New Episode - THE HOUSE THAT JOY BUILT with Holly Ringland
On Creativity, Bravery, and Self-Belief
Episode notes
What happens when you blend the potent cocktail of creativity, storytelling, and raw human emotions? You get an engrossing conversation with Holly Ringland, a writer, storyteller, and television presenter whose work has traversed the globe and screens alike. Holly joins us to shed light on her creative journey, from the conception of her internationally best-selling debut novel, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, to its transformation into an Amazon Prime series. She also unwraps her new nonfiction book about creativity, The House that Joy Built, and gives us a glimpse of her second novel, The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding.
This episode takes you on an emotional rollercoaster, offering an intimate look at Holly’s response to seeing her story come alive on screen. It also delves into her transformative writing experience and the power of overcoming fear. Ever wondered how to harness creativity and foster growth amidst the noise of self-doubt and fear? Holly shares her secrets, detailing her approach to writing, her dual desks strategy and the importance of small, achievable steps and connecting with nature.
Finally, Holly underscores the importance of self-belief in her writing journey, sharing her story of defiance against initial rejection. Reminding us that creativity is an integral part of our everyday lives, she explores the joy, fear, bravery, and the power of having an inner fan. This episode is not only a celebration of storytelling but also an empowering narrative reminding us all that we have the power to write our own stories. Join us as we navigate this incredible journey with Holly Ringland!
Episode Chapters
0:00:00 - The House That Joy Built
0:05:19 - The Emotion of Unbelievable Joy
0:12:57 - Overcoming Fear, Opening Up
0:22:03 - Embracing Growth and Creativity With Bravery
0:32:52 - Writing and Creativity
0:46:27 - Psychology, Creativity, and Dual Desks
1:00:38 - Harnessing Inner Fan Energy, Overcoming Criticism
1:12:24 - Writing Journey and Power of Self-Belief
Transcript
INTRO - Holly Ringland
Oh, thank you, Pam, it feels like coming home, back on the Convo Couch.
INTRO - Pamela Cook
I'm in the van, which, of course is inspired by you, so thank you for coming again.
INTRO - Holly Ringland
Oh, Pam, my pleasure, spread the joy.
INTRO - Pamela Cook
So before we get on to talking about THE HOUSE THAT JOY BUILT which is our main topic of conversation. I'm sure there's going to be lots of tangents. Yeah, but seeing Alice, and your gorgeous story, Holly, transformed so amazingly onto the screen, has been a joy for me, so I can only imagine what it has been like for you.
0:04:54 - Holly Ringland
I've been asked this question a lot, as I'm sure you can imagine, since the show came out in August and Prime Video were kind enough to ask me to talk about it and do some publicity.
And the thing is, Pam, I get no better at knowing how to answer this question because I don't have words. The answer feels like an emotion that I don't know how to name, and it's an emotion that is made up of many different emotions that fire in my body all at once.
So there are all of the emotions that, like you say, when you watch it, it was a joy for you, and so, in that emotional, empathetic way, you're feeling what I'm feeling. It is like it is a mind-blowing joy and it is incredible, and it is amazing and it is bewildering and impossible and believable.
So it's all of that emotion, family, and at the same time, in the same emotional experience, it is also surreal and it feels like I can feel my physical brain kind of hurting while I try and understand that I am seeing brought to tangible life in front of me on screen, objects, elements, moments that I also have the memory of, where I was in my life when I made them up, and so I feel my brain folding in on itself while I'm trying to get my head around that and then, at the same time, firing in the same emotional experience. So we're all filling the one experience right.
This is why I don't have words, because there's no name for this simultaneous emotion. Is that this story the story of Alice Hart, as because I've had such beautiful conversations with you on this very Convo couch over the years.
This story is drawn from my lived experiences. It's the emotional truth of my lived experiences, and so I am watching some sort of confusing experience between memory and fiction and imagination and emotional truth all coming together. So there's our third compartment of emotion, and then the final thing is let's just throw in Sigourney Weaverr and Asher Kedi and Leah Purcell and Alicia Debnam Carey.
Let's throw all of those kind of small deal gals. Let's throw all of them in to play the characters that lived in my body and in my head, alone with me. Let's throw all of them in and let's make it global. And let's break records with how many people watch it.
In the opening, Pam, I just I do a lot of staring at the sky, at the wall, at into the distance. I still don't fully understand it. I don't think I ever will. How could it ever possibly sink in? I hope it never sinks in. I hope I never get used to it.
It is the most impossible and extraordinary thing that I never saw coming in my life. In a thousand million possibilities for what could happen to me and my writing in a life, it's complete. I don't even. I could just sit here for an hour with you trying to find the words and I won't find them.
0:08:54 - Pamela Cook
Well, I think it's a pretty good summary of how it's made, of how it must feel.
0:08:59 - Holly Ringland
Yes, it's and it's been a really powerful reminder that even the greatest joys can be stressful to manage, that along with joy comes a lot of other things to manage as well Fear of being seen, vulnerability, traumatic experience, memory like they're all in there. What a cocktail. What a cocktail, but what an incredibly wonderful thing. Just utterly bewildered.
0:09:36 - Pamela Cook
Yeah, perfect summary. I think we will of course. Yeah, we could go on and on, but I think that is actually a perfect kind of segue into talking about THE HOUSE THAT JOY BUILT because, of course, the writing of Alice Hart as your first published novel is written many things prior, but as your first published novel and your first or a into having your work really seen by the world and all the emotions that that that come with that, that's really the subject of this nonfiction memoir, isn't it?
0:10:08 - Holly Ringland
Yes, it's THE HOUSE THAT JOY BUILT didn't exist. We are in, what are we wearing? October? It didn't exist in February of this year of 2023. Not in a way that I could see it anyway, like I had no idea in February of this year that I was going to write my third book this year at the same time.
I think I have been writing the narrative of this book with my thinking for probably about eight years now, and that is what the incredible power that Catherine Milne, my publisher, has in the ways that we know each other so well, making stories together, is.
At the beginning of this year, she said to me you have a lot to say about creativity and joy and grief and fear and trauma and power and freedom. And my sort of basic front, like brain, response was no, I don't know, I'm not that person. I'm never writing nonfiction and I'm never writing memoir. And so, hilariously, Catherine and I've been laughing because I think the subversive way that I might ever write memoir, as if I'm writing about something like creativity.
And the reason I say that is the reason I give that context is because once Catherine and I had enough conversations about the possibility of me writing this book, I realised straight away that I would not if I was going to write nonfiction and if I was going to write about creativity and all the forces and states of mind and emotion that feed into it for us or block us from it. There is no way I was going to write this book at arm's length distance from the page.
The only way that I felt like I could put a book into the world and offer it to readers was if I was the hamster, and that's actually, that's terrible. I'm anti animal cruelty and experiments. Hamster in a really big range, free range, loving like zero sort of pain and torture. But I needed to be the…what I mean by hamster is, I needed to be the case study. I have read so many books about creativity and soaked them up and wanted to fully soak them, and then I would disengage the minute that the author would say and now we have Joe and Joe is….
And suddenly I'm ripped out of what I'm reading and I'm reading about something that feels abstract, because I don't know who the case study character is, and I thought it's the only way that I can talk about this. It's the only way that I can honour the gift that readers have given me, which was the sort of double wrong approach that Catherine took with me.
She said you have a lot to say about this, and your readers have been asking you about this for years, asking me how do I create when it hurts, how do I create when it feels like a waste of time, when so many people are suffering in the world, when there is so much suffering in the world, when there is the climate crisis and inequality? And Catherine said to me I've been watching you at events and I've been watching you have these conversations and you have something to put on paper.
And so to honour both her belief in me, but to honour that gift readers have given me by asking me those questions in a big roundabout way, deciding to do this, deciding to say yes to Catherine Milne because I defy the person, I dare the person who says no, but to say yes to the opportunity to write it, I just knew that I would not hold myself back from the page.
It had to be. If I was going to encourage people to open themselves up and go inwards, I would need to do the same. And so that is why the segue is there, because the first time that I majorly cracked myself open in my life from years of fear, stopping me from writing, which is the source of my creativity, was finding the courage to write the Lost Flowers of Alice Hart.
0:15:03 - Pamela Cook
Holly, I have to say there's a bit in the introduction and then you talk about that moment where you sat down and that opening sentence which I'm sure you've heard this before but in my opinion is one of the best opening sentences I've ever heard to the beginning sentence to the Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. I was lying in bed because I've been listening to the audiobook of THE HOUSE THAT JOY BUILT and I was lying in bed on the weekend and I listened to that and I have to tell you that not only that sentence but the way that you explain how it felt to be putting those words on the page for that very first time, I actually had goosebumps all over my body.
I might actually what I think I'm going to do is, if it's all right with you, I might actually insert that little bit of reading into the podcast so listeners can hear that.
0:16:01 - Holly Ringland
Quiet and sick of feeling pinned down by fear. Decades of fear in a rage. I rummaged through my desk for a notebook and pen. What would happen, I demanded of myself aloud, if, for once, I didn't listen to the fears in my head that I have been listening to for as long as I can remember? What if fear wasn't the first thing I listened to? I opened my notebook and took the lid off my pen as I bargained with myself. What if I didn't listen to all the reasons I can't do this?
The next moment is one I will treasure and revere for the rest of my life. As though I was outside of my body, I watched my hand write the first words that came into the tiny quiet space I carved out in my mind, no matter how many fearful thoughts were pressing in from all sides.
In the weatherboard house, at the end of the lane, 9 year old Alice Hart sat at her desk by the window and dreamed of ways to set her father on fire.
I sat back and dropped my pen. I remember saying something aloud holy fuck. Followed by here she is, and there she was, Alice Hart, the main character of my debut novel. Suddenly, in that moment, I found myself obliged to a 9 year old child who needed me to tell her story. I knew, looking at the words I'd written by hand on my page, that despite how my hands were shaking, I would not let fear stop me showing up for her.
0:17:54 - Pamela Cook
Laying down that very first sentence, as you say, was a way of really cracking open your creativity, wasn't it? And then you talk about in the book this whole process that, as anybody who was a creative, whether you're a writer, or you talk about this also in the book it doesn't have to be writing, it could be art, it could be cooking, it could be gardening, it could be jewellery, making any number of things. But that fear that we have of actually putting the words down or making that brooch or planting that, whatever it is we want to plant, we can be held back for so long, but then suddenly something does crack us open and then it's just like a blooming, isn't it?
0:18:35 - Holly Ringland
Absolutely absolutely and you can feel it. That reminds me of the quote from Hillman F Clint that's at the back of the book, towards the End, where she wrote something in a journal that speaks in effect to the idea that we might go on for months and years thinking that we are without growth and that there is no seed, there is no life, that we are fallow and barren and there is nothing inside of us that can yield any wonder or magic or all or any of the things that we feel when we dwell in imagination. But then something will happen, like you say. For me it was, and I talk about this in the book.
It took a bereavement, a deep grief, a deep and painful grief from the death of a loved one in my family. It took that to finally bring home to me how much of a bore and how much of a thief fear is.
Because fear is boring in the sense that when it's not protecting us from life-threatening danger, it's stopping us as a. It's a reason that stops us from following instinct. And it's a thief because if we're not careful, it steals our life from us that we could be spending living in free flow with our imagination and that place inside of ourselves and it had become so powerful in me that it did take a full cracking open. It really was a reckoning with myself, yeah.
0:20:43 - Pamela Cook
It's funny, I ride horses and a horse as somebody who came to it–like I came to writing later in life–the fear is always there and I'm always trying to conquer the fear of the riding. So a couple of years ago I got a new horse and he's beautiful, he's just, he's amazing. But the fear is always there and I've had to step up to a new kind of level of riding because it finally shoved me out of beginners after about 10 years.
0:21:15 - Holly Ringland
That happens when you practise and do something enough. You get shoved out of beginners, don't you?
0:21:21 - Pamela Cook
And I guess it's a bit like riding I keep getting to these points where it's I can stay here and be stagnant and not ever get any better or feel any more connection with him.
0:21:29 - Holly Ringland
Yeah.
0:21:30 - Pamela Cook
I can push myself beyond this kind of fear that keeps holding me back. And last week I actually rode him at home for the first time, alone, on my own, with no one home, and just that one little thing. It was a big thing to me, but just somebody else it would be nothing. But for me to actually ride him here on my own, with no one at home was amazing. It's an opening. Yeah, it is that opening, yeah, and it shows what you can do once you've taken that step.
0:22:03 - Holly Ringland
You can't unsee, unknow, unlearn that growth, yeah. Then you're in that position with yourself where you also can't lie to yourself. You can't say to yourself I can't do it anymore, because you've done it.
0:22:17 - Pamela Cook
Yeah, exactly, yeah. It's like when you finish a novel, isn't it. And then you get to this one and you think, oh no, I can't do this. Actually, I can because I'm done.
0:22:27 - Holly Ringland
Yes, and you're cultivating without even being conscious of it. You're cultivating self-respect, you're cultivating your own embrace and acceptance of growth, and it doesn't feel good. This is the thing that really amuses me about being human is that the things that we want the most right. We have to be brave to do them because of the culture that we live in, this constantly on, constantly producing, constantly the words we use hustle, slay, smash, like we are in. This never turns off neon landscape of on and doing and producing.
And part of the reason why I think that we're so afraid of creating is because we have to justify to ourselves and therefore everybody around us that our imagination and pottering and being idle and trying new things without knowing what the outcome will be is a really valuable way to spend our time, because it might not produce something. Maybe it's about trying, maybe it's about thinking, and that acknowledgement of what we get out of trying and thinking and spending time focused and connected to our imagination is just not something that is considered prodigious or outcome productive, anything like that.
And to do it, to get on your horse, to sit at your writing desk, to go and buy your model train set because it lights you up inside. You have to find bravery. You have to find courage to stand for that being a valuable thing to do with your time. But the thing about being brave is it doesn't feel great. Being brave does not feel like a puppy getting their belly tickled, or lollipops and rainbows, or like the most joyful day of your life. Being brave feels fucking scary.
0:24:46 - Pamela Cook
Feels really good afterwards, but at the time very shit. After you've done the thing.
0:24:53 - Holly Ringland
That's when you get the endorphins and the payoff and the relief, the joy. But the doing is uncomfortable. The doing and the bravery and the courage of the doing, that's the discomfort and that's the exhilaration. You got on your horse, you did the thing, you did the thing with this beautiful horse and that's the other thing about horses they can read your emotions.
0:25:20 - Pamela Cook
So when you're scared, it's contagious and they feel that fear as a great example and I was thinking about this as I was listening to THE HOUSE THAT JOY BUILT and you talk about, which we're going to get on to.
You talk about taking different steps and finding ways around that fear and getting through that process. So I thought, okay, I've got to work out strategies. I put some music on and listened to some music while I got him out of the paddock and I took all my gear down. I anticipated all the things that were going to stop me.
And then I prepared in advance, got everything ready, had everything laid out and you talk about this too, shaping behaviour. Yeah, thinking ahead and trying to prepare for what obstacles might come up and then doing it.
Let's go on to that now, Holly, because you do talk about that in the book, and that idea of taking small steps towards embracing creativity and getting yourself into that mindset where you do feel you can actually start on something, yes, so I'll use myself as an example.
0:26:32 - Holly Ringland
It will be different for maybe everybody, but the examples that I used in the book is talking about when I was in the process of writing the first draft of the Lost Flowers of Alice Hart which, I want to be really clear, scared the absolute shit out of me every day.
I never was cool and breezy about it. It never felt like my nervous system was settled. Whenever I went to my desk it absolutely terrified me, and so what I learned through trial and error was that managing fear, anxiety, self-doubt, inner critic, past traumatic experience all of these things that we hold in our minds, that we have in our minds that whenever we approach anything that puts us at risk, like it doesn't have to be life threatening, it's just okay.
I'm going to go and work on my novel today. Oh my God. Instant vulnerability alert and then sweeps everything mentally to try and stop me from being at risk of we don't know what's going to happen, we being all of the party of negative voices in my mind. We don't know what's going to happen. You're probably going to write total shit. This is going to be terrible. Let's not do it.
So off they go, the alarm start firing and I learned trial and error that with all of that noise and those intrusive thoughts in my head, when I would try to go to my writing desk and my objective for the day was maybe write chapter six, I would sit down with a loose idea of maybe where chapter six started and I would start trying to write and it just felt like there was a tsunami rising in me and mentally I just would get completely and very literally mentally overwhelmed.
I had a very vague idea of what I was at my desk to do and I had too many forces at play in my mind. You know, anxiety on its own would have been enough, but really negative voices, as I said in a critic self doubt, everything firing all at once and I couldn't write. I had to. And then, sitting there in my body with my body stationary, while all of these really agitating emotions and thought processes were going on, it felt like my body was going to explode, like one of those party poker things that scares the hell out of everyone. So I would take my body out to move, to try and move everything through my body, and I would run or walk and I intuitively start to talk about the donkeys too.
Okay, great, I was like, should I talk about the donkeys? Yes, definitely. So. This is how it happened that this was all in Manchester, where I was living when I wrote Lost Flowers, and behind our house in Manchester. I should say there's a long path behind our house and I write about this in the book, and it goes for kilometres in either direction and I'd walked it a lot.
But during this time when I was writing Lost Flowers, and it was just so painful, I would go to my desk, I would sit down to write. My notes in front of me were as brief and limited as right chapter six, and I would just fall apart. Overwhelm would just take my brain and I couldn't function, I couldn't write and I didn't fully understand why, and it was very frustrating and in that state of mind it's very easy then to turn on yourself and to start thinking my God, why can't I do this?
And that's very easy to start turning on yourself with not very kind in a dialogue. As I said, I knew from being raised by my mum, who's very active get your body moving, step away from the desk sitting there, sitting still, it's only going to make it worse. Get away from the desk.
So I laced up my shoes, I went to this path behind our house and I started running and I've run all throughout my life since I was a kid. But I started running in quite a sustained way and I started going further and further distances and then would turn around and come home and one day I ran right to the end of the path behind the house and discovered the most unlikely surprise, which is at the end of this path through all different suburbs and green space, there's suddenly a donkey sanctuary filled with the most beautiful creatures, these donkeys that are being cared for and are in rehabilitation I don't even want to know from what, but are being cared for and I was kind of jaw dropped by the surprise of finding this place in Manchester, which is still very much, still very much looks and feels in some ways like what it is the world's first industrial city.
And there I am standing in a field looking at this little donkey sanctuary that I didn't know was anywhere near our house. So I started to run regularly to the donkey sanctuary because I loved hearing their braying, their little happy braying in the distance, and I then started to come back to my desk from the running and the open eye meditation of the running and the flow on effect of to make myself run. The only narrative I could hold in my head was one step at a time, keep breathing, don't push it, don't injure yourself. If you keep a steady pace, you can run 8k. You can go 4k there and 4k home and you won't injure yourself. Go steady. And I got home after doing this for a while.
I got home and changed intuitively changed my approach to what I was writing in understanding that when I pushed myself too far, if I pushed myself too far running, I would injure myself. And that started to mirror how I was feeling at going to my desk, expecting myself to write chapter 6 in one day. So I started to think, instead of chapter 6, maybe I just start with Alice's waking up at Thornfield.
What does she see through the window? So I would write that down on my to-do list today at my desk. I am going to write what Alice sees when she wakes up in Thornfield and looks out the window and this constant sort of running the donkeys. Coming back to my desk, I started to intuitively break down this process into tiny steps that were achievable. I could write what Alice saw through the window and it felt doable.
I didn't feel like a failure from the outset. I didn't feel like I was everything negative that the voices in my head were trying to tell me that I was, which is just awful stories. I achieved it and it didn't matter. I knew it didn't matter if the sentences weren't right or the writing wasn't polished. It was getting the world onto the paper from my heart and I would do that and I'd be like shit, I've got time to have a cup of tea and do something else this afternoon. So then I would be like write the conversation Alice has when she comes downstairs, what's the tension like when she comes downstairs for the first time in Thornfield. And then I did that, Pam, and all of a sudden it was like I didn't feel like the most hopeless person in the world, or that I wasn't good enough or that I was a failure.
Before I even began, I felt like I was doing these tiny, little achievable tasks and so here is the cracker. That was in 2015, I think 2015, I think when I was doing that. So we're eight years later now. It is not until I wrote THE HOUSE THAT JOY BUILT eight years later. And this is the magic of story. This is the stuff that we don't understand and we can't prove through research and neuroscience.
But I was running to those donkeys. I was watching them, saying hi to them, listening to them coming home. I knew nothing then about shaping behaviour. I didn't go home and read about how to rehabilitate donkeys. I was too busy going home and trying to figure out why I couldn't write and how to get myself writing and breaking it down into little steps. That I was figuring out because I was running to these donkeys every day. And it's not until eight years later now, this year, when I wrote THE HOUSE THAT JOY BUILT, that I did research those donkeys and found out that the way that donkeys are rehabilitated was exactly the same thing that I was doing to myself at the desk to get myself to write.
Because the big light bulb moment for me was realising one day after I pushed it too hard when I was running and I hurt myself, I caused a hip injury was that I couldn't write because I was asking my brain to come to the desk and draw fiction from emotional truth of a lived experience, of having lived with and survived I suppose you would say male perpetrated violence. My brain was just constantly shutting down and on top of that I had all of the just normal self-doubt and inner critic. But when I started to break it down into tiny steps, write the duty through the window, it was accessible. I wasn't being swallowed whole by this idea of right about loving a violent man. I was writing about a view through a nine year old's perspective in fiction of what was in her window.
And that is exactly how donkeys are rehabilitated from whatever unfathomable and horrific situation that they have been rescued from is that the trainers and the head educators with donkeys. They break the steps down with donkeys, right down into the smallest steps. Like the human trainer should perhaps start by just standing by the donkey's shoulder and just breathing with the donkey so that they can feel each other and know that they're safe. And then there'll be another tiny step where maybe the trainer steps towards the donkey's front hooves and this is another sort of building exercise that keeps the donkey calm and the donkey's getting rewards so they're feeling like, okay, I've done a good job. And these tiny steps are what the donkey rehabilitates is called shaping behaviour, and the smaller the steps, the greater the likelihood is for success.
And I cannot speak for anybody else, Pam, but that is 100% the way that I wrote the Lost Flowers. If donkey rehabilitation training worked on Holly Ringland and I had no idea until I wrote this book that is what was happening at the sanctuary. The whole time I was running there and back I had no idea that those were the steps that were going on with the donkeys that I was. It's a beautiful thought, isn't it? Was there some sort of osmosis? Who knows really exactly. It's unfathomable. Just one of the magic moments of writing the book, like the donkeys.
0:39:22 - Pamela Cook
Holly, you do reference a number of other researchers and speakers and scientists and things in the book. You must have gone down some amazing rabbit holes.
0:39:33 - Holly Ringland
Oh my God, my Google search history. My Google search history is just a feast for anybody looking for a weirdo Like what a bitch. Yeah, writing this book was a little bit like building a campfire and I didn't want my experiences to be the only stories gathering around the fire, so to speak. Yeah, where I use myself with examples and drawing on my own life experiences, I also bring a wide variety of voices to the campfire for the reader, so that they can hear from all sorts of other different people in different life experiences and stages of their creativity, their creative process and particularly, even not being creative professionals, just more people who integrate creativity into their lives every day.
I wanted to bring lots of voices to the fire, without bogging down the narrative, but more in the spirit of see, you're not alone. We're not alone in all of the fears that we feel and also in all of the things we instinctively know about how creativity makes us better people when we are connected to it. So the rabbit holes I went into was everything from animal experts talking about what animals do to each other in a state of play to A-list celebrities like Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks talking about feeling like frauds, to donkeys to dung beetles, Pam. Researching dung beetles that literally need the feces of other animals to live was a combination of giggling and I'm connecting it all to being a mirror, to the creative process and to ourselves.
There were some moments where I was just roaring with laughter. I cried a lot while writing it as well. Other moments where I was like what the fuck is this book? What am I writing? But it was such a meta experience I would be writing about. In the book I explore eight types of fear or mindsets of fear and, as I say in the book, the types of fear I experience are far from eight, but let's just keep it to eight, otherwise we'll have a 200,000 page book.
And so I structure the book by sharing eight different types of fear. Just a little bit of fear. We don't even know what we're afraid of. It's just fear. I'm afraid today.
And then, with each state of mind or mindset that comes from fear, I meet it with the remedy or the state of mind that I approach it with.
So, for that broads here, I meet it with play, or for self doubt, I meet it with self compassion In a critic, in a fan.
And to talk about all of these things, it is another reason why it makes it really powerful, I found and felt, to bring other people across all sorts of areas like neuroscience and life coaching and self compassion, expert research and creativity experts, to just show that creativity isn't separate from us, it's not something we do, it's what we are, and getting divorced from that is, I think, somewhere in our lives we get divorced from that, maybe because we inherently know it as kids, and it's that the power is when we come back to it and understand that creativity is not out there, it's in here and it's always there. And even when we think we're not creative or not being creative, it's present in everything we do every day, how we love each other, how we love our friends, how we come together, how we love our friends, how we parent, what we cook, what we wear, how a good song might come on the radio and we let ourselves dance. It's not separate to us, it's in us.
0:44:18 - Pamela Cook
It's who we are, yeah, yeah. And I love something else that you just mentioned about ourselves as a child.
0:44:26 - Holly Ringland
Yes.
0:44:27 - Pamela Cook
And that this in the book really resonated with me. A few years ago, I did a series of workshops with a fantastic writing teacher called Joyce Conblatt, and she's a beautiful writer and a fabulous teacher, Buddhist background and very much into meditation, and is one of the exercises that we did. We had to bring a photograph of ourselves as a child and the instruction was don't labour over too much which picture to choose, just go to the photos. Wasn't hard for me, because there's about three photos of me as a child, child, so I just chose one.
But the meditation was basically to really just focus on that child. Who is this child? And we did this whole meditation around this photograph and it was such a powerful exercise.
0:45:16 - Holly Ringland
Really I'm like oh my god, I'm just sitting here thinking how did you go?
0:45:21 - Pamela Cook
I'd still have the journal stuff that I did back then, I'm sure somewhere I never throw anything out and I've still got that photo pinned to my callboard actually. And it was this exercise of looking at yourself as that child and having that compassion for who that child was and just opening up a bit of a dialogue with yourself as that child and it was a really powerful exercise. When you talk about in the book about this idea of reconnecting with our childhood self and our inner child, it is such a powerful thing to do.
0:45:54 - Holly Ringland
It's incredible, isn't it? And I thought about this and I talked about it a lot with my closest circle while I was writing the House that Joy built, because there are some people that can hear the phrase and in my life I've been one of them can hear the phrase inner child and just shut down. That is two Byron Bay, that is two cheesecloth, that is two womb. All you've said are the words inner child, and it's just. The connotation is just and shut down.
The very first time I went and saw a psychologist in my in adulthood, when I was trying to find my way into managing post-traumatic stress disorder, I remember I didn't write this in the book, but I remember our very first, at our very first appointment, she sat down and a good psychologist will give you space and let you be and say okay, how can I help you today? What are we here for? What do you need? And the first thing I'd said was I don't need to talk about my childhood. Yeah, like I don't. That's got nothing to do with it. I just want to talk about here and now, like teenage or nothing. Like I just want to talk about right now. And I had nothing to base that on and it's just that I'd seen all the movies right, yeah.
And the inner child workshops. And so I was like, oh God, I don't want to be a cliche here, like we don't need to do the therapy scene from the Hollywood movie, let's just deal with right now. And I thought about this a lot writing this book because I wanted to. The reason why a cliche is a cliche is because it's so true and connected and overused and everybody knows it, and that I wanted to talk about the reality of the fact that things like the inner critic, self doubt, fear of failure, feeling like we're not creative they are all things we have learned. They are not things we're born with.
We are born as human beings with two fears, according to research fear of loud noise and fear of falling. Everything else that we are afraid of we learn. That includes snakes and spiders and it all like things like in the outside world, and it also includes what we are afraid of about ourselves in our inside world. And so somewhere in our life we have learned self doubt, we have learned to judge ourselves, we have learned to criticise ourselves and we've possibly internalised the judgement, self doubt and inner criticism of figures of authority that perhaps caused those first seeds of doubt to plant in ourselves. I don't think I could be wrong, but I don't think I use the phrase in a child.
0:49:09 - Pamela Cook
I'm like I don't, I'm pretty sure you didn't use it. I don't, I'm pretty sure you didn't use it.
0:49:13 - Holly Ringland
But totally reformed, like everything that we are, and particularly creativity, because it is so intuitive and alive in us as kids, until we learn somehow, for some reason, in some situation. It should be something to be put away along with childhood and anything else that's childlike or childish or any other shaming words. But I and what we suffer then is I love that quote of Brene Browns that I use in the book about the fact that unused creativity metastasizes. It becomes rage, it becomes grief, sorrow, shame, because we are constantly extinguishing, ignoring, disconnecting from a part of ourselves that we're born with.
0:50:08 - Pamela Cook
Holly, one of the things connected to that of course, all these things are connected, of course I love that you talk about in the book is this idea of having an analog desk and a digital desk. Yes, that's real. I thought, wow, that is so true, because when we're creating like in writing for instance, when you're drafting, you're using a different part of your brain to when you're using, to when you're editing and revising and being more.
0:50:31 - Holly Ringland
Absolutely.
0:50:32 - Pamela Cook
So I love this idea of having two different writing spaces where you can be really playful and creative and everything in one and you can be that in both, but then also saving the kind of technology and those aspects of it for the kind of digital desk.
0:50:49 - Holly Ringland
It was a game changer for me, Pam, and I got it from Austin Cleon. I was reading his books Show your Work and Steel Like an Artist, and I was reading those two books when I was in that period of bereavement that I talked about earlier. And this idea of that he talks about in those books, where you use different parts of your brain to do different parts of creative output. He calls himself a writer who draws, so he's big into sort of he's great, he's an artist, basically, but he's also a writer. So in his office he's got his desk with all of his, all those luscious stationery things that all of us stationery addicts like dribble over.
He's got all of his pens, different types of card, paper, crayons, pencils. He loves to cut out. He makes poetry out of like bits of newspaper that he cuts out and glues it all together.
So then he brings in the collage element and he says that there is nothing allowed on that desk that's digital. So his tablet, his laptop, his printer, anything that is all on the opposite desk in his office and he was also responsible for reminding me. It's a nice tie-in, actually, because reading his work was also responsible at that time when I couldn't write, was sitting down at the keyboard, I couldn't write and I started running. Something that he talks about is your brain tells your body as much as your body tells your brain. If you are sitting stagnant at a computer in front of the screen, your body doesn't have the chance to be telling your brain what it knows with feeling, sensation, responses to movement. So that fed into me running, which obviously really worked for me and was very effective. But similarly, our body, like when you're at an analog desk you use your body differently to when you're sitting in front of a laptop, so your body is communicating with you all the time.
Maybe you sit down at your analog desk because as soon as I read that, I immediately went into my office and was like and there's a photo in the book of my two desks in the house that Joy built and I just divided everything and on the analog desk I filled it with everything that my senses just lost their minds. Sensors have minds Lost their minds over, like fountain pens and ink and paper. And I go out for a walk and I collect interesting rocks or shells or twigs and my partner, sam, says going out for a walk with me is like coming home with a really over excited dog because I just upend my like pockets because I've found a beautiful leaf or and they all go on my writing desk, the handwriting, the analog desk, and I fill it with essential oils and flowers and I stick pictures on the wall. It's very, it's very tactile, it's very immersive. It's a raw lump of labradorite that flashes when it catches the light. It's like my magpied bower bird space.
And then right next to it is this beautiful also weirdly, because there is not really anything about me that's a minimalist but there is this shock spoiler.
But right next to my analog desk there is my digital desk that is really satisfyingly neat, decluttered, my Bluetooth keyboard set up maybe like speakers, laptop, printer, and there's that really satisfying order of the tools. It feels very much like it's the tool space and the analog desk is the dream space and, in addition to and being partnership, to how leaving my desk to run worked with coming back to my desk to write in small steps, having an analog desk and a digital desk work together in that my body reacts differently at either one, and when I'm handwriting at the analog desk and I'm playing with seed pods or I'm playing my music box or rifling through old letters or bits of bobs or scraps of newspaper or whatever, you can almost feel the currents of energy and you can feel your imagination lighting up and if you pay attention, you might get goosebumps. When you look at a photo or you read a line in another book and you can feel the prickles on your scalp. Your body is always saying, oh, pay attention to this, I love this.
But if I tried doing all of it at the same desk, where the digital space is, it was too cluttered, it was too messy. My brain didn't know exactly what I was doing there. Am I on my laptop? Okay, I'll push my laptop aside and look here. It was like they were cross signals but separate the two, and there was much more sort of harmony and flow between the different parts of my brain that my brain was using Incredible game changer for me.
0:56:34 - Pamela Cook
Yeah, I really love that idea and of course, it plays into that whole thing that we were talking about of when we were a kid and you loved to draw and get it out and you texted yes.
0:56:45 - Holly Ringland
And remember we had stations in your classroom or preschool or daycare or babysitter or the kitchen table with your mum, brother, sister, caregiver, whoever Chances are. Hopefully we all have some kind of experience as children, when it was like now we're going to finger paint at the finger painting station, now we're going to do craft at the craft station, now we're doing reading in the reading corner, like everything is connected, but they each had their own little station. That I thought about while I was writing, because Joseph Campbell wrote about bliss stations.
Oh okay and Austin Cleon talks about that in his books as well and giving yourself, as an adult, the space to do the thing. Wouldn't it be lovely if we all had enough space in our houses to have a finger painting?
0:57:48 - Pamela Cook
Oh yeah.
0:57:50 - Holly Ringland
But just the difference between the different parts of our brain that we use for our work. And it could be with any like creative outlet, whether it's visual art, writing, anything that you're making. So let's say that you are a painter for the joy it brings you. You're a joy painter and meaning that you're not a professional painter in the sense that it's not your livelihood, but maybe you are painting the joy and meaning and value that it brings you and you also want to share those paintings in this digital world online. Maybe you have a space, maybe you have your painting area and maybe that is very separate from the outer world area. It's inner world and outer world, and that's analog is the inner and the digital is the outer, and that's something that runs through the whole book. It's my, the way that I frame.
It is kind of argument is the wrong word, but it's putting forward a case to the reader about things that I thought about since I wrote the Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, which is that in my experience, we have a landscape inside of us that's no different to outer landscapes in the world that we love, and that landscape inside of us is where all of our dreams and hopes and grief, like the things we grieve, griefs and joys.
They are all in there, and that's the creative jungle, that's the forest, that's the place where everything that means anything to us, that we create, comes from, and we, you can feel for years like there's nothing there, but, like you said at the beginning of our conversation, you crack yourself open, meaning that you just turn towards it, and it's extraordinary that you will find that there is always life there, there is a light there waiting for you. Years can go by and you might not have created anything, and it is so extraordinary to me that you can feel like it's dead inside. I have felt it myself countless times. And you turn towards it and spend some time there and all of a sudden it starts as a shoot and then you are, and then you are just a wash in this wash in this land that you remember because we lived in it as kids.
1:00:33 - Pamela Cook
Yeah, yeah, that's beautiful, very powerful Thank you. Tell us, I won't keep you too much longer, Holly, because we could talk about this all day, always.
1:00:42 - Holly Ringland
This is how we roll Pan.
1:00:43 - Pamela Cook
This is how we roll, and I do want people to actually read the book, so we don't want to give away too much True.
1:00:48 - Holly Ringland
That's a good point. That's a good point.
1:00:50 - Pamela Cook
But one thing I would love you to tell us a little bit about is who is Starshine and how did she help you in the process of your creativity.
1:01:03 - Holly Ringland
Oh, that's beautiful. Thank you for asking. You know that I'm going to light up talking about this because this gives me an opportunity to talk about many things I love. There is a chapter in THE HOUSE THAT JOY BUILT that explores that terrible bully, the inner critic, and where the inner critic comes from and how inner critic is different to self-doubt. There's another chapter on self-doubt as well, and the mindset or remedy that I meet and that I cultivate to meet my inner critic with is not a term that I have coined, it's been around for a while, it's the inner fan and it's basically a force equal and opposite to the power of the inner critic. Now my inner critic has had decades of living alone up there in my mind, and cultivating my inner fan is something relatively recent in my life. So there's a bit of catching up to do.
But Starshine is the name of my favourite imaginary, if you like, was an imaginary to me, imaginary kind of my little pony best friend in the 80s and I loved her. I loved everything about Starshine her rainbow mane and she had a star, a golden star, on her rope. I think I remember that my little pony oh my God she was just.
I'm engendering Starshine as she, they I don't think my little ponies had genders. Starshine was heaven and Starshine had solo adventures up in the other world, in the sky. She, they caught rainbow light up into the sky and played with the stars and the rest of the Milky Way and just was on her own. I'm going to call her a her because she's a her to me. Yeah, and I related to that.
I was I was an only child when I had Starshine in my life, a little figurine at the time, and I had lots of solo adventures in Mum's garden and down at the sea and that freedom and that magic of the outer world and the inner world were one and the same in me and as I talk about in the book. Then we grow up and the growing up shouldn't mean that we grow out of that, but for so many of us it does and it did for me for various reasons. So it took it took years for me to discover that I could meet far from the voice of Starshine in my head. I could meet the voices of criticism and judgement in my mind with the play and power that I remembered from Starshine.
So my inner critic is met by my inner fan, who I refer to as Starshine, but my inner fan is not any one person or thing or being. It's a feeling, if you like, and it's. It is everything from how Starshine made me feel when I was a kid to having the energy of the greatest sort of sports mum on the sidelines that you'd ever seen not aggressive, but so passionate and such a massive cheerleader that even when I fuck up, that energy is there on the sidelines going. You tried, girl, you did really well. Now, you couldn't have done it. It's like the greatest sports mum ever. And then also compared to Pam, I can't believe I'm going to say this publicly. Also, my inner fan is also Channing Tatum, and it is.
1:04:53 - Pamela Cook
It's too late to say that, Holly, because you've already said it in the book.
1:04:57 - Holly Ringland
I'm still in denial about the fact people are reading this and it's out in the public. So my inner fan is like Channing Tatum when he's dancing to Pony in Magic Mike or in Magic Mike 2, when he's dancing with all of his friends or when he puts videos on Instagram wearing a princess hat building a castle for his daughter. So I cannot hide from the truth being that I very much enjoy the feeling that I get with my inner fan where I'm trying something, I'm trying to be brave or I'm trying to encourage myself. I very much enjoy the feeling of imagining Channing Tatum's face, looking at me and going you got this girl, or he may or may not have a shirt on also in this scenario.
Or he's got a princess hat on and he's building a castle and he's looking at me and he's you can do this, Ringles you, it's fine. And what I love about harnessing that energy with him in particular is we are not boxed, we are no one thing. He is not just Magic Mike, he is also somebody who builds an amazing princess castle and writes children's books. It's that power of I can be more than the boxes that I or other things in life or situations in life she warned me into, and so that energy of my inner fan of all of those things I call it star shine to honour that first sort of magical companion and energy companion I had when I was a kid, and also because it just sounds quite perfect, doesn't it?
1:06:57 - Pamela Cook
Have you got? Have you still got a little star shine? Have you got your own?
1:07:04 - Holly Ringland
I do somewhere? I do. I think that she might be in a tub somewhere. But what was beautiful before the house that Joy built came out. It was my birthday in July and my family bought me my little pony star shine jewellery to wear. Oh, gorgeous, I love it. So I will be packing that for a book tour. Yeah, and I might be the only one who knows what it means, but I will have a front and centre necklace with star shine on, because that's that, that's the beautiful thing about the energy of an inner fan.
Right, you can decide, based purely on joy and feeling good, what that inner fan energy and story is. That we tell ourselves to meet the story of the inner critic in our minds, because it's just a story. It's a very convincing one, but it is just a story that our mind tells itself, yeah, and it's come from somewhere. And the desperately hard thing to understand about it is that all of the harshness of the inner critic, comes from a need to be loved and wanted. It comes from scarcity. It comes from wanting love.
So when I practise an inner fan in my mind, depending on how I'm feeling and what I need and context, it's not that I imagine that it is my inner fan loving my inner critic or doing anything with my inner critic. It's just turning towards that arms wide open feeling of if my mind can criticise itself, there is a muscle I can also develop and build up. Where my mind starts shining. And if that requires Channing Tatum giving me a solo dance, then so be it, while telling me you are brave and you can do this, I'm all for it.
1:09:13 - Pamela Cook
I think I absolutely, Holly. This may have come up when we spoke before, but when I heard it in the book in the audiobook I listened to THE HOUSE THAT JOY BUILT I didn't register that I'd heard it before. So one of the publishing companies that rejected your manuscript Alice Hart, later on made an offer for the same book and I think that's a really interesting thing for any writers out there to hear, because obviously you want your manuscript to be in the best state it can be in before you submit it to a publisher. But there's this kind of sense that you know once you get a rejection from a publisher or they say, no, we're not interested, that's it, it's far night, they never, ever want to look at it again.
So it's really interesting that they weren't the publisher that subsequently published it, but they actually did want to, so incredible.
1:09:58 - Holly Ringland
It's like an incredible learning experience and lesson. The way it came about was this publishing company had a competition for an unpublished manuscript where, I think, you needed to submit the first three chapters and then you went from there and so I had the first three chapters of the Lost Flowers of Alice Hart finally crafted and honed and I submitted those three chapters to this competition and I waited and then I got an automated email reply telling me that I hadn't been successful in progressing to the next stage. Thank you very much. And that was it. So the failure was implied. These three chapters are not good enough for what we need. These three chapters are not what we're looking for. These three chapters are not publishable.
Like my mind interpreted, like any rejection that we're all familiar with, your mind interprets the rejection and what it's telling you, and so that's what my mind was telling me, that this implied rejection was saying about my first three chapters of Alice Hart. I wasn't a good enough writer to be published. My chapters weren't good enough to be published. And is that the end of the road? But I sat still with myself and weirdly and I think it's because I had about, I think the first three chapters were maybe 15,000 words, because a rejection like that in my life prior to that experience was something that knocked me off my feet and probably stopped me from trying anything similar again for years. Because that sense of confirmed failure was so powerful.
1:12:00 - Pamela Cook
It's so powerful when we perceive that we have failed at something and it reinforces the negative voices of the absolute.
1:12:10 - Holly Ringland
They grow, they power up. Of course they don't want it, that's because you're rubbish. Yeah, they become like they, like increase in their Avengers level, their super heroines, their strength, their villainess gets even stronger. But weirdly, with this rejection from this company and the competition from this publisher, I sat really quietly and, having written 15,000 words, there was something that I felt inside of myself that I was unfamiliar with, and it was that I was not going to let their rejection stop me from believing that Alice Hart mattered to me.
So I kept writing and if we fast forward, maybe three years or so, those exact same three chapters and the rest of the manuscript which I'd finished writing and had gotten into the same level of quality as the first three, my agent, I had an agent at that time and I won't go through the process of getting an agent because that's a different question and conversation. But there was a process and I don't want to skip over that because I hate it. Before I was published, I used to get so frustrated by what the writers were saying and then I got an agent and I was thinking but it's not that easy, how do you do it? So there definitely was a process and I had an agent and they submitted those exact three chapters, plus the rest of the manuscript, to Australian publishers. And the publisher that rejected the three chapters in the competition came out gangbusters arm swinging to make an offer to publish it, and it was an invaluable lesson in how not finite these things are.
And in how subjective they are. Did a different person read the submission pile for the competition that read the manuscripts for Alice Hart and put an offering? These are things that you don't even know to think about when you are brave and you do these sorts of things with your creativity, your work. And, as I say in the book, that implied rejection and failure of the first three chapters not progressing anywhere in that competition. That could have stopped me writing and I cannot bear the thought, is too painful to even go down that road and follow where that path would have taken me if I'd stopped writing, if I believed Alice Hart didn't matter to me and if I'd not stuck to my conviction in my soul about what being in her world felt like for me and I loved it in there with her. And if I had listened to that rejection and failure as being definitive and more important than the love that I felt writing Alice onto the page.
1:15:29 - Pamela Cook
Oh, no, I think that's. I think that's really important. I'm really glad you included that in the book.
1:15:36 - Holly Ringland
Yeah, thank you, it is. It's so important, there's so much that we don't have control of just blanket statements, and particularly with what happens to us, to the creativity that we offer outside of our bodies and our worlds and our lives. But what I think I have figured out is one thing that I can control is answering the question. When I'm creating, which is, which means when I'm writing, is answering the question do I love this? And if I am writing from a place of love, if I love the story that I'm writing, that is the best I can do and that is the singular focus, that, when I'm in a first draft, that is where I keep my focus, because if I try and write for any reason outside of that in a first draft, I'm not writing from the true and pure, raw place. And that's what that kind of all played into not giving up on Alice Hart in that rejection in the competition.
1:16:49 - Pamela Cook
Yeah, so glad you didn't. Thanks, Pam, I did want to ask you before we wrap up. So obviously there's all these things and much, much more in the book, whether you listen to that on audio or grab a copy. One of the things I wanted to ask you about was, of course, you recorded the audio book. I did. How was that? It was?
1:17:08 - Holly Ringland
Beautiful. It was beautiful. I had no audio book recording experience before that. The only voiceover experience that I had was doing the narration for Back to Nature, the ABC series that I was in with Aaron Pedersen in 2021. But I think what serves me well probably is in terms of feeling like I could do it. I should say is that I've read my stories out loud since I was a kid and it's just falling into that routine that routine might even be the wrong word falling into that sort of zone, that mode with yourself, where you start reading and you remember how you read as a kid and how you were read to. And beautiful to read the book out loud myself, because I remember the tones and inflections and feelings from writing it. So it was a beautiful experience, it was wonderful.
1:18:08 - Pamela Cook
And it makes listening to the audio book slightly. Listening to you talk just so authentic and makes it so much more meaningful. I think having you that's beautiful to hear.
1:18:18 - Holly Ringland
Yes, yeah, that's so good to know.
1:18:21 - Pamela Cook
Oh, thank you and Holly, the other thing that you've implemented on your website, I noticed is a thing called joy rise. Can you tell us about that?
1:18:31 - Holly Ringland
Oh, that's right. So I thought that it might be a. It might be a really nice opportunity. We'll see how it goes After people read or listen to the House that Joy built and they close the last cover to keep the possibility of a tendril between us going.
And so I've opened an area of my website up called The Joy Rise, and it's a space for questions and answers between my readers and myself, where if somebody reads my novels or they read the House that Joy built and they have a question about creativity that they would love me to answer, they can go onto my website and submit the question and then, whenever I have the resource and capacity, I will answer and share them on my website and in my newsletter, which people can subscribe to as well.
So it's a way of keeping the conversation going and an offering that space to people that might not feel like they can ask a question at an event or for whatever reason, at an event or on social media, and a way of kind of just keeping it circular. That readers gave me the gift of inspiration by asking me questions about creativity that made me think maybe I can write this book and now, if I can offer a space for questions about creativity, where anything that I have to say might be a value. It's just like a beautiful circular way it feels to keep it going. So I don't know how it's going to go and I don't know how long it will be online for or what it will become, but I thought I'd love to open it up and see what comes of it and if it can be a value to people.
1:20:25 - Pamela Cook
That's a lovely idea. Cos you are going on tour imminently.
1:20:31 - Holly Ringland
God, I am. Yes, starting next week, on the 18th, in Meanjin, Brisbane, I'm going to a number of capital cities. All of the information is on my website and on my. It's pinned to the top of my Instagram profile. Tickets are all available. You can find it, as I said, on my website or through my Instagram profile. You can see everywhere that I'm going and I would just love to. I can't wait to see you, Pam, and I would love to see as many people that want to come as possible. Be gorgeous.
1:21:08 - Pamela Cook
Well, it's going to be fun, so I'm really looking forward to. We haven't met in person yet.
1:21:12 - Holly Ringland
I know it's going to be glorious, so it's going to be glorious.
1:21:16 - Pamela Cook
And this episode will be out this week. So all of that information is relevant.
1:21:21 - Holly Ringland
Thank you, thank you.