannah shares how she got started and (un)structures her day to the tools she uses, how she creates and runs her e-courses, builds community and navigates social media as an introvert. She reveals everything she has learned in 12 years of running a successful, heart-centered online business. She'll also help you figure out the shape of YOUR business.

The Inside Story isn’t a blueprint, it’s a permission slip to create the business that fits YOU.

“Susannah not only offers outstanding guidance and a wealth of information and tools in her class, she has also built an exceptional community of nurturing and supportive business owners around her. We are proud to be Insiders!”

— Kerstin Martin