A Conversation with Regina Louise

We are at the tail end of Black History Month, and I wish to celebrate by spotlighting the work of an extraordinary woman, Regina Louise, who is a true artistic force to be reckoned with. She is the author of two memoirs about her experience traveling through over 30 foster homes in her youth and emerging triumphantly on the other side. Her story has recently been adapted as a Lifetime movie that is viewable on Amazon Prime.

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After living in over 30 foster homes and overcoming dangerous withdrawals from inaccurately prescribed drugs, Regina Louise took charge of her life. After missing many years of formal education and labeled 'below-average or marginal at best,' Regina's optimism and perseverance has helped her become a clear definition of resilience.

Author of the bestselling memoir Somebody's Someone, Regina's story has been featured on NPR's All things Considered, The Tavis Smiley Show and The CBS Early Show.

She is a leadership coach in human services, a Hoffman Process teaching candidate, and the winner of an Adoption Excellence Award from the Administration for Children and Families. She is also a trauma-informed trainer who advocates on behalf of foster youth and their emotional permanency. She lives in Northern California.

In her most recent memoir, Someone Has Led This Child to Believe, Regina tells the true story of overcoming neglect in the US foster-care system. Drawing on her experience as one of society's abandoned children, she recounts how she emerged from the cruel, unjust system, not only to survive, but to flourish.

This unflinching, unforgettable account has been adapted as a Lifetime movie, “I am Somebody's Child,” which can be viewed on Amazon Prime.

KARIN GUTMAN: It's Black History Month and you recently attended the NAACP Image Awards. Can you tell us about it?

REGINA LOUISE: Every year the NAACP Image Awards recognizes a film and literature and music that has been created to highlight the gifts and contributions of those of us of African American ancestry and identity. And my movie, I Am Somebody's Child, was nominated for Best Director and therefore the director invited me as her guest. So, I accepted.

KARIN: Nice!

REGINA: There are two events. One on Friday, which is a dinner and then one on Saturday, which is televised. The one on Saturday has all the mega stars—the Morgan Freeman’s, the Angela Bassette’s, the Jamie Fox’s, the Rihanna’s and Tiffany Haddish’s, and on and on.

Native Son won in the category of Best Director. As far as I'm concerned, when you're black in America, whoever wins is a win for all of us. So, it's a beautiful thing no matter how you cut it, because the work I do, have done, and hope to continue to do, isn't about me necessarily as much as it is about those who are historically underrepresented and those who are voiceless or marginalized. For me to know that the movie—no matter what the nomination is—has legs now, means a lot.

KARIN: I know the movie is largely based on your second book, Someone Has Led This Child to Believe. Can you tell us about the story?

REGINA: It was my master's thesis for graduate school. It is written in collage because to say that all the memories I have are 100% accurate, is pushing it. I wanted my memoir structurally to mimic memory—fragmented, nonlinear, with these collage-like moments. I think that the movie should have been a miniseries because it's such a vast story. In my book I jumped from 19 years old to 40, covering some of the most tumultuous years of my life.

KARIN: For people who are not familiar with your story, it might help to also share more about your first book, Somebody’s Someone.

REGINA: Somebody’s Someone is a story about my younger self being left in the care of my mother's foster, or kinship, family members. They were not of my ilk. We didn't jive. Our souls were not compatible. So, as a result of the abuse, I decided, I have to get out of here. I won't make it out alive if I stay. So, it's about my leaving, my activating agency at 11-years-old and leaving the situation for a better situation, not knowing what better was. But I knew it had to be an upshot from being beaten, neglected, and constantly shamed. It's a heroine's journey of taking my life into my own hands and manifesting my destiny and meeting up with a woman who wanted to be my mother, but wasn't allowed to because of racial differences during the '70s.

Then the second book, Someone Led This Child to Believe, picks up where the first leaves off. The ending of the second book rectifies the ending of the first book.

KARIN: I believe all of our stories contribute to a broader conversation that's happening in the world. How do you see your books, your stories, contributing to this conversation about race specifically?

REGINA: There are many conversations going on. Where am I in that conversation? I am in the conversation from the point of view that there are hundreds of thousands of young black girls in the foster care system. There are more children in foster care than there are in the general population of America. Let me say it this way… the conversation that I am narrating is about the overrepresentation of young girls in foster care and how they are continually being left behind.

The equity gap between foster youth or young black girls and their contemporaries is staggering. They're so behind, and the opportunity to be given a hand-up is not happening. They are a forgotten about demographic. Period.

I believe that my attempt—although a feeble one at best—has been to shake it up, to open the national narrative around it. I don't know if I've been successful at that. In terms of African American History Month, Cynthia Erivo, who played Harriet in the film, received an Oscar nomination as well as the NAACP nomination for the song “Stand Up.” I think we could all stand to learn from the words of that song. "I'm going to stand up, take my people with me, together we are going to a brand-new home."

Even though this song is about a time in the past, it's not. It's actually about the time right now; because if it weren't, there would be no need for the NAACP because there would be equity amongst all races and we both know that that's not true.

The bridge is so brilliant: “I believe it's my responsibility to turn my face to the sun and with a weight on my shoulder.”

That is so apropos for today… for people to take the weight, take the mantle of displaced children on their shoulders and, opposed to a bullet in the gun, take the intellectual pursuit of equality and justice for all. Use the Declaration of Independence to arm ourselves with what it means to close the gap on access, with respect to children in foster care and all disenfranchised children.

Black History Month for me is most effective when it is all encompassing. I love it when it's not just about the celebrities and stars, but also about those of us who are out there hustling day and night. Last year I canvased 47,000 miles on Amtrak across the country on behalf of unwanted children. That's real.

And I can say that I championed the movie for 17 years. Not for it to be about a white woman loving or saving a girl. It is really about agency. Perseverance. Sure, I had somebody model for me what love was. But what's most interesting is how I was able to scale that. How I was able to multiply that woman's kindness and generosity throughout my life. That to me is the definition of triumph of the spirit—to believe what is possible against all indictments.

To me that's what ties all the work I do to black history; not just this month, but every day, every trip I take, every time I say yes, I'm doing it on behalf of black children that are disremembered and unaccounted for. The ones that don't have a voice, the ones that could never in a million years afford to luxuriate in a lot of the successes that many of us have acquired. My work is to represent that.

KARIN: It can be challenging to talk about race. How can someone move beyond fear or hesitation and enter the conversation?

REGINA: It's to ask those questions that are relevant to my subjectivity. What is it like to be black in America? What is it like to be you? What has it been like to feel you constantly have to make a way where there isn't one? It's all about bedside manners to me, that we all do our best to recognize our biases and then to compassionately try and relax them so that we can make room for that “other person” to be in their their-ness and to allow that to just be.

KARIN: Let’s talk about your new book, for which you just landed a publishing deal. Congratulations! I know it’s a new kind of format for you. Can you talk about it?

REGINA: It's a set of strategies, actually. Strategies that I got by bootstrapping. I consider myself a straight up bootstrapper, and I consider myself a straight up, kick-ass kind of girl. I do what needs to be done by force or extreme effort. That to me is kick-ass. That’s what I had to be. It wasn't an option. Now I've chosen it as a superpower. Kickass!

So, I have a book full of strategies and activities and actionable steps that I'm offering people in a way that will hopefully encourage them to move past injunctions that moor them in  ineffectiveness or unhappiness. I think one of the virtues of my not being “parented” is that I have been my own savior. Isn't that what Adele said: "This time I'll be greater, I'll be my own savior." I know that quite well.

I know the dance of what it means to save myself again and again and again and to resurrect myself again and again and again. I never had the luxury of being moored in depression. I saw very recently… there was something online where someone creatively unpacked depression, to rephrase it as, “I pressed on.” Within depression is I pressed on, and I'm actually going to use that. How do you transmute, how do you transform depression? How does anybody do that? I didn't have the luxury to be depressed. I could only press on.

To learn more about Regina, visit her website.

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A Conversation with Daniel M. Jaffe

I have recently gotten curious about the, sometimes, fine line between memoir and fiction. What makes memoir memoir, and at what point does it become a fictional telling of the story? Also, if you are debating between the two, how do you decide on the best way to write your narrative?

I had the unique opportunity to explore these questions with esteemed author and teacher Daniel M. Jaffe, who is a profound source of wisdom. He refers to his newest novel, Yeled Tov, as an autobiographical novel. It follows a Jewish teenager struggling to reconcile his devotion to Torah with his growing attraction to other young men. In fact, Dan initially wrote it as a memoir, so he knows intimately the experience of writing the same story in both forms. Scroll down to read our full interview.

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Daniel M. Jaffe is a former corporate/securities attorney turned writer. Several of his short stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and dozens of his stories, essays, and articles have appeared in anthologies, literary journals and newspapers in many countries and languages. His work has been taught in college and university courses. He holds degrees from Princeton University (A.B.), Harvard Law School (J.D.), and Vermont College (M.F.A.).

His newest novel, YELED TOV (2018, Lethe Press), follows a Jewish teenager struggling to reconcile his devotion to Torah with his growing attraction to other young men. Can he be both Jewish and gay? Does he risk losing God's love?  

KARIN GUTMAN: We first met when I took your class at UCLA, “The Art of the Lie,” which used personal experience as a springboard for fiction. What inspired you to create such a course?

DANIEL M. JAFFE: Actually, I can’t take credit for having created that course. The now-retired Director of UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program, Dr. Linda Venis, was an endless source of course ideas.  After I’d been teaching in the Program for a couple years, Linda approached me with this particular course idea and asked if I’d like to teach it. Given that I’d had experience writing both fiction and memoir (as personal essay), the course was a natural fit. So, Linda provided me the course description and then let me develop a syllabus so as to take the course in my own direction. A really wonderful opportunity.

KARIN: I understand that your most recent novel, Yeled Tov, was originally written as a memoir, but then you adapted it as a novel. What was the reason behind this decision?

DANIEL: The notion of writing Yeled Tov evolved over time, as did its ultimate form. Yeled Tov (“Good Boy”) is a novel about a Jewish teenager, Jake, struggling to reconcile his observant and traditional religious beliefs with the growing awareness of his gayness. As his experiences and guilt intensify, Jake holds imaginary conversations with God, who is basically a manifestation of Jake’s own conscience. When Jake reaches a point where he feels completely wicked and beyond redemption, as a biblical abomination, he imagines God turning His back on him, and Jake attempts suicide.

This is all autobiographical, my most central and agonizing personal story. Thirty years ago, when I first committed myself to writing, I made a conscious decision to concentrate on fiction rather than memoir because I felt that fiction could mask real experiences that felt too private to acknowledge publicly—such as my coming out struggle and suicide attempt—yet still offer the opportunity to write about them with emotional honesty. Also, I could minimize the potential for embarrassment of my parents and any others whose lives intersected with mine. Among other things, I indeed wrote a number of short stories about teenage characters struggling with a religious-sexual identity conflict, including one where the teenager contemplated suicide.

Over time, however, I found myself increasingly wishing to be known beyond the fictional façade, so I started writing memoiristic personal essays, some addressing my teenage coming out struggle. Eventually, after Dad passed away and Mom lost awareness due to dementia, I no longer needed to worry about embarrassing them by exposing a painful, intensely painful period in their lives. Also, I wanted to publish a book addressing a tragic reality: even today, LGBTQ youth sometimes kill themselves out of a misplaced sense of shame. One source of that shame is religious teachings, a phenomenon I was in a good position to address.

Sometimes I write just for fun and to entertain, but at other times I write in order to promote social change, hopefully to help people. This was one of those times. We all know that fiction or memoir about personal trauma can help readers in similar circumstances feel less alone. Our writing can offer hope and, if we’re lucky, save lives.

So, I spent a couple of years writing a full-length memoir about my teenage struggle. One day when meeting with my publisher over lunch (he’d already published three of my books by then), I proudly announced what I’d written. Without so much as looking at the manuscript, he said, “Dan, gay memoir doesn’t really sell anymore. But if you re-write it as a novel—that I can sell.”

Hah! So now I’d come full circle: a process that had started as fiction, then shifted into memoir, now needed to return to fiction. So, I spent a year re-conceptualizing and re-writing, and the result is Yeled Tov, very much a novel rather than a memoir. What’s so interesting is that when interviewing me about this fictional work, the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, was most interested in its autobiographical aspects. They even published photographs of me with my parents so as to make the social-political point that an observant Jewish family can welcome a gay child. Fiction and memoir are completely blurred in this project.

KARIN: Do you think that’s true, that a gay memoir is not saleable?

DANIEL: As much as I feel a modest authority in discussing the writing of fiction and memoir, I feel absolutely no authority whatsoever in discussing the marketplace. I haven’t a clue as to what will sell and what won’t. All I know how to do is write.

That said, I think my publisher’s reluctance was specific to the topic of gay-themed memoir, rather than memoir in general. Even more specifically—memoirs about coming out. There are an awful lot of them out there, which is wonderful. I suppose those that sell best are those written by famous people. I can understand that—celebrity sells. And I ain’t no celebrity.

But this phenomenon is not limited to memoir. In my early years as writer, in the 1990’s, I wrote a couple of coming-out-themed novels loosely based on my experience, but not nearly as autobiographical as Yeled Tov. The late 1980’s-early 1990’s was a boom time for lesbian and gay fiction—our work was being taken seriously by the New York publishing establishment for the first time. One editor who was in charge of a major publisher’s lesbian-gay line of fiction kindly read one of my novels, but rejected it saying something about being tired of coming-out novels. He, as editor, was probably inundated with every single coming out novel being written at the time. But the general public? I, as one reader back then, couldn’t get enough of them. Every person’s coming-out experience is unique, and I found it incredibly soothing to read each and every such story I could get my hands on, as a sort of validation of my own struggles, a sense of camaraderie. But… it wasn’t up to me, it was up to this editor who had all the power. He was tired of the subject, so he assumed his readership was, as well. Maybe he was right. We’ll never know.

KARIN: Do you miss anything from its original iteration as a memoir?

DANIEL: Certainly, I had to cut out a lot from the memoir. The approach I took in the memoir was that of a middle-aged man looking back on his youth and re-visiting, interpreting. I could have taken a similar stance with the novel, but my publisher felt that a simpler, more direct approach would be better, particularly since he wanted to promote it to a late teen readership. So, a good deal of the memoir is gone, the self-conscious analysis that often marks what I think of as strong memoir.

Initially, while re-writing the material as fiction, I felt pain at cutting much material.  I think it’s Annie Dillard in her incredibly insightful book, The Writing Life, who points out that, before we can truly cut material out of a draft and just move on to write what’s best for the work, we need to forget the pain of having written our treasured lines. Gradually, as I developed new material and re-shaped, I forgot the pain and time and effort spent on writing what I now had to cut out.  The novel became its own entity, and I stopped focusing on what it wasn’t.

KARIN: Do you think writing the memoir help make the fictional version better?

DANIEL: I think I could have written Yeled Tov directly as novel. Whether the memoir form as “first draft” ultimately made the fiction stronger or not, I can’t tell. To be perfectly honest, I no longer remember details of the memoir version. It’s as if the novel over-wrote and erased it.

KARIN: What new things did you discover in the fictional story? What liberties did you take, that hopefully, made it a better story?

DANIEL: Whether the novel or memoir is a “better” story or not, I can’t say. But they’re certainly “different” from one another.

As I mentioned a little earlier, the structure changed in that the memoir was reminiscent—an adult looking back at his life, whereas the novel simply follows the teenager forward from late high school through early college.

In terms of liberties, the novel version freed me up to write a different outcome for the character.  In real life, I didn’t quickly heal after my college suicide attempt. I continued to suffer and struggle for years. In the memoir, I made clear that eventually, I did find an inner peace, I found a wonderful man—Leo and I have been together now for over 26 years, legally married for over 6—and found profound acceptance by family and community. Given that the memoir’s focus was on my teen years, I didn’t need to go into detail about my adult life in order to make the story complete. The reader could accept the story as limited to a difficult time, and could also accept that the difficulty eased later on even if I didn’t write about that; after all, I was alive and writing, so the reader knew I hadn’t ultimately killed myself.

Certainly, I could have ended the novel with some sort of leap forward in time to show Jake, the main character, finding happiness years later. But that would have violated the way I handled time in the novel, which was moment-by-moment during two years of Jake’s life. And such an ending would have felt rather forced.

Another option would have been to have Jake succumb to his depression. But that was exactly opposite the message I wanted to offer readers, particularly younger ones. Up until the late 20th-century, so many LGBTQ-themed novels ended in suicide or death. Enough! The whole point of writing this novel was to suggest that LGBTQ people could find ways to thrive even after experiencing difficult personal struggles.

So, I needed to come up with an ending that fit with the novel’s handling of time, yet didn’t have some false, sudden turn-around where years of suffering magically transformed into happiness. Such an ending would have trivialized the very suffering Jake had experienced. What I came up with was a series of post-suicide-attempt conversations for Jake with family, friends, a therapist, and God, all of whom are saddened by the suicide attempt. Up until the suicide attempt, he torments himself within himself, never reaching out to another person. After the attempt, when others are now reaching out to him, he can’t avoid such conversations. They get him out of his own head, and help him realize that there might be different ways of looking at his situation, at Jewish religious teachings, and his future. That’s how the novel ends, with Jake finally beginning to connect authentically with the people around him and beginning to accept the possibility—just the possibility—that he’s not such an awful person, that he might fit within Jewish tradition, and that his future might not be as bleak as he’s imagined. By the end of the novel, he has earned something he had not possessed until then—hope.

KARIN: I believe that there is a healing component to writing. Did you experience that with this book, a kind of personal transformation in the writing of it?

DANIEL: Oh my gosh, this is so true for me. I experience healing in my writing all the time.  No matter what we’re writing, it’s coming from our psyches, so it’s us on the page. Whether we have happy dreams when we sleep or nightmares, we’re working out some issue or other, right?  It’s the same with writing. We’re processing. We don’t always reach clarities, but we’re wrestling with our angels and demons both.

In Yeled Tov, after Jake’s suicide attempt, he finally confides in another Jewish character that he attempted to end his life as a reaction to the Torah’s prohibition against homosexuality. The other character responds, “My dear friend… We’re supposed to live by the Torah, not die by it.” Here I’d been writing for years about my own life, yet I’d never articulated and distilled that thought until the very moment my fictional character said it.

I never had such a conversation with a Jewish friend in real life. Nobody ever said line that to me. I never even voiced it to myself. Yet at the very moment I wrote it, I experienced an epiphany… 40 years after my own suicide attempt. It came out of my writing through a fictional character’s voice. And I don’t mean it came from the character based on myself; it came out of a character loosely based on an actual friend from my past, an observant Jewish woman of great compassion. After I wrote that sentence, I lifted my hands from the keyboard, covered my face, and wept. Finally I was able to say, in one sentence, the healing phrase I’d been needing to hear all these decades. Decades. It’s become my mantra. This is the personal power of writing fiction.

KARIN: What do you like to read? What are you reading these days?

I read all kinds of things. Novels, short story collections, memoirs, histories, plays. Sometimes, I do background reading related to projects I have in mind. I’ve been reading some memoirs by former Soviet dissidents because I’m considering writing a memoir about my experiences in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s when I studied for a short time in the Soviet Union and met various dissidents. Once I began studying in law school, I undertook to translate documents for them—political trial transcripts and so forth—so as to advocate for their causes in the West. An old friend of mine, Alla Podrabinek, recently completed a memoir of her life in Siberian exile with her dissident husband, Aleksandr. I loved reading that one, both for elaborations on what I remembered of their lives and for episodes that were new to me. And I’m now reading a classic dissident memoir, My Testimony by Anatoly Marchenko, one of the first memoirs of life in the Soviet gulag. I read/am reading these in Russian so as to brush up on my language skills.  Reading a foreign language helps with my English prose because it keeps me sensitive to word choice, sentence structure rhythm, and tone.

I’m also reading a collection of Philip Roth’s prose writings—essays, interviews with him, and interviews he conducted with other writers. Several reviewers have compared my writing with his, so I enjoy reading his take on his own work.

I recently finished a collection of short stories by Louis Auchincloss, a remarkable fiction writer known for his spot-on renderings of New York high society. I’d long heard of him, but had never read him before. I bought a book of his stories in a used book shop in Merced, so that I’d have something to read during a trip to Yosemite. Now I’m a fan!

KARIN: What advice would you give to a writer who is not sure whether to write the story as fiction or memoir?

I think of autobiographical fiction and memoir as being on a continuum. Some autobiographical fiction is loosely based on real life. Some memoir takes liberties with facts in order to render psychological truth more clearly. They’re definitely related forms and they blur. It’s often difficult to find a bright line between them. I think it’s a question of emphasis, and of how we want to hold the work out to the world. As I mentioned a little earlier, if we label something “memoir,” the reader makes certain assumptions about the writer’s life after the period covered in the work because the reader knows facts not covered in the actual memoir—the author survived Soviet labor camps, for example. After reading a novel, the reader might speculate about the main characters’ futures, but can’t really know for sure.

Maybe the wisest way to start writing a story based on real life experience is to dive in and write it however it comes out on the page. As you’re drafting, ask yourself if you’re altering what really happened, and why. Are you censoring yourself, avoiding writing down some painful things? Are you trying to “protect” real people in your life? (Keep in mind that there’s a difference between writing memoir and publishing it—you can always write and explore something yet wait until some later date to seek publication, if ever.) Can you bring yourself to write what you’re avoiding, or do you need to mask or avoid it for some reason? Answering these questions might help you figure out whether your work is more made-up than not, where on the memoir-fiction continuum it fits.

KARIN: When you say that "some memoir takes liberties with facts," what do you mean exactly?

DANIEL: What I meant is something like recording a conversation that happened years ago.  We can imagine a scenario where, in real life, there were 10 people in a room during an important conversation, and each chimed in, and the narrator gleaned an epiphany from that input.  In real life, when we know a large number of people very well, we can react instantly to each comment because we have so much context for each person's reaction.  We intuitively weigh Cousin X's comments more than Cousin Y's because Cousin X is a therapist and Cousin Y is generally obtuse, but maybe this time Cousin Y makes an unusually good point, and Aunt A amplifies that point and the narrator weighs Aunt A's reaction heavily because she's always been so insightful, in contrast to Uncle D who's chiming in but he's always been an idiot, etc.

To include all this and more, all these comments and the narrator's reactions might be confusing for a reader because, in a memoir, we likely wouldn't have the space to fully develop each of those 10 people well enough so that the reader could grasp the narrator's intuitive reactions. So, in writing the memoir, in order to keep focus on the psychological truth and what's important--a group of relatives got together and influenced the narrator's thinking--the memoir might describe that conversation with only 3 relatives having been in that room. Taking liberties with the facts to render with greater clarity what's really important.

But here's where taking liberties would violate the psychological truth: if we're writing a memoir episode of a 7-year-old boy who stole a Babe Ruth candy bar, but we write, instead, that he stole a Cadillac... well, yes, both versions are about a little boy stealing, but they represent very different psychological dynamics. It's a question of proportion and degree.

KARIN: Are you still teaching? Where can people take a class from you?

I teach less now than in the past. This February 29, I’ll be offering a one-day workshop through UCLA Extension Writers’ Program called, “Inspiring Our Muse: Nurturing the Writer Within.” It’s a course about the writing process, about sparking our imagination and tapping into our creativity. There are still spots available, should any of your readers care to sign up!

Buy the book!

To learn more about Daniel M. Jaffe, visit his website.

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A Conversation with Helen Jacobs

As we near the end of a decade (a decade!), I wanted to offer something special to mark this moment. So I reached out to Helen Jacobs, whom I've been following for a few years, upon hearing that her debut book was coming out. Helen is a psychic and channel based in Australia and her book You Already Know, while already on the shelves in Brisbane, will be released in the U.S. on January 14th.

A heads up: this interview goes well beyond the conversation of writing, and while I don't know each of your particular leanings when it comes to spirituality and its practices, I can tell you that Helen is a true force for positive change and inner transformation, and offers here a wealth of wisdom and insights that I'm excited to share with you. We talk about everything from her perspective on the geo-political climate to what we might expect as we enter a new decade. We do manage to touch on her writing process as well!

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Helen Jacobs was a successful PR and marketing executive who left her thriving career to become a full-time psychic and channel, hosting popular workshops and events to provide thousands of readings for people all over the world. As a soul guide, Helen mentors and teaches women how to change their lives and find a more meaningful path for themselves. She is also the host and creator of The Guided Collective Podcast which helps listeners connect to their intuition, their spirit guides, and their unique purpose.

Weaving her own personal experiences throughout her debut book You Already Know, Helen shares her unlikely journey and explains how to create a beautiful life for yourself today – by listening closely to your intuition, and following it. Her teachings will guide you in learning how to foresee potential life pitfalls, realize what your guidance is asking you to heal (and why), and prepare to find your true soul calling.

KARIN GUTMAN: It’s such a treat to speak with you! I've been following you ever since The Little Sage, and I know you've had quite a bit of an evolution since then.

HELEN JACOBS: I think a lot of people ended up finding me when I had The Little Sage. In truth, it's not where I started and I'd actually been, for probably three or four years, working under my own name, giving psychic readings. Essentially, that's all I did for the first couple of years. Prior to that, my background was completely different and I worked in public relations. I left PR to give psychic readings and I had a blog at the time. I don't think anyone really read it, but somehow it was enough to bring me clients. And in truth, I think clients were finding me just through word of mouth. Then I started The Little Sage because I felt called to. I felt like we were ready as a community to get together and to have resources and information that, at the time, I don't think really existed. There's a lot of it available now.

As you say, this evolution is because I honestly live my life following my intuition and higher guidance, so if I get the nudge to stop or start or do something that appears to be crazy, then I do it. Because I have this publicity background, I often watch what I'm doing myself and think, “Helen you are mad. Why would you close this business? Why would you do this? Why would you make these changes?” So the evolution is very much my personal growth based on listening to and trusting my guidance.

It's interesting, I think, for someone like yourself who's been watching on. We're all evolving, perhaps I'm just making it a little more public.

KARIN: You say, at the time you created The Little Sage, that there weren't many resources. What are you referring to exactly?

HELEN: I felt still quite young when I started The Little Sage. Particularly in Australia, anything that had been done prior in spirituality or even some self-development, all had the same flavor. It had the same tone and almost an inaccessibility or un-relatability that I think a younger audience couldn't connect with. I didn't connect with it. Perhaps having that publicity background, I wanted to position it in such a way that was very accessible. It was really about breaking down quite big concepts.

I created my Oracle cards around the same time. Everything else that was on the market was very esoteric, whereas mine came on and it was white and watercolor. I think that spirit had led me to this place, where perhaps spirits saw it before I did, that the mainstream or the masses were waking up and didn't want spirituality to be so out there.

KARIN: I remember finding it incredibly unique. What year did you create The Little Sage?

HELEN: Behind the scenes, I was working on it from around 2013. I kept it running until, I think, 2016.

KARIN: What shifted at that point for you?

HELEN: So, I'm also a channel, which means that I can receive huge volumes of information verbatim from the world of spirit. I had actually sat down to write the book, which now has morphed into You Already Know. At the time I sat down to write the book that I thought was needed, I started to channel huge volumes of quite advanced teachings that started while I was pregnant with my daughter Rose. For me personally, as I was receiving this higher guidance and I started to embody it and evolve myself by practicing what spirit was giving me, I ended up finding this disconnect between where I was going and where The Little Sage was. I had tried a lot of different things with The Little Sage, and pretty much everything I tried did work to some degree. It was like planting all of these seeds, but I couldn't quite get the whole garden to work.

What I realized is that The Little Sage was definitely helping people through one cycle of spiritual awakening or very early spiritual awakening, but that there was, for me, another round of awakening, more of a soul awakening. It felt like my understanding of my purpose—my understanding of the work and the message that I believe I'm here in the world to bring through—suddenly became much, much deeper.

KARIN: When you say soul work, can you describe the container in which you work now?

HELEN: For the last 12 or 18 months, it's very much been about working with individuals so that they can understand their path and their purpose. People may be at various points along their own journey. Maybe it is someone who's starting out, or like you, someone who has been at this for some time. I'm essentially helping people through that process. I help people come back into their truth and then figure out how they offer that truth to the world.

KARIN: You write that the book will help you identify what your guidance is asking you to heal and why. I’m wondering what exactly you mean by that? It sounds like the process of healing is connected to discovering your true soul calling.

HELEN: Yes, it is. After working with spirit for well over a decade, what I’ve found is that when we're asking questions about our purpose, our guidance is often asking us to focus on something else that feels very unrelated—tidy up your diet, take care of this relationship, move house, change jobs—something that feels like it's almost at the opposite end of what we're asking about. But as we tend to those steps, we are guided deeper into healing our internal world. We may have to heal some of our past traumas or change our limiting beliefs or re-frame the way we see ourselves and the world. I believe that at a deeper level we have, as a soul, many lessons in this lifetime. And as we truly learn and integrate the lessons, our purpose deepens.

As I went deeper into my own healing, my purpose became more available to me. I could see that I'm available to make a bigger impact or help more people, but that's only possible if I get out of my own way. I was raised in a Catholic household where my mom and my aunt poked fun at having gone to see a psychic or having their tea leaves read. I grew up believing that it was not safe for me to be psychic. So that’s clearly something I have to heal in order to go out into the world as a psychic.

KARIN: Who is the book for?

HELEN: It is for anyone who is wanting to follow their guidance, in order to understand themselves and live out their life path. I believe that the book will meet you where you are. The same tools and techniques can be applied at any stage of that journey, whether you're starting out or not. I take someone from the outset of ‘what is your intuition and how do you connect with it’ and ‘who are your guides and how you can work with them’. I take you then through the process, when your guidance will start asking you to do the healing and inner work and inner transformation, right through to… one of the last chapters in the book starts to point to some of the advanced teachings that I started channeling. So I do believe that this work will meet anyone where they are.

KARIN:  That's amazing. I believe you're still offering your monthly forecast, right?

HELEN: Yes, they are available on the podcast at the moment.

KARIN: I find it fascinating that you're able to guide individuals as well as the whole—The Guided Collective, as you call it.

HELEN: I think anything that we're doing individually is also happening on a collective level. We’re not separate beings in isolation. As each and every one of us is awakening, we’re adding to the mass consciousness, or the collective awakening, that's happening on our planet right now.

When I first sat down to write the book, I ended up channeling something else entirely. There was another group of guiding beings that appeared to me. They called themselves the High Council of Sages. As each of us has at least one spirit guide, the High Council of Sages is this group of guiding beings working with those of us on this planet who are awakening and choosing to live differently—to awaken physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

As a channel, I work with them to receive their guidance on what is happening as we are waking up collectively. What we do individually is making an impact on the bigger issues that we see geo-politically, economically. Sadly, in Australia right now, we have so much of our country on fire, and I think you've also been experiencing fires. Although it feels like it’s not related and not making a difference, if each of us is doing the inner work we will actually start, I believe, to heal the planet because we're raising the vibration.

KARIN: Can you speak to what’s happening in the U.S. right now? The political climate we’re experiencing, in particular, feels so extreme.

HELEN: Yes, I have been getting a lot of messages around this. Essentially, if we look at what is happening in the States, there is a heightened global awareness of what happens when ego, power, and unconscious behaviors are at the forefront. I talk about this process in the book at the individual level, that usually there is some sort of crisis or catalyst at the individual level that wakes us up. This would be true for everywhere. If we look at it from one level, we've put these people into power to get us to wake up and say, “What is the crisis point, how uncomfortable do we need to be until that mass consciousness shifts and changes?”

I do believe that right now we are at that tipping point. I also believe that there is more and more positive energy and positive vibration that is lifting and rising. Also, as we go through that change and transformation, it's very uncomfortable and all the muck has to come out. At the individual level—and you may have experienced this at various points when working with energy or when changing our belief systems—we may have what I call is a vibrational flu. Our body becomes unwell. We might have to cry for some time or we might have to just separate from our life for a minute while we take care of ourselves. I think that this is happening on the collective scale now. We’re realizing, “Oh my God, we've got all of this anger… oh my gosh, we've got all of these awful, horrible, separative beliefs that have kept us so trapped.” And as they all come out, the challenge for us—and this happens both individually and collectively—is that we don't attach to them, that we keep choosing love and the potential of what is possible and not just be stuck in, Oh my God, the world is turning to... excuse my language, to shit. We have to keep believing it's possible to change.

KARIN: Does that mean taking action, or is it more on a vibrational level?

HELEN: I think it's all of it, right? In the book I explain that we have a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual body. If we're looking at the collective and what's happening with the systems and structures on our planet—physically, we need to take action. I think voting in the States is voluntary, right?

KARIN: Yes.

HELEN: Perhaps in your country it’s getting out and voting. Maybe for some it’s activism and physical marching. Physically there are things we can do—donating time, money, resources, our voice. But at the mental level, we need to be changing our thinking with movements like #MeToo. I've seen a lot of really interesting debate and discussion around race and equality and these things are happening emotionally. This is where we are probably needing a bit of extra work—the emotional healing that needs to happen—when we've had huge race issues, when we've had huge political issues, when we've had huge divide. There are several, probably hundreds of years’ worth of trauma that needs processing. How do we do that on a mass scale?

KARIN: Yes, how?

HELEN: Well, I actually don't know the answer to that just yet.

There’s also the spiritual, or the energetic, and that's where each of us can be raising our own personal vibration. As each of us are doing that work, it will shift and tip the scales. Also, we have to change earth's energy. If we think of earth as a being herself, we need to be feeding a lot of energy into our earth.

Karin: How do we do that?

HELEN: Definitely we still need to take care of the environment because that would be the physical layer. This starts to move into some of the advanced teachings that I was pointing to before. My belief is that our physical bodies are a vehicle or a channel or a conduit for energy. If we're able to reach to these higher dimensions and higher frequencies… the spiritual awakening has allowed us to get that far but we actually need to go the next step now and understand that we need to take that energy into our body and learn how to keep moving it down into the earth. How do we actually send those frequencies through the layers of the earth into the core of the earth? Also, how do we then activate the healing energies that are within the earth and draw that back up from the earth?

KARIN: I can’t imagine the time and energy it takes to channel this kind of information. How do you relate to this gift of yours? Do you find it distracting? Is it something you can turn on and off?

HELEN: It depends on the day. In the book, I share this story of my aunt who had passed away in August 2001. On September 8th she came back to visit me and made it very clear and apparent that I could connect at length and sustain a connection with the world of spirit. My first reaction was a huge depression. I didn't want to connect with it. It was incredibly overwhelming, I was scared of it. What I said before about my upbringing… it was like, “I can't reconcile these two things,” and so it did take me a lot of time to figure out how to do that.

In the beginning it was very much about turning it on and off, and I think for many people that might be the way that they want to manage it. I also mentioned in the book that I think we all have the ability to connect—we all have intuition, we all have access to spirit. Not all of us are going to be inclined to spend all day connecting with it, right? I've made this my life's work so I feel like my flow is more constant. One of the things I learned in the first few years is that I am also a medium, which just means that I can connect with our deceased loved ones. I found them very annoying. They didn't respect any boundaries; they turned up at all times of the day and night. So I chose not to do that work anymore. I am human and sometimes I just don't want to know. Honestly, there are times I want to just put my head in the sand and be in my own self-pity and be like, “No, I don’t want to do anything. Don’t make me do anything else.” However, inevitably I get up the next day and ask again, what do I need to know?

In the book, I include a range of practices that can help us open that flow or manage the flow. I don't think that everybody's flow will be the same as mine, because I think it's part of my purpose. What I have access to, I think everyone can do, but whether they're inclined to… that’s up to the individuals. I also need to have a lot of recovery time too.

KARIN: I bet.

HELEN: Which I'm still learning to figure out even all these years later.

KARIN: What is your take on other spiritual practices like astrology, moon cycles or numerology? Do you incorporate these into your work?

HELEN: I have a strong personal interest in those things. I actually do reference them in the book. There's a chapter towards the end where I do talk about the connectivity with astrology and moon cycles and menstrual cycles for women. I think they're all connected, and I think that we need to be careful that we're not placing any particular emphasis or power on any one of those things. If we hand our power over to the psychic, to the astrology prediction, or to even my energy forecast, then we've kind of missed the point.

I just see that so much in our world is connected. This is part of that awakening. If we awaken and we're drawn to astrology, great. That will help. Or if we are drawn to some other healing modality or some other teacher, myself included, I think all of those things are useful. But we have to start seeing the big picture eventually. It’s not any one teacher or modality that's the answer. I talk sometimes about a tapestry. We have to weave all of these things together to come back to whole.

KARIN: So, for example, how would you recommend using your monthly energy forecast?

HELEN: In the book I talk about something called the mirror technique. Everything that exists outside of us is actually a mirror pointing us back inside of ourselves. Something like my forecast for example... you might listen and hear one thing and someone else will listen and take out something else entirely. The idea being that those things are mirrors pointing you inside of yourself to do that inner work.

Astrology, we've just had a full moon. The full moon doesn't control us. The full moon doesn't make us go crazy. The full moon is helping illuminate what is inside of us that can be released, what can be cleared, what can be healed. We're in constant dance and constant communion with the world around us that is actually inviting us inward to heal, so that we then take outward the thing that is healed within us—the new perspective, the offering, the purpose. It becomes a mirror for someone else. They’re going to do their work, they'll contribute something else. And you can see how that starts to build in change, right? There's this ripple effect.

So it’s not that, “Oh my God, there's a full moon and I need to have a particular practice.” Well, you can. Maybe you'll do that practice or maybe you'll just sit with the thing that you need to do and do that.

KARIN: Is it true that your focus or mission is to work specifically with women?

HELEN: For now.

KARIN: Why is that?

HELEN: At this time on our planet, as we're moving through such change and transformation individually and collectively, we're needing to reinstate the Divine Feminine. What that means is that the feminine energy has been awakening for some time. Things like intuition, expression, writing and storytelling, these are feminine traits. I just want to be clear, I'm not necessarily referring to gender or sexual orientation. That is separate. The feminine energy is really around collaboration, intuition, creativity. Also healing. A lot of women are feeling that call first. There are also men or other gender-identifying people who are also feeling that call because they will have a connection to that energy that's tapping them on their shoulder and saying, “We need your voice as part of this.”

If we think of femininity on a spectrum where in the middle is a balanced feminine… at one end we can have that submissive, passive, doormat type energy of the feminine and at the other end, perhaps there is an overly sexualized, overly playing on the feminine to control and manipulate. As a spectrum, that feminine has to come back into balance and somewhere in the balance is definitely owning our sexuality, owning our power, owning our sense of eroticism, but in a balanced, healthy way; and also to bring the other end of that spectrum out of that submissive passive and reclaiming our voice, reclaiming our wisdom.

When the feminine spectrum comes back into some semblance of balance, and at the moment we're trying to come back to balance, we're giving permission to the Divine Masculine to come back into balance. Coming back to what we were talking about, particularly in the States with the type of leadership that your country has right now, we can see a gross misrepresentation of masculine energy.

KARIN: Yes.

HELEN: We've also been operating in a system that is very patriarchal. We can also add into that race and gender. It's been very much skewed to a white privileged male. At an energy level, we can see that it's been skewed in a very toxic way.

If the feminine is rising and the feminine comes back into balance, then the masculine will have no choice but to meet and rise up because energetically when you set a new set point, anything that isn't a match has to fall away. And so that's what we're seeing right now. We're seeing that the feminine is rebalancing, that all of these patriarchal, toxic, masculine structures—production at all costs, profit over people, all of those things—have to drop away.

It's not just women. I do want to be very clear here that there are many gender identifying people that are taking part of this. I do believe that there will come a point where the masculine embraces their own feminine energy—and as the masculine energy comes back to balance, female-identifying people can then embrace a more balanced masculine energy.

The other thing that's really interesting, just in observing my own work… I've always predominantly worked with women not because at the outset I set out to, but because that's who turned up. But I am actually seeing that tide turning and I think that there are a lot of males or male-identifying people who are now feeling like it's more welcome for them to display such feminine qualities. As we provide that safety for them, it is shifting, but we still have a way to go.

KARIN: Since we are nearing the end of the year, I was wondering if you'd be willing to reflect on where we’ve been this past year and share about where things are headed in 2020?

HELEN: I actually need to start forecasting into 2020, and I've only just started scratching the surface. If I remember correctly, the card that I had turned for 2019 was self-love.

KARIN: Yes, I think it was.

HELEN: We've been exploring this sense of self and exploring a sense of unconditional love and what happens when we actually have such love for ourselves—then we can offer it to others. I think we still have some way to go on that theme, but upon reflection, there's probably some really interesting developments in that space, probably more so in purging what doesn't look like love, what doesn't look like the ideal.

One of the things that I've been feeling into for 2020, and I think just by the actual number itself, that there's something here around vision, 20/20 vision. There is something here around our ability to really, truly, clearly see the truth of ourselves and so much of this has been on the collective, the mess that we're in. It may also be that I've woken again this morning here in Australia… we're so sad. We're so disappointed in our government because these fires really should not be happening and they won't declare a climate emergency. So there is still this underlying courage for 2020 of clearly seeing ourselves individually, clearly seeing the predicament that we're in physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually—and physically, there meaning also environmentally. The challenge for us is how do we see these things and be able to act? How do we put it into motion? How do we make such change?

There's also another thread here, I think, for specifically this group that I call The Guided Collective, the people that are identifying that they want to follow guidance, their own internal truth and their own intuition in the world. We have to rise up and we have to be at the forefront of this using our voices. The energy healers need to start working on the collective energy and working with the earth. We all need to rise up out of the “I” and into the “we”. There is definitely something about 2020. I haven't quite received all the messages on it yet… you're sort of getting a sneak peek.

If this year was about self and love, next year is very much about how does the “I” contribute to the “we” because really there is no 'I' if the 'we' doesn't get this right.

KARIN: Do you have any end the year rituals that you do that you’d be willing to share?

HELEN: Yeah, well this year I'm planning on taking all of December off, which is very unusual for me. I am a self-proclaimed workaholic. I will often do some sort of closing ceremony. We're also letting go of a decade. I let that sit and then… whether this happens on January 1 or it happens on January 30, I'm not so fixed, but I will allow the new to arise within me. I just create enough space like taking holidays and spending time at the beach, spending time in nature, and I wait until something comes onto my heart. Where is it that I need to go next? I will always do some version of that. I'm also trying to get better at celebrating. I do really want to celebrate this year because I think when we're in times of such change and global crisis, if we put all of our energy into that, while of course it needs attention, we also need to counterbalance it with that happier positive energy that allows us to keep doing that work.

In my unique case, I actually need to practice physically celebrating, like throw yourself the party. I'm pretty good on the emotional and energetic side of things. For me personally, I have to remember to invite others into that celebration or to actually say, let's have a beautiful lunch together. Definitely this year I feel like I've had a lot to celebrate. I've had to keep reminding myself to physically mark those stones.

KARIN: Your book came out!

HELEN: Yeah, I totally underestimated this process. Even though I had 10 years leading up to it, I wrote the version that's gone to print in six months. In that six months, I wrote it three times.

KARIN: Wow.

HELEN: Yes. I can now look back and go, “Holy Dooley. That was a big process.”

KARIN: So the 10 years leading up to those six months was made up of what?

HELEN: I certainly had various iterations of that manuscript in several folders and files. I also have kept a journal for well over 10 years, so I have at last count over 200 journals… I had written this over and over in some form. I've taught this for 10 years. I’ve paneled this for 10 years. I speak all day, every day about it. So in some way I had really been expressing this for some time, but the actual act of having to sit there and finish it is grueling. That you have to actually put a full stop on it and at some point say, “Well, the deadline's here. This is it.” I found that really hard.

KARIN: How did you know it was that tipping point?

HELEN: Well, for me, I had a publisher who set the deadline for me. That's exactly what I needed. If I'd set my own deadline, this book may never have come about.

KARIN: Did the publisher approach you or had you been seeking a publisher?

HELEN: I'd never actually contacted them. It was a chance meeting that I talk about it in the book, because I think that this book is part of my purpose. I knew that one day they would turn up, so I was just always on the lookout. I think there’d have come a point where I started to canvas my work. But I was busy doing other things and it was a chance meeting. It was a conversation. We started emailing. The email became the proposal, and I was offered the contract.

KARIN: Amazing.

HELEN: Yes, so unheard of. I remember going to a lot of writing classes over the years, and having a lot of writers tell me, “Oh, this is so hard.” Of course it can be, but I really actively chose for the whole process to be joyful. Other than that final push of birth, it mostly was joyful.

KARIN: Which part was joyful?

HELEN: I took joy in talking with the publisher. I took joy and gratitude in signing the contract because I'd waited for it for 10 years. I took joy in getting up every day and writing. Even if that day of writing was difficult, I came back to, “I get to do this.” I took joy that somewhat someone had had great faith in this book and that it needed to be printed. I tried to take joy in the editing process. As my editor would say, “What is this?” and queried things, I took joy that someone had such dedication to my message to make it the best that it could be. I took such joy that the designers went through so many iterations of the cover to make this the best that it could be. I really took joy in the launch. It was a little uncomfortable to talk about it every day, but I took joy in that this moment won't come again. I will never have a first book again.

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