Empowered Women Empower Women

I find writing cathartic. I love writing about empowered women because women make up fifty percent of the population. The writing community has embraced me and I love interacting with them.

In the first interview, I talked to Jamie Weil about her mission, vision, youth mental health, balance, and creating sacred spaces in our lives. In the second interview, we talked about bipolar depression, spirituality, and being in a mixed marriage. In the third and final interview, we talk about writing and women empowerment.

Jamie Weil lives in Cottonwood, California. She writes everywhere. She has identified as a writer since third grade when her teacher sent her poem “Red” to the Record Searchlight and they published it. She has written for the children’s educational market, the adult non-fiction market, and has worked as a journalist, second-grade teacher, and mom. Her YA novel, First Break, was released on World Mental Health Day, 10/10/18. Her second YA novel “Intuition” was published almost exactly a year later on 10/2/19. She is currently in post-production on the pilot episode of “A Crazy Thought,” a groundbreaking docuseries on youth mental health and suicide which she is creating with a team of amazing award-winning female filmmakers.

Jamie, the writing community is an amazing community. I am enjoying interacting with them. What is different and unique about writers?

Oh my yes! I am so excited to have found this group on Twitter. They are teaching me in such a kind and gentle way how to interact in that space which I really haven’t understood up until now. Honestly, I get lost in the conversations where there are more than one @ and wonder “are you talking to me or?” I’m loving it though and I actually got a “trigger finger” on one #writerslift because I was so excited to finally interact! I had to go get X-rays, chiropractic, acupuncture, the whole nine! It still hurts and that was a month ago. Who knew Twitter with writers could cause injury?

Writers are the best. They are so observant and I love the way they tap into the ether to bring stories into consciousness. I love to watch the choices of medium they choose, their process, how they choose to put themselves into the world. They’re also very brave because when we write we pour out a piece of our souls for the world to see whether intentionally or not. I can sit and talk with writers for hours. I especially love the banter of television writers who write comedy because their minds are so quick and bounce off each other in such fun ways.

I feel like I’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg with the writer’s community. I am looking forward to digging so much deeper. I’ve even started keeping a notebook of my favorite @peeps. You’re in there, by the way.

Thanks for choosing me as one of your favorites. Art imitates life. Do you write from your own experiences?

Not usually in works for hire, but certainly in my young adult novels. My best writing has always come from that space. Sometimes tangentially, sometimes directly. For example, First Break was really from a space of watching closely what is happening in a psychotic break when my son was young but then seeing it over and over from various angles in other’s lives. Paige, the protagonist, is 17 because when I started that book, I had gone to a seminar at UCLA on the Lanterman-Petris Act which says that once a minor turns 18, they are in charge of their own decisions. However, a very common time for a psychotic break is this age transition and when one is in a psychotic break, their mind isn’t working well enough to make those decisions. Both men who made that law were there and said they had never intended for the horrible fall out that was happening from that law. In that case, I was very preoccupied with the stories I was hearing of young people lost in state hospitals due to the very privacy laws that were happening and leaving them super vulnerable.

In the case of Intuition, which was my second young adult novel published in 2019, this was based on my direct experience of having a babysitter who was a serial killer, tried to pick me up on the day of his last kill, and eventually was brought to trial (with my stepdad defending him as the Public Defender and calling me to testify), then executed on California’s death row at San Quentin. In that case, art definitely imitated life with the ability to push the time frame into contemporary and think about how technology may have affected that outcome differently.

In Chasing Sacred Spaces, I will definitely be writing from my own experience and that is non-fiction so the boundaries are different.

You are a filmmaker. The impact of visual art is totally different from written art. Do you notice the difference?

Completely different, especially in the area of documentary filmmaking. I came to filmmaking as the means to an end. I answered a calling centering around shifting the landscape of youth mental illness and suicide, beginning with youth. The calling was to use visual media that could reach more people, to make a movie that would make a movement. But like I said earlier, I had the issue that I was not a filmmaker and barely knew how to use my Iphone to take video. 

It was yet another education, but I feel like thinking through an interview with the film is similar to what you’re doing here. You put together a list of questions you think will guide the interviewee to tell their story in a way that relates to the whole. Then you have an additional step (about 100 additional steps) to think through and make a shortlist of how the story will be visually told. It was quite overwhelming at first and VERY expensive so you don’t want to mess up. It’s much more collaborative than the written word in that you have sound, camera people, writer, director, producer, talent, etc. and all those pieces need to be coordinated. It’s really hard to do them all yourself though I know people who do because it’s cheaper and less frustrating in many ways. But the magic of filmmaking is when you watch from concept to finished product and you put out a piece that really moves people. When the quarantine hit, filmmakers were locked down and couldn’t work, taking away this beautiful immersive medium that I personally so enjoy collectively experiencing in a theater. My husband and I see several movies per week. We have been really missing this during the pandemic. I called my executive producer on a docuseries we’ve been working on the past few years called “A Crazy Thought” and we brainstormed how to edit some of that footage into a few pieces that would really help people during the quarantine. We put together shorts called “Social Distancing Together – for the health of it -,” put them on Facebook and Instagram TV (IGTV) as a gift to the world. We couldn’t have done that with books in that immediate timing.

The written word, however, is my happy place. I have written over 50 journalistic articles, blogged on three different blogs with 300K words, over the past ten years, and have written 8 traditionally published books. I love to sit in my big red chair in my home office and write stories about causes, people, places, ideas, passions, food, wine, adventures, and ways I see the world. I love to play in different genres. From the moment my first poem “Red” was published when I was 7, I was hooked on writing for an audience, and in so doing, I could connect with them in some way.

Jamie, as a writer what does women empowerment, mean to you?

I think I covered this above in my novella, but basically it means listening to women’s voices. It means scooting over and making room at the table in real ways. It means understanding the “Me Too Movement” could only happen in a container that resembles a Gilead-like world so dramatically portrayed in The Handmaid’s Tale. Nearly every woman I know, including myself, have been sexually molested, assaulted, discriminated against, harassed both subtly or overtly at work, date raped, and so on. It’s just never-ending. Binary cultures have formed undercurrents where no matter how progressive a partnership may look, there is often still an underlying expectation that the woman will take care of the meal planning, shopping, cooking, cleaning, kids, and hold down a job or whatever else needs to be done. In same-sex partnerships, partners are presented with these dynamics as well, but somehow, they seem more balanced than the hetero partnerships I have seen.

Women empowerment, then, means having the resources, the voice, the stance to be in the world in a way where one’s gifts can shine, be used, be compensated in the same way men are. It means that women are addressed more like in indigenous matriarchies as the wise intuitive beings that are and less like all they have to offer are their bodies, their looks, and their ability to give birth and cook for the tribe. 

Recently, I’ve seen some very authentic deep conversations between women about women that I feel very excited about. Many women have “women issues,” but it is not ladylike to talk about these so historically they haven’t. However, as my son and daughter-in-law have taught gender studies over the years, I’ve had an opportunity to understand this both intellectually as a construct and personally in my own journey with sabotaging women. In Village of Oak Creek, near Sedona, it hit me on the women’s hat: Empowered Women Empower Women. The ones who don’t sabotage out of fear or retreat. We need to begin by empowering our girls early on with different education than they get now. We need to keep honest and open conversations about this topic between women on the surface and recognize that we have been trained to NOT talk about this. We need more allies like you in this space to pick up the cause, open the conversation, and get this party started because once enough women feel empowered, I truly believe we will be living on a much more peaceful planet.

Finally, what kind of music do you listen to when you write?

I always have a water feature nearby and am listening to that. Recently, I have been listening to this compilation soundtrack given to me that is supposed to activate and release flow. I think it works because that was what I was listening to when I wrote Chasing Sacred Spaces in a weekend.

Thank you so much Jerry for inviting me to your blog. I hope I didn’t write too much. I can’t believe we didn’t even get to the food!