AS AN EXPERIENCED communicator, Michele Cushatt speaks internationally to a wide variety of audiences and has published three previous books, including Undone, I Am. Her fourth book, A Faith That Will Not Fail, came out in March, 2023. A three-time head and neck cancer survivor and parent of “children from hard places,” Michele is a (reluctant) expert of trauma, pain, and the deep human pain, and the deep human need for authentic connection and enduring faith. In short, she is an expert in how to write from the middle of the mess, which is a topic we take on in our conversation. Listen in and read along.
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Marion: Today, my guest is writer, speaker, coach, and teacher Michele Cushatt. She is the author of four books, including Undone, I Am, and Relentless. Her fourth book, A Faith That Will Not Fail, is just out, and the subtitle of it is “10 Practices to Build Up Your Faith When Your World Is Falling Apart.” I just love that. All of her books are published by Zondervan, a branch of HarperCollins. It’s an honor to welcome her here today. Hi there, Michele.
Michele: Hi, Marion. I feel the honor. It’s an honor to be here with you.
Marion: Well, it’s a joy. We’ve known each other a long time. We’ve never met, but it’s one of those things we’ve been running so fast through our lives, but we check in with each other. I just had to stop and get you when I checked in about this beautiful new book. Let’s talk to these writers. Your website, the blog, your former podcasts, your books all seem to have at least one major theme in common, they speak from the middle of the mess.
You write and talk and interview and discuss from there, not waiting until you have figured it all out. I’m no marketer or branding expert, but if I was asked what your brand is, I’d say that your expertise is not only knowing how to, but how you thrive writing from the mess. Let’s talk about that.
Michele: Yeah, let’s go.
Marion: Many writers ask me when they should start writing and I always feel that tucked into that question is the suggestion that they should wait until they have it all figured out. I can say with great assurance that I’ve never figured anything out in its entirety, but that’s me. Talk to me about writing from the middle of the mess, if you would.
Michele: Well, for me, it was a matter of to some extent life and death. My life story is really complicated. But to give you a cliff notes version, over the last 30 years, I’ve gone through marriage and motherhood, followed unexpectedly by a divorce six years in, became a single divorced mother of a one and a half year old, rebuilt my life, then got remarried and had the joy and adventure of blended family, which by the way, it doesn’t look anything like it does on TV, and navigated those turbulent waters. And then in the middle of all of that, we foster adopted three more children.
We got a phone call from a relative telling us about twin four year olds and a five-year-old that had a history of severe abuse, neglect, very traumatic circumstances. The question was asked of us, will you take them? We were almost done parenting our three boys at that time, so it was kind of like asking us to go back and run a marathon all over again. And then right in the middle of that, I was diagnosed with cancer three times. I just wanted to give people a little bit of context.
When we talk about writing in the middle of the mess, I’m not talking about just a bad day. I mean, it’s literally writing in the middle of very tumultuous and life and death situations. For me, writing wasn’t just an option, it was a necessity. It was a means for me to try to, to some extent, unravel or understand circumstances that were beyond my understanding, and writing was the means of that unraveling.
Marion: I think that we see this in all of your work, that writing is the beginning of the unraveling. It’s where we go to to unravel it. I love that phrase, writing is the beginning of the unraveling. Let’s give an example. In your book I Am: A 60-day Journey to Knowing Who You Are Because of Who He Is, you help women and the barrage of negative self-talk. I love you for that. Because if we exchange those lies for truth, we can start to build a very different identity and get rid of this horrific stuff we say to ourselves.
But that means you understood that you were actively doing that when you chose to write from there. Just talk a little bit about how you say, oh, that’s a good topic because the negative self-talk would be like, “No, it’s not.”
Michele: No, it’s not.
Marion: You’re too stupid, or you’re too this.
Michele: Exactly.
Marion: How do you even speak to it when it’s literally the voice in your head?
Michele: I wrote that book after my third cancer diagnosis. I had my brand of cancer, if you want to call it that, was head and neck cancer, cancer of the tongue. I’ve made my living as a communicator, as a presentation coach, as a presenter. I have trained and coached speakers for 15 plus years. My mouth, my ability to speak, was core to my identity. It was who I was. Then all of a sudden by this third cancer diagnosis, the cancer was so aggressive in advance that they had to do a nine hour surgery where they removed two-thirds of my tongue, as well as my submandibular gland and lymph nodes.
And then they did radiation that burned my vocal cords and everything else. I won’t go into the details, but I came through it. It’s a miracle I’m still alive, but I didn’t come through it unscathed. Those who are listening can hear that I talk with a lisp. In fact, the fact that I’m able to talk at all is no small miracle, and I’ll pay for it later. That’s just part of my reality. This struggle with identity and wrestling with who we are and where we see our significance or value and the same messages in the head that fight us at every turn, this was something that I was living through every day.
I can tell you now, I still live. Every time I choose to show up and speak into a microphone knowing that my speech is flawed, I have to fight the committee in my head that says, “Nobody’s going to want to listen to you, Michele, because you don’t sound right. Something’s wrong with you. You’re flawed.” The way you write from that place is… First of all, that’s my personal story, but it has a universal angle, right? I had cancer. I have a permanent functional disability with my speech and my ability to eat and drink and swallow and all that stuff.
That’s reality. That will go with me until I die. But the truth is, is my external flaws are simply a metaphor for the flaws that we all carry, that some of us think that nobody can see, but we know they’re there. We try to walk through this life knowing the things that have marked us, that have scarred us, that have flawed us, and we’re so afraid that we’re going to be found out. And that causes us to not only live pulled back and hesitant and full of shame, but then we even almost anticipate or project that others are going to reject us too.
When I started to find that universal angle, it wasn’t just my hard story, it was a hard story that everybody could relate to. In other words, I started talking about how the fact that we all have our cancers, the things that mark us and wound us and leave us less than what we were before, whatever they may be. How do we counteract that, or how do we step into it? For me, and this is what I talk about in I Am and some of the other books, I had to decide, am I going to be the woman who talks funny, or am I going to be the woman who has something to say?
Marion: Uh, love that.
Michele: Right?
Marion: Yeah.
Michele: But that’s true for all of us. That’s true for you, Marion. You’ve got your own things that have marked you or flawed you. And at some point, you have to decide, is that going to define you or derail you, or are you going to let it be something that you leaned into and it develops you? This thing that was my flaw, the thing that constantly tempts me to pull back and hide, when I lean into it, it’s actually the things that causes other people to lean in and listen. That’s the irony.
When we do that in our writing, when we dare to take the risk and peel back the layers and do surgery on ourselves as creatives, as artists, as writers, and we dare to reveal that and at the same time figure out what the universal angle is, what is the common felt need that we’re all experiencing, and when you write from that place and lean into it, then all of a sudden, the things that you think create distance between you and your audience are the thing that actually creates connection between you and your audience.
Marion: And that’s just it, finding that connection, that honest connection. At the dawn of the internet when all the mommy bloggers emerged and they were all perfect.
Michele: I’m at home melting down and going, it’s 11:00 AM. Can I have wine yet?
Marion: I’m having a little trouble with getting the booger off my shirt.
Michele: Exactly.
Marion: I think that you live this. Let’s talk about getting that message out into the world. You published with Zondervan. It’s the world’s leading Bible publisher and provider of Christian communications. They’ve got over 300 new original books published annually. They’re 80 years old. They’re a branch of HarperCollins. They publish a variety of genres, Christian children’s book, Christian fiction, Christian nonfiction, including memoir. They have a young adult or YA imprint.
Your other brand is that you are a Christian writer, but I always stumble over this when I talk to a writer in the faith-based market. Help me out. How do you refer to yourself? Are you a Christian writer, a faith-based writer, a religious writer? What does it mean in terms of your own market differentiation?
Michele: That’s a great question. I mean, my faith is such a huge part of who I see myself as being. It’s hard for me to separate myself from that because it’s so much a part of my story. But the way I really see it, so yes, I write for the faith market or the people who are seeking some kind of purpose or meaning or spirituality to their circumstances, people who are having that existential kind of crisis when they’re dealing with something hard. The truth is, is a lot of people wrestle with any kind of faith or spirituality, namely because of hardship and suffering.
I see myself as standing on the fence straddling the tension between what faith looks like in real life and creating hopefully safe spaces for people to wrestle with that. I am not about the cliches. I am not about just spouting religion for religion’s sake. This is more about can we just sit here in this place of real life where we’re trying to find purpose and meaning in our existence, and yet there’s part of us that wants to believe in something bigger than us, and yet the reality of our pain and suffering and circumstances make us question that. Can we write in that space?
And that’s where I find myself. Yes, I’m a Christian writer, but I see myself more as someone who has a front door wide open just saying, “Come in. Let’s just have a conversation about this, because I get why you wouldn’t want to have any faith in anything because of your life circumstances.”
Marion: Well, it’s that kind of honesty and transparency that brings you the voice that you’ve got. I struggle. I work with so many writers as a memoir coach and a memoir teacher. Whenever I suggest to a writer that he or she go look at the Christian market, I’m frequently met with skepticism. But the fact is it’s a $1.2 billion market. It represents 10% of the broader US publishing market.
There have been astonishing cross genre books. We all know Rick Warren’s astonishing bestseller, The Purpose Driven Life. It sold more than 35 million copies. It’s a Zondervan book. It was for the general reader, drilling into the question we all share, which is what on earth did I come here to do? Why am I here?
Michele: Why am I here? Yes.
Marion: It’s written in 40 read in 15 minute chapters, and it became a worldwide phenomenon. I point to your work all the time. I point to his work all the time. Why do you think people are reluctant as they can be? Is it they just don’t understand what the religious or faith-based or Christian market is, or do they think they’re going to not be handled right? These books are handled magnificently.
Michele: Well, I think our experiences have a way of creating a filter through which we view it. The truth is, is that a lot of us have had very painful experiences related to faith and Christianity or whatever. Whatever denomination or religion that you’ve gone down that road or explored, it’s not been a positive experience. And because the meaning of life, finding purpose is such an intimate and core part of who we are, when we have a painful experience related to that, it’s really like a trauma. It’s not like going to a restaurant and having a bad hamburger.
When we have a painful experience when it comes to any kind of faith, it marks us so deeply. It’s so intimate. It hits us at such the core that then we’re suspect of anything else that smells a little bit like that. We don’t want to get wounded again. I think that’s fair, but I also think you present another fair point. It’s a legitimate market. Think of the cookbook market, right? That’s a whole market too that’s doing really, really well. I’m not going to not explore that market simply because I got a really bad cookbook sometime or had a bad experience.
There is some fairness to the reality that it’s worth exploring. Now, like anything, you’re going to find good and bad people and good and bad opportunities, and you’re going to bump into challenges in any direction that you go. That’s just the reality of it. But Zondervan has been incredible to work with and they’ve allowed me to have my own voice and to really have my own message and brand and create this safe place to have these kinds of conversations. I’m super grateful for them.
Marion: That’s great. I so appreciate your candor there because I can’t say why people might be traumatized by their own faith-based background as well as you can, and I appreciate that. The other thing that I really like about the religion publishing industry, for lack of a better phrase, is that over the past 25 years, they have percolated up female authors, and the sales strength of the female author there is remarkable. I think that there’s a lot to be said for looking for your own home. You want to be with a publisher that understands you, relates to you.
And if there’s a faith-based aspect, that the faith-based publisher is a good place to go. Certainly they’ve produced a beautiful new book for you. This is an extraordinary piece of work. I’m so pleased to be able to talk about A Faith That Will Not Fail: 10 Practices to Build Up Your Faith When Your World Is Falling Apart. Let’s talk about how you use your language. You say in your copy, my faith has been tested, and it’s a grace to bring you the pages birthed in that place. This is a very transparent recognition of where you’re writing from. But here’s the question.
You have a voice that that is not at all preachy. You have a voice that is not at all dogmatic. I want to get into this a little bit further. This is a place you offer us from a place of equality. You’re not saying, “I found the answers, here they are.” You’re giving us 10 practices to build up our own faith. Talk to me about how you find a voice within a Christian publisher when you do have a practice that you want to share with us. How do you avoid being dogmatic and prescriptive?
Michele: Well, first of all, I am so grateful you said that because my aim was to not be dogmatic and preachy. I’ve been the victim of that before, I guess you could say, and it doesn’t help anybody. I mean, it’s like if somebody is drowning in the ocean and you stand on the boat and say, “Well, you just need to swim harder,” that doesn’t help anybody. Throw them a lifeline for crying out loud.
My goal has always been to do everything that I can to help the reader to know that they’re not alone. That is really my heart. Now, how do we not be preachy and dogmatic? Well, I think it takes… And this is true in any kind of book that you write because I think people can be preachy even when they’re not talking about faith.
Marion: Sure. Baseball.
Michele: Yeah, exactly.
Marion: Health care.
Michele: Or dieting or health or all these different things. Well, it’s one thing to be confident in what you believe, it’s another thing to be so obstinate and dogmatic about it that you make it impossible for anybody to enter into the conversation with you. And that means that really writing from that place of openness and transparency without being preachy requires, and this is not a very popular word in today’s culture, it requires a measure of humility and realizing that you’re still in progress as well. I wish I could say I’m by nature a humble person. I don’t think I am at all.
I think the nature of my significant struggles throughout the last 30 years and suffering has forced me to see myself as a fallible, mortal human being who has a lot to learn. When you write from that place and you can literally picture the person on the other side of the page, and boy, I do this so often, and really connect, what is their pain, what is their felt need, what is it they are longing for, how can I throw them a lifeline, then their tone and the way you write and the language you use matches that heart. I mean, it really comes from a heart, a character I believe.
I don’t know that people can fake that very well. It comes out one way or the other if you are dogmatic and preachy. I think it’s somewhat of a character thing. For me, I spend a considerable amount of time listening to the market, paying attention to what people are talking about, listening for phrases I’m hearing repeated all the time. The subtitle of this book, The 10 Practices to Build Up Your Faith When Your World Is Falling Apart.
Well, World Is Falling Apart, I wrote the subtitle myself. “The world is falling apart,” is what I was hearing everywhere. We’re going to speak that language. That’s what people are talking about. We’re going to talk to them.
Marion: Such good advice, to listen to what is in the ether, to get a sense of what’s coming, and that’s how you best choose what it is that you might have to offer to people that they’ll find of interest. That subtitle is great, and I like that it’s 10 practices. You cleverly include these five minute faith builders.
Amid these 10 practices, there’s worship, humility, relinquishment, waiting, and more, but the one that took me by surprise the most is the first, it’s lament. You encourage us toward a practice of lamenting. And I got it, but I want you first to talk about how you made the selection of the 10 and how and why you opened with lament.
Michele: Well, the 10 practices, I wanted to do things that we weren’t already numb to, things that people weren’t typical, like get eight hours of sleep a night and get your exercise and eat your vegetables. I didn’t want to do things.
Marion: There’s no vegetables in this book.
Michele: There’s no vegetables in this book. Even though I happen to be a fan, we are not going to talk to you about vegetables. I mean, I was like, what would be something that we’re not already tired of? That would be fresh? That was one. Second, it had to be something that I felt since I come from a faith tradition that was consistent with what I believe in the Bible, but the most important element with those 10 practices, it had to be something that I actually did myself. If it wasn’t something I utilized, if it wasn’t something that helped me, then I would not be a credible source.
I had to meet those criteria. That was my process for selecting. I had a list of probably 15, 16, 17 before I narrowed it down and really came up with the ones I felt reflected my journey. I started with lament. Let’s talk about that because I started with lament, and I’ll tell you why in a moment, but when my editor, my acquisitions editor, read my initial manuscript, it was fair to ask it, do you really think, Michele, we should start a book that’s supposed to be hopeful with the practice of lament?
It’s kind of a downer. I’m like, I know, right? You know how editors-writers do, we had this whole back and forth discussion of, should we do this? The reason I left it there, and this was my argument for it, I said, for someone whose world is falling apart, to start anywhere else will be impossible for them to do. When somebody is struggling, when somebody is suffering, when somebody is in a hard place and really searching for the meaning of life, usually grief, some kind of loss, some kind of challenge has gotten them to that place.
To start anywhere else would be asking them to jump to the top of Mount Everest without doing the climb. We’ve got to start at lament. That’s where we have to start, and that’s where we earn their trust to go into the other nine practices.
Marion: Well, it works beautifully. It brought me to my knees first. It brought me to consideration first, and it gave me permission to grieve a bit more too. I opened our conversation asking about your brand and that idea that you write from the middle of the mess, but let’s take this a little bit further on the back of this idea of lament. I’m really specifically asking about the power of writing into what we do not know. I’m a huge fan. I recently lost my two closest friends both to hideous diseases, both long struggles, both experiences full of mystery, frustration, fear, grief.
But the end of the day, mostly it’s mystery that I’m finding is hanging around. I’ve been writing into those losses. And while I may never publish the result, the inquiry has been a unique form of annotation of what I already had on me, combined with some fairly mind-expanding tracking into new territory because it’s what I don’t know.
How about you? What do you think happens to us as we write into those questions about which we do not have immediate answers?
Michele: Oh, you know I love this question so much, and I love that you write in these places. There is something so sacred about the moments that are pregnant with questions and confusion and mystery. It’s really otherworldly. If we’re too busy moving on to the next thing because we’re too uncomfortable with the discomfort, we miss it. I live in Colorado, halfway between Denver and Colorado Springs. I go up to the mountains all the time. I’m a big hiker.
I will take my backpack with my black lab and we’ll go up and I’ll hike for five, six hours in the mountains, multiple miles out by myself in the middle of nowhere. When I approach the forest, the mountain, it just is one big scene, right? It’s the mountain. It’s the forest. I just see this, but I don’t see the intricacies of it. It’s just a massive mystery. The magic of hiking is the one step at a time walking through, and you don’t know what’s next. You don’t know what’s coming around the bend.
You have no idea. There’s a little bit of fear there. Let’s be honest, Colorado has black bears and mountain lions and all kinds of crazy wildlife, but there’s also beauty. If you refuse to hike the trail because you don’t want to experience the potential, the risk, the fear, you also miss out on the beauty. I think what writing does when we write into the mystery is we’re literally slapping on a backpack. We have no idea where it’s going to take us, but we’re choosing to do it one step at a time.
Marion: Perfect. That’s lovely. I love strapping on the backpack. That’s it. One step at a time. Yes, you’re absolutely right. And as we wrap this up, which I would prefer never to do, but hey, you’ve got to go for both. . .
Michele: I can always come back, Marion. We can always talk writing.
Marion: I think we should just make the deal that every book you come back and talk to us about writing. That would be perfect for me.
Michele: A pleasure.
Marion: But I must ask the question I ask every memoir writer when I interview them, what are we asking a memoir writer to do when we ask them to go back into a trauma? You went back into your three bouts of cancer. Are we asking you to reimagine it, relive it, reanimate it, or report on it cooly from here?
Michele: What I always say when people ask me this question, because memoir writing always comes at a cost. My first and third books were hardcore memoir. The second and fourth were narrative nonfiction, but had those memoir elements. When people ask me, I say, your job is to tell the truth about it. You do have to go back. I don’t think you fully relive it, but you go back and tell the truth about what happened to the best of your ability, for good or bad. You tell the truth about it.
Now, this is going to sound really dogmatic, so I’m going to break my own rule here. I don’t think we can stay cool about it. I think that’s part of the sacrifice memoirs make when we choose to tell our stories is that we have to emotionally connect with it if we want to emotionally connect with the reader. I love the reader so much that it’s worth it to me.
Marion: That’s a beautiful answer, Michele. I’m so grateful for it and for all of your work and for the time you’ve given me today. Thank you so much and go sell a bazillion copies of this book, please.
Michele: And you too. I still have my book of yours here on my desk, and I tell people about it all the time, The Memoir Project. I adore you, Marion. So grateful for you.
Marion: It’s mutual. Thank you. The writer is Michele Cushatt. Her new book is A Faith That Will Not Fail: 10 Practices to Build Up Your Faith When Your World Is Falling Apart. Just out from Zondervan. See more on her books wherever books are sold. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Adam Clairmont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing?
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