Episode 161 with Ashlee Gadd
Igniting Play and Creativity in Motherhood
SHOW NOTES:
Learn more about Ashlee here >> Ashleegadd.com
and here >>ashleegaddphoto.com/
and here >> @ashleegadd on Instagram
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RELATED EPISODES:
1KHO 112: Let the Mothers Go Out to Play! | Leah Boden, Modern Miss Mason
1KHO 102: Why Creativity Matters in our Broken World | Rachel Marie Kang, Let There Be Art
SHOW TRANSCRIPT:
161 ASHLEE GADD
Ginny Yurich Here we go. Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich. I am the founder of 1000 Hours Outside, and I'm so excited to be talking to Ashley Gadd today. Welcome.
Ashlee Gadd Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Ginny Yurich So we connected on Instagram, which is amazing that we connected because you delete your Instagram every other week. And so I hit the jackpot. I connected on the week that you were there, one of the weeks that you were there, but you just came out with a phenomenal new book. It caught my eye right away. It's beautiful. And the topic about creating in the margins of motherhood is such an important one. So this is called Create anyway, the joy of pursuing creativity in the margins of Motherhood. I love that the name is a signature. I think that's so cool and unique. Just a beautiful book. And it caught my eye and then it caught my heart. I really, really loved it. Ashley So thanks so much for taking the time to be here. Could you tell people a little bit about you before we dive into this incredible book?
Ashlee Gadd Sure.
Ashlee Gadd Well, thank you so much for that warm welcome. And I love that it caught my eye and then caught my heart. That feels.
Ashlee Gadd Like.
Ashlee Gadd Marketing copy I could put on something.
Ashlee Gadd So thank you. Yes, I am.
Ashlee Gadd My name is Ashley Gadd. I am a writer and a photographer. I live in Northern California with my husband, Brett. We've been married for 15 years and we have three kiddos ages 11, eight and four. And in my spare time I run an online community for mothers called Coffee and Crumbs. I don't really do that. My spare time. That takes up a lot of my time, but that's. That's pretty much me.
Ashlee Gadd Yeah.
Ginny Yurich So people can find you everywhere. So you've got your website. Ashley Gatcombe. Your photography site is so beautiful and it was really cool. I looked at your photography site after reading your book and about how you sort of went back and went into this approach of going into people's homes and capturing their every day. So that's. Ashley Gad photo dot com And I loved seeing that because I just saw it just capturing the everyday moments in people's homes and it's just stunning. And you have your Coffee and Crumbs podcast, which is fantastic. And so this book just came out in March and I know that people are absolutely loving it. I loved it from the very get go. This quote that starts it out that says mother shape, love and macaroni and sleeplessness and soap into young men and women over the course of many years. Is there a greater art or more powerful patient creativity than that? From Brian Doyle. Wow. I was like, Stop me in my tracks. Wow, what a quote.
Ashlee Gadd This second I read that quote. I immediately I was reading that book while I was already working on Create anyway. And it was just one of those perfect moments where I just knew.
Ashlee Gadd Immediately that has to go in the book. That has to be the first quote in the book. It's just sums.
Ashlee Gadd It up so nicely.
Ginny Yurich And it's just gorgeous. It catches your attention. You've just got beautiful photography in here. But a big premise of this book is motherhood versus creativity. And I think that so many of us think it has to be versus motherhood versus creativity, but you tell a different story. What is your view on motherhood and creativity as opposing forces?
Ashlee Gadd Yeah, I think when I you know, when I first became a mother, that's the only way I could see it, right, was that motherhood was taking away time and energy and passion from my creativity and my creativity was taking away time and energy and passion for my motherhood. And I spent.
Ashlee Gadd A.
Ashlee Gadd Lot of years in those early years of, you know, the fog of motherhood, of of just transitioning into being a mother and then having another child. Two years later, I spent so much time wrestling with this idea that I couldn't do both.
Ashlee Gadd But I wanted to do both, you know, in.
Ashlee Gadd Wrestling with that idea that I couldn't really fathom but obviously.
Ashlee Gadd Can't give my children up. So ours kind of falls.
Ashlee Gadd On to the other side of the plate right as the only option. And yet it didn't really feel like an option because to give up my art, to give up my creativity, to give up writing, to give up photography, to give up all the things I love to do that make me feel alive, you know, would be giving up a part of myself. So this book is really kind of the culmination of, you know, I've been a mom for 11 years. I still have so much to learn and experience about motherhood. But I would say anyway is sort of everything I've learned in my first decade of motherhood, of really leaning into the idea of turning that narrative on its head, you know, and leaning into the idea that my motherhood can actually bless and. To inspire my creativity and my creativity can actually blast and inspire my motherhood. And once I kind of was able to move past that scarcity mentality that both of those things were like siphoning each other off, you know, that there was actually such a value add in letting them blend together. As messy as it is, and it often is. And that's sort of the premise of the book.
Ginny Yurich Yeah. And it makes me think like, don't we want our children to have these sort of creative, interesting, unique mothers? Doesn't that make their life more fun to you and more interesting that we're all a little different and we're pursuing these things that we love? And one of the things that's really cool about the book is that while you were writing it, you were also pursuing a new creative act, something that you were a beginner at. So can you tell us about your film photography?
Ashlee Gadd Yeah, I would love to. So it's funny, when I first started learning film, I wasn't it wasn't connected to the book. I just wanted to learn how to shoot film. And interestingly enough, learning to shoot film and the desire to learn to shoot film came up during my morning pages. So morning pages are a practice that Julia Cameron swears by. It's the practice of writing three pages of stream of consciousness thoughts first thing in the morning. And I will confess I have like a love hate start stop relationship with that.
Ashlee Gadd So I don't want anyone to think that I've been doing.
Ashlee Gadd That for years. And I do it every day. Not at all. But I've gone through fits and bursts of wanting to do morning pages, and when I happened to be in a good habit of it, I just kept noticing that over and over again. That was coming up in my random journaling in the morning that I really wanted to learn how to shoot film. And so I set out to teach myself how to shoot film. And I mean, I did not know anything. I bought a used camera off eBay and watched a bunch of YouTube videos and Googled my.
Ashlee Gadd Way through it. I mean, it is crazy.
Ginny Yurich That this is the time that we're at in the world, though I have childhood memories of winding it, you know, attaching the little there's little holes and you got to put them in the little prongs and then you got to find it. Now people have to go to YouTube. They've never done it.
Ashlee Gadd They never done it.
Ashlee Gadd I'm a self-taught photographer digitally, so I have a DSLR and I've had multiple the last four years. And I I've gotten quite equipped at handling a DSLR camera. But yeah, shooting film is actually so different. You wouldn't think it's so different, but it is so different. And a lot of the rules are flip flopped with film and digital. And so it was quite a learning curve for me. And as I was learning how to shoot film, it was actually just so fun because I was really living out so many different parts of Create. Anyway, in the practice, I was learning a new thing. I was taking risks, I was trying something I wasn't good at. I was having to keep my perfectionism at bay and just kind of putting in the work, putting in the discipline of learning a new creative skill. And it was so fulfilling for me that when it finally came time to actually design the book and talk through, I always knew there were going to be photos in the book, but it wasn't probably until we were kind of halfway through those conversations that I threw out the idea, What if, you know, we only put film photos in the book and then that's kind of representative of the journey of learning film. And it kind of really speaks to the idea of create anyway in real time. And so my editor really loved that, and I was fortunate enough that they gave me some extra time to put all the photos together. You know, film photography is just an incredibly slower process than digital. I can shoot a bunch of digital images in one afternoon and have them edited and ready to go and film. You know, you have to send your images to a lab. You have to wait for them to be scanned. It's just a much slower process. And so I'm really thrilled that we got to do that for this book. It just it meant a lot to me, you know, even if it doesn't mean a lot to other people. That meant a lot to me.
Ginny Yurich But I think that it does. And I think that, you know, when you talk about you love to find the light, you follow the light. And the book is very light. All of these photos, every single one I loved every single one. You It was definitely something that made the book even more endearing. The photos are so beautiful and it was so neat to think you were learning something new as you were writing this book. And I think that leads to this thought about perfectionism. You have a lot of information out earlier about being a perfectionist or a beginner, like the same type of thing. You're like, you know, I don't want to start because it's not going to be perfect. And you had a really cool quote in there. Be willing to be a bad artist. If someone is willing to be a bad artist, they have a chance to be an artist and perhaps over time, a very good one from Julia Cameron I thought was such a cool quote. So you have in there you have this phone time peanut butter cup trick. Know it's about minutes in the seat. So can you tell us about that? Yeah.
Ashlee Gadd You know, it's.
Ashlee Gadd Such a big part. I think that oftentimes if you maybe don't identify, you know, as a full blown artist, I personally believe every human being is creative. But for the sake of this conversation, we'll talk about kind of the idea of being an artist. I think there are so many notions of being an artist that are over glamorized and maybe oversimplified. I think that oftentimes when we think about an artist, we think about a writer, We think about these.
Ashlee Gadd Like.
Ashlee Gadd Moments of inspiration, you know, where the muse just arrives and we just churn out a magical piece of art. And it's just this really like sacred, amazing experience. And while no doubt that does happen super occasionally, very, very rarely.
Ashlee Gadd It does.
Ashlee Gadd Happen. I don't want to discount that. What happens more, I believe our artists, writers, etc., putting their butts in the chair and working on their craft. And that is the unglamorous, it's the unsexy part, but it's such an imperative part. And when I think of, you know, over the span of time, specifically with writing for me of where and how I've grown as a writer, I've really grown in my stamina, in my endurance and my my ability to sit down in the chair and do the work. And so.
Ashlee Gadd Sometimes I still.
Ashlee Gadd Don't feel like it. And that's where the phone timer in the peanut butter cup comes into play, because I am not above a bribe and I am not above bribing myself. And sometimes you just got to do the work. And for me, occasionally that looks like putting a peanut butter cup on the edge of my desk and I set my timer for 30 minutes, and after I write for 30 minutes, I get to eat it.
Ginny Yurich I love it. Well, and I really related because you talked about now see, I have a camera and I've always wanted to be a photographer and I'm just really not good. I'm not that good. And I try and get better and I try and take these courses and I have succumbed to oh, oh, if I just had that lens. And then you get the lens and you're like, Wait a minute, this is me. And so I, like you talked in the book about how, look, I spent all this time researching the lens. I bought the lens I spent all this time researching. You talked about signing up for some sort of a writer, like a, you know, some word editor or something like that, the fancy word processing program or the Masters of Fine Arts. You're like, all that time that I was been chasing those things, I could have been actually creating and getting better. And so I really, really related to the buying photography gadgets instead of taking pictures. And so in that vein, you had really good advice about taking inventory of what you already have. So what might that look like in someone's life?
Ashlee Gadd Yeah, I mean, it depends on your craft and what you're interested in, you know? So a Gardner's going to look different from a baker is going to look different from a photographer. But I think so often we discount what we have inside of us. You know, photographers need more than just a camera and a lens. We need imagination and we need wonder and we need a hunger for light. And we need the ability to pay attention. We need the ability to wait for a moment. We need patience. A photographer need all kinds of things that are not related to the gear. So I love to just encourage women to just take inventory. What's inside you, what's in your heart, what's in your mind, what's in your soul? What do you bring to the table even when you're totally empty handed? You know, we are going to need some stuff.
Ashlee Gadd To be.
Ashlee Gadd Creative, to make things, to create art. We are going to need some supplies. But more often than not, I think we so quickly are just looking sort of. I mean, I know for me I used to. That is procrastination, you know, with photography where I was spending hours upon hours in these random forums on the Internet just.
Ashlee Gadd Trying to figure out what was.
Ashlee Gadd The secret sauce to making me a better photographer. Like I was missing it. There was a golden ticket out there, and surely I could find it on Amazon if someone would just light the way. But more often than not.
Ashlee Gadd The truth is what I.
Ashlee Gadd Really needed to become a better photographer was patience and practice. I needed to take more pictures. I needed to try and fail and try and fail and try and fail a million times. And then somehow my pictures did get better. I mean, that is the secret sauce. It almost seems too good to be true. But there is something really incredible that happens when you just commit to doing the work right.
Ginny Yurich And that goes all the way throughout your book, because then you also have this burnt candle thing where you've collected all of these candles. I'd love to hear about that. And actually it was really cool. I saw that Presley now does it. She has.
Ashlee Gadd And I'm raising a diva diva.
Ashlee Gadd That's her.
Ginny Yurich Modeling. And I think that's actually really cool. So I mean, that's another similar thing. How you use these candles and then you has a gorgeous pictures of them. So tell us about that.
Ashlee Gadd Yeah, So I am I am not a hoarder in the slightest. I am the anti hoarder. I'm the only anti hoarder in my family. I should clarify, I pretty much live with a bunch of hoarders, but I'm not a hoarder. And yet while I was working on it anyway, I had this one day. I think I was only working on the book proposal and I had a candle on my desk that had burnt out and when the little kind of like puff of smoke came up, I just realized in this moment I was staring at it, kind of mesmerized, realizing how many hours and hours and hours and hours I'd already poured into this book. And I was only in the proposal process. It was still so early and it had already just consumed so much of my time, so much of my energy, my brain space, my passion. And I just really wanted to commemorate the act of writing. Every day when I sit down and I write a candle, it's not like I'm churning out 2000 words. I mean, sometimes I sit down and I write a candle and I write absolutely nothing. I sit there and I write two sentences, and then I delete them. And then I stare at the wall. And then I just like John. And then I write two words, you know what I mean? Writing is a mess sometimes, and it's not easy and it's not simple. And I wanted something to commemorate the time that I had spent. So it's not related to word count. It's not related to any kind of specific output other than minutes that my butt was in the chair and I was writing. And so I ended up keeping every candle that I burned out while I wrote the book. And I kept them in a bag in my closet like a hoarder, which is very against my tendencies. But that bag became so special to me, and every single time I added a candle to it, I could hear it like plunk in the bag and it just blew my mind. At the very end, I decided to kind of early on, I'm going to keep all these candles, and when I'm all done with the book, I'm going to take a picture of them on my dining room table. And that is what I did. And it is one of my it's my favorite picture in the whole book is the one you can see my feet in the bag of candles. And I, I haven't actually printed it and framed it yet, but I want to I'm going to print that and frame it in my bedroom just as a reminder of how much time truly went into this book and how really, you know, none of it was wasted. Even the days that felt like it was all a waste because I wasn't moving forward, none of it was wasted.
Ginny Yurich Wow. And the candles are in here more than once because they're also in the back cover, which I thought was a really, really cool ending. I just absolutely loved the picture where they're in the basket and your feet are in there and really neat that it's a reminder that our children are watching because I saw the poster Pressley's painting.
Ashlee Gadd You know, she's little, she's got.
Ginny Yurich Her Kindle. So they're watching.
Ashlee Gadd She is now she is now demanding a candle when she makes art.
Ashlee Gadd Just mama, can you make candle.
Ashlee Gadd Like, oh, goodness. If there's two of us using candles in here every time we make art.
Ashlee Gadd We are going to burn through our collection a lot faster.
Ginny Yurich Well, that's really sweet. I thought that was like a really big connection point I think that anyone could do. It's a celebration. All those burn candles are a celebration. And it means that you've put time toward something that you are passionate about. And so people could do that with anything when they're baking, when they are playing music. So I think that's just a really, really cool idea. The Candle Hoarder Story. It's a good one. You say the more we create, the more we create. So just things that are flowing into each other. Okay. And a couple questions are there were some things that came up and I was like, Ooh, I want to know more. So you're talking about sort of this imposter syndrome and fear. You said this one sentence feeling that I had somehow conned my way into a book contract. And I want to know that story.
Ashlee Gadd Yeah, I so I've been writing on the Internet for a very long time. I actually just did the math recently, and I've been writing on the Internet for over 14 years. And at some point, you know, I really feel like.
Ashlee Gadd I.
Ashlee Gadd Am trying to think of exactly how I want to articulate this. It's almost as if I had labeled myself an Internet writer. You know, this is a woman who writes online. I'm proud of a lot of the writing I've done online. I don't discount it. It's not like book writing versus Internet writing is all that different. But in my head it was. And in my head I belonged in one column and I didn't belong in the other column. And so when Create anyway started to take shape and really take up a lot of space in my heart and all of it was very God led, I felt very compelled, very nudged, very spiritually moved to pursue this project. And when I started taking the steps forward, doors were just flinging open left and right. And while I firmly believe that was God's provision over the. This project. There was still so much doubt all along the way, right, that me, these publishers want to meet with me. Don't they know? I just write on the Internet.
Ashlee Gadd Don't they know I'm not I'm not even a real writer. You know.
Ashlee Gadd I told myself so many stories and I'm thankful that by God's grace I was able to just to keep going and silence those voices in my head that were telling me pretty much all the time that someone was going to figure out that I'm a fraud. And I don't I don't actually know how to write a book. And I'm not actually a very good writer. And, you know, I would say I battled that in the two years that I was working on this book. Those voices creeped up all the time. You know, they were there. They were present. Yeah. I mean, Peter, apparently.
Ginny Yurich Interesting. You've been writing for 14 years. That is a long time. And yet you had to sell it to yourself.
Ashlee Gadd Totally more than once. Yes.
Ginny Yurich Yeah. Yeah. And now you're in both columns. You're an Internet writer and.
Ashlee Gadd You're a writer. Even even with the book, you know.
Ashlee Gadd So many times along the way, my literary agent, my publisher, have asked, Do you have another book idea? Do is there.
Ashlee Gadd Anything else cooking in there? And I was so quick.
Ashlee Gadd To say all throughout the process, No, no, no, no, no. I'm a I'm a one trick pony. I'm a one hit wonder.
Ashlee Gadd I don't even know how I'm doing this. There is going to be nothing else after, you know for sure.
Ashlee Gadd And then, lo and behold, exactly six weeks after Crete anyway came out, I sat down in my backyard with a notepad, and I started writing down ideas for what I think might be another future book.
Ashlee Gadd Because actually.
Ginny Yurich The more we create, the more.
Ashlee Gadd We create.
Ginny Yurich This is how.
Ashlee Gadd Work, right?
Ginny Yurich Yeah. So no one is a one trick pony. Everyone's got more. If you do it, more is going to come. I love that. Okay, so then I had another question which relates to that because you started with a health blog, so you said right now you're at Ashley Gatcombe and before that was where my heart resides. And before that it said Health Blog, but it didn't give the name and I want to know the name.
Ashlee Gadd Oh, I won't tell you the name. I was so mortified by this, by the way. And I and this is not.
Ashlee Gadd Out there anywhere. I mean, I'm sure if you Google it like nothing will come up because my husband has a rest. He's promised me it's all there is.
Ashlee Gadd I had a blog called.
Ashlee Gadd A Hearty.
Ashlee Gadd Dose of Health dot com and the rest of it this is it is is truly so.
Ashlee Gadd Hilarious is that I am not the epitome of health. I mean most people who know me I am I'm not terribly unhealthy.
Ashlee Gadd You know, I try to.
Ashlee Gadd Take care of myself, but I am not I am not the poster girl for nutrition. I'm not the poster girl for exercise at all. So it's hilarious to me that that was actually my foray into writing on the Internet.
Ashlee Gadd Was Health blog cool. That's was that.
Ginny Yurich Girls I mean it's good people need to know that you start somewhere and you don't know where it's going to end up. So you just start and you keep going. And one other question that I'm not quite sure I think it was answered, but I couldn't really tell. So you had this funny story about being at a playgroup and talking about, you know, that sometimes we just feel like impostors and we don't know what we're doing. Well, the real mothers show up and someone says, Who brought the grapes? Why aren't they cut in half? And it's in quotes. And then after it says, I brought the grapes, but that was not in quotes. So I wondered if you said it out loud or if you just let it lie.
Ashlee Gadd No, I did not. I did not claim ownership.
Ashlee Gadd Over that mishap. So it is my fault. That was my silenced, my silent monologue of just who brought it up. Nobody. No, no. You guys, you did bring those grapes. What in the world? How did those get in here? Oh, is that.
Ginny Yurich Is when you know you are a genius parent, though, Because I have done the same thing. People will be like, Who's kid? I'm like, Oh, I think that's my friend's kid. I don't know.
Ashlee Gadd Not mine, not it.
Ginny Yurich Who brought the grapes and didn't cut him an apple?
Ashlee Gadd I don't know.
Ginny Yurich I love that story. Okay, You answered my main question that I had lingering after reading this awesome book. But, you know, I think that this sort of imposter syndrome and fear is something that so many people deal with and also the fear of feedback. So it's is something that comes up. People don't take a step because they think, look, people are going to slam me for it and I'm going to get hate mail. And you are? Mm hmm. But you talk in there about what happens afterward. Can you talk us through the feedback thing? Yeah.
Ashlee Gadd I mean, I don't even want to oversimplify it, but when I think about this idea, right, I think about fear. I think about the courage it takes to put yourself out there. And I think about the risk. You know, creating is a risk. Sharing your art is a risk. It does come with a reward. And so I think at the end of the day, all of us sort of have to weigh, are we willing to put ourselves out there versus. Living with the risk of regret. Right. Because that's kind of what we face on the other side. Do you want to go your whole life not making anything because you're scared? Of what? Like bad Amazon reviews? I mean, I don't know.
Ashlee Gadd I and I see that as a person who is legitimately scared of bad reviews. I'm not even reading mine.
Ashlee Gadd Aim to terrify to look. I haven't read a single one. So I see that with all of the compassion in the.
Ashlee Gadd World because I, I get it like.
Ashlee Gadd I get I get that fear, I get that insecurity. I get that panic rising up in your chest. When you think about putting yourself out there vulnerably, when you think about putting your art out there into the world and you have no idea how it's going to be received.
Ashlee Gadd It is.
Ashlee Gadd Absolutely terrifying. I wish I could tell you there's just like a magic vitamin. You can pop in. You won't feel those feelings, but there isn't. You will feel them. And I think for me, I've just gotten to this place where the risk of regret would be higher for me to. You know what I mean? To sit here in hide in my house and sit on the talents and the gifts that the Lord has given me to bury them in the thing and to shove them in my closet, to not use them out in the world. I think that's a harder feeling to swallow at the end of the day than just being scared of what people are going to say about your work.
Ginny Yurich Right, Right. And if you do get slammed and I think this is a cool thing in the book, you talk about other people's experiences, that what they learn is that I wasn't too bad. Maybe it felt bad for a couple of days and then I moved on and you had a really cool this book is really well-written. It was like you would start a chapter with a story and then you would go to a different topic and then you'd weave back in that story. It was like, brilliant. Every time.
Ashlee Gadd I couldn't really wrap.
Ginny Yurich My mind around it. I was like, What is happening here?
Ashlee Gadd So kind. Thank you. It was really.
Ginny Yurich Cool because then you related that to falling in the harness while you're doing a high ropes course. Like, okay, yeah, you're going to fall, but it's not going to be a catastrophic fall. Like, maybe you fear it. It's going to be a couple feet and you're going to be fine and you're just going to move on.
Ashlee Gadd Even as we're talking right now, I'm thinking about my kids getting like the flu shot or whatever. You know, where you think it's going to be. So even me, I don't love getting the flu shot. I don't love getting shots. But you you work it up in your head that it's going to be this just like super terrible, traumatic thing. It's going to hurt so, so, so bad. And then you go and you do it and it does hurt, but it hurts for 10 seconds and then you're fine, you know? I mean, it just it you just you move on. And I think so often we do that with feedback, too. It comes in, it sucks, it hurts. You dwell on it for 10 seconds, sometimes more. If you're me and you replay it over and over again for 48 hours.
Ashlee Gadd But whatever the thing is for the or for the rest of your life, maybe you see you still can move on at some point. You know, it.
Ashlee Gadd Doesn't sting forever.
Ginny Yurich Mm hmm. Yeah, I really like that. I got a lot out of that. And I think that anyone will who is just scared to put things in the world because they might get bad feedback. That's really good advice. And then there was all this information about play, and I thought that this was so thought provoking. I also grew up and I think a lot of us grew up and get your work done first and then you play and then you had this whole section about, well, what happens when your work is never done? Goodness, this is what's happening, right? Ashley It's like our work is never done. You say I have yet to live one day when I am fully caught up on everything. If there is always more work to be done, when exactly are we allowed to play? So tell us your scooter.
Ashlee Gadd Story.
Ginny Yurich And kind of what are your thoughts on that? I mean, it really is such a huge question. Yeah.
Ashlee Gadd So I don't know if you're familiar with the Enneagram. Are you?
Ginny Yurich And I'm familiar. Okay, I'm familiar. I know I'm too old.
Ashlee Gadd That's okay. No, I met. So I'm a type three, if that helps any listeners. Just kind of.
Ashlee Gadd Peg me in a box a little bit that I.
Ashlee Gadd Am. I tend to lean workaholic and that's my Achilles heel. That's my weakness, is that I tend to work myself into the ground if I don't have any barriers around me. And this idea of play has really come up a lot with my workaholic tendencies because I have more often than not convinced myself that play is basically nothing more than leisure, and leisure has to be earned. And where I feel like I've actually gone so wrong in that is that I actually do think we can work ourselves.
Ashlee Gadd Out of.
Ashlee Gadd Creative inspiration when we decide we're going to be locked to our laptops for 10 hours a day and we're going to be like just hunched over our screens and our keyboards for hours and hours and hours on end, and we're never going to have any fun. Who wants to make art that way? I mean, and what kind of art can you really even make that way? Because that's not very inspiring for very many people.
Ashlee Gadd So it's almost like.
Ashlee Gadd Well, when I think of. Play. I think of living. I think of living. I think of being outside. I think of doing things that delight me, that bring me joy, that make me laugh. And none of those things I feel when I am just on a laptop for hours on end. And so I would say, I've been wrestling with this for a long time. And a lot of it is boils down to just a lot of the heart stuff that I have going on about my identity and what my work, you know, means to me and how I how I wrapped up so much of my self-worth into my productivity. And that has been kind of a journey with me and the Lord. He's been really untangling me from a lot of that, and I've been trying to make it more of a priority to rest and play, not because I've earned it, but because it's just part of living. It's part of being alive. It's part of it is part of making art. And my sweet husband and my son, Everett, I don't remember. This might have been for his eighth or ninth birthday. I don't remember if I said in the book, but he got a scooter for his birthday. And when that we take walks around our neighborhood almost every night when the weather is nice. And we were out for a walk and I had this like compulsion to get on his scooter.
Ashlee Gadd I don't even know what.
Ashlee Gadd To call it. I just all of a sudden said, you know, ever can you hop off? You know, can you give me let me let me take this for a spin around the block.
Ashlee Gadd And I got on that scooter.
Ashlee Gadd And it was like something and locked in my chest. I just felt like a child. I felt so free. I felt so.
Ashlee Gadd Uninhibited and, like, full of wonder. I don't know. I just scooted all around the.
Ashlee Gadd Block as long as he would let me take it for a little spin. And I had kind of joke to my husband.
Ashlee Gadd Like, I really want one of these, you know, kind of.
Ashlee Gadd Playfully as a joke. And then for Christmas, he actually bought me my own. So I now have my own pink scooter, and I still ride that sucker all around my neighborhood.
Ginny Yurich Which I love because you thought you were getting a vacuum.
Ashlee Gadd I thought I was getting a vacuum. I was actually very excited. We should tell you.
Ashlee Gadd Something else about my personality.
Ashlee Gadd I sound like such a buzzkill, but that.
Ginny Yurich Is. That is the workplace thing, right? Totally. I think it goes it goes right in line with this question of is creativity essential? Like this is sort of one of the main premises of your book, which is like, yeah, is creativity essential to human flourishing? And no, I think play would be a similar thing. Is it essential? And I think both things can seem very frivolous, a frivolous use of time, and yet you're talking about what are the inputs, what are we putting in so that we can pour out later into our communities, into our children, into our art and all of those different things. And so I think it's a good reminder. You say our kids don't ask for permission to play or create. They just do it. So we should follow their lead. It's not frivolous and we should do it as well. So I really love that. Get a scooter instead of a vacuum. That's a good story and really just a start. I liked reading that you said I have yet to live one day when I am fully caught up because that's how I feel too. So everybody must feel that way whenever caught up. So you just have to make some decisions about how you're going to use your time. You had the best advice in here on Community. I've never read it anywhere else. Ashley never read it. I was so glad that you said it because I don't know. I think when you have an internet presence, people ask you questions, you get emails, they want to know about your life and a question that gets brought up so often or even just a comment. It's very sad. Ashley People say I don't have any friends. Yeah, and you say all friendships start with an invitation. And I think that's a really big statement. Tell us your advice on building community and starting friendships.
Ashlee Gadd Yeah, I mean, if there's anything I have learned in my adult years about starting and kind of maintaining friendships, it's that it is always easier to invite someone than to sit around waiting to be invited. And I have a lot of compassion for women who are afraid to put themselves out there. I mean, it's kind of like what we were just talking about with the feedback and the criticism, right? We're scared of rejection. We're scared that if we ask people to spend time with us and they say, no, that is going to hurt.
Ginny Yurich And and it does and it does happen. It does happen. I cannot tell you how many people have said no or how many people have said yes, and then they don't show up or how many people have said yes. And they show up once and then they never show up again. So. So then that's working it all through your mind, too. And there is a lot of that.
Ashlee Gadd There is a lot of that. So I want to acknowledge the reality of that.
Ashlee Gadd While.
Ashlee Gadd Again, honing in on this idea of the risk of regret that if you sit around and just wait for people to invite you places, you could be sitting around for the rest of your life. I mean, I hate to say that, but this is truly one of those. The ball is in your court situations, and I can tell you I tend to be the. Initiator in a lot of my friend groups where I'm the one that sends the text. I'm the one that plans the things, you know, let's go to dinner, Let's go see a movie, Let's do this. Do you guys want to come over? And I tend to be the one who's kind of just constantly throwing out invitations. And oftentimes, you know, when the answer is no, I at this point, I would say I'm so used to not receiving a yes every time that I can just brush it aside and move on. But the number of times that that has actually turned into a yes are a ton. I mean.
Ashlee Gadd I spend a lot.
Ashlee Gadd Of time with my girlfriends. I go on trips with my girlfriends, I go out to eat with my girlfriends, and I'm nothing. I've initiated every single one of those, but I have initiated enough to feel like I have really made a contribution to the relationship. I have made the first step forward in drawing somebody closer to me. And yeah, I just I would love for more women to do that. Just send the texts, plan the thing, invite the person. It's really not that hard, you know, if you can if you can start getting momentum with it too, you'll get better at it over time and it won't even be as scary.
Ginny Yurich And people love to be invited even if they can't come. It makes them feel sort of it makes them feel good. You write in the book, I beg you, I beg you, take the matter into your own hands. And I love that. I think that this concept of going first, which you write in the book, and Jon Acuff, who writes a lot of business books about books about relationships, too, he says go first and give others the gift of going second, which I think is a cool way to look at it, to write, you give someone else a gift than that maybe they can try, help them be brave and they can invite the next time. And this part of community led to really touching parts in your book about infant loss, about miscarriage. And I didn't know if you wanted to talk about that for a little bit. I can share this beautiful, beautiful writing. The seven weeks. I mean, I read it over and over again. It is just so touching, you know, that someone would think, you know, I lost a baby at five weeks and it was only the size of a sesame seed. And do I have the right to grieve? And then this one says seven weeks, but enough time to dream and wonder what will the eyes be? And enough time to download the app, enough time to fall in love. I mean, how beautiful. And so you talked about it in the sense of by having this community, you had people who would come and help. And that was hard to be the one that's on the vulnerable side, but it really did a lot. So how can we how can we take those steps to be the helped instead of the helper? Mm hmm.
Ashlee Gadd Yeah, there was. I mean, I think for many years I resisted help because I don't want to put people out. And I'm super independent and I'm really good at taking care of myself. And I like to be strong and I like to be capable. And there's so much pride wrapped up in what I'm telling you right now. But that is the truth of the matter, is that I would always rather be the person helping someone than be the person receiving the help. It makes me feel weak. It makes me feel needy, and I don't like to feel weak and I don't like to feel needy. And I think what I've realized over time is that, number one, I'm not letting out my friends who want to come bring me dinner after I had a miscarriage. That's not putting them out. If anything, holding them at an arm's distance while I am in pain is actually really just hurting both of us. Right? I'm refusing the help. I am sitting in my own sorrow and I'm lonely and isolated in that and I make it. I'm pushing my friend away, you know? And so I think so often of how I feel when I get to help someone. I feel good when I get to help someone. Not that it's about me and how I feel, but when a friend is hurting or a friend is going through something and I am able to actually conjure up a tangible way to help them, serve them, bless them, be there for them. That is a gift to me, and I know it's a gift to them. It's always a gift when someone shows up at your doorstep with food. That's a gift, right? And so by declining the help, resisting the help, what I'm also doing is I'm declining the gift that it would be for them to feel like they could actually do something when.
Ashlee Gadd In actuality they.
Ashlee Gadd Can't really do something. You can't do something about my miscarriage. You can't bring that baby back to life. But you could feed me dinner, you could feed my kids, you could take the pressure off of what we have to make tonight do. You could take money out of our grocery budget that I don't have to think about right now. I mean, we had food dropped off nonstop for weeks, and it was a huge blessing and a huge gift. And I think that by the time I had my miscarriage, I had already had three kids. So I. Been around the block, you know, motherhood, speaking. I've gone through lots of things with these three children, and I think I wrote this in the book. But I honestly think that if I would have miscarried, maybe with my first or, you know, before I had had so many experiences of being helped and of helping others, I would have not told anyone and I would have not accepted any help. I wouldn't have even wanted any help. And this time around, it was just like, Yes, yes, yes, yes, you can bring me dinner. Yes, I had to go to the hospital. I mean, the crack of dawn like 4 a.m. And my friend, it was one of those situations where, like the kids had to go, you know, what are we going to do, load the kids up in the wake them up at dawn and bring them just to drive me to the hospital? I couldn't drive myself home. And I asked a friend who I knew woke up early, like she wakes up early every day. And I just I texted her, Can you drive me to my DNC? I need. I just need a ride. I need a ride at the crack of dawn. Can you do that for me? And she was honored that I asked her, you know, and that was cry.
Ashlee Gadd I was like such a small detail, you know, just like.
Ashlee Gadd Literally, I needed someone to drive.
Ashlee Gadd Me 10.
Ashlee Gadd Minutes in a car. But it was everything that she.
Ashlee Gadd Didn't even.
Ashlee Gadd Like. She did not even flinch, you know? And that just meant so much to me.
Ashlee Gadd And I won't ever.
Ashlee Gadd Forget it, you know? And I just think, like, I'm so glad that I'm in a place now where time and experience has taught me that I can ask for help and I can receive help. And in doing that, it's a gift to myself and it's also a gift to me. Friendships. Sorry, It sure is.
Ginny Yurich Or I loved that. In that part you had the story about Pressly and she was trying to put on her puddle jumper and it's like she didn't want help. She didn't want help, she didn't want help. And then she got stuck because she's like, okay, I get my arms, too. You can just see a two year old's mind working, right? I can get my arms too, but there's no way I'm going to be able to clip the back and that you just sort of reached the spot where and I think this is a lot of times what happens in life where you have to have the help. There is no other way around it. And I think then you learn that it's a gift. Like you said, it's a gift for everyone. And community is so beautiful. I got that out of your book about creativity. This book has a lot in it. I was impressed. A lot of beautiful chapters and a lot of beautiful stories and a lot of things to think about. Each chapter ends with a creative exercise, a journaling prompt an artist highlights. That was a cool thing. I love Rachel Marie King. She was right at the beginning. And so you've got these different artist highlights throughout the book, which was that hard to pick?
Ashlee Gadd It was really important to me to highlight different types of artists who are making different things, you know, because I'm very much a writer and a photographer, and a lot of the anecdotes that I use throughout the book are writing and photography related. But there's so many other types of art that different women can make. And so I just wanted to be able to highlight that throughout the book so that hopefully if you're not a writer and you're not a photographer, you would still be able to read the book and kind of find something in it for you and maybe expand your definition of what creativity even means.
Ginny Yurich I love that because you have little things in there like Bake Your Cake, and Rachel talks about entrepreneurship, which I was so surprised to read that in a book about creativity, like entrepreneurship. Yeah, that's a creative act and music and it does it expand your mind as to what counts? And I love how you wrote in the book. Painter Unpaid or unseen, these things are all important. I want to talk about my favorite chapter.
Ashlee Gadd Okay.
Ginny Yurich All right. My favorite chapter is Throwing Glitter. This was my favorite chapter. I absolutely loved it. I loved all the chapters. But can you talk about can you start with your mother in law? I just love everything about your mother in law.
Ashlee Gadd I love her, too. Yeah, my mother in law. She is honestly one of the most supportive, encouraging people that I know. And she also has this delightful habit of wrapping every single gift she ever brings into my home in glitter wrapping paper. And I don't think I've mentioned this, but I'm kind of a clean freak and kind of a neat freak. Obviously. I was very excited to get a vacuum for Christmas that turned out to be a scooter, and I was only moderately disappointed.
Ashlee Gadd That it wasn't a vacuum.
Ashlee Gadd So my mother in law is causally bringing over these like glitter wrapped things and the glitter gets everywhere. I mean, it gets on everything. There's always a trail of glitter. After she leaves, we'll find it months later, just in the couch cushions. It's everywhere. But because my mother in law is so supportive of just really like everything I do, I kind of started equating throwing glitter as sort of this way to express the idea of supporting and encouraging other women in their creative endeavors or in whatever dreams they're pursuing. And so that's kind of where the throwing glitter story began.
Ginny Yurich I just love it because you relate it to lint picking. So it's like you could be one or the other. So what would an example of a lint picker be?
Ashlee Gadd Yeah, a lint picker. That's a term coined by Julia Cameron, who I've quoted a few times in this book. I just really adore her work. And she talks about lint picking as this idea of kind of just, I think, the story that she told her, like the specific scene she painted was this idea of you're all dressed up and you're ready to go somewhere and you're feeling really marvelous, and then somebody comes over to you and just picks lint off your outfit. And it's just this idea of having someone kind of pick apart, you know, the stuff you're doing and pick at pick at you and pick at your work. And just not being able to see the whole of what you were creating, of what you're trying to do, but just kind of wants to criticize and pick apart at the little things.
Ginny Yurich Mm hmm. Yeah. So the sort of what do we want to be? What we want to be a litter thrower or a lint picker. And these sentences, these are ones that you store in your heart. I feel like you say, for all the times I battle comparison, I have never once regretted being generous with my money, my time, my likes, my shares, my comments, my praise, my encouragement. You say if I lived to be 95 years old, I hope to have a horse voice from a life spent cheering too loudly for those around me. I want to leave a trail of glitter, just like your mother in law. I mean, I would say the sentence in the whole book that stuck out to me the most. And it's such a good book, but the one that I've got all the stars by says, If what we feed grows, this is what I want to feed my capacity to celebrate others. Wow. Wow. And this is what you're doing through your coffee and crumbs community through this book where you include other women. So as we're sort of wrapping up here, I'm sure people would love to know a little bit more about what you do with coffee and Grams, what you've been doing with it for the past decade plus.
Ashlee Gadd Sure. Yeah. So Coffee Grounds was a space that I started back in 2014 when I was the new mom. I had an 18 month old. I was pregnant with my second baby and really just kind of in the thick of it, in the trenches of it, and was starting to look online for more places to submit my own writing about motherhood. I wanted to write. I wanted to write essays about what it was like to be a mom. And back then, when I was looking for that, I you know, I think nowadays there are so many beautiful motherhood websites out there where women are writing really honestly and really vulnerably about being mothers. And back then there just weren't a lot of options out there. So I kind of set out to create the space that I myself wanted to submit my writing to. And so our mission has always been from the very beginning, you know, we just want a place where we can write honest stories about motherhood to make other women feel safe, known, encouraged and loved. And we have a really high value in our space on encouraging women. And we also have a really high value on the literary merits of the work. We're all writers. We identify as writers. We work really, really hard on our craft, so we're a lot slower paced then I think a lot of the other websites that are out there like, we're not pushing content, we're out there, we're really trying to create art that is meaningful and poignant for mothers in this time now.
Ginny Yurich And so then what has the podcast evolved to be?
Ashlee Gadd Yeah, so the podcast was kind of a I feel like when we started the podcast, you know, nowadays everyone has the podcast.
Ashlee Gadd Back in time, just.
Ginny Yurich Like how everybody used to have a blog.
Ashlee Gadd Totally. Yeah, it feels.
Ashlee Gadd Very much similar that in 2015, you know, our readership was growing rapidly and I had one woman on our team, Lesley Miller. She had kind of brought it to the table, like, maybe we should start a podcast. And at that point, I mean, coffee crumbs was still shaping itself, I guess you could say. And it was kind of like, Yeah, why not? Like, let's if you want to do it, let's experiment, let's try it. And so we launched a podcast and that has grown a lot over the years, and women seem to really resonate with the work that we do in that space. So that's just kind of another another form of storytelling in a sense. And we're actually working on a narrative podcast right now, which is not yet done, but that has been really cool to work on. It's been very challenging in that like learning film, right? I don't know anything about this. I've been podcasting for a long time, but I've never done a narrative podcast and it's a completely different it's very slow. I'm actually just now in real time thinking of all the parallels between film photography and the Narrative podcast, because there's a lot of similarities there. But yeah, we're working on that as well right now, and that's going to be a really, really compelling. Storytelling story driven narrative through a podcast. And I'm really excited about we're telling other women's stories through that show, and I'm excited to finally finish it whenever it gets done.
Ashlee Gadd But it's kind of the it's like the little.
Ashlee Gadd Project that could. We've been working on it for literally years and it is we've got two episodes done.
Ashlee Gadd So it's slow, slow moving.
Ginny Yurich But like the film, it's really neat. You live what you write, you live what you write. And I, like I said, the book fed my soul. I cried through it, I laughed, I loved it. And consent was like, What? Wait, what? What did she just do here? How is the story? Wait, this was. It is just so amazing. The writing is is really impressive. It's masterful. It's masterful. Writing is what I would say, because you're constantly weaving these things and coming back and weaving back. And and I and to a point where you're like, Wait, why? It's so incredible. So, you know, to see someone who is a master at what they do. So here you go. Here in both columns. Internet writer, No book writer. Ashley Gadd. If people want to find you, I'll put all the information in the show notes. And the book is called Create Anyway, just came out in March. The joy of Pursuing Creativity in the margins of Motherhood. I like what you wrote in there. You said, I wish this is a book I would have read nine years ago where, you know, when my kids were little, you wrote the book that you wish you would have read. And so I think that all mothers would get a lot out of it, because as you create, you're not only filling your own soul, but you're also modeling for your kids. And you can see that through the things that you post. So, Ashley, this has been awesome. We always end our podcast with the same question. What is a favorite outdoor memory from your childhood?
Ashlee Gadd Oh, from my childhood I spent my entire childhood in the pool. So my, my parents own a swimming pool business and we had a pool in our backyard. It was our whole backyard. You walk out, there's like, you know, two feet of concrete.
Ashlee Gadd Pool and then a fence area. Our entire backyard was the pool.
Ashlee Gadd And oh, my gosh, I just was in it every day. I had blond hair as a kid and my hair would just be green every summer, just pretending to be a mermaid, diving down to the bottom of the pool, hair swirling all around me. And that that is my favorite memory, just being in my pool.
Ginny Yurich I love that. And I love all those interesting careers. Like you grew up in a family where you had a swimming pool business, so. Well, what you know, there's all sorts of cool, different kinds of swimming pools and shapes, and that's super interesting. I love it. Well, Ashley, thank you so much for taking this time with us and for writing such a beautiful book. I can't wait to hear about the next one whenever that one gets announced. I know you said you're jotting down some notes and some ideas, and the more we create, the more we create, so I can't wait.
Ashlee Gadd To read it.
Ashlee Gadd Thank you so much. This was a delight. And if I had any shred of imposter syndrome today, I feel like you really just squashed all of it.
Ashlee Gadd So I appreciate all.
Ashlee Gadd Your kind words and your you're just generous encouragement. It really means a lot to me. Thank you.
