Unfixed Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

This conversation is going to stay with me for a long time. Together, Josh and I walked the fine threshold between grief and storytelling, illness and healing, and I found myself feeling lighter and more stable when we finished.

In Josh’s words:

You can’t treat grief with a pill. But you can treat it with a story. Last week I spoke with @Kimberly Warner, author of “Unfixed,” a memoir about family identity and chronic illness. It turns out there is no separating the two. After Kim lost her father, she took a DNA test that revealed he wasn’t her biological dad after all. But her biological father had died, too. Those revelations set a complex cascade of grief in motion. Kim was grieving the man who raised her, whom she thought of as her real father, but the DNA test upended her sense of self. And then she never had a chance to meet her biological dad. By the time she discovered that he existed at all, he was already dead. In the midst of all that stress, she began experiencing vertigo. The ground beneath her feet felt like the deck of a boat on open water. There was a name for her illness – Mal De Débarquement Syndrome – but there was no cure. Doctors are impatient with chronic illness. Because there’s no fix, there’s no chance for them to play the hero. Symptoms present physically, but they might have mental or emotional roots that no pill can touch. That’s why illness narratives matter so much. By shaping their own story, finding order in their confusion and pain, a person who suffers from chronic illness can reclaim their own identity. Instead of being the patient who “failed” to respond to treatment, they can be the storyteller who extracts meaning from suffering. I know a little about grief. Before I left academe in 2021, I lost two grandparents and a cousin. My grandfather died of natural causes in January, my grandmother died of grief in August, and my cousin had a brain hemorrhage from COVID in October. Then I left a career that I’d formerly loved. The only thing that helped during that time was storytelling. I shared memories of the people I’d lost, perhaps to convince myself that I carried them with me still. And I wrote my way through my life transition, interviewing many others about their pivots from academe to industry, trying to see where I fit in that new story. Grief breaks you in a thousand different ways. You can't put yourself back together again in quite the same shape. There’s not much medicine can do to help. But without storytelling, you might never put yourself back together at all.

Thank you j.e. moyer, LPC, Sean Talbeaux, Lor, and many others for tuning into my live video with Joshua Doležal! Join me for my next live video in the app.

A juicy teaser:

Kimberly: Some people might see like this story of yours is actually a true redemption arc, you know, like, Oh, she solved this resolved this. So I’m curious, how does the broken part, how do the broken parts still live in you? And how do you hold them differently? Like, do you relate? Like, do you still visit self-doubt and depression? Absolutely. And all that stuff. And so what’s transformed with how you relate to those parts of yourself?

Nan: I’m not afraid of it anymore. I’m not afraid of it anymore. If I feel myself getting sad, which is different than depression... I ask the sadness what it wants me to know. If I start to feel depressed, I say, what’s the message? What do you want me to know? If I get angry, there’s always that curiosity that will kick in.

And for those who don’t yet have a copy in their hands, my book Nan mentioned is available for purchase!

What a tender, joyous celebration. The festivities were abundant with laughter and tears, and overflowing admiration for my publisher Empress Edition’s & Alisa Kennedy Jones game-changing vision and artistry. ❤️❤️❤️

I never imagined a simple reading from my Unfixed launch party would ripple like this, but here we are. This book was born on Substack, chapter by chapter, held and then lifted by a community of readers who walked with me long before a publisher ever came calling. And then Empress Editions appeared, a publishing revolution created by midlife women for midlife women, born from a single question in a book club: What if we all hired each other? What if we finally centered the stories traditional publishing sidelines? Empress is flipping the entire model so midlife authors keep the lion’s share of their work, yes—but more than that, they’re building a movement to amplify the voices of women whose lives are anything but finished. I’m honored that Unfixed found its home with them, and that this Substack community has been the current carrying us forward. If you feel called to read the memoir or support the work of Empress, links are below.

"I'm no fan of myself. I've learned to tolerate myself. Like, okay, this is who I am. I don't know if anybody runs around and goes, gosh, I'm so glad I'm me. So, I don't have that, but there is an acceptance, and I think that gets better as you get older, and I think it's easier as you get older… but when I write I get to be my best self."

-Adam Nathan, writer

Ah, dear listener, what a delight awaits you today!

Before you plunge into the words below, I urge you to find a cozy nook, perhaps wrap yourself in a blanket, and instead of reading, close your eyes and listen. In this interview, the extraordinary Adam Nathan brings to life poignant excerpts from his oeuvre. Through his lyrical cadence, he leads us into imagined realms where humor hangs with mystery, play lives alongside compassion, and pain, love, and redemption reign as royalty.

He speaks of the tender moment when his mother read to him in his youth, feeling "as supple as a tiger cub in his mother's mouth." I suspect you, too, may find that same warmth enveloping you. Adam, no stranger to the full spectrum of human emotion, crafts stories that gut and mend, reminding us that to feel—even the sharpest of pains—is far superior to numbness. From that raw experience, the heart transforms, becoming more than mere anatomy; it evolves into a vessel of shared vulnerability and grand humanity.

And speaking of grand, Adam has embarked on a monumental journey: to write 100 stories in 100 months—an astonishing span of 8 1/3 years fueled by relentless creativity and fervor. He's nearing the completion of his first ten, which we discuss in our conversation. I implore you to seek them out in their entirety. They will haunt you, tickle you, and join you at the kitchen table, urging you to question assumptions, live more authentically, and cultivate gratitude for this magnificent thing we call life.

"This is my third act. This is where I feel I contribute and where I feel something that I'm leaving behind is special. Nobody really cares whether I'm writing a hundred stories or six or a thousand. But I'm telling myself, look, you have a hundred stories to say It – It with a capital "I" – and if you live that long, the hundred stories are what you're saying life means to you."

"Writing is the most true to myself that I can be."

"To me, it's just exhilarating, the notion that you can have a seed of an idea and then the only way to find out where the plot is going to go is by inhabiting those characters and the situation and just writing it and finding out. And that's pretty much how I do everything when I write."

-Nathan Slake, writer, scientist, dreamer

Occasionally, I'll discover a writer whose prose tastes like food—nourishing food, delicious food. Phrases that slow me down, descriptions to savor, sentences that land in my body like sun-warmed blackberries: complete and whole, yet always leaving me wanting more.

Nathan Slake is one of those writers. While his professional life is spent within the walls of academia, teaching and researching immunology, his soul resides in storytelling. I've found a kindred spirit, a brother-from-another-mother, in Nathan. I nodded throughout our conversation like a bobblehead as I related to his experiences of being a "slow bloomer," his love for "slow reading," and the not-so-slow exhilaration of creating and writing without a map, where deep listening precedes strategizing.

Nathan is someone to keep on your radar, friends! His imagination and craft are already captivating the minds and hearts of many readers. And while he humbly admits to only "discovering his soul" in his 30s—largely due to a deliberate cultivation of attentive presence and deep conversations with his wife Josephine—this soul is already a mosaic of memorable landscapes and characters, all grappling with poignant themes on the nature of consciousness and what it means to be human.

"I love that imagination gives us access to certain kinds of truth that don't exist in the factual world. There is sometimes way more truth we can explore in fiction than we are able to in our very limited lived experiences."

-Gail Marlene Schwartz, author, queer mom, persistent student of collaboration

When Gail Marlene Schwartz posted a section from her debut novel Falling Through the Night on Substack, I knew I'd found a woman unafraid to "go there." I fell in love with her characters immediately—unhinged, messy, complex but never far-removed from the love that bonds them to one another. I devoured the novel in under a week and wished upon finishing I could invite all her characters over for a home-cooked meal. And while that didn't happen, I did get to spend an hour with their sparkling creator and I was equally nourished and enlivened by the occasion. Gail's passion to explore personal experiences, particularly in relation to motherhood and mental health, through the lens of fiction is so infectious and playful that I'm near convinced to veer from non-fiction myself. Author Siri Hustvedt once said, "Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened," and Gail's vast remembering calls in a theater of archetypes who bruise and then embrace, unravel and then mend, each written with such humanity and care that it's easy to feel an emotional recognition, our own unfinished stories rememberingand rewriting possibility in tandem.

Falling Through the Night just won the National Indie Excellence Award in the LGBTQ Fiction category for 2024 so a hearty congratulations is in order. I'm including a synopsis below that may help orient you throughout our conversation, though you certainly don't need to have read the book to follow Gail's hard-earned and enduring reflections on identity, friendship, disability, mental health, family and fulfillment.

Audrey Meyerwitz wants to fall in love and have a family. But for this queer 30-something insomniac who's struggled with Generalized Anxiety Disorder since childhood, it's a goal that's far from simple. When best friend Jessica, a recovering alcoholic, helps introvert Audrey with a profile on SheLovesHer, Audrey takes that scary first step toward her lifelong dream. Through online dating, immigrating to Canada, and having a baby with Down Syndrome, she struggles and grows. But when Audrey unearths a secret about her mother, everything about her identity as a mother, a daughter, and a person with mental illness ruptures. How do we create closeness from roots of deep alienation? With humor, honesty, and complexity, Audrey learns that healthy love means accepting gains and losses, taking off the blinders of fantasy, and embracing the messiness that defines human families.

"By experiencing deeply and profoundly the grief, I floated on this ocean of loss. And I felt saved in my life by that."

-Mary Tabor, author (Re)Making Love: A Memoir, The Woman Who Never Cooked, Who by Fire

When I read anything by Mary Tabor, I do it slowly. Deliberately. I liken the experience to being deeply engrossed in a 5000 piece, handcrafted jigsaw puzzle, each piece just as important and gorgeous as the final image. But there's more. Solving this puzzle will reveal something I've never known about life, so while I must go slowly, there's also an urgency. I know I speak in metaphor but I've spent days trying to find the exact words to describe the incomparable experience of reading Mary. It will change you. You will make discoveries. You will feel her own necessary vulnerability hand-in-hand with your own. Her words will guide you along the vertiginous cliff of love, loss and uncertainty with an assured hand that says "It's painful, but that very pain will save you."

Mary's Substack Only Connect is a confluence of her spanning knowledge and experience as an author, professor, radio show host, and columnist, where she shares her serialized memoir (Re)Making Love, fiction, and essays about the arts, books, movies, and all things literary. "Only Connect" is the epigraph to E.M. Forster's Howard's End and she claims it's the best advice she ever got, living this truism not only through nurturing intimacy with writers on Substack but also through her staggering ability to weave together stories of her own pain and seemingly disparate subjects and literary forms. Mary is a one-woman light show of synaptic connections and it was an honor to join the shimmering display for an hour to learn more about her creative process, why she believes writing is a journey of self-discovery and how to find levity in the face of heartbreak and the unknown.

Mary is also "accidentally funny," and in between Mary's poised, wisdom-sharing, we burst into fits of laughter, so get ready to learn, feel inspired, and smile.