I first met Johanna Franzel in the spring of 2017. We were part of a writing class in Portland, Maine. Every week, we sat in the basement room of a library and Susan Conley, an acclaimed author and our fearless leader, urged us onward.
I adored Johanna’s writing the second I read it. Her paintings of scenes were precise and evocative. She was also reaching for something real and honest.
The fact that she was a leader in public radio for over a decade and a teacher of embodied writing practice, meant she had a unique power with language. Wisdom seemed to live and breathe in her.
She was working on a book about moving through chronic illness and Crohn’s disease. She was workshopping her opening scene—lying on the bathroom floor and reaching for her notebook when the pain became too intense:
“When I finally stop crying, I open this little journal, pick up my pen, and turn to the first blank page. If we are really paying attention here, we might notice the tiniest shift; my breath slows and softens. There is a small feeling of relief that whatever impossible feeling I’m holding has somewhere to go. And then I write. I write my humiliation and my heartbreak. I write from the crackling directness of my body’s experience. I write because I don’t know what else to do. I write because the story I’ve been telling myself is just beginning to come undone, and writing feels like the only way through.”
— Introduction, Writing Yourself Home by Johanna Franzel
Two years later, I bumped into Johanna in a grocery store in Freeport. We awkwardly stood in our Covid masks, gave air hugs, and she told me that her health had seriously deteriorated. I could see the strain in her eyes.
She later told me that it was around this time that she decided to abandon the book project. Here she was, she said, the sickest she had ever been, so clearly the book was ruined. However it turned out that this hospitalization actually became the turning point.
What you’ll hear a lot in our conversation is this word “healed” and our society’s obsession with it.
“When we say healed, what we often mean is fixed… to be unmoving, to be stuck,” says Johanna. “Yet to grow into a grander sense of health—I keep using the word inclusive, a more inclusive kind of health—is actually to cultivate being unfixed, right?”
“Can I be more fluid?” she asks. “Can I be more permissive with myself? Can I be more compassionate? Can I understand what it means to love myself and the people around me well from this moment—as opposed to how do I get to that place where it’s all over now?”
This insight became the book’s powerful title, Write Yourself Home: A Creative Guide for Living Well in the Body You Have Through Embodied Writing and Movement Practice.
Last month, Write Yourself Home was published by North Atlantic Books.
I can’t tell you the levels of joy I feel to watch this unfold and how much of a role model she is to me right now. And this is partly why I’ve reestablished this video podcast—because I want to sit with writers and artists and thinkers, and I want to listen to their lived experience.
My chorus of inner critics began singing while I edited this video—there is a long list of things wrong with how you edited this, they pointed out to me—but I am strapping the critics into the backseat.
Today, I am taking a driving lesson from Johanna. I am letting go of my incessant need for perfection. I am choosing to lean into acceptance and joy with this moment, right here in time.
Because surely this is also what my Buddhist teachers have been telling me, again and again, for all these years. To be grateful for this rainbow, this incalculably precious human life, that has come together for this one short dance.
To learn more about Johanna Franzel and her amazing book, head here. You can also follow her Substack ‘Permission Slips’ here.
