Personality & Place #209

Hannah Holmes:

You can change your behavior. While it takes much, much, much longer to change your actual brain, you can change your brain the way your pathways fire through long and and serious practice. We can see that with meditation that you can actually change your brain patterns despite the genetic programming that created those patterns.

Joan Dempsey:

I spend my days primarily by myself, working in the shed, and what I love about that and what works really well for me is that I'm in charge of everything. I get up when I want to get up, I take a walk when I want to take a walk. And I work harder, I think, than I've ever worked because what I'm doing I love. I don't have anybody else that I'm accountable, so I don't have any politics that I have to deal with about getting approval or getting consensus or any of those things. So now I just get so much work done. It's fantastic.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine radio show number 209, personality and place, airing for the first time on Sunday, September 13, 2015. It can be a lifelong process to understand what makes each of us thrive as individuals and how to create personal environments that foster our best selves. Today we speak with science commentator Hannah Holmes about her book Brain Makes Sense of your Peculiar Personal. We also explore the idea of creative space with Joan Dempsey, a writer and teacher who works out of a converted chicken coop known as the shed in the backyard of her home in New Gloucester. Thank you for joining us. As someone who pays quite a lot of attention to the book world, I've been familiar with this name for a few years now. Hannah Holmes is an American writer, journalist, essayist and science commentator who who has published four books, most recently Brain Science Makes Sense of your Peculiar Personality. She has published articles online and in magazines including Sierra, New York Times Magazine Louisiana Times Magazine, Outside National Geographic, and Discover. She lives with her husband in Portland, Maine, and she has also been a real estate agent for the past three years. Thanks so much for coming in.

Hannah Holmes:

My pleasure.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So I have been actually paying attention to your books because they're so interesting. I think that one of them was about watching your lawn and seeing your lawn grow. And I think you've done a lot of work on something like dust. So you've been paying attention to the microscopic world around you from your vantage point here in Maine, and yet you've moved on recently to brain science. Lots of stuff going on here.

Hannah Holmes:

One thing leads to another. Believe it or not, I have always enjoyed polishing, turning a spotlight on the things that we take for granted, like dust. It's something that you just don't think about unless you're thinking in terms of how it bothers you. But it's a microcosm of our entire universe. And so it's perversely amusing to me to take something incredibly mundane and look at how it really functions in our world and functions to perpetuate an ecosystem that supports us. And the same goes for the suburban safari book. We look at our back lawns as though they're these ecological wastelands. And for many years, for decades, biologists treated them as wastelands and disparaged them. It turns out they're actually tremendously rich environments for a whole lot of species. We do a really good job of creating habitat for a wide variety of animals and plants in our backyards. And so, again, it's the stuff we take for granted. We carp about the dandelions and whatnot,

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

but

Hannah Holmes:

we actually create a very healthy, if you can avoid the pesticides, very thriving, rich environment in a world where that's increasingly difficult to come by.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

As you were talking, I was thinking about Abigail Carroll, who is with Nonesuch Oysters. We interviewed her for the radio show and she was talking about something like this, that the ocean is so different and varied, and it has such different and varied impact on things like creatures like oysters. And you can go six feet north of one oyster bed and they're going to be experiencing a completely different sort of aquatic ecosystem. And yet we don't necessarily pay attention to it because here in Maine, we look at, oh, there's water, there's water, and oysters must live in it. Great. So how does this, this paying attention, the microcosm, how does this get you to the brain? Because I'll tell you the reason I was really interested in having you come in Is because I watched your TED talk about the red mind, blue mind. And it was so fascinating to me that I thought, you know, this lady's paying attention. Talk to me about that again.

Hannah Holmes:

It's this stuff we kind of gloss over and dismiss. Dismiss as unimportant, uninteresting. We just take for granted that the people who think differently from us are incomprehensible. They are only like that for the purpose of annoying us. But scientifically, that cannot be. And so the personality book Quirky was me really trying to understand why every population of animals has individuals who are super obnoxious. Because evolution demands that every personality type be functional, be useful. Otherwise it would evolve away. We would not have those types. But the fact is, in mice and starfish and humans, there are obnoxious individuals. They are biologically obnoxious. Why? And the book grew out of that question. Looking for comfort, really, in my discomfort around obnoxious people. What's the explanation for this? How can I stop just being mad and reactive when people are obnoxious? And how can I understand them and accept them and appreciate what they bring? And it really helps to bring mice into the picture because how can you hate an obnoxious mouse? They're all cute.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, yes, mice are def. If you like rodents, that is very much the case. But one of the things that you talked about in your book is and that I found so interesting because you talked about mice that were more and less fearful and mice that were more and less, more or less open and different other personality traits. But you also started pretty early on by saying about 50% of our personality is genetically determined. So how did you come to grips with the fact that the other 50% of the obnoxious person is not genetic and possibly they have some way of impacting that.

Hannah Holmes:

Yeah, that's kind of a trick answer. Scientists used to feel that when you look at nature versus nurture, it was about half and half that nature determined about 50% of your personality and that nurture shaped the other half. What research is finding now is that it's much more interesting than that, is that your genes, your nature determines who you seek out to hang out within the world. And it is those relationships that provide your nurture. And so your genes are actually seeking out an environment that is suitable to your personality, to maximizing your personality potential, whether that's obnoxiousness or friendliness or helpfulness. So the genes that you're born with cause you to find an environment that's comfortable for your head.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So all these Self help books that are out there that are telling us that we can change our lives, we can, but we have a lot of the decks stacked against us.

Hannah Holmes:

Yeah, you can change your behavior. You can't. Well, it takes much, much, much longer to change your actual brain. You can change your brain the way your pathways fire through long and serious practice. We can see that with meditation, that you can actually change your brain patterns. Despite the genetic programming that created those patterns and child abuse and things like that. You can see how those ramify in the actual structure of the brain. So certain events can cause changes in the infrastructure. But what is easier to do is put a transmission between the brain and your behavior so that when your brain is saying, somebody cut me off in traffic and I'm going to ram them in the pumper, you can put a transmission in there that shifts down your behavior from your impulse. So while your personality is to ram people, your behavior that comes out is to take a deep breath, remember that all humans are human, and go on with your day. You're not changing your personality per se, you're changing the behavior that flows forth from your natural personality.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

One of the things that I found interesting was that you actually used your own self as a subject in this book, that you used yourself and actually your husband and I think a friend of yours, or maybe a couple different friends as examples of different sorts of personalities. And that's interesting to me because you end up getting. It's sort of science and not science. You're observing your own self from within yourself. And you talked about the sort of the neurotic type of inclination, I guess, versus the non neurotic inclination, and how this had really impacted you and how it had been both a good and a bad thing for yourself and evolutionarily as a human. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Hannah Holmes:

Yeah. In science writing in particular, it's really, really a struggle to find ways to make these chemical and mechanical concepts relatable. Science writing, there's always that struggle to demonstrate how the science connects to daily experience for humans. And the only way I could think of to do this, to make personality science personal to people, was to use real people and to help the reader to care about people, even when the traits those people might be displaying aren't naturally lovable. And so by becoming exhibit A in that book, I'm able to sort of model the. Not only the way humans spin off some cuckoo behaviors, but also how it's just fine. It's all just fine. No matter how cuckoo you may be or you may think you are, we're all just fine. We're all as nature intended. We're all serving a purpose here. And for me to walk myself through that process makes it easier for the reader to understand that whatever she brings to this book in terms of obnoxiousness or natural terror of the world, it's fine.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

As a doctor, I really liked the part that you described about serotonin and how the serotonin impacted the way that you observe the world and maneuver the world, because for a long time we've been prescribing these serotonin reuptake inhibitors, so that increases the serotonin levels in the brain. But you brought up the fact that, you know what, if we have too much serotonin, if we don't have enough, that's one thing. But if we have too much, that can also be a problem as well. And I've seen this in patients that get medications that bring up their serotonin levels, and all of a sudden, instead of not being depressed, they get very anxious and very upset. But it's something that we don't always consider when we're kind of tinkering with neurochemical transmitters or other hormones or other things within the body.

Hannah Holmes:

There's much so, so much of this that we don't understand very well. Most of the psychiatric drugs that we use, antidepressants and whatnot, were developed using mice and very, very primitive experiments that measure the effect of a drug's effect on the personality and behavior of a mouse. And if you give a mouse Prozac and then hang him by his tail, he will actually struggle harder and longer to climb up the rope that's suspending him than he will without Prozac. That is kind of the acid test as to whether we have a good drug for human beings or not. It's really poor. It's really terrible. A lot of times they don't translate at all. And the a drug just stops dead after the mouse studies. But you can see how it's easy to go far, far astray with a psychiatric drug, if that's where you start. Does this chemical cause a mouse to struggle longer when suspended by its tail? Okay, well, maybe it'll make people happy. That's a huge leap. And there are a million ways for it to go wrong, not least of which that no two human brains are alike. We all have different sensitivities to each chemical we put into our brains. And so the best we can do with some of these antidepressants and stuff is maybe a 50% effectiveness rate. So only 50% of the people you put this drug into will respond to it. The other 50% are so different in the brain. It's just a non vicious, non starter. Give me something else. Let's try the next thing. So we're very much going by Braille when it comes to trying to alter the way our brain receptors work in order to elevate our mood just to the right spot without pushing it into the crazy zone or causing mood swings and whatnot. It's amazing that we can do what we can, but it is still very much a primitive science.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So when you're describing hanging a mouse by its tail and it's struggle to kind of climb back up its own tail, There was another experiment that you described where they would put a mouse in water and mice can swim, but some mice would keep swimming kind of as if they had some sort of hope for the future. And other mice would just sort of, I don't know, they would float there with their little noses above water as if they had less hope for the future, but they could still biologically exist. So the struggling mouse that climbs up his tail is similar to the struggling mouse in the water. And these are the mice that theoretically have some greater resilience. And so this is what we're trying to model as human beings.

Hannah Holmes:

Exactly. And obviously to some extent it works, because that's where Prozac came from, is from the observation that a mouse will swim for longer in a test tube if he has been taking his Prozac. And if you take away his Prozac, he will just collapse in lethargy. We can't interpret anything about the mouse's feelings. I mean, perhaps the mouse is going into like a Zen state of total universal acceptance and happiness. But we do the best we can from the behavior. So they don't call it depressive behavior in mice. They always say depression, like behavior or behavior that indicates depression. They never attribute an emotional state to the behavior. They only talk about the behavior itself.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

See, that's another interesting thing, as I was reading along, that there ends up being in some interesting way, almost a value judgment that is assigned to many of these personality traits. So for a long time extroversion was considered this thing to be aspired to. And lately introverts have gotten their, I guess, greater voice. And so now more and more people are recognizing it's really okay to be an introvert versus an extrovert. But even some of the things you were describing in the book, even the idea that you know, some people are more neurotic or some people are more fearful as opposed to seeing this as evolutionarily advantageous. It still has a value judgment associated, like maybe this is a negative thing. Whereas if you're more, I don't know, if you're more fearless, like, this is the great American hero. How did you feel as you were going through writing about this and seeing this?

Hannah Holmes:

Yeah, it was really interesting to consider the role that culture plays in judging which personality types are the best. And definitely American culture thinks that extroverts are awesome. Impulsive venture capitalist types are just, you know, that's sort of the American myth. That's the person who's conquering the world. But different cultures feel quite differently. So that same personality in, say, Japan, which values a more reserved, perhaps dignified personality or behavior type, that person is not going to be encouraged to express their full extroversion and impulsiveness. They're going to be discouraged. So that's that 50% nurture stuff. They will do what they can to make their personality comfortable in the environment, but they will always get messages back. Tone it down, buddy. Just keep a lid on it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

As you were writing this book, one of the things you had to do was convince some of the researchers that you are not a member of an animal rights group, that you are not a member of PETA. And it was actually really hard to get your foot in the door because in trying to do this research on rodents, they get a lot of negative feedback. That must have been a little strange as a science writer to be kind of given the cold shoulder.

Hannah Holmes:

It was very funny. It was frustrating, but really frustrating. Actually, I had to go to Germany to get into a mouse research lab. I couldn't get into a single mouse research lab in the US but funny as well. Just in terms of personality, to be writing about personality, trying to work with these scientists and meeting such neurotic fear based behavior. And I get it. I mean, some of these people are really persecuted for the work that they do in trying to help us all have better mental health. If there's a better way, I don't know what it is. Nobody loves to torture mice or monkeys, but also nobody likes depressed people leaping off the bridge. But it was very interesting to observe these people from both a science writer perspective and then from a personality perspective how suspicious and fearful a number of them were, which made for sort of fun writing because I totally, totally made fun of them.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, but you did it in a very gentle way.

Hannah Holmes:

I hope so.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I mean, it really didn't come across as if you were judging them at all. It just was. I just wanted to talk to you about mice and personalities and why is this so hard and yet at the same time, understanding why this is so hard.

Hannah Holmes:

Yeah, that there was this guy who was so, so suspicious at Duke and in the middle of his fear that I was PETA. I mean, he was really open about his fear, but at the same time, his wife was from Nova Scotia, I think. And when I came to his lab, he wanted me to bring her some Maine lobsters. I was like, do you really think someone from PETA is going to bring you living animals with the full knowledge that you're going to plunge them into boiling water and I'm going to have a problem with you giving mice Prozac? It doesn't make sense. But that's what fear will do to you.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Right? So you had said, I'd like to come visit you. And he said, okay, you can visit, but bring lobsters. And then even when you showed up with the lobsters that you were going to give to him so he could eat them, he still was concerned that you were from an animal rights group. That's very interesting.

Hannah Holmes:

Very funny.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So tell me about the red brain, blue brain thing that you discussed in the TED Talk. And I hope I'm getting this right. But I thought it was very interesting because it really did speak to just what it means evolutionarily when you have one type of brain versus another.

Hannah Holmes:

Scientists are starting to pay a lot more attention to the subject of why some people turn out blue brained and why some turn out red brained. And again, using genetic research, you can determine that it's about 50% genetic and then about 50% environmental, again with the caveat that the genes of your personality will steer you toward an environment that feels right for you. So if you start from the premise that this diversity in the way we view society is evolved and genetic, then you must accept that it is important to have that diversity, otherwise it would not have happened. If evolution allows a diversity to exist, you must accept that that diversity has a purpose. So when I was looking at what that purpose might be, pulling together a lot of different studies people have started to do around the country and around the world, what makes these two types so different? And it was really fun to look at the various ways people have tried to tease out the differences and then to try to find my own explanation as to why this serves us as a species.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So people who have a red brain, they tend to be more and I want. You can describe this better than I, probably, but they tend to be more on alert. They're more territorial. They're more likely to kind of keep the invaders out and protect those that are within their tribe or their camp, which is great because they will always have the resources that they have. On the other hand, the people with more of a blue mind tend to be more open and open and welcoming and let the invaders in, which is great because they can procreate and they'll, you know, they'll keep propagating the species, but on the other hand, sometimes they'll let in the invaders that might actually kill them. So that's what you're talking about with red and blue.

Hannah Holmes:

If you start from the premise. I mean, for most of our history as a creature, like every other creature, we've been territorial animals. And in our case, probably in little villages or groups of perhaps 200 people. We had no antibiotics, no vaccines. We were extremely vulnerable to every stranger we encountered. The natural response was suspicion. And to be a successful territorial animal, you have to defend your access to food and water in your territory, and also to what I use as shorthand as uteruses. They're hard to come by. There just are never enough uteruses. And so a good territory contains uteruses, water and food and some place to sleep, and you have to work to defend that. Otherwise every passing stranger is going to take all your stuff. And the same goes for the neighboring groups. So there's this natural animosity between territorial groups. On the other hand, if you never let anybody in, you're going to inbreed, eat all your food, someone's going to die in the pond and foul the water, and then you're all going to die. End of story, end of evolution. You lose. And so somebody has to be the one who's looking outside the territory, looking across the boundary, looking for other opportunities to expand the resource base, whether that's looking for fresh sources of food, looking for interesting new uteruses, looking for clean water. You know, nature is chaotic and unpredictable, and when it wipes out something in your territory, you better have a plan B. And that plan B is often to go into someone else's territory. That's a lot easier if you already have good relationships with them. And so what it looks like is the blue brain specializes in maintaining those networks outside the territory. The blue brain, special, the red brain, specializes in defending what has already been accumulated in the territory and making sure that we have reliable access to that stuff. So the red brain is awesome at quick response to danger. You can measure this stuff in human brains, how quickly they react to a dangerous stimulus. Red brains are quick on the draw. They prefer extremely good organization so that we can all respond as a group. They make awesome armies, essentially. And the blue brain is better at looking for opportunity, at seeing a stranger as something to be exploited as opposed to something to be stabbed. And they're interested in new experiences, so they have a natural curiosity that pulls them away from the known and into the unknown.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What I love about all of this is that you also, over the course of all of this time, all the writing that you've done, all the research that you've done, you've come to a place where, you know what I'd really like to do? I'd like to sell houses. So three years ago, you decided you were going to sell houses. And you actually are using the knowledge that you gained of personality and of people and of observations to help you do this. And it's something that you really enjoy.

Hannah Holmes:

I'm really surprised how good a fit this has been. All my journalistic work has translated so powerfully into helping people with their territorial issues, not just in terms of ensuring that the territory is a good one, which is sort of the fundamental job of a real estate agent, but also helping them navigate their own emotional response, which can be extreme, it can be extremely uncomfortable. It really is true that moving is the third most stressful life event after death in the family and divorce. Moving, it is horrible for you. Even if it's exciting and fun, it's extremely stressful. It brings out the absolute worst in people, and it's wonderful to be able to prepare them for that, to help them understand what they're responding to. They're not being crazy, their territory is being ripped out from under them, or they're walking into a brand new territory with no idea what the future holds. On a biological level. You know, intellectually they understand it and they feel like they should be happy and everything's beautiful. But emotionally, for an animal to leave its territory, oh my God, that's. That's life and death stuff. And that is how our brain responds to it. That's a pressure cooker for an animal's emotional response to change territories.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I for one, appreciate all the time that you have spent observing those of us around you who are inhabiting your world with you. So if you're listening and you'd like more information about Hannah Homes, the real estate agent, you can go to HannahHomes.net and are there other places people should be looking to learn more about the work that you're doing.

Hannah Holmes:

Hannah My current blog is I call it Geek Realty and it's a blending of science and human behavior around our houses and also sustainability issues which have always interested me. The website for that is kludgy and unattractive, but I do repeat it on Facebook and so if you can find me on Facebook you can find Geek Realty.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

We've been speaking with Hannah Holmes, who is an American writer, journalist, essayist and science commentator who lives in Portland, Maine. Thank you so much for the interesting things that you've brought to our conversation today and brought into the world at large.

Hannah Holmes:

Thanks Lisa.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

As someone who spends a fair amount of time writing for the radio show and also for the magazines, I do know how important it is to have a great place to do my writing. And I have with me today another individual who is quite familiar with this idea. This is Joan Dempsey, a graduate of both the MFA in Creative Writing and the Postgraduate Certificate for the Teaching of Creative Writing Programs at Antioch University in Los Angeles. Joan Dempsey is a writer and writing teacher. Her work has been published in the ADIRONDACK Review, Alligator Juniper, Plenitude Magazine, Obsidian, the Citron Review, and has been aired on National Public Radio. Joan writes and teaches from the shed in New Gloucester where she's lived for the past nine years with her partner Bert and their two dogs, Logan and Bea, and two cats, Maggie and Little Jack. Thanks so much for coming in, Joan.

Joan Dempsey:

Thanks for having me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

As I'm reading this, I'm just picturing this place and your little family of animals, Logan and Bea and Maggie and Little Jack. And it seems like you've really created a space for yourself in New Gloucester.

Joan Dempsey:

Yeah, absolutely. The shed that I work from when we moved here nine years ago was a chicken coop and a tool shed. And as soon as I saw it, even before we moved in, I thought, that's going to be my space. So I designed the interior of the space and the structure was in good shape, but we had it renovated and now it's full of books and it's my own space and I work like crazy and I leave the door open so the animals can come in and out.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Where did you come from? Where are you originally from?

Joan Dempsey:

I grew up in New Hampshire and then I spoke, spent the probably 22 years living in Boston and went back for a short stint to New Hampshire and then came to Maine nine years

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

ago and somehow managed to have a connection also to Los Angeles.

Joan Dempsey:

Yeah, that really was Los Angeles was never a place I thought I would be interested in or want to go. You know, I had probably the stereotype that a lot of people have big, smoggy, lots of traffic. But when I started looking for MFA programs to study writing, that one really jumped out at me. And they have a nice focus on social justice. They have a really diverse population of students who go there and it's a low residency program, so I went twice a year for. And it ended up being two and a half years and it was just fantastic. Probably not probably by far the best learning experience I ever had. Really tremendous.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What was your other life before you went back?

Joan Dempsey:

I've had several lives. I love to sort of go where my interest takes me. So I spent some time after college exploring the world of graphic design. I took some classes at Mass College of Art. I managed a small design firm for a time in Cambridge and then I discovered that everything was moving online and I liked the, the tactile part of design. So I decided that wasn't quite for me. Then I jumped into the peace movement. I did anti nuclear work for many years with a bunch of lawyers and got a Master's in non profit management. And then I jumped into animal welfare. And I spent 10 years working at the Massachusetts SPCA, primarily as a lobbyist and an animal advocate. And somewhere along the line there, I dipped my toe into writing. And that's my true passion, for sure.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So as you were moving from graphic designer to peace, social justice, animal welfare activist, to writer, how did you determine that, this dipping of the toe, that this was your passion? What was it about the writing that really called to you?

Joan Dempsey:

Well, the thing about the writing that called to me is that I think it's the thing that has been the most consistent over time. Each of those areas I got very excited about. I got excited about learning all I had to learn. And then I reached a point where I was done, where I felt like, you know what? I've learned all I can learn, and I'm ready to move to something else that catches my interest. But when I started writing, my first workshop, I took it. I was probably about 30 years old. I took it at Grub Street Writers in Boston. They were very new at the time, but they're lovely writing so school now. And I knew in that first. The first session of the first workshop I took that this is the thing I wanted to do. And that was because I sat down to do an exercise and this character just appeared to me. And I had always frankly thought that was a crock. When I heard writers say that, I thought, oh, come on, you create. You create this stuff. But it happened in my first writing exercise. And this character came and I just followed him and I really fell in love with the work. And then over time, I've just continued to take workshops. And then I got my mfa. And I think it's the fact that every time I write something new, I'm entering a new era. So I have that love of following my passion in different topics, wherever it goes, and writing sustains that. And I can't imagine it will ever stop. I'm both learning about the craft of writing constantly, and I'm learning about new topics as I research them for the next book.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Why did you decide also to get this postgraduate certificate for the teaching of creative writing?

Joan Dempsey:

That was a. Well, it was a twofold decision. I love teaching because I not only can help other folks, but I learn things more deeply myself. So it was that. And there was also the practical matter. I knew enough about the world of writing to know it's not an easy way to make a living. And I thought, well, maybe I'll go into academia and this will be helpful to me. I just ultimately decided, after doing a stint in academia, short stint, that I would get really sucked into doing that work and I would leave my writing aside. So I decided not to go that route. But teacher teaching still really moves me, and it moves me because I can help other people have that great experience that I had of falling in love with the work. And right now what I'm doing is teaching on my own. I've got my own business and I'm teaching people online primarily, and it's just endlessly rewarding.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

As you've created the space for yourself, the shed in New Gloucester, what things have you learned about yourself? You've gone from a very outward facing direction where you're dealing with people and lawyers and animals, and now you've gone more inward. You've created this little space, a little almost like an eggshell, to kind of protect you in some ways. But also it's poisonous, porous enough, as you said, that your dogs and cats go in and out. People go in and out. So tell me.

Joan Dempsey:

Well, I think the most important thing that I've learned is that I feel like I've arrived at a place where I know what works well for me. And I'm outward in many other ways. I am an extrovert and I do get energy from being out in the world and being with other people and talking with other people. So I have not lost that peace. I spend my days poor, primarily by myself, working in the shed. And what I love about that and what works really well for me is that I'm in charge of everything. I get up when I want to get up, I take a walk when I want to take a walk. And I do. I work harder, I think, than I've ever worked. Because what I'm doing I love. But I get to make decisions every day about what I'm going to do and if I. I don't have anybody else that I'm accountable to. So I don't have any punch politics that I have to deal with about getting approval or getting consensus or any of those things. And while I was good at that when I did, also had its frustrating moments of trying to move ahead, trying to get something done, feeling like it just takes so long to get anything done with groups of people. So now I just get so much work done. I work all day and I work, you know, I just. It's fantastic.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So we're lucky to have you then.

Joan Dempsey:

Well, I'm not sure about that, but.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, just the fact that we've gotten you to leave the shed, I guess is.

Joan Dempsey:

Oh, yeah. Well, see, this is a perfect example though. You know, if I was working a full time job, I would have had to arrange that. But you know, I got the call and I thought, sure, why not? And my schedule is my own, so here I am.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I do love this and I have to say, of all of the writers that I have interviewed, and we've had a few on the show, you're the only one who said I'm an extrovert.

Joan Dempsey:

Yes. Yeah, that's pretty. I think there's also a myth that many writers are introvert, and I think many are, but I'd love to see a study about that because I certainly am not an introvert and there are plenty of writers I know who are also not introverts. But I do think there's a tendency for writers to be sort of, you know, they get their energy from being inward instead of outward.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And having worked with writing teachers before, one of the things that they've mentioned to me is that writing becomes such a personal exercise. There's often almost a therapy that takes place if you're talking with, say, a person about their personal essay or even a novel. Do you find that to be true?

Joan Dempsey:

Yeah, very much so. Very much so. And what I find is that there are some forms, folks, where it's very directly personal, where they're setting out to tell a personal story, they know that they're doing that. The thing I'm more interested in, and this particularly happens in fiction, is when there's a lot of deep psychological stuff going on that the writer isn't aware of until after the fact. That certainly has happened to me and I have seen it time and time again with writers that I work with on their manuscripts. They know what they're writing about and the topic they're writing about. And so somewhere along the line discover, oh, gee, this is about my fill in the blank. And I think that the best writing comes from that place where there's an unconscious depth of emotion that comes out almost in spite of what the author is intending. And that kind of deep writing is some of the best I think there is.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Do you think that fiction can be helpful in some ways? Because when you're writing a personal essay, it's about your life and oftentimes about people that are still living and about conflicts that still exist. Whereas fiction, you can pour a lot of something into it and it doesn't have to be completely real.

Joan Dempsey:

Well, that's the beauty of fiction. I remember at some Point when I was working on my first novel, I was just racking my brain. I can't remember the specifics, but I know I was thinking, did this really happen in the real world? Did it happen? And I. I was researching and trying to find it, and suddenly I thought, I'm writing fiction. I can just make it up. And that was so nice. I mean, writers do want to get the facts right, and they want their work to be believable. But the beauty is, it is fiction, and you can make it up, and that sometimes saves you.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Over the course of my time, I've written a couple of novels which have not yet been published. And somebody read them over with me, and she said to me, it's very interesting that the men in these novels which I wrote several years ago, she said, they all seem to be men talking at you. She called it something. She called it mansplaining, where some men have this tendency to talk to women as if they don't really know very much. She said, do you know that all of your characters are like that? I said, I had no idea how interesting that is because I actually think that in my life I have attracted a fair number of men who would like to tell me things just by nature of, I guess, my personality. It's less so now. But isn't that so interesting that here I am writing a novel, and then the men are all a certain way?

Joan Dempsey:

Yep, there you go. This is perfect example, perfect example. And you couldn't see it yourself, but when someone pointed it out, you thought, oh. And reflected on something in your own life. And that's the other piece that I love about this work, is that you continue to grow.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You.

Joan Dempsey:

You don't ever stop growing as a person and as a writer. And I just. I can't think of a better way to spend my time.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So tell me what your first novel was about, because I'm interested in how you progressed from your first novel to the novel that you're working on now.

Joan Dempsey:

Well, I've written two novels, neither of which are published. My first one is In a Drawer. The second one is with Agents right now in New York. And the third one is still the seed of an idea. My first novel, I think, was my learning novel. It's a quiet, literary novel, primarily about death and the ways in which we choose death. Agents loved it and said, we can't sell this because it's too quiet, too literary, and given the market, it's going to be tough. So I learned how to write a novel from writing that book. My second novel, which is out with agents right now, I'm quite excited about. I deliberately wrote it as a literary page turner so that an agent could say, yes, I can sell this because it is a good read. My readers have told me enough, and I trust my readers, that it's a good read. Also about sort of dark subjects, though. It involves the Holocaust, a Holocaust survivor, art theft. But it's set in 2009 and also deals with issues of homophobia. So there's some pretty serious stuff going on. But it's a really moving plot. And you ask how I move from one to the other. Again, I go where my interest lies. What do I find myself reading about and thinking about when I'm not even thinking about writing? I tend to find a topic that that's of interest to me and then just go and read and watch and listen to anything I can listen to. So the one that I'm exploring right now is looking at wrongful imprisonment. I have a judge character lurking in the background and a jury sort of lurking as well. And I don't yet know who's going to come forward and say, this is my book. But I've been reading, I've really been binge reading and binge watching anything that has to do with wrongful imprisonment.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

These are some heavy topics that you've drawn to you in your life. You've already talked about being part of the peace movement and you've talked about animal welfare. You've written about death and wrongful imprisonment. Where does all that energy come from?

Joan Dempsey:

Well, I don't know. You know, I remember a friend of mine saying I spent, I spent two long weeks down in Washington at the Holocaust Memorial Museum when I was writing the last book. And I got a grant to spend time there. And every day I would go there and go to the archives and I would sit and watch testimony from survivors, just, you know, talking head, talking for hours and I couldn't get enough. It was just fascinating to me. And so I think for me there's something, and I haven't really formulated this yet, but it seems to me there's something about helplessness and giving voice. Certainly animal welfare work is about giving voice to animals who can't speak for themselves. That's a common thing that's said in that movement. And when I was doing anti nuclear work, we were working with a lot of folks who had been impacted by nuclear fallout, essentially. And certainly in the Holocaust you're dealing with victims. So there's something in there that pulls me in and certainly with wrongful imprisonment, there is a helplessness due to the system for these folks who become imprisoned through no fault of their own. So there's this thread there, and I'm just kind of learning about it now. What is it about it that attracts me to that? But I think it's something about voicelessness and helplessness and how to have those people come forward and speak out and be heard.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Joan, tell me about your growing up years. You said you're from New Hampshire originally, right? Was there anything in your family background that caused you to be interested in, I guess, giving characters voice or giving animals voice or giving other people voice?

Joan Dempsey:

Yeah, definitely. I grew up in New Hampshire. I was born in New Jersey, but my parents went back to the land in 1970, so I was a second grader and moved to rural New Hampshire and they started a health food store and that whole bit. And my parents were very. And my mother still is very liberal and really had a keen sense of social justice. My father had been a teacher in New Jersey, and he ended up standing up for somebody who had been fired for really prejudicial reasons. And my father lost his job as well. We had books all over the house. There was an entire section about race, which I'm not sure actually where that came from, but I still have all those books, books that my father had studied. And I don't know where that came from in him, but there was definitely a sense of looking out for people who are less fortunate. And certainly we always had a lot of animals, and that was a big part of my growing up.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You described the reason that you went into graphic design originally was that you like the tactile nature of it. Is there a tactile aspect to writing?

Joan Dempsey:

Well, there is. Certainly. Writing with pen and paper is very different than writing on a computer. And there have been studies done about that that I can't quote, but I know they exist about the sensation of physically writing on paper and how that pulls something different out of you than typing on a keyboard. The other thing is, as a writer and as. As a teacher who's trying to promote my business of teaching, I get to do a bunch of graphic design anyway because I work solely alone. I don't have designers I work with. So I still get to dabble in that realm when I'm promoting courses and trying to attract people to working with me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, it's very interesting because as you are talking about the tactile nature of this, the characters, there is a tactic, tactile aspect. I mean, they might be Only in our minds as we're creating them. But they become very. I don't know, very real, very embodied. So there's something about them that, whether you're writing it or whether you can reading it, you can almost touch them in a way.

Joan Dempsey:

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm glad you mentioned that, because one thing, and I don't know if you've done this since you've written some novels yourself with your characters, but there are times when I, alone in the shed, feel physically. Either try to evoke an emotion or I act out something physically that I'm trying to describe. In my current novel, there's a scene where this guy gets beat up. And it's a very quick beating up. But I've never been beat up. And of course, I've seen it on television, et cetera. But I thought I was in the shed, literally falling to the ground to see where would I hit from first on the ground if this had happened, that sort of thing. So that piece is something that I do, and the evoking emotion to really get to. How do I feel about something? If a character is going through an emotion, I will sit at my desk and probably, much like an actor does, and try to physically conjure the emotion in myself so that I can begin to feel it and then observe what's happening. Am I getting goosebumps? Am I getting. Does my stomach really hurt? Because there are a lot of cliches about how you can describe emotion. What does that really feel like in my throat? Is it really thick? Or is it something else? So these are the kinds of things that occupy my mind. Another experience I had, and this is slightly different, but it is that physicality in my first book, and this happened with my second book as well. In the first book, I had a dream that I was the main character. In my book, I had been struggling to really get inside of him. And I had a dream where I was inside of him. And that was fascinating. I really. And that carried me through the rest of the novel because I felt like I know what it feels like to be him, because I have been. And then in the most recent novel, my main character, I was helping her do something. She's an elderly woman, so I physically felt her in that dream.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

When we had the author, Lois Lowry on, she. She was talking about being able to physically remember various stages in her life. She physically remembered being a child, I think, at the age of seven, and what it felt like to be in the classroom. And it wasn't just she remembered it, you know, as an intellectual exercise, she kind of embodied that memory. And I don't know how many people have that ability, but it sounds like what you're doing is this. Is this sort of evocation of that physicality.

Joan Dempsey:

Definitely. And I have definitely experienced what I call. And I don't know if anybody else calls it this, but I call it body memory. So, say, for instance, you've lived in a house for a long time, and you walk into the kitchen and the fridge is on your left, and it's always on the left. So you develop this body memory of walking into that kitchen and opening the fridge in a certain way. When you go to another place, you often do that, even if the fridge is over on the other side of the kitchen. And I think that's the same thing that Lois is talking about. And she can put herself back in other places in time, but she feels it inside, and I definitely have that. One of my strengths, I think, as a writer is that I see places in my fiction as clearly as I see this studio that we're sitting in. And they're completely made up, fictional places. But I could draw it, I could stage it. I see that very, very clearly. And I can feel what it's like to be in that space.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So that being the case, it seems like the making of your shed, of your space was particularly important. You actually. Spaces are so important to you that you actually needed to have this place that was yours.

Joan Dempsey:

Yeah, absolutely. The thing about the shed and the reason why my artist was. Or writer friends, when they come and see it, tell me they hate me because they're so jealous of the space, is that it's very important for me to have a space that's mine alone. Because the psychological energy it takes to do the work is a lot. And to minimize external distractions and have everything around me sort of being. Supporting that energy is super important. And I really advise it for any writer or any artist to make sure they claim that space for themselves and make it happen somehow.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I think you're probably right about people being envious of the space. I mean, I think of the song that all I want is a room somewhere far away from the cold night air with one enormous chair. Exactly. It's not even a place that necessarily we might write, but it's a place that we might return to and a place that might cradle us somehow.

Joan Dempsey:

Absolutely.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And then if you are able to return and be cradled, then. Yeah. From. From whenceforth? Creativity books and all sorts of things.

Joan Dempsey:

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, honestly, I feel that way about where we live and. And our place. When Bert and I came here nine years ago, I really. The first morning I woke up in that house, I felt like I'm home, and I hadn't felt that for quite some time. And so it is that sort of safe home place that we can move out of and be creative. So I feel very fortunate in that way, in that I'm able to go home and venture forth from home and come home.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And it's interesting that you are, from your shed, creating a novel about false imprisonment.

Joan Dempsey:

I know. Go figure.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

That's a very interesting irony that you're

Hannah Holmes:

working through in this novel.

Joan Dempsey:

It certainly is. Or maybe it's just that I feel so sorry for those folks who are locked up and, you know, trying desperately to get out and find their own place that they can come and go from. You can't come and go from prison, so.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, Joan, I give you so much credit for having follow this path, and really, when you understood that this was your passion, kind of locking down on that. And really, I just love this, this approach that you're taking, because there are many people in the world who kind of secretly think, oh, I wish I could do whatever it is, but you're doing it. You're doing it. You. You're building it. You're creating it, and it's. It's. It's pretty wonderful that you have this place that you've developed.

Joan Dempsey:

Yeah. Thank you.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So I'll be looking for your novel, your second novel. And then at some point, when it's not too literary and people appreciate you more, your first novel will be published, too. We'll all be working for the first novel by Joan Dempsey. How can people learn more about the Shed and the teaching that you're doing and the writing that you're doing?

Joan Dempsey:

Sure. You can find me online@joandempsey.com We've been

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

speaking with Joan Dempsey, who is a writer and a teacher and also inhabitant of the Shed in New Gloucester. And thanks for coming in, and please say hi to Bert and your dogs, Logan and Bea and your cats Maggie and little Jack.

Joan Dempsey:

Great. Thanks so much for having me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You have been listening to Love Maine radio show number 209, personality and place. For a preview of each week's show, sign up for our E. We love to hear from you so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Personality and Place show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.