From Captivity to Clarity: Reclaiming Your Voice and Writing Your Truth

Lisa [0:00]: 
Well, hello, Jessica, welcome to the podcast. I am so excited about today’s conversation. 

Jessica [0:06]: 
Thank you so much for having me. I am equally as excited.

Lisa [0:10]: 
Well, when I got the pitch, the first thing that I thought of was when you were rescued. Some people may not know what that is, but I remember when that ordeal happened, because it happened in 2012—at least the part that we were made privy to. That was a profound year for me as well. So, we’re going to talk about some of those things, but I always like to start by giving you a chance to let people know what you’d like them to know about you, about the books you’ve written (because you’ve written multiple books), and the work that you’re currently doing.

Jessica [0:43]: 
Thank you. Well, I mean, I could use a lot of words to describe myself. I’m a wife, a mom, a writer, and a publisher. But I guess most notably, I am a kidnapping survivor. I’m a teacher by profession, and I ended up getting a teaching job, which is what my heart craved and wanted, in East Africa right out of college. I met this cute Swedish guy at a trashy nightclub one night about 18 years ago, who, a year and a half after we met, became my husband. He was working in Somalia—he’s like the equivalent of a human rights lawyer. His organization moved him to be based in northern Somalia right when we got married. So, I quit my teaching job in Nairobi, Kenya, where we had met, and moved up to Hargeisa, Somaliland to be with him, because we didn’t want to have a long-distance marriage. Teachers can always find work; we always land on our feet. There’s always someone interested in learning English, or kids running around who want to play bingo or memory. So, I wasn’t too worried about keeping myself busy.

That morphed into working for the UN and for the Ministry of Education creating curriculum because curriculum development is my specialty. I landed a job working for a Danish organization in mine action and firearm safety education, which wasn’t my area of expertise, but you can learn technical information easily and apply that. That’s what I was doing in 2011 when I was called to go down to southern Somalia to conduct training for our staff. It was great, until it wasn’t. 

Three days into our training, my colleague and I were taken hostage while we were headed to the guest house. We were held at gunpoint and then taken out into the desert, where we were forced to participate in what I describe as a mock execution. We were held for 93 days in the desert until January 25, 2012, when we were rescued by SEAL Team Six, by order of President Obama. So that’s the very summary of that very defining 93 days of my life.

But that’s not where my writing journey began. I’ve always written. I started writing in the fifth grade on my mom’s typewriter. I’m an old soul, I think, because I would get up every Saturday morning, make myself a pot of black tea (I don’t know what fifth grader does that), and sit at my typewriter at my desk and write my little novels. But my publishing journey started about six months after the rescue, when I woke up one morning and said to my husband, “I think I’m ready to talk about this. Maybe I should start writing things down, because I know I’m going to start forgetting.” That led us on a very traditional publishing journey, which I had a great experience with. Not everybody does, but I did. I’ve been writing for about 12 years, which led me to working with women in my own publishing company. It’s a non-traditional publishing company where I only support women who’ve been through something—now they know something, and they want to teach us something. We’ve published several anthologies and memoir manifestos, as we like to call them. We just keep growing, keep publishing, and keep working with these incredible women who’ve overcome. It feels like my life’s calling, and it’s been a hard road and a long journey to get here, but now that I’m here, it feels special.

Lisa [4:49]: 
Yeah, I love that you’ve taken something so awful in your own life, and you’ve turned it around in such a beautiful way. You’ve created these anthologies, which don’t just give you a chance to share more of your story or look at things from a different angle, but you’re allowing other people to find their voices, hone their voices, and share their knowledge and wisdom with all of us. But I want to back up for a second and ask you about the publishing journey you had with your memoir Impossible Odds. You said that about six months in, you felt ready to write. I know for a lot of people, when they’ve gone through something really difficult, a lot of times there are no words for what we’ve experienced—it’s just a lived experience in our bodies. What was that like for you in your first draft or two to write all that down, and how did it help reframe or change the way you understood your experience?

Jessica [5:57]: 
Well, I want to give a bit of context around Impossible Odds. I got pregnant very quickly after the rescue. I found out about a month after the rescue that I was pregnant. So, I was thrown into the throes of expectant motherhood, which definitely threw me for a loop. I woke up, probably around five months pregnant, when I had finally stopped throwing up, and I think I had the bandwidth to think: “Okay, I’m going to bring this new life into the world, and this baby is coming in on the heels of this life-changing situation. I need to write all of this down for him before I forget.”

Because of the nature of my story, it was a very high-profile media event due to its connection to SEAL Team Six. There was a lot of media attention around it. I didn’t know what I was doing, because I’d never published before, but I found a literary agent who was happy to take me on. She was very well-versed in the process, but we only had about three months to get the manuscript written, and I was having a baby in the middle of it. I was still struggling with PTSD. There was no way I was going to be able to write the manuscript by myself. So, we brought in a ghostwriter to help, and my husband, who’s Swedish and whose first language isn’t English, didn’t feel capable of writing his part. The ghostwriter really helped and supported him, and then wrote the third section, which is more military-focused. But I wrote my parts of the book.

Yes, there were no words. In the aftermath, trying to tell my family about the experience, day by day, we gave up after about day five because none of us could handle any more of the details—it was too traumatizing. But it’s like that quote: “I write to know what I think.” I write so that I know what I feel. For me, writing is the only way to break myself out of the numbness. It cracked me open, and it got me ready to bring another life into the world, as ready as I could be. I think it also tethered me to the experience in a way that was of my choosing. I found the process to be empowering because it was the first time I had gotten to speak what was true for me, at least in that first layer. Now, there have been sub-layers of truth and themes that I’ve mined out over the decade or 12 years since this all happened, but it helped me at least get through that first part. Does that make sense?

Lisa [9:32]: 
Absolutely. And you know what I’m hearing, which is very common, is that there’s an aspect of reliving when we write about something traumatic. I mean, we’re always reliving, regardless of content, but when you’re beginning to relive those traumatic events, we feel them very deeply in our bodies. What I love that happened for you is that you were very supported. You had a ghostwriter who was there helping to shape things. You had an agent helping to shape things, and of course, you were writing your own pieces. But you had people around you to help you make sense of your experience at the level that you could at that stage. Because obviously, the story you told in that memoir is the story of someone who had just escaped something, not the story of someone who has healed—because you hadn’t gone on that journey yet.

Jessica [10:25]: 
Exactly. And I can’t write about something I haven’t experienced. I always say Impossible Odds is the account, right? It’s considered a bit more of a report. It’s the account of what happened. The anthologies, Deserts to Mountain Tops, are themed. Those, to me, are essays reflecting my healing journey. There are so many different facets to healing, and there are so many different things that one could write about. I just think that, you know, people give me so much backlash, especially on social media, about, like, “Can’t you write about anything else? Can’t you talk about anything else?” And I’m like, “Sure, but you don’t understand. This changed me at my core, and there are so many facets of who I am now that I view through that lens. I want to explore and write about that. And I’m okay with that.”

Lisa [11:28]:
Yeah, and what I would say is that 12 years is not that long when you’ve gone through something so traumatic. It takes a long time to unpack these things. What I see you unpacking on Instagram is your resilience, not necessarily the trauma narrative. Is that how you see it, or what work do you hope to accomplish, in addition to just mining at a deeper level?

Jessica [11:54]: 
I think I have several goals when I’m speaking on Instagram. I mean, my audience is always going to be women. I’m always trying to reach women who have felt shamed into silence. That is the audience that I serve, or I strive to, because a lot of it took me several years to realize that the kidnapping was a result of me abandoning myself, of me deferring my own safety and security to someone who didn’t have my best interests at heart, and somebody who bullied me, my colleague. And realizing that so many of the things that led me to that moment are very universal. And so, while my circumstances are kind of strange, everything I’ve learned about myself, and my own resilience is very universal. And so, I strive to remind those women that, you know what, you have, every right to share your story. If you feel compelled to do so, you have every right to speak, not just your truth, but the truth. You have every right to do this. So, that is my goal: to empower women to speak up and to share their story. 

It’s not for everyone. Not everybody feels like that’s part of their healing journey. But for the ones that it is, I want to show them that there’s freedom on the other side of that. Because I feel like once I started talking more openly about the self-abandonment, and about the fact that I felt bullied by my colleagues at work, and my disordered eating, and all the other things that I’ve written about and that I talk about on social media, it has been very empowering for me and has been resilience-building. And I think that I’m not the only one that it works that way for.

Lisa [13:47]:
Absolutely. I know several people who I would consider influencers now, in the sense of like, I have a brand or a product that I want to share with you. I think of my client, Tia Levings. She is someone who was very much shaped by her experience within the Christian patriarchy, and she talks about it all the time. And in sharing her experience, it doesn’t just empower her by giving her a platform to be able to talk about this, but it’s about the number of people who contact her and say, “Me too. This happened to me too.” 

I was moved by one of the essays in your anthology about how one of the issues that happened—one of the, I would say, things you probably know in retrospect about how this kidnapping happened, how you ended up in this situation—is how much you discounted your own internal voice and intuition around something not being right.

Jessica [14:42]:
Yep, yep. It still gives me chills to think about that morning. That is probably the most important moment of my life because I walked away from my truth. I walked away from a premonition. I mean, I had nightmares all night long; they were almost verbatim what played out in the next six hours. And I am not a person that’s like a prolific dreamer or, you know, has psychic abilities or anything like that. My intuition was just screaming at me, trying to keep me safe, and I abandoned her because I was afraid of inconveniencing people. I was afraid of what people would think. I was afraid I would lose my job. I was afraid of this, that, and the other. And I, you know, I grew up in the church. I grew up a good girl. I grew up in the Midwest. These are all behaviors and practices that were praised and modeled for me. And so, I say it’s the most important moment of my life, not just because it led me down this road that changed the trajectory of my life, but it also was so clarifying. It was the moment where I can go back to and say, “Oh, okay, that pattern. It’s time to put that to rest. Yes, we’re not going to repeat that lesson anymore, because we’ve learned it in a big, big way.” Yeah, and so that, to me, above all else, is the purpose and why I talk about it so much.

Lisa [16:32]:
And I think it’s important to be able to talk about these things. And what touched me is, you know, I told you before I hit the record button, you and I were both what I called 2012’d. We experienced that existential crisis, that big, terrible thing that impacted us. And in my case, mine is far less dramatic but was more long-standing was that I was bitten by a tick, and I got Lyme disease. What’s interesting is that I have that fulcrum moment as well. I went to the doctor. I was having this burning pain underneath my arms, which was really weird, like in my lymph nodes. I’d never had this before. I knew I’d been bitten by a tick, I’d had some other wonky symptoms, and I went to this doctor and said, “I think I have Lyme disease. I’m not super sick, but I don’t feel right either, and I’m having these weird symptoms.” And I knew something was wrong with my body. I knew, and I had known that something was wrong leading up to this as well, and I’d been dismissed by all these doctors. And this doctor looked at me and said, “You’re not sick enough to have Lyme disease. I can prescribe you some antibiotics, and I will hand you a piece of paper with a prescription on it, but you don’t have Lyme disease, and you don’t need to take these. What you need to do is to come back in six weeks and get tested, and then that will prove to you that you don’t have Lyme disease.” And internally, I felt this burning in my gut, like, “I don’t think this is right.” But at the same time, I don’t like antibiotics. I try not to take them. I also wanted to be a good patient, because I’d already been told I was a problem patient, right? Yep. And, you know, he was the authority, and so I did what he asked me to do. And it was the absolute worst thing that I could have done. I abandoned my inner knowing, and then I got to go on this wild ride, which lasted for years, where I was extremely sick, and I got to a place where I thought I was going to die. I’m grateful beyond grateful that I am not just alive but that I thrive. Yeah, and it gave me a chance to confront some of the traumas that were impacting my immune system—all that stuff. It was like the worst possible blessing. And so, I’m grateful for it, and yet I would not ask for it again. I would not wish it on anyone else. And so, I think that the way we tell our stories about not abandoning ourselves, even though our experiences are different, there was that universal theme that spoke to me, and I would imagine speaks to others.

Jessica [19:15]: 
And I feel for you on so many levels with that. I actually have two authors that I worked with in the second anthology, both with Lyme diagnoses, and their journeys are just like, you know, I got a message from one of them the other day, and she’s like, “I’ve had 20 good days straight,” which is amazing, but it’s been years—years, you know—of not being believed, right? Yeah. So, I feel that. All of that. I had a two-book contract with my publisher, and I went back to them several years later and said, “I’m ready to write a second book.” And it was about like, reclaiming my voice. It was about understanding that I had abandoned myself. And they were like, “Yeah, no, we’re not interested. We released you from your contract.” And I was really happy, actually, because I had already figured out that I wanted to start Soul Speak Press, and so I was elated to be liberated from that. But I was halfway through the manuscript and decided, the world doesn’t need another memoir from Jess Buchanan. 

There are so many women. I hear stories every day. I get DMs every day from women who have reclaimed themselves in some way. They’ve escaped violent marriages, domestic abuse, they’ve served in the military, escaped impending debt. I mean, just bonkers stories. And the throughline for all of us is this conditioning, this cultural conditioning, the patriarchy, right? And abandoning ourselves for the sake of authority, for the sake of, you know, I just thought everybody was smarter than me. Everybody knew better than me, and it turns out, everybody was lying to me and withholding pertinent information that I needed to make a decision about my own safety and security. And again, not everybody goes to Somalia and experiences being held hostage by pirates, but we all know what it feels like to be held hostage by something, and to be held hostage in silence. And so that’s why I published that first anthology about our collective journey to reclaiming our voice. I just put the call out. I mean, I didn’t have a very big audience or network at the time, but I said, “Hey, I’ve got a vision for this. I’ll work with you. I’ll help you find the theme in your story.” And it was just like women came in droves, like, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, me too, me too, me too, me too. I want to finally share my story.” And it was the most healing project I think I’ve ever, even until the end of all my time here on Earth and all the writing I hope that I get to do—that first act of just collective, that collective journey of reclaiming our voice and practice of writing together was transformational.

Lisa [22:20]:
Yeah, yeah. And I want to get into that a little bit more, but I’m going to backtrack, because you work as a book coach, and one of the things you do is you help people claim their voices. And back when you were in Somalia and you were in captivity, you did something that helped you find your voice, and that helped you begin to do this work. So, you would go through every single event that happened in your life, and you would think through it in a way that allowed you to reconcile it. And I want you to talk about this, because I work with so many women, especially, who have gone through really tough things, and they want to reconcile things, but they don’t know how. And I share lots of different ways, and I have a feeling there are going to be some similarities between what you did and what I teach, but I think it’s important for people to hear these things again and again, “This is how I did it,” so that it can serve as a model for something they could do. Could you take us through just one life event, how you thought about it, and how that helped you reframe and reclaim a piece of who you are so that you could go on to do this work? 

Jessica [23:34]: 
I love that question. Thank you. I would say it all stemmed, really, from a couple of reasons. One, I was trying just not to lose my mind. I needed to do—I needed to find something to do, right? And secondly, I kind of laugh in sarcasm or irony. I’m like, I’m the kind of person that doesn’t like to waste time, right? Like, I’m not going to take an opportunity for granted. So, I looked at all this time I had just yawning out before me. I had no idea how much time I had, but I also had some work to do. I had some emotional work that I was grappling with when all of this happened. I had lost my mom the year before, just a little over a year before, and we’d lost her very suddenly and very tragically. And so, I was still processing. I was still—we were all very much like in the throes of grief. I mentioned I grew up very religious, and that rocked my faith and my spiritual life to its core, losing my mom the way that we did. I was taking a spiritual sabbatical. I think that was the last thing I said to my dad during the last conversation I had with him before this all happened, was like, “God and I are on a break. I don’t feel like having any conversations with Him.” 

So now I’m 40 days in, thinking I’m probably going to be here for the foreseeable future. My mom and I had a very fraught relationship. And I thought, you know, no time like the present, why don’t I explore this? She had had a horrible childhood. She dealt with mental illness that greatly impacted me and my childhood. And so, I decided to just go back and remember it all. And I went from my very first memory, and I walked through every day that I could remember. I can’t claim that I remembered every single day of my life, but everything that I could remember and all the weird things that I’d never really thought through or taken time to examine, especially around my relationship with my mom and her mental illness. And I walked through those really difficult memories and those experiences that had impacted and traumatized me as a child, and it led me to a resolution. I wish that I’d had a pen and paper to have written through this whole experience, but I didn’t. But it led me to a place of forgiveness to her and to me, and some sort of like spiritual forgiveness between each other. Even though she wasn’t there, I could feel very much that her spirit and her presence was there, and I had conversations with her that I’d never had when she was living, and I never would have had the time or the opportunity, I think, to do that, to bury those grudges. Like, I got real into it, you know? It was like Cast Away,you know, how he starts talking to the volleyball. Like, I’m pretty sure that’s what it looked like, you know? But I was having this very physical experience in a very emotional and spiritual space. But I remember picking up a stick and digging in the ground next to my mat, and mimicking, like, burying my grudges and laying them to rest there, and—and then, you know, moving and walking away. And so, I think that practice, I would never have had the opportunity or taken the time to do that, and a lot of it revolved around people I needed to forgive, and that was very freeing to process in that way, completely on my own, pretty much in solitude. When I wasn’t being terrorized, there were long spans of just silence and solitude. And so, I think that another version of myself came out on the other side of that. And to me, that’s—that’s healing.

Lisa [28:03]: 
Absolutely. And so three things I’m curious about are that I teach, when I teach forgiveness, I think it can be really important to the work that we do as book coaches, as people who are helping others with their stories, are: number one, bearing witness to your own experience, and really allowing yourself to feel whatever it is you need to feel, whether that is deep sorrow or incredible rage. And then also being able to see through someone else’s eyes, you know, to do that perspective-taking work can be helpful, and then you had this beautiful practice of a physical way of putting it to rest. And we often discount these things, like, you know, writing is one way to do it, yeah? But sometimes we need a ceremony, something physical, something tangible, that we do that moves us forward, yes?

Jessica [28:59]:
Yes. Yes. I am a big ceremony person. Every October, I hold a grieving ceremony. Sometimes I do it with friends. Sometimes I just do it by myself. And every morning begins with the ceremony. And that has, I think, that’s transformational, not just in your healing, but also just like practice of your writing. Like, just, you know, like signaling, “Okay, it’s time to start,” and end with a ritual or a ceremony. But it’s symbolic, but it also is just so—it makes everything feel so much more tangible. And I think, you know, we talk about healing in the abstract so much. And for me, it made it something I could touch, taste, feel, and it was like closure, right? It was like my closing ceremony. So, I love that you use that word, because that really resonates with me. Yeah.

Lisa [29:55]: 
I’ve had many ceremonies in my life to move past some of the things that I’ve gone through, and so when you’re working with your coaching clients, or you are putting out those calls for your anthologies, how does that work that you did translate to the work that you do with these women who have had powerful experiences, and they now know something from them?

Jessica [30:20]: 
I am a terrific space holder. I think that the number one thing I bring to the table when I’m working with a client is that they’re safe with me, their reactions, and their emotions—they’re really crappy first drafts—it’s all safe with me. And I’m a teacher, first and foremost, and so I’m always striving for all of us to learn, whether it’s about ourselves or about memoir writing technique. We get definitely into the logistics around publishing and book launches and all of that. But I think it first starts with this open-hearted space of like, “Tell me your story. Yeah, what happened? How did you feel about it then? And let’s try to find that thread about how you feel about it now.” Yeah, everything is—it’s all allowed. It’s all okay. We have time to tweak, we have time to redraft. But it all starts at the very—the very first question of—I can’t remember who says it—Maya Angelou, maybe, who’s like, “Tell me where it hurts.” And like, how often does anybody ever ask you that?

Lisa [31:49]:
Right? And yet, it’s one of the most important questions that you can ask someone. And I love that that is the place where you start, “Tell me where it hurts,” because we all have a hurt and yet we are not our hurts, which is something that you also say a lot, that we are the resilience inside us that allows us to hold space for our hurts and also to live anyway and to not allow those things to define us. I love your TED Talk, where you say, “Change is proof of life.” And I wonder, is that something you say to your clients? Do you have them watch that, or have them think about how change is proof of life in their own story or in their own experience?

Jessica [32:41]: 
I don’t know if I, like, reference that, per se, but I think it kind of comes through in just my approach and everything, because it’s just foundational to how I think and how I live and how I work, right? I’m not into toxic positivity. You know, Deserts to Mountain Tops is the theme of the anthologies where I’m the lead author. So, we talk a lot about that that mountaintop looks different to everybody, and it doesn’t have to be all like tidy, pretty, tied up with a bow. Your mountaintop could be, you know, for—I have one author who’s contributing to The Pilgrimage of Motherhood, and she’s writing about her journey with her daughter, who’s 30, who’s mentally ill, and it’s not going to get better, yeah. And one would say, “Well, where’s the hope in that story? Where’s the mountaintop in that story?” And, and we—she and I have had that conversation, and to me, the mountaintop is you’re here writing about it. Yeah, you’re brave enough to take us through this journey that has just been heart achingly beautiful and just filled with sorrow, and you’re letting us into your world, and you have the courage to do that. That, to me, is a mountaintop. Yeah, right, absolutely. So, I mean, back to the change as your proof of life. I mean, I think that that’s kind of like just the theme and the approach that we take to everything that we do at Soul Speak Press, like these, changes these—you know, I use the word “change” instead of kidnapping because it works better in a TEDx Talk. But, as you said, 2012’d, like it, it took you on this wild ride that you would never want to go on again. But also, look where you’re at now, and what you’re doing and what you’ve learned. And to me, that’s the point, like, it’s very simple, it’s very cliché, but to me, that’s the whole point of life. Yes, just learn these lessons.

Lisa [34:54]: 
It is. And we all get a chance to either learn them or not, and if we choose not to, we will repeat them. That is definitely for sure. And I have certainly had my fair share of those things happen. But yeah, I think being able to accept that change is reality, and to understand that different does not need to be spectacular is so important, because readers will call BS if you do that. Life never wraps up in a bow, nope. And I have certainly read some memoirs by best-selling authors where I’m like, I don’t know, um, I’ve kind of experienced some of these things. I know there’s a little more nuance there. And I think making it real for people is important. 

By the time this comes out, I will have published an essay in HuffPost on emotional flashbacks. It’s going to be coming out in a couple of weeks, because for those of you who are listening, we’re recording this in August. And you know, I’m a person who has done a lot of healing. I also have a degree in clinical mental health counseling. I have worked with trauma survivors for many years, and yet, the reality of being a person who has complex PTSD is that sometimes my nervous system goes wonky, and it does things that can be crippling. And yet it does not mean that I am broken, but it is also the reality. And I wrote this essay, and I shared this because so many people go through this, and they don’t understand what it is, and they feel like there’s something terribly wrong with them. But the reality is, is they’ve just been through something, yes, and they’re experiencing an echo of that experience.

Jessica [36:51]: 
Yeah. I think in our culture, in our society, we don’t leave time or space or opportunity to go through something. Yeah, we don’t. We just, like, deny, deny, deny. You don’t have Lyme disease. You don’t have Lyme disease. Like, that’s, you know, you’re—you don’t need these. It’s just like, always, I do. I feel like that’s so prevalent. And I hear these stories all the time, and I think that that’s why the work that I do resonates with the women that it’s meant to resonate with. Because, finally, there’s a place for them to go where they can either—I think generally we work with the woman who has gone through it and healed to a certain point where she’s ready to start writing about it and talking about it. But occasionally, we get someone who hasn’t started that journey, and so we’re privileged and honored to get to initiate that with them and to walk with them as they go through that. And it’s hard, yeah, but we hold the space for them.

Lisa [38:05]: 
And that is such a gift, because not everyone begins their healing journey in a therapy session. You know, some people don’t have access to care, either because of funds or because of other things, and so wherever we begin is a gem for that person and for us to be able to be part of that experience.

Jessica [38:30]: 
Yes, absolutely. It’s just important that we begin.

Lisa [38:34]
And you are holding space for a bunch of authors who are writing about motherhood. You’re writing an essay about motherhood, and this is going to air in December, which means the publication of your new anthology is going to be just a few weeks away. So, tell us about this upcoming anthology and what you’re writing for it. 

Jessica [38:59]: 
Deserts to Mountain Tops, Volume 3 is our third, and it’s called The Pilgrimage of Motherhood. And I have had that title in my heart since my kids were babies, so I’ve held on to that for like, seven, eight years. I remember exactly where I was when that title came to me. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I’m so happy it gets to title this volume. We have 22 women contributing, and I mean, the stories are as varied and diverse as the women themselves, really harrowing journeys many of them have been on. In my story, I’m still writing the essay, so I’m not sure how it’s all going to evolve, but really, it’s about how I got pregnant with my son about a week after the rescue. So, you know, we always joke that my book is called Impossible Odds, but that was the impossible odds, like, how…how the hell did that happen? But here we are, and he’s a big, huge, almost as tall as me now, he’s almost 12. And really, what that process was like, because that was re-traumatizing, right? I went from one hostage situation to what felt like another hostage situation, like I didn’t know what was happening to my body and it was just completely unexpected. And really my evolution as a mother through this journey, and how he saved me, I think a second time. I could have seen my healing journey having gone down maybe a rougher road, had I not had to show up for him in those early days of trauma recovery and healing. 

And, you know, we had talked a little bit before we started recording about it happening so close to my kidnapping trauma that I wasn’t ever sure, like, was my anxiety linked to PTSD from the kidnapping, or was it just motherhood? So, trying to extrapolate what it was, was really interesting, and something that I’ve just poured—I probably have 20 journals that I’ll go back through, but I’m really excited about it. I’m always excited about the anthologies that we put out, but this one feels like an accomplishment, because what is a pilgrimage? It’s a sacred, spiritual journey. And I feel somehow that it—to me, it’s that I’ve come full circle. You know, if we want to look at the hero’s journey, you know, like, this feels like I needed that cycle for this facet of my life and my story, to a certain degree. Anyway, that’s how I like to think of it. So yes, the book comes out on January 25, 2025, and yeah, we’re really excited about it.

Lisa [42:00]: 
Wonderful. And are you doing pre-orders?

Jessica [42:03]: 
We don’t. We just load them all up on launch day. But if anybody wants to help with the book launch, to do advanced reader reviews, we would love some help. So, feel free to reach out.

Lisa [42:20]: 
Well, speaking of such things, I’m going to ask you again at the end about all the ways that people can connect with you, but is there one way you would like people who would like to be advanced readers to connect with you?

Jessica [42:32]: 
Sure, they could email us at hello@soulspeakpress.com, and we will get them all set up.

Lisa [42:39]: 
Beautiful. So, you’re a writer, you’re a writing coach. You work with so many different women. What is one of the best pieces of writing advice that you either share with others or that someone shared with you?

Jessica [42:52]: 
First, get it out, then get it right.

Lisa [42:55]: 
I love that.

Jessica [42:58]: 
Yeah, I think so many of my writers, my authors, they get so stuck in perfection. And a lot of the writers that come to us are inexperienced. This is—they have a story to share, but they’ve never really written. So, we’re taking baby steps, and that’s again, like, why we go back to the drawing board and just tell me your story. Tell me what happened, tell me where it hurts, and we’ll help you get it down on paper. But first, we’ve got to get it out.

Lisa [43:29]: 
And that is true for anyone, whether you are writing about something really difficult or something that maybe is more informational. Just get it out, then get it right. So that’s beautiful. So, as you hold space for all these people and for your healing, because, as we both know, healing is an ongoing journey, we’re always unpeeling another layer of the onion. What’s one way that you nurture your resilience?

Jessica [43:56]: 
Well, I would say, a lot of time alone. I am an outgoing introvert. I’ve landed on that, I think, and it is imperative for me, for my mental health, my emotional, spiritual health, my creativity. It’s hard to carve that out when I have two little kids and clients and a husband who works from home, but that’s why that sacred start is really important for me. First thing in the morning, when everybody else is still asleep, their energy is not meshing, like trying to overtake my energy. You know, it’s just a very sacred time for me. So that, and of course, you know, nature heals, nature absorbs, nature supports always. And so those are crucial for my healing.

Lisa [44:50]: 
And the same for me. And you have a connection to Charlottesville, Virginia, which is where 

where I live, and something that is not too far from Charlottesville, Virginia is—is the Porches, which is a writing retreat out in the middle of nowhere in Nelson County. And sometimes I will go to the Porches so that I can just commune with nature. Because even if you can do it for one day or two days, just having that time of solitude is so important, I think, especially as women.

Jessica [45:18]: 
Absolutely. What a gift to have it so close by. We’re starting to do writing retreats, and we’re having our first one for our anthology authors in April, and we’re going to Asheville. I’m super excited about it, because just 10 of us getting together, taking time to write and to share and to heal, and move to that next level, it’s going to be special.

Lisa [45:46]: 
I love that, and I love Asheville. The energy there is just so great. I taught in Boone, at Appalachian State University, which is pretty close to Asheville. I taught there in—was it 2006? I spent a month and a half in the mountains, and it was just a gorgeous setting. And there is just a special energy there.

Jessica [46:09]: 
Yeah, and I mean that energy is like, what draws it out, right? Yes, you know, it’s just, it’s—there’s nothing like it. So, yeah, I’m super excited.

Lisa [46:21]: 
Well, if people want to buy your anthology, check out all the things you’re doing, and learn more about Soul Speak Press, what are the best ways for people to connect with you?

Jessica [46:31]
Thank you. Well, I’m on Instagram. That’s pretty much my main social media platform. So, @JessicaCBuchanan, or @SoulSpeakPress. You can connect with us there. I’m active on both handles. You can check us out at soulspeakpress.com. We’re currently getting ready to rebrand, so we’ll have a brand-new website by the time this comes out. So, I’m excited about that. And then you could just email me at info@jessbuchanan.com or my team at hello@soulspeakpress.com. We would love to hear your story.

Lisa [47:04]:
Wonderful, and all of that will be in the show notes if you missed it. So, fear not. You can connect with Jessica any way you would like. Well, Jessica, thank you so much for being on the podcast. It has been a pleasure to speak with you, and I’ve absolutely loved our conversation.

Jessica [47:19]:
Well, thank you so much for the opportunity, and I have loved it too. What great questions! I’m so appreciative.