Rachel Schwartzmann: Welcome to Slow Stories. I’m Rachel Schwartzmann. I'm a writer, creator, and the author of Slowing: Discover Wonder, Beauty, and Creativity through Slow Living, coming September 17th from Chronicle Books.
For those of you just tuning in, Slow Stories is a multimedia project that began with this podcast and now includes a newsletter on Substack. There, I write about things like time, creativity, and pace—and on this show, I interview artists, entrepreneurs, and innovators who share slow stories—and big ideas—about living, working, and creating in our digital age.
So before we get into the episode, I wanted to share a really exciting announcement: I've spent the last couple of years writing and revising my first book, Slowing, which is out September 17th of this year with Chronicle Books. That said, it's now available for pre-order anywhere books are sold. And for those of you who don't know, pre-orders are incredibly important for all authors—but especially first-time authors like myself. They signal to bookstores and retailers that there's interest in the book and really lay the foundation for my career as an author, which I'm excited to continue.
All that to say, I'll be sharing much more about Slowing in the coming months, and you can follow Slow Stories on Substack for those updates and follow me [on social media] @rachelschwartzmann. But for now, I'll leave you with this: Slowing caters to many literary sensibilities: essay and memoir, creative wellness, and personal growth. Language and lyricism are front and center, but there is also a practical component. There are various ways you can engage with and experience this book. For that reason, I don't know where exactly you'll find it on the shelf, but I'm confident it will fit somewhere in your home. That's where I wrote it, and that's what it means to me. I can't wait for you to read it!
Now, on to the episode, which begins with an opening story from Julie Chavez, who shares her relationship with rest and reading, and shares a passage from her memoir Everyone But Myself. Here’s more from Julie.
Julie Chavez: Hi, I'm Julie Chavez, author of the memoir Everyone But Myself. In the spring of 2018, at the age of 38, I experienced a season of severe anxiety and depression after I spent too long caring for others at my own expense. I was a generally happy mom, wife, and librarian until I experienced my first major panic attack, followed by debilitating anxiety and an eventual diagnosis of underlying depression.
For a time, I was lost in my own beautiful life. The path back to myself was paved by slow, small steps as I learned to trade achievement and perfectionism for joy and presence. Looking back, I saw that reading had fallen away with my other methods of self-care. It required a stillness I couldn't muster when I was at my lowest after a false start with a thriller. I mean, really, am I a masochist? Because who else would try a thriller when coming out of debilitating anxiety? But then I found myself reaching for Gift from the Sea on a summer day. Here's a passage from my memoir about that slow, sunny afternoon.
PASSAGE READ BY JULIE CHAVEZ ︎ PURCHASE EVERYONE BUT MYSELF︎︎︎
Rachel Schwartzmann: Thank you so much again to Julie for sharing. You can follow her on social media @juliewriteswords and order her memoir Everyone But Myself anywhere books are sold. Now, here's my conversation with Amy Lin.
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In many ways, Here After is a story of falling—in love, apart, out of time. It's a story that alerts us to our hearts and heartbreaks. It's a story that asks the big, unanswerable questions, but perhaps most poignantly, it asks readers to be here—to bear witness. As Amy writes in the book: "I do not say: Everyone is so afraid of grief, and this fear is dangerous to the grieving. I do not tell him the painful lesson I am learning: Enduring the thing itself—he is not coming back—is unbearable but denying it is worse, is an even greater, even more insidious, threat to living, if that is what you want to do."
Amy has crafted an intimate portrait of grief, resilience, and humanity. And in this interview, she shared more about the value of seriousness in life, her thoughts on slow storytelling and creativity, and what time means to her now.
Amy and I recorded this conversation back in April, as she wrapped up her book tour. Since then, she has experienced new forms of great love—and loss. I continue to be in awe of her resilience and grace, and her slow story will surely stay with you. But I don’t want to give too much more away. So, on that note, here's Amy Lin, author of Here After.
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Amy Lin: This is such a wonderful question, and I have yet to have been asked it, which, of course, I knew would happen. I really love this.
Outside of what I do, I'm a very tender person, and it's not something that's necessarily apparent to everyone who meets me when I am moving through professional circles. But I'm a very tender person, and I was the kind of child who I really recently realized that this isn't usual to people, but I was a kid who narrated her life to herself—and I still do it—but it was particularly noticeable when I was a child and it would be things like Amy is going to the lunchroom, or Amy is going up the stairs. And I was narrating my world to myself. And it's only as I've gotten older that I have realized that that stems from really a lifetime of feeling at the outskirts of things and a little bit unsure as to how to move through my life. Before I even really knew that it was what I was doing, I have created narrative as a way to find my place in it.
I'm very almost creepily observant. I pay extremely close attention to the world and the people and the ways in which the world and the people interact because I'm always trying to better understand how I might fit more seamlessly into the places, many places which I often feel I don't fit. And that has made me this person who can appear one way but is often really very soft on the inside and very attuned to what is going on around them and quite sensitive, even just physically to sensory input.
I do a lot professionally and I think people have this idea that I am sort of limitless in what I can do, which is very much not the truth. I require large periods of time where there is quiet and [being] at home. I remember Kurtis, who always had these strange similes; they were really remarkable, but he would say, "At home you're like a piece of dust." And he didn't mean it at all in a pejorative way. He meant you just are—you're present, and you're very quiet. A lot of that has to do with my need to regulate how much sensory input and thinking I do in the world. And so outside of my work, I take a lot of very long walks and I spend time in the home quietly. And I really enjoy—although it is totally a hobby— painting. Kurtis was a beautiful visual artist and most certainly had actual talent. I do not. I simply have a joy in painting, and I find it very relaxing. So when I have time, I will do things like that, which I find very enriching and really enjoy.
And I am a hobbyist art collector. And so within the bounds of what I can afford, I spend a lot of time going to shows and talking to artists, saving up for pieces that I really love, and filling the home with things that feel interesting to me. I feel compelled to have a home where the art speaks to you and has its own presence and is not just something that looks beautiful but has its own voice.
Rachel Schwartzmann: That all makes sense. My grandmother is a really beautiful artist. She makes these abstracted figures, really large scale work. And I don't know if you've seen on Instagram any of the paintings in my home, but those are her works.
Amy Lin: I have. I have admired them.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Thanks. That's her!
Amy Lin: Oh my gosh, she does amazing work.
Rachel Schwartzmann: She is amazing.
It's so funny how these through lines show up in different ways in our lives because I don't know if you were necessarily an artist as a child, but with the observation and attention, how that shifts to different mediums...
Amy Lin: Yeah. And it's interesting how it's woven into our lives. My dad's mother, whom I loved but was not overly close to was an artist. She was a professional pianist, a beautiful ceramicist. And my second cousin is a gorgeous visual artist out of Philadelphia. And these are all things I didn't really realize until I stepped more fully into this idea of myself as a literary artist. You know, I had people say, "Well, this is so much like your grandma; this is so much like your cousin." And I thought, oh, how interesting. It's true.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. It's funny to think about the lineage of creativity in our lives and how we're not always ready to face or own it.
Amy Lin: Yeah, it really requires a stepping into—and with the case of my dad's mother, you know, she was a very young widow as well and her mother before her was. And so there's also this lineage of artists who also carried grief their whole lives. I was just very young when my grandmother was alive, which is the reason we weren't close [there was] just simply a very large age gap. But I wish that we had had conversations about that, how it informed so much of her creative practice, because I can't believe that it wouldn't have.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I want to go back to something you were saying about Kurtis—well, really just about childhood. I don't know if you ever had conversations about this, but it would be interesting to imagine you and Kurtis meeting as children and what those interactions would've been like.
Amy Lin: Oh my gosh, that's so beautiful. I truly think I have a sense of who he was as a child, which I truthfully think was not so dissimilar from who he was as an adult. But as a child, he was described to me as an incredibly needy baby. He would cry and cry and cry if he wasn't being held. And the only time he would be quiet was if he were holding him. And so he was described to me as a baby that just had to be held. And if he was held, he was happy, and he was happy, then everybody was happy. And, in so many ways, that was who Kurtis was as an adult. He really needed to feel held. And then he was just radiant with that attention—that joy. And he would give it back to you tenfold.
So I would imagine if we met as a child, I would probably be at the edge of some childish gathering, and Kurtis would be in the middle of it, you know, radiating a kind of joy. And I would be watching him, wondering how he could be so easily liked. At some point, he would float over to the edges because I saw him do it as an adult, and he would say, "Come on, come on in," because he opened the door to so many people. And I think he would've done that as a child as well. And I know he did from his friends. A lot of them felt that he held the door open to them.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I definitely want to speak more about Kurtis and your beautiful book, but I think in other interviews—and alluding to this throughline of your childhood into adulthood—I was really struck by your quality of seriousness and privacy and those things that you value. I think those are two really underrated qualities, personally.
Amy Lin: I will say, as someone who is both serious and private, they definitely are.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, I'm very quiet. I'm a perfectionist at times, and people say, "Just don't take it so seriously. Don't take yourself so seriously." But why not? Why not put value behind something that I care about or that I'm doing? So I'd love to talk a little bit about that as well. What are you taking seriously right now, and what matters to you?
Amy Lin: I love this question, and I really love the noticing that's behind it—because it's something that I think if you are someone who takes yourself and the world seriously, and if you are especially someone that combines that seriousness with the privacy, a kind of quietness about your spiritual self, it invites, in my case, an extraordinary amount of criticism. And it has been something I have encountered my whole life.
Even as a child, I remember probably being ten on an airplane and the flight attendant saying to me, "Just give us a smile. You're a kid." What do you have to be so serious about? And I remember my mom saying to the attendant, "She doesn't need to smile." I so appreciated that. And I come from very serious people who take life very seriously, but they're so full of levity and joy. My mom has an incredibly incisive sense of humor. So, I was raised in this tradition, and I really value it in other people. And this is a long-winded way of saying thank you. This makes me feel really seen and held in a way that I'm actually not very often. So I'm really grateful—emotionally—for that.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Of course.
Amy Lin: Right now, I'm taking the practice of running seriously, which is to say that I am trying to simply do what I can when I run outside. If I take it competitively, which I have done in the past, I get very obsessed with how much I'm doing or how quickly I'm going. And it has not allowed me to sustain the practice. But when I take running just the actual act of attuning to what my body is doing—how my body feels, when I take that really seriously—I'm actually able to run a little bit most months. And it's very soothing for me; it's important for me to get outside. It's important, albeit a little difficult, for me to move regularly. I find it kind of stressful.
And so I'm really carefully taking the practice of doing what I can when I run seriously, and when I cannot do it, I lose my breathing, or I start thinking, I don't want to do this anymore, I stop. And it's a really difficult practice for me as someone who can be very all or nothing, just listen to what my body wants to do. But I kind of did this casually last year, and I managed to move in a way that, for once, did not feel overly burdensome. So this year, I'm trying to pay serious attention to that.
And I am also taking this Netflix show, "Blown Away," very seriously. [Laughs] Have you seen it?
Rachel Schwartzmann: Oh no, I haven't. Tell me!
Amy Lin: It's a competition-based show, but it's about glass blowing. All these very famous and accomplished glassblowers come from all around the world to compete in challenges that showcase their art. They're conceptually based; they always bring in different artists—people from ballet, people from football, from architecture judge—it's deeply moving to see these artists because glassblowing is an incredibly physical art. I had no idea.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Are they large-scale, or does it depend on the challenge?
Amy Lin: Some of them are on a massive scale, some are co-miniature, and some are some of the more torches. I'm completely absorbed in the way that these artists move from concept to 2000-degree fire. I did not expect to be so taken with it. But I am quite serious. I put away everything, which is very rare when I watch television. I'm like, I am currently watching this show.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I'm going to add this to the queue. I've been watching a lot of bleak documentaries.
Amy Lin: This will be a perfect—
Rachel Schwartzmann: Palate cleanser!
Amy Lin: Yes, exactly.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Oh, it sounds amazing.
I don't know why, but when you were describing the nature of the art, my mind went to danger and bravery. I think that there is something kind of brave about it.
Amy Lin: It's literally dangerous to do what they're doing. And this last season that, I watched a woman who loved glass [but] she's going blind. She said that looking into this 2000-degree heat actually harms your eyes over a long period of time. So it is exacerbating her blindness, but she can't stop doing it because she loves working with glass so much. It's very moving.
Rachel Schwartzmann: That is really moving. I think that kind of underscores how much art can have that effect on you. It it just takes you to the center. Yes. And you can't look away.
Amy Lin: Exactly. Yes.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I wonder too, you know, the pacing involved in that. It's a reality show where competition, so I'm sure we're seeing sped-up moments. But yeah, the amount of time and patience required, I'm sure, is just on another level.
Amy Lin: Oh it's, they work in like four to eight hour blocks. It's wild.
Rachel Schwartzmann: On that note, something that I like to explore with Slow Stories is my guests' relationship with pace. And it's interesting with you because you've navigated so many moments of slowness that have not really come out of choice or peace. And that's something that I think we tend to minimize with slowness. It can be a really beautiful, peaceful thing but also really polarizing at times. And that doesn't necessarily make it all bad, but it definitely forces us to confront certain things. And we'll talk more about this as we discuss Here After, but I'm curious how you would describe your relationship with pace overall and how it's evolved in the context of telling stories.
Amy Lin: So overall, my relationship with pace is one of constantly reminding myself that rest is essential to doing anything. And this is something that I knew conceptually before Kurtis died, but I didn't do it. I do have the ability to work at a pretty high pace for a really long time. And then Kurtis died, and grief completely humbled me to my own limitations—and it made new limitations for me. And then my health failed and I had physical limitations that were not small and everything in the world was locked down necessarily. But it was a very slow pace because you were not going and you were not doing. And I was grieving so actively and I really began to encounter this limitations that I had that I no longer have. And I have come to perhaps begrudgingly accept that I cannot go into a day anymore and not think about whether I will have all of the energy needed to do everything.
I actually have to factor in time to rest. And it can be a complex relationship because I don't always want to. And truthfully, it doesn't feel natural to me to take a break. And I think that's what we don't always understand about slowness: for some people who practice rest, it doesn't feel peaceful to them. It feels like waiting around at the DMV [Laughs]. They're at the DMV of their own health, but they are all still practicing slowness because they recognize the value of it. And I am someone who does that where I build in rest in a day, in a month, or in a week. And sometimes I'm able to feel held by the rest and think, yes, this is really nourishing to me. But other times, it feels like I'm waiting at the DMV.
But I know, because I've done it, that if I don't take these periods of time, even if I'm still working on acceptance of my own limitations, then I know that I cannot continue.
I have lived physical burnout now twice since Kurtis has died in a very physical way—and you know what they say about learning a lesson twice. But I have finally learned it now, and I sometimes feel frustrated that grief has taught me this lesson so completely. But I am also so aware of the ways in which I show up better, more open to the work and to the practices that I do be them practices of relationship or practices of writing or practices of movement. I always show up more open to them when I've rested. And it's an ongoing practice for me. Rest is a practice for me.
It's something that Kurtis could do. He had such a gloriously easy relationship with rest. He rested when he needed to. He rested without guilt, without frustration, without that toe-tapping that I can sometimes get. He luxuriated and rested. He would sleep in on a Saturday until 2:00 PM, and I would be up at like seven working, and he would come out at two, you know, dramatically stretching, rubbing his eyes as if he had just woken up. And he would say, "Oh my gosh, I've slept in again." And I'd be like, "You do this every Saturday!" And one time I did ask him, I said, "Do you really just rest? Do you not feel that you have so many things to do?" And he said, "Like what?" And I thought, wow, he really is just resting. He's not even thinking about it. I can think of 95 things he could be doing right now.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Resting is the thing to do.
Amy Lin: Exactly. That's what he meant. He's like, "Like what? I'm doing the thing." It's awful that grief has taught me this lesson, but it's also really beautiful to live in a space that Kurtis lived in so easily. And I feel a part of his legacy when I do that because I feel a little bit as if his rest is still holding me, and my ability to rest comes from him in some ways.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, it's almost like you're carrying the baton.
Amy Lin: Yeah, I honor that part of him when I rest. And that makes resting sacred to me.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean in [previous] conversations you've had, I've been really moved by the sentiment that when you're in grief, everything is in the present tense. And slowness is so often about being in the present moment and trying to live in the present moment even when it's painful. Do you like the present moment, generally? How do you think about time?
Amy Lin: It's such a good question. I think and metabolize time completely differently than before Kurtis died. And sometimes, I get questions about whether I think I will return to a more traditional understanding of time. And my answer to that is always no. Once you enter the territory of grief... time is different in grief in many ways. Time moves differently and is flattened in grief in a way that I think you'll carry the knowledge of, if not the reality of, your whole life. I feel now very aware of the fragility of our idea that time is a coherent beast.
After Kurtis died, started reading quite a bit about the actual nature of time. One of the books I read is by this great physicist. He speaks about how time is also a matter and that it can break down in the same way that fabric can. In deep space, we see time breaking down, and it's a matter and also at a subatomic level; time does not have what we like to apply to it this past, present, and future [idea]. It is, in fact, material, and it behaves differently. The atoms of time behave differently if they're being observed versus if they're not being observed. And that what we understand—our very limited understanding of linear time, which we have invented—is only possible because we blur or we just flat out do not know about the actual realities of what time is as a matter. And so he said everything that we understand time to be is a blurring—he calls it a blurring because we have to blur away the realities for it to function as a matter of authority and a matter of capitalism in a lot of ways in our society.
And when I read that—and I'm obviously not a physicist, and I had to look up a lot of words while I was reading— I thought, this feels like grief to me. I feel like grief removes that blurring, that tendency for us to think that our lives will march along a certain line and that the narrative of our lives will cohere.
Grief is a problem of narrative. It's a problem of coherence. I am a wife, but I do not have a husband. The narrative of my life doesn't make sense. And when we drill past what we think of as time—as an authority, as a clock in our world—and we start looking at time as what it is, the blurring drops away, and we start to realize that we don't understand anything at all. And that time is not actually authoritative so much as it's matter. So much that it's something that we live in relationship with. And time will behave differently when it's observed. And so people too in grief, when they observe these kinds of truths—when the blurring begins to sharpen, and you begin to understand how fragile this idea of the narrative of time is—you also behave differently. And that's how I feel now that I am witness to time and its fragility in a way that others are not. It moves me differently through the world.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Does it make you less afraid?
Amy Lin: I think it makes me feel really acutely aware of how little time we have, which seems like it should make you more afraid because it should make you feel as if you have so much you have left and you don't. But on the contrary, I just feel in each moment when someone chooses to spend time with me, I feel a real gratitude for the fact that of all of the things they could have done with what is a relatively spare moment, that they spent it with me. And that isn't to say the grief has turned me into this walking pillar of gratitude. It has not. But in terms of time, I used to spend, let's say, three hours at a coffee with a friend, and I was like, well, that was really nice. But now, at the end, I will always say to them, "You didn't have to spend this much time with me. And I'm really grateful that you have because we might not necessarily have three hours for different reasons in a year or five years." And I really treasure time with people differently. I hold it as if it is a fragile thing now, whether before I was a little careless with it.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think, too, with time—and connecting with people and telling stories—it's the same sort of thing with a book. If a reader is choosing to spend time with that narrative, there's a lot of responsibility.
Amy Lin: Exactly. Yes. I mean what a beautiful thing for someone to sit down and spend their time with you, especially in a book, because there are so many other things they could be doing.
Rachel Schwartzmann: When you hear the phrase slow stories or slow storytelling—in relationship to books and to narrative—what comes to mind?
Amy Lin: I think a lot about the practice of farming, which is fallowing. And when you farm, there has to be by the nature of growing responsibly and also productively a fallow period where the field actually lays fallow and nothing is done to it or touched. And when I think of "slow stories," I think a lot of writers feel pressure inward or outward to constantly be writing [or] creating. They turn in one book, and then they need to be halfway through the next one, or they need to be thinking about their ideas all the time. And when I think of "slow stories," I think about the ways in which narrative needs time to fallow. Even just in our minds, even just in our creative cycles: we might have a draft, we might have an idea. There will inevitably come a time where those words or those ideas need to slow down. They need to fallow. They need to rest.
We need to step away from it. And we need to let what the narrative—what the story is—be. We just need to let it be. We don't need to to touch the world, we don't need to rush the world. We don't need to think of another world. We need to actually step away from it. And I think that is something that is underemphasized by the nature of capitalism and also the nature of creativity where we often will say it's a fountain of creativity, but we don't refer to the fact that fountains are not necessarily going all the time. There is often a season when the fountains are turned off, and our relationship to creativity needs to or should include a conversation about slowness and about fallowness because that's where the soil richens. That's where the soil gets ready to produce what it's going to. And I think it's a really important but often not emphasized part of being a creative person and of creating slow stories.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It's obvious that kind of care and attention went into Here After, which is the epitome of a slow story. And I think now would be a great time to pause and have you read from it.
Amy Lin: Absolutely. I would love to.
PASSAGE READ BY AMY LIN ︎ PURCHASE HERE AFTER︎︎︎
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Rachel Schwartzmann: How has pain changed your relationship with attention and this idea of well-being?Amy Lin: It's such a good question because grievers are, are in so much pain, and I am in so much pain. So often I find I have had to develop an awareness of pain that I was forced into with grief. But now, as grief inevitably never goes away—but changes shape and holds differently in your life—I find myself needing to more intentionally grief tend. I really have to be more aware of my body when I am in pain.
This week, for example, the last few days I've been feeling just a little bit sort of like a tire with a slow leak. And I feel this faint drag, and I think, oh, well, I probably need to go for a run. Just get outside. I maybe need to take a nap. So I've been doing those things. I've been like, okay, I'm dehydrated. I've been drinking some more water. And then, about two days ago, I looked in the mirror—I have these strange moments in grief where I won't recognize myself; I'll think, who is that? I had that moment. It's been a long time since I've had that [moment]. I looked in the mirror and I thought, who is that? And I suddenly realized that it was me. And then I was crying—like deep, early, gasping, crying. And I thought, oh, that slow leak I felt wasn't dehydration or not getting outside or not getting enough sleep. It was grief and I had failed to notice it. I had been moving towards that pain, and I ought to have tended to it a little bit earlier. But I hadn't paid close enough attention to my body, and I fell down this hole of grief; the valley of death is how I think of it. And it's been very intense.
It's been very close to me in a way that it hasn't been for a minute. And I have had to, for the last two days, completely move around the things that I plan to do because grief has been so present, and I have paid very close attention to it. And I have really mined what I'm feeling and what parts of my grief are coming up for me. And it's been a gentle reminder. Well, maybe not so gentle, actually, as two days have [felt] pretty long. But it's been a reminder that now, living with pain—physical and emotional—I have to tend to it. I need to pay attention to it daily and just do brief check-ins about how I am feeling. And if I'm starting to feel that kind of slowly, I do need to give it time and open up to what the experience will be. And that wasn't something I had to do before. It can be a difficult and kind of brutal process, but it also opens me up to other things that I'm feeling and holding and carrying.
I sometimes hear people say, "Well, if [you're] grief tending, [you're] just going be sad all the time." And I always tell people, "Well, we do such a disservice to ourselves as human beings. If we think that we are only capable of one vast emotion, we're people who house deep grief." But also, as I've said before, grief is the final form of love. So we hold deep love, and we also hold deep joy, and that's all in the same body. And when you grief tend, yes, you notice grief and you pay attention to it, but it also has this unusual effect of sometimes making you tend to your other big emotions—your big loves or your big joys, or sometimes your big shames, which are also uncomfortable to encounter. You think, oh, I didn't know this was living down here. And it makes you pay really close attention to your internal architecture in a way that, for me, has been really important in allowing me to live alongside those things.
Rachel Schwartzmann: An image of a garden keeps appearing in my mind.
Amy Lin: Yeah, I think it is, in some ways, very tied to this idea. I really love plants. I have a lot of them and tending is the word I think of when I water or fertilize them. I was just saying this morning, "Oh, I need to fertilize the plants this season." I haven't. It's time for them to get a little bit enrichment. In so many ways we need to do that as well.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I'm curious—just as we talk about pain—do you feel a physical difference between talking about grief versus writing about it?
Amy Lin: I do. That's such a beautiful question. I do feel a physical difference about it. When I am writing about pain, I feel closer to it, truthfully. I think I feel closer to most things in my life when I'm writing about them. It is the medium in which I am the most myself—the most honest and most open, which is crazy to have a book about my life because I'm so private. I am a very private person, and I have this very public pain, and it's a dissonance to live in. But when I'm speaking about things—because I'm also a teacher and I speak about things all the time— I have the ability to think about something when I am speaking and step back a little bit from how I am feeling. That allows me to interact with what I am speaking about in a totally different way.
And often, when I'm editing a book [or] when I'm writing it, I get caught in these knots. And that happens in any creative process as you inevitably hit these knots you need to untangle. And often, I've realized, not until I can speak about the knots, not until I can mull them over out loud that I begin to untangle them—because the untangling is a process of thinking. And so often when I am writing, whether it's nonfiction or fiction, I'm really close to how I feel and it makes it very hard for me to think. And so I've actually learned a lot about how I hold grief and think about it. As I've been on tour speaking about it, I've had moments in interviews where I've paused and said, "I just taught myself something that I didn't even know I knew because I had been speaking about it." And I feel those things on the page. I move through those things somatically on the page, but I teach them to myself when I'm speaking about things.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It's really interesting. You know, my episode with Victoria Chang hasn't aired at the time of this recording—and for those listening, Amy graciously opened that interview—but in her newest poetry collection, With My Back to the World, she writes this at the end of the poem, "Leaves 1966:"
"I miscalculated my depression. The last time I saw it was at 10:00 pm I always think it's gone. But it regrows each night. It has skin. It is even waterproof. In that way, it resembles leaves. But everything resembles leaves at some point, the way they need a host, the way they are called leaf, whether they are on a tree or not, their arrival and decay. Maybe that's what we're all doing. Language isn't actually inside us as I had thought. We are tenants of language. We are leaving while writing."
Amy Lin: Beautiful. I was so honored to open Victoria Chang's episode. I'm a very big fan of her and I cannot wait to read this latest book. What a stunning way to see the world and to think about language.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I also think, you know, grief is different than depression; though there are some mirrored aspects to it. And I, like many of your other interviewers, have just been baffled by your realization that the five stages of grief, as we knew them, were not really meant for the bereaved. But I just thought the sentiment was so interesting that we're leaving while writing that we're almost renting the words. And there's a kind of grief and depression associated with that, for me. But would you agree that, in a way, we're leaving something while writing?
Amy Lin: I think that we are, yes. I think people want to associate that leaving with a kind of catharsis a lot of the time. And I don't experience this as such. I've said before, "When you throw a life ring to someone who's drowning, you don't ask them when they grasp it, was that cathartic for you?" You don't do that writing. For so many people, and certainly for me, [writing] is not a cathartic thing. I don't find it that way. But I do find it a kind of leaving, and there is a sadness. There's always a sadness in leaving, especially if the thing you are leaving is something you love. But there is also always a kind of leaving [that is] a small relief. It is just that you know that you can't sustain that kind of joy forever and that you need a small break before you experience it again.
When you leave something, you have the ability to move closer or further away from it. And there is a kind of relief in that and a kind of sadness in that, in our ability to move closer or further away from anything. And it's that kind of mobility that we have that leaving shows us—that carries us in and out of language. And I think when we put something in language, we are leaving it. We're leaving it as we have said it there. We can draw close to it in that form again, or we can go far away from it. But we have, for one moment, made it into something that can be left.
Rachel Schwartzmann: In Here After, Kurtis tells you at one point that you think sadness has a kind of beauty. You disagree, but quietly know he is right. And in one of my recent episodes, one of my guests said that they actually like to be sad and find value in sadness. I'm curious about what you found in sadness that you weren't expecting. Is sadness different from grief?
Amy Lin: I think that it is, yes. I think sadness is specific to the temporal moment in which it happens, which doesn't mean that it can't extend past that moment, but that it is related to a specific kind of time. That time can be very long and very intense. But there is a kind of amelioration of sadness that I don't think happens in grief. Grief is such a physical and emotional trauma and is chronic, and grief exists outside of the temporal moment. It is its own time. Whereas I think sadness lives in time. That's how I feel, the difference between the two in grief and sadness.
The thing that has been unexpected to me is the ways in which people have really met me. And, of course, this isn't to say that people haven't left me. I had someone ask me that recently. They said, "You speak so much about the people who have shown up for you, but has anyone left you?" And I said, "Of course, yes." People that have surprised me have left me. Part of that's in the book. And that is surprising and painful, but it's also actually something they tell you about in grief therapy. They say grief wears people out. People will just leave. But what grief therapy doesn't tend to emphasize because it isn't guaranteed—and in my case, I was very lucky to receive this—is how much people help you. And I have been deeply moved by that.
I don't feel worthy of help a lot of the time. It's really hard for me to ask for help, and to be the recipient of so much help has been radical for me to realize. I had a friend tell me recently—well not recently, but when Kurtis died, that's me thinking that Kurtis's death is recent, the time blurs for me—she told me until Kurtis died, [I] never asked [her] for anything. She said, "Now you've asked me for things and I feel like we're actually friends." And I said to her, "What are you talking about? Like you're one of my closest friends." She's like, "I always knew that I didn't feel it." And she's like, "Then Kurtis died, and you needed me in a way you didn't before. And it makes me feel what you've been telling me all these years."
That's a really beautiful, surprising thing that's come out of grief for me. I've kind of realized, oh, there are some people [feel] helping someone isn't a burden to them, or it isn't wearying to them all the time. It is, in fact, nourishing to them. And I have been really lucky to be a part of that and have been really grateful to be held by those people. And that has surprised me.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It's human.
Amy Lin: Yeah, very much so. Very much so.
Rachel Schwartzmann: On that note, why don't we have you read another section?
PASSAGE READ BY AMY LIN ︎ PURCHASE HERE AFTER︎︎︎
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Rachel Schwartzmann: Tell me what you want to say today and what questions you want to ask.
Amy Lin: I think I'm always trying to say in some way or another that Kurtis was a man who loved living so much. I don't understand how he got so little time to do it. And I think the question that I am always asking that really brought me to Here After and continues to haunt me in so many ways is how he can be gone and how any of us can continue in the face of knowing that everybody is always participating in some continual leaving.
I really believe that art asks us questions, and books, in particular, I feel when they succeed, begin by asking these questions to which we feel clever as readers. We think, oh, I know the answer to that. But then, as books continue to move us, or as paintings continue to move us, we start to realize that we are barreling towards questions that we don't have any answers to, that maybe we're actually afraid to ask ourselves.
And I think all art, when it's really moving me—perhaps even when it's achieving something—it's asking me an unanswerable question. And I am forced to sit with that and think about what you do when you live with those questions to which there are no answers. And I'm with the book and often with my own thoughts. I'm really thinking about that: How do you do that? How do you live with the questions? How do you continue when you know there is no answer to some of the things that we have to live with? And grief really is the landscape of those questions. And so many of us live in the landscape of grief. And so many of us think that we are the only people who don't know how to do it, but that we are in fact not alone.
It's a funny thing about grief, isn't it? It so tries to convince us that we are alone, that nobody else is in this much pain, and that nobody else is as ill-equipped as we are to deal with what grief is asking of us—what love is asking us to do in the end. But grief is also a condition that I really believe requires others. I think it asks of us the courage and a continuing that we actually can only find with others. I don't think we can bear grief alone. I don't think we're actually meant to. And that becomes the enigma of grief—that in a land that is telling you are so alone, you must go find other people.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I don't know if this is a strange question...
Amy Lin: I love strange questions!
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah! It's interesting: If grief was an entity or a being that you could ask a question to, would you ask it a question? And what would it be?
Amy Lin: Oh, I love that. That's so interesting.
If grief was an entity that I could ask a question, I think I would ask grief what it needed from me. Because I feel—and this is my grief, my therapist has told me it's actually not how a lot of other people hold their grief—but the term I use in grief therapy a lot is I feel grief has colonized my life. That it came in, and it forcibly took everything that was mine, and it renamed it in the name of grief. And I feel angry a lot of the time that I am held by grief in what I consider a very aggressive way. And my therapist is like, "Well, you know, most people feel they live with their grief. They feel a kind of ownership over it because it's theirs. And so, they also feel kind of control. What's so unusual about how you speak about your grief is that you don't speak as if it's not yours. You speak as if it is this totally separate entity that has forcibly come in and rearranged your life. You speak almost as if grief isn't yours."
That's really something that stayed with me because I kind of think, well, isn't that how it is? My love of Kurtis felt like something that we built together. It was ours, how much we loved each other. The bond that we had that severed when he died was ours. It was never just mine. And I think that's maybe why grief feels a little separate from me is because it's tied into that love that I never felt that I had any ownership over. I had responsibility for it, and I was a part of it. It was ours. It wasn't mine. And so the grief feels like something that isn't quite entirely mine. And sometimes I feel—especially when it presses very close to me—it is asking me for something, that it wants something from me, and I'm not sure what it is. And I sometimes wonder that. I think: What do you want? How can I give you what you are looking for? And that's, again, one of my answerable [questions]. I don't have an answer to that yet.
Rachel Schwartzmann: The way you've approached it, I don't want to say it makes sense, but I understand that. I understand that it would be something that was more of a shadow rather than something you invited in or took ownership of. That's really, really interesting.
Amy Lin: It is. And it makes my relationship with grief a little bit contentious in some ways, but also in a way that I feel that I work with it or work sometimes against it. And it's just a different relationship to when I think you see it as an inherent part of yourself. People step to their grief differently when they approach it in that way. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just different.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I'm curious if you think we have a responsibility when it comes to telling stories about the past, especially when they involve others?
Amy Lin: I do. I feel quite emphatically, and perhaps this is part of that seriousness that you so beautifully honored earlier, but that seriousness— how seriously I take myself, how seriously I take the world—I mean, I really think carefully about how I step through the world and how I step to other people. That's what I mean by taking myself seriously. Not that I think that I am this arbiter of the best things to say, just that I think carefully about what I say and do.
I think part of that seriousness is that I feel and think a lot about my responsibilities. Writing about someone who lived—about a person who was an entire universe—I thought a lot about what my responsibilities were. The book is by very careful design. It is my knowledge, experience, and memory of who I knew Kurtis to be. I stayed very close to who I knew him to be and to who I loved him to be. I kept it to what I knew.
There are so many different versions of Kurtis that exist in other people and in other memories. But I felt keenly that those narratives were not my responsibility and that it would be irresponsible for me to gesture to those [for those people] because that's their honor and memories. I very much wanted to respect that. And so I kept it tight to who I knew him to be. What was not in the book was whether it was something that Kurtis would want to be known, and it was something that I knew he would want to be known. [If it was something] he would find joy in about us or about our love, then it was responsible for me to include it. But if I felt any hesitation in my spirit or some sort of check about whether Kurtis would want that known, I usually chose, in most instances, not to include it.
Rachel Schwartzmann: As you talk about Kurtis—and remember and honor him—is there a question that you wish people asked him more often?
Amy Lin: Oh, what a beautiful question. Yes. I wish that people had asked Kurtis more often what he thought. He was such an easygoing man, very easygoing, so laid back. He was on the floor most of the time. And because he was so easygoing, he had this really beautiful ability to hear from you what you thought. And he really wanted to know what you thought. He was very interested in what you thought about the world. He asked me all the time what I thought about the world. But I would see in social situations that people love to share what they think, including myself. Kurtis would be such a beautiful recipient of that [so] people wouldn't ask him what he thought. And Kurtis was hesitant to share what he thought because he really didn't want to get things wrong. But he had really interesting takes on the world and he had preferences and opinions and spice, you know, that people didn't always see.
Because I'm also a question asker, I asked Kurtis questions all the time. I was very privy to some of those privately held opinions, thoughts, questions, and selfness that he had. And I felt very honored to be a part of that. But it was because I would ask him, and I know because Kurtis would tell me that he felt very known by me. A part of that is, I think, because of how deeply I endeavored to know him. And so I wished—because he had so little time—that others had asked him more because they would've only realized that the abundance that Kurtis offered them was but a small part of the abundance of who he was.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Is there a question that you wish he had asked at any point?
Amy Lin: I mean, there are the things that I wish that we had spoken about and had asked me about or that I had asked him about death. There are so many things that we weren't prepared for because we were so young. And part of that's in the book. I didn't know if he wanted to be buried or cremated. I had to decide that on my own. I wish that we had talked about that.
In terms of him asking me something, I think I wished Kurtis had asked me what he had given me because I think, in some ways, he was always trying to find that out. You know, "I think I'm the heart." You know how much he cared for me. I think he was always asking in some ways: How am I precious to you? And, of course, I told him. Of course, I know that. But I wish he had asked me more regularly that I had been able to give him those daily granular answers. You're precious to me because you sneeze in a specific way. I didn't ever tell him that. Do you know what I mean? But it was true. It's something that I know exactly how his mouth moved when he sneezed. And I always found it very endearing. I know that's something I never told him because when you live together, you don't ask your partner daily: How am I precious to you today? And you miss out on all of those little moments of importance because you're just moving through life. You tend to focus on the big things. You're precious to me because of this big thing. But when grief comes for you, you start to realize all of these really small tender moments about someone and how they are so precious to you. I wish that he had asked me that more. Not because I didn't praise him, but because I know he was thought about it. He always wanted to know how he was important to me and I wish that I could have given that to him more often.
It's a beautiful question. I was just reflecting on what a great question I thought it was. I think it's amazing. I'm going to ask other people that. What question do you wish you were asking your loved ones or that they were asking you? I think it's a beautiful question.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I only have one more question before we have you read. It's very similar. This is something I ask in all of my interviews: What's a question you hope other people start asking you more often? Whether it's about grief, love, creativity, really anything that comes to mind.
Amy Lin: Hmm. Thank you. Wow. I love that. I hope, I wish, I think that people were asking me more often what it feels like to be me. I tend to ask people that question: What does it feel like to be you? It's one of the things I trot out at parties because it's the smallest form of small talk I have, which is still big talk. What it feels like to you is not small talk, but it's kind of that. Or: What pains do you carry? Are you suffering? You know, those are kind of my other ones. But I think a lot of the time, people see me move through life professionally or through difficult situations in the ways that I feel I'm forced to, which is that I've had to learn a kind of courage that people often mistranslate as strength and they just assume that I'm fine.
A lot of the time they just think, oh, she's got this under control. She knows her own mind. She's very serious, so she's just going to do that. She's not capable of tenderness or playfulness or needing help. They just assume they know me in a way that they don't. And I think if they pause to ask me, "Well, what does it feel like to be you?" they might be surprised by some of the answers, which isn't to say people don't ask me beautiful questions all the time, but that some of my friends, especially since Kurtis has died and they started reading my writing, they said, "Oh, I've really realized some things about you that come through in the writing that I just didn't understand before." And we've talked about it because it's really the first time they've ever asked me what it's like to be the person that I am.
Rachel Schwartzmann: We don't go there a lot now.
Amy Lin: We don't. I mean, I would say in our day-to-day, if you were tasked with saying what it feels like for your best friend to be them, you could probably say a little bit about it. You might not fully know the answers to that. And if you ask them, they might not know at first as well. But we all, on some level, understand color and shape and feel of what it's like to be us, and there's real value in hearing and thinking about that.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Especially now. Everything's become so insular and a cloud that I don't think has lifted for a lot of us over the last few years, mostly.
Amy Lin: Exactly. I mean, so many of your questions are ones that I'm going to carry forward and ask people. This has been deeply nourishing as I knew that it would be. But you have such a beautiful way of entering into wondering, which is such a secret practice.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I try. That's all I can do. [Laughs]
Amy Lin: I feel very honored to be a part of it.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Oh, I'm so glad.
I guess for the purposes of this interview, let's have you close things out by reading another section of hereafter.
Amy Lin: I would love to. Thank you.
PASSAGE READ BY AMY LIN ︎ PURCHASE HERE AFTER︎︎︎
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Rachel Schwartzmann: That was my conversation with Amy Lin. You can purchase Here After anywhere books are sold—though we recommend supporting local and independent bookstores if you can. You can also follow Amy on social @literaryamy. I'm Rachel Schwartzmann, and you've been listening to Slow Stories. Thank you so much for tuning in.