The self preservation instinct that's at work in all of us says, no, no, don't do it. Don't do it. And and the impulse to love says, Yeah, but presence, connection, belonging, this is where your most meaningful life will always be found. You. Music.
Hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ, look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, we've all been through loss. I know I've been paralyzed to keep going, to continue to risk, to open myself up to love again. So how do we move past paralysis
and risk again? Well, in this episode, Stephanie Duncan Smith takes us on a profound journey through grief, loss and the resilience required to open ourselves up to love again. She beautifully weaves together themes of time, the liturgical calendar and the radical empathy of a God who meets us in every moment, whether joyful or
sorrowful. Stephanie shares her own experiences with pregnancy loss and how she grappled with the dissonance of everyday life and the world's expectations in the midst of her grief, she redefines resilience, not as overcoming, but as the ability to hold joy and sorrow together, to live in the uncomfortable tension. This conversation as a master class in finding hope, courage and the freedom to feel the full range of human emotion even in the darkest of times.
Stephanie's words offer a path forward for anyone who has experienced profound loss and a reminder that love is always worth a risk. So join us. Here is my conversation with Stephanie. Duncan Smith, Stephanie, welcome to shifting culture. Excited to have you on thank you so much for joining me.
Excited to be here. Thank you.
Yeah, I'd love to know what your journey was in your own life, moving from feeling like you should feel certain things in your life into a place of giving yourself permission, or feeling like you have permission from God to feel what you actually feel. I
am an Enneagram four, which, if you're an Enneagram person, you know that the four is often known as the individualist, and they're often deep feelers. So feeling has never been a problem for me. Um, you know, to the contrary, it's often like, okay, you can move through those emotions and then maybe find a place for them to just chill for a little bit, um, and come back to reality.
Stay tethered to reality. So, but I think what you're asking is, how did I find in in myself, the permission to experience the fullness of those emotions, maybe when they were so intense, at the deepest low of my own experience, when the feelings were really intense, I don't really feel that I had a choice. Denial was certainly not a choice, because that felt invalidating to me and my pain.
It was very painful to stay in that place of grief and sadness and sorrow, but I think I felt that the alternative of putting that all aside would be actually even more painful. So for me, I just it didn't feel like much of a choice.
So when you're feeling that, that deep level of pain, like the the fullness of your your feelings, where did you feel God present with you in the midst of pain and grief and struggle,
I felt, and I had to fight to feel this, but I I felt ultimately that it was just God's presence with me in the pain, and not just the presence with but the actually, I felt God's love through the resistance to try and Explain and try and oh, well, it wasn't that bad, or somehow paper over, justify, dismiss what I was going through. And I'll never forget there was a moment for
me. And you know, I'm speaking from the experience of pregnancy loss, there was a moment for me when our loss was very fresh and my grief was very strong, and we were at a family gathering, and I just, I just could not engage the levity OF THE. Group, and I wanted to be present, and I wanted to be with family, and I, you know, there were kids running around outside, and there was a bonfire and s'mores, and it would have been lovely, and it all felt like a farce to me, because no one really knew.
I wasn't really talking about it, besides my immediate family. And it the burden of pretense for me felt too much in that time. And I'll never forget, my mom was seeing my grief, and she said, Do you want to just sit by the fire? So we we went and sat by the fire. Nobody else was
there. And instead of trying to fix instead of trying to summon up some kind of reason, instead of trying to prescribe a solution, she just listened, and I could almost see the muscles at work in her restraint In not doing those things, but it meant the world to me, and I think I ultimately felt loved and cared for by God in that with this, in my pain that came without any kind of shoulding or, you know, well, just try This and you'll feel better. It wasn't when I needed I just needed present.
My spiritual director constantly tells me he shouldn't shit on yourself, right?
Good advice.
That's really good advice. You know, when we, I mean, my wife and I lost a baby, and in pregnancy as well. And you know, right after, like the day after it happens, we, we had to be in a wedding. We had to celebrate. You know, there's all sorts of of dissonance that you feel when there is a where's there's joy in the midst of this, what you were, you were feeling everybody, you know, running around feeling this joy.
I was at a wedding. We were, you know, this is a joyful moment of two people coming together in love, yeah, and then on the, you know, underneath everything, you feel this grief and this loss and this pain. How do you deal with the dissonance of everyday life and the world around us,
yeah, well, I'm so sorry for your loss. And I I think dissonance is just the word, and it's familiar to anyone who's gone through any kind of loss or grief and had to figure out how to live their Tilly life, speaking from my experience of pregnancy loss. So for us, our first pregnancy we lost during
Advent. It was the week before Christmas, and that added insult to injury for me personally, because, of course, Advent is a preparatory season toward really the ultimate birth pregnancy and birth narrative that is the hinge of history. So I felt I could not participate in that
celebration. I could not anticipate in that anticipation, honestly and and I think what makes it especially difficult with pregnancy loss is there's a it's often shrouded in secrecy or even stigma, and I don't believe whatsoever that anyone is ever obligated to share what's going on with them personally and what burdens they're carrying. No one, no one needs share that. But what's really hard? I mean, you're welcome to if it makes you feel better, but you never have to.
But pregnancy loss, it's, um, you know, it's, it's personal, and there are good reasons not to share. But I just remember the going back to work after after Christmas, and everybody's like, how is your Christmas and and it just there. I mean, what a lovely, kind question. And I was flummoxed as to how to what felt like me, pretend what what
it felt like to me. So I often, I think I write this in the book, but to me, the loss is the first grief and the pretense is the second, and that day to day, how do you, yeah, just go about your life carrying such weight. I think it can help to determine what's best for you. Some some of our family asked me, What would help you right now? Do you want to talk about it, or do you not? And they let me steer that and decide, and that was really
valuable and meaningful. I think also, you know you don't have to. You never have to share your personal pain with anyone, but having a few safer. Relationships that can hold it with you is, is really sustaining and stabilizing when you need it most, so you don't have to share with everyone, but having just a few people who see you in your pain, I think, is, is really such a gift. And then I think just do what you need to
do to take care of yourself. And if that means, you know what, right now, you need to go see a silly movie in the theater. You need to just step out of your life for a minute. Or maybe it means, yeah, you need to go deep and journal and put on some music and kind of get in a space where you can confront what's
going on. But the main thing is, is a mindset, and that is that whatever, whatever pain you're experiencing, your grief, your lament, is valid and healing will never come from telling yourself I'm overreacting, or my feelings are disproportionate to what's going on, or they don't belong, or they're too much, they're not too much, they're they're entirely, perfectly appropriate.
So as you write in your book, you use the framework of the liturgical calendar, year of the church. How has that helped you, and how has that framework helped us? In the midst of this,
my spiritual imagination has always been most stirred by the incarnation. There's nothing like this idea of God becoming human with us. I've always loved the liturgical year, which is really just a retelling of the incarnation of God with us in our time. That's all it is. So if you're unfamiliar with some of the rituals, or feast days, or you know, you don't lent or Ash Wednesday, you're not really in your practice that don't worry about all that. It's just a retelling of Christ with us
throughout the year. And something that I I've really come to love about the liturgical year is it's often visualized as a circle, almost a wheel. So it it starts at the beginning of Advent, that's always the beginning of the Christian year, and it cycles all the way through Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Easter tide. And then ordinary tide is the longest part of the year, which is really designed for us to practice the resurrection in
our daily lives. But what I've come to love about this image of time as a circle is God has come to be with us in every moment of a full circle. So in in a life, life holds so much. It holds a vast spectrum of experiences that are high to low and everything in between, beautiful and joyful and wrenching, and there is no moment, there's no emotion that God does not come to meet us in. And that's what the liturgical year says to me. My book is also anchored in the
Christian year. So every chapter engages a season, Advent, Christmas and on, and then blends that with personal narrative and the design of that is to show again God meets us every personal moment, meets meets God is there to meet us in so I write in the book the range of the liturgical year becomes for us one of its greatest gifts, expressing the radical empathy of God with us in every moment the I am incarnate in our joy, fear, sorrow and surprise God in every gradient of the
color wheel that composes a life, it's
beautiful that is there, that he's with us in the midst of every every feeling, every emotion. Time is really interesting to me. We have a time now where you have, like, some anniversaries that come up, where you have a loss of pregnancy, you have a birth of a child, you have this hope and you have this joy, you have this despair and you have this grief. That feels, to me, that it's all actually compounded into the past and the present and the future, and it's all
wrapped up in one. And we, all we have, is the present, but it feels like the past is with us. It feels like the future is with us here. What is your relationship with this love and grief and hope and joy and time, and what does that look like to have it all be present? You? Yet be in the past and the future.
I love this question, and I write so much into the theme of time and love and loss in the book, I think anyone who's ever experienced a loss, whether it's a pregnancy a loved one, those anniversary grief, anniversary dates can be really hard, and they hold memory as well as the pain of the present and also the loss of the future, right.
There's, it's, it's deeply dynamic, and something that I write about in the book is, after our pregnancy loss during Advent, I I really struggled on New Year's Eve because, and this was also december 2019, so it was not just a new year. We were crossing the threshold into a new decade. And I was, I was keenly aware in the festivities
of that evening. And again, I was with family, and I kind of wanted to forget, and I kind of didn't, but I was keenly aware that I was leaving love behind, and I referred to her as she she was not coming with me. She was not crossing the threshold with me. And as the countdown to midnight began, this was an ending. And I would not be sharing a 2020, with this little one. Sola, this would not be a birth year that, you know, there would not be a birthday that
year. It's so hard to reckon with that and and, you know, not just New Year's Eve, but really every day. You know when, when you're missing someone. You think every single day is almost shifting us further apart from that, that present when we were together. And you know, the Christian hope also assures us that every day is getting us closer to that, that
togetherness again. So there's, there's some hope in that as well, but something that in grief, there's such a you're very aware of your loss of control, you know there's nothing you can do to change the circumstances. And where I found some shred of agency for myself is in considering the way that love actually makes time travelers of us. And I think this is true of human love and divine love. For divine love, we are God's beloved, and God will
do anything. Love will do anything to be near the beloved, and that's why we have the story of the incarnation to begin with. And then when the lover and the beloved can't be together in in the present, love has such an imagination that it will find a way, whether that's the memory of keeping someone alive or it's the sort of imagining of, yeah, you know, right now I would have a five year old, and what would that be
like? Or can you imagine your great grandmother getting to meet your first child for the first time? Like, what would she say? What would that be like? These are not things that maybe will happen or have happened, but, but there is an imagination there, and I think that's a beautiful thing to exercise, and also a practice of hope
it's good. Have you seen a rival the movie arrival? Yes,
yeah, such a good movie. Yeah.
I think it's I it is my favorite movie. And I think it's partly because of of this. I mean, I love, I love the fact that we have a linguist trying to decipher the language of aliens. But we also have this, this piece of grief and loss and yearning for the love that she can't have at the moment, and then just realizing and opening up her mind to be able to actually time travel, to be able to feel and be present with the love that she has lost, and the love is is actually
present with us. It's a beautiful, beautiful movie. Reading your book made me want to re watch a rival and like be present in that and and look at it through the lens that you're talking about of of time travel and love and presence in the midst of grief and and loss, but also, like when we're in that space and it's it's difficult, and we're in this loss, and we're, we've lost some hope. We often get paralyzed and we're I don't know if I want to do this again. I don't know if I want to
open myself up to love again. I don't know it seems too risky. It seems like I'm going to experience this deep loss one more time, and I don't want to experience this again, because it's painful. And how, how did you figure out how to move from a paralyzation in that way, into a space of I'm going to risk, to open myself up to love again? Yeah, this
really is the central question of the book, and the this is the the reckoning realm. Exactly. I'm fortunate enough to have a three year old and a one year old right now, and both of them were
born after losses. I really only tell the story of the first loss in the book, but actually, while I was editing the book, we experienced the second loss, and part of the story there is, I'm writing this book about this question, right, of how do you reckon with the way that love compels us toward relationship and the way that risk really repels us to run the other direction, because relationships are where you get hurt, whether you're rejected, whether you lose, whether it it gets tricky
and complicated, and there gets baggage, and that's where life gets really messy. So the self preservation instinct that's at work in all of us says, no, no, no, don't do it. Don't do it. And and the impulse to love says, Yeah, but presence, connection, belonging, this is where your most meaningful life will always be found. And what I came to realize is that none of that presence, connection, belonging, all the things that make life most meaningful, that can only be accessed on the
other side of risk. The catch is we get to choose. You don't have to go for it when you've been hurt, it can be so hard to make the choice to love again or try again, and you don't have to, but if you don't, you are also making the choice to live a
small life. And I've I've learned that the hard way in many different avenues of my life after our second loss and again, this is outside the book, but after our second loss, I had to, had have my own reckoning moment and say, Look, do I want this enough to try again, knowing what can happen, because the worst has happened to me again and again now. So do I want this enough to try again and take on that risk? And, you know, searching within myself?
The answer was yes, and I also had to come up with the self awareness to and maybe the self correction to say I was not a fool for wanting something beautiful, it doesn't make me a fool just because it happened again. Because I think the cynic in all of us wants to say, See, I told you this was going to happen. I told I told you this terrible thing was going to happen, and it did, and that's a terrible way to live. It's just it's a miserable way to live.
And I've, I've lived it too long, and my husband and I had to, had to decide we were not fools for hoping for good, knowing the risks, but hoping for the best. We are not. We were not that would be the wrong lesson to learn, and we didn't want to learn that lesson. So I think really screening those thoughts and bringing them back to a place of groundedness and wisdom and what matters in life, you know, can be it's not easy
work. There's no shortcuts. But I think for me, it comes down to that choice of what kind of life you want to live.
I think part of that and part of risk is is being resilient and resilience, what are some some misperceptions that we have of what resilience is and what is resilience for you?
I have a whole chapter in the book called redefining resilience, because I have so much to say on this very point. I you know, I think too often resilience is made out to be a mandate, and it's made out to be almost a a showboating of overcoming, and I have a strong allergic reaction to the word overcoming, because to me, it implies that you're over the past, and I don't put a lot of
stock in that concept. And. I'm just gonna read a small bit of where I say this, yeah, I write in the book over it, what an empty place to be where nothing can touch you. I hope I'm never over the realness of loving another, even if this means enduring loss. I hope I'm never over the depths and empathy that love through loss has awakened in me. I hope I'm never over it, because if you dim one set of colors in the Color Wheel of human experience, you will desaturate them all on the whole
I'd rather stay in it. I'd rather live in color with the fullness of my humanity and the life cycle itself. And I think anytime you try to get over something I think of like clearing a track hurdle. I It seems to me like a shortcut for not doing the processing that can make us whole and ultimately heal us. So if I had to propose an alternative definition of
resilience. I think true, authentic resilience is learning how to hold joy in one hand and sorrow in the other, and get comfortable in the uncomfortable tension between the two, because we're always trying to solve for x and x is always the good life where we're happy and successful and everything's going our way, and you just, you know, haha, I think it's, it's learning to get comfortable in that tension and accept it and Find your stability in that space in between happiness
is something as As Americans, we I mean, but it says in our constitution that we, we have the right to the pursuit of happiness. I actually think that we've probably done a disservice to our country to say that pursuing happiness is a as a lofty goal, we constantly, every year, get a list of the happiest places to live on Earth, right? You go to Disneyland, it's the happiest place on Earth. You have happiness. Then what, as you said, to hold joy and grief.
Then is there a difference between the happiness that we're trying to pursue that actually doesn't bring us the deep satisfaction of life and joy that maybe I can actually have that and whole grief at the same time. Is there a difference between the two, and why would joy and grief satisfy me? As somebody who wants to live a life of color, write
a lot about in the book is the experience of mistrusting joy or happiness. So it's that feeling of actually things are going great, but you can't enjoy it because you know that the other shoe is about to drop, so you're suspicious when things start to go your way and again, miserable way to live. Ticket, Sprint, solar, nose. The Surface perception of happiness is a little more one dimensional than joy. And in joy, there's, I think the difference is, Joy never downplays or dismisses
sorrow where it's found. But also true, Joy refuses to downplay actual Joy where it's found. And I think we all have a slant towards one or the other. Some of us are a little more willing to sort of shove unpleasant things under the rug and just stick to what's happy, and some of us are a lot more willing to just give in, to fall into cynicism and be like, this is all going to end badly, so it can be good to recognize your slant. One memory that rises for me is when our daughter was
baptized. And I, you know, everybody was so happy for us. It was a beautiful day, and in all the well wishing, I found myself thinking every parent just wants their kid to be happy, right? Like we all want that, and I do want that for my
children. Of course I do, but I came to realize that wanting someone you love to be happy is actually too small of a walk, and what I really want for her is to feel the freedom, to feel the full range of her one wildlife, as Mary Oliver says, I want her to know that it's okay to be sad. It's okay to be
unsure. Yeah, and you know, she's three and a half now, and she's almost four, and we're coaching already, and it's amazing to me how quickly kids pick up social cues, like some emotions are good and others are not good, and she, for better and for worse, is a deep feeler like me. So you know when, when she was kind of early toddler and the Tantrums were starting,
I would, it was very funny. I would try to express empathy with her, and her seeing my sort of empathetic sadness in response to hers actually freaked her out. And she's like two and a half, and she's yelling at me,
mommy, be happy. Be happy, Mommy. And and I thought, oh
my goodness, okay, you're allowed to be sad. And I am too. We have to start practicing this early, but I do, but I want, I want her to know that that is hers. There's no should. There's no should. Over how you feel. You got to learn how to, how to keep moving and keep living your life. But you feel what you feel, and there's no judgment. Yeah,
and I think kids feel that already. I mean, this is what happened to my son today. He there's some things he has to do at school. He doesn't really want to, so he cried for like, 15 minutes, and it like I was trying to get him out the door. And he was like, No, and he's crying. And then he's like, Oh, my eyes look like I'm crying, and my friends will see that. Oh, I've been crying, you know? And so he's like, I can't
go to school like this. I have to, like, make sure that my eyes don't look like this, and so I mean, you're he's already saying and I don't know if I can feel what I'm feeling, because I don't want to other people to see me and the fullness of what I feel. I don't want other people to see my grief and fear and anxiety that I'm feeling at this moment. You talked about baptism in the time of baptism, and one of my favorite things you write about is on baptism. And Brooke, you talked about
baptism is a tesser? What is tessering? And what is a tesser? This
is one of the several metal and Lengel references in the book, who's one of my just beloved favorite authors. Tessering is from her series, and the book particularly of wrinkle and time. So it's a way of time travel, and she describes it as, you know, an ant is crossing a skirt, and you wrinkle the skirt so that they can get from one spot to another sooner, faster. That is my favorite metaphor for baptism as as weird and wonderful as that is.
Yeah, that's great. Can you read from your book about baptism?
Okay, I'll start. I'll start with this one. All right, of course, I want my daughter to be happy, but I also want her to be free to feel the full range of her wide and wild life. I don't want her to live bracing suspicious of joy, a posture her parents are continually unlearning. Neither do I want her to live shrouded in denial, in the fixation of happiness at the expense of what is honest and true. Rather, I want her to feel the freedom of feeling it all and knowing that she is not
alone in any of it. Baptism is a tester, if there ever were one, and the waters of the sacrament past and future come rushing together into the present, pouring an ocean of meaning into the little bottle of now, as NT Wright says, baptism is the nexus of dimensions, past, present, future, life, death and resurrection. As we the baptized, are initiated into the great belonging of the life of
Christ. The water seals us into the sacred belonging, signing the promise that God is with us in all our travels and timelines, through all living dying and rising.
I think that's so beautiful as a description of baptism. Baptism is a tester that it is like God is with us in all of our time and all of our grief and sorrow and loss and our joy and and everything that God is with us. It's a it's a beautiful description. How has that brought you some some hope in your life? And how has baptism like been something that you could hold on to you? The
incarnation is the story of Christ coming into our time, and I think baptism is the symbol of us being raised up into God time. So there's a real reciprocity there that interests me and helps me locate some courage. Because if, if Jesus is true. Be with us in our life and our death, then we are with Him in His resurrection. And that's that's what baptism has come to
mean to me. It really is a promise, and it is that promise of presence and union with Christ and my favorite way, you know, to express the hope is just the future of all things new, and we get to be participants in that. It starts now. It'll be finished later, but that's so beautiful. And I'm I have a very low tolerance for over promising. And I see this as a this is a pervasive problem in Christianity, especially because there are many promises that many Christians bank on
that God never makes. It's not only dishonest, it also casts a vision for a God who can't be trusted, and I find that deeply problematic. So the way my brain works is to forage and search for any kind of promise that actually can hold up. And I find it here in I'm not guaranteed any kind of outcome whatsoever. But because I am baptized, I know that God is with me and I am with God in whatever happens.
You know, there's so many metaphors that can be made from baptism, tethering is one, birth is another, death is another, and I found it so, so meaningful to baptize my children into this promise that God is with them, and that's, you know, an act of faith. They'll make their own choices in time. But it was a way of expressing, you know, God is with her, my daughter, God is with him, my son and their belonging is spoken for, no matter the rest.
So if you're talking about some over promising, and you're talking about living into other things that maybe God didn't promise, as you go into ordinary time in the liturgical ear, you're you're trying to find out, how are we living into this resurrection and this resurrection life that we get to participate in as well. So then, what is our relationship to that, and what does it look like to live in in the time of resurrection?
I think this speaks back to what true resilience is, for me, because another widespread myth about resilience that many of us believe is that it's all on us. And I don't believe that that feels like pressure, that does not feel life giving, that does not feel healing to practice true resilience. I think we we lean into the resurrection of God. This is something that it's not all on us. It's already been done. All we have to do is be present and connected and engaged with the reality that's
already been sealed. And again, that is a practice, and that is ours, the strength, the courage, that it's not all on us, and I will find I have a brief excerpt on that. So in one chapter, I'm writing through my physical birth prep for labor, and considering the parallels between preparing, you know your body for such a major event and
living your life. So I say just as a woman in labor is called to stay with her breath to bring forth new life, the liturgical year calls us to stay with the story that leads to new life, and that really is ordinary time. You know, there's nothing major happening in the church calendar. It's just a Tuesday, it's just a Sunday, it's just life. And then I write this kind of hope is not wispy wishful thinking. It is a deadlift from
one's core. It takes a certain strength to keep your hopes up, to engage the muscles of your core and list, list, list, against the entropy of everything, against the gravity of death itself. To keep such a hope up is to set the total weight of your being against the full catastrophe of living. And in doing so, grit your teeth, fire every muscle you have and feel the burn of the sweat beaded push. Yet this is no
bootstrap endeavor. We are not tasked to do any of this in our own strength, but in the borrowed strength of Christ's resurrection power. And I think that's, that's what makes all the difference. Um, you know. Practicing resurrection. It's it's a call, it's an invitation, but we never do it in our own strength. That's
hopeful, that it's not in our own strength, that it is Jesus with us doing it. He's the one that his resurrection is the one that that helps us. So if you had a conversation with your readers, people who pick up even after everything which is a beautiful book. What would your hope be for your readers?
First, I hope that they I hope that you receive the gift of feeling seen in what hurts and you experience the presence of a God with you, witnessing you in your pain, as well as maybe the liminal in between spaces and the
uncertainties. And then I also hope that you find your courage renewed to take risks in the name of love, and to find the courage that you need, to take the courage that you need to love again after being hurt, to try again after things have not gone as planned, and to live that courageous life of loving anyway, I will say too, I it was very important to me from the outset of the book that this
actually not be a grief book. I hope that it speaks to people in hard places, but also to me, the book was not written to stay in a place of grief. And in fact, if pregnancy loss is a sensitive and personal topic for you, and that would be difficult reading, I wrote it in a way that you can just skip chapter four. That's
the hard chapter. So if that's too hard to skip chapter four and keep going, but I really wrote it to narrate not not the grief of what happened, but what happened after, and how to sustainably and believably Find your footing and your courage again when The joy and sorrow of life feel too much.
Stephanie, if you could go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?
Oh, wow. Well, let's see. Let's set the scene 21 I was newly married, just figuring life out. And I think I would say, I think I would say, keep reading, keep writing. It's a practice, and there's no deadline, so just keep leaning into what you love.
That's great advice. Really good anything that you've been reading or watching lately you could recommend.
Well, I'm really looking forward to one of these days finishing the bear, because I have, I've, there's not a lot of margin or TV time in my life right now, but with with kiddos and book launch, but I have really loved that show, and I'll tell you why. One of the things that it does so well is it's, it's really a show about, it's about, it doesn't center romantic relationships. Um, you know, there's, there's a couple flashes, but there's but, but
they're side plots. And I, I love that they're, they're demonstrating in real time that romantic relationships are not the only interesting relationships, and there are some meaningful and deep, profound dynamics in sibling relationships and parent to child relationships, colleague relationships, competition, so that one's been fun and food is always fun. So that's on the watch list.
Awesome, the bear selling watch list. Go put it on yours and yeah, get over. Yeah, some of that anxiety inducing scenes in, yeah, but it's, it's all right, my wife won't watch it with me because it's too anxiety inducing for her. My husband
feels the same exact way. I guess it doesn't bother in any grim for
that's good. How can people go out and get your book, even after everything? And where would you like to point people to? How can they connect with you?
Thank you. It's available anywhere books are sold. And if anything spoke to you in this conversation, I would humbly invite you to join me for a deeper conversation in the book itself, you can find me@slantletter.com or Stephanie Duncan Smith or slant letter on sub stack. I have a weekly sub stack newsletter that is. Really designed for writers who are interested in the writing craft and also the writing process as spiritual practice.
That's great. I have one quick little bonus question that I thought as an editor, what's your biggest pet peeve that you see in writing?
Oh, man, you're
gonna make a sound so cranky,
but you're not. I understand that. But one of the things that guy, ah, I can't believe that this is here again.
Yeah, biggest pet peeve, I think the biggest thing is, is a classic writing one, but show, don't tell. I don't want to hear how your book is going to revolutionize its genre. I want you to show me on the page so that I say, Wow, this is going to revolutionize its genre. So, yeah, you know, stories details that tell that's what I want to see. I don't. I don't want to hear about, you know, the time you went to your dentist or, like, I want you to show me, Wow, the I want you to make me
feel something connect. So that's what I'm looking for. Excellent.
That's good. Well, Stephanie, thank you for this conversation. Thank You that we could go on some, some time traveling and go into the space of grief and loss, but with and also hope and joy and resilience and resurrection and ordinary time and baptism, and all of the life that we get to live and enjoy that we could actually step out and risk to love again. So thank you. I love this conversation. I love your
book. It is fantastic. Really recommend people go out and get it and just go marinate in the words of Stephanie, because these words are incredible, as you heard on this conversation as well. So Stephanie, thank you for this conversation, and have a wonderful, wonderful day.
Thank you for having me. You.