Kara Westerman and Writers Daily Dive
The Road to Published series
Occasionally, when I’m featuring another writer and their work as part of “The Road to Published” series, the article will be free to all FORD KNOWS subscribers. I want to be sure my guests receive the widest possible notice—creatives helping each other is part of the mission of this series.
And for the month of March, all subscribers of FORD KNOWS and Kara Westerman’s newsletter are invited to participate in free Saturday special meetings of Writers Daily Dive. Details below.
For access to all “The Road to Published” articles and Chat, and to support my work here and on Qstack, please become a paid subscriber. Thank you!
Words and people who have passed inhabit similar realms. Where we come from and where we go to are deeply personal ideas, and part of their beauty is that they are unknowable. Call it the Heart, the Mind, Imagination or Spirit, Heaven or the Void, we spend our lives surrounded by the enormous power of this intangible stuff, every moment becoming, changing, and passing into nothingness.
It is no wonder that most of the oldest surviving texts of our cultures are those which deal in matters of the spirit, a divining and imagining of what lies beyond the here and now. In the attempt to make real matters of the heart and mind, artists and creators through the ages have sought to give shape to our evanescing hopes and longings. The accumulation of those marks represents our culture. They are the best efforts of all humanity to express our joy in life, and our sorrow at its temporality.
Paradoxically, a focus on the here and now—mindfulness, or a flow state—is exactly what many artists refer to as the ground from which their art and ideas emerge. We pay attention to the vision (or listen, or meditate on it) and then we make—we embody, we give voice. Some say making art is a kind of prayer.
Like prayer, our making is not always successful. We may wish to express the idea we discover inside ourselves just as we wish for the return of a loved one. But it is only an act of faith that, though our prayers and dreams may go unfulfilled, we are better for the trying. It is the joining of hope and action that makes us artists and humans.
Kara Westerman is on a mission
Kara Westerman appeared to me out of the Substack-sphere as a vision of hope incarnate. If I was intrigued when I read her About page, I was in awe of the tenderness with which she embodies her mission to write a book about her late husband, Nick, and to add their published opus to the shelves of his book collection.
Even when she writes about Nick gardening, she is writing about their love. Here is just one of the many striking acts of reverence in her work:
Each Spring I watched you keep the Buttercup at bay inside the border made by the shade of the Katsura tree. Watching you in your shorts and garden hat and kneepads was one of my great pleasures. You pulling the Celandine stems up gently until the entire root emerged with most of the seeds still clinging to the fragile tendrils - did you know how closely I observed you? I saw how you combed the surrounding ground for any tiny round pellets which might have escaped before you dropped them pinging into a small copper vessel for a friend. Despite your dire warnings, your friend Richard was also lured by the Buttercup, as if it were a drug, and asked for seeds.
On those slow summer days I did what I could to help from my basket chair, swaying from your tree a few feet above. Reading aloud from one volume or another in your dog-eared, Carlos Castaneda collection, or from Hafiz, or whatever we were immersed in at the moment. Dropping thousands of words, as you gently knocked the seeds off the roots and into the pot. Our conversation never really stopped, did it? Time and space, life and death, and neuroses like yours and mine were our favorite subjects. You needing to keep the creative impulses in your soul at bay by repetitive tasks such as weeding, for fear your father might still ridicule you from beyond the grave. And me needing to keep it all, save it all, including you, which, by the way, I am doing right now. Another ping in the copper can. So there.
Mark shakes his head as I explain to him how you removed the Buttercup by hand. Stem by stem, I tell him, and he makes large round eyes. He refuses to believe it ... I tell Mark how weeding served as meditation for you. Yup, he nods. He knows all about the relief of getting your hands in the dirt. I tell him how this relentless repetitive activity kept your anxiety at bay, Nick. I told him about one of your favorite phrases from your Kabbalah study, that life was like a task without end, that could never be finished, but that neither could it be put down. Mark doesn’t mind the philosophy. I know he enjoys digging deep. You tried to write your story down your whole life, I tell Mark. But time ran out, I say to the air in front of me.
— Episode #7: A Suitable Vessel For Magic - The hunt for the celandine buttercup by Kara Westerman
These are Kara’s answers to prompts from the previous R2P episode “On Art and Spirit”
What is your "calling" as a writer or artist?
Prior to the disasters of 2020 I couldn’t have told you whether I had a calling to write or not. Writing had helped me stop drinking in 2001, and I had gone back to graduate school for fiction in 2007. But it wasn’t until a few weeks after my husband Nicholas died in 2020 that I felt the incredible need to write about his life. It was a mandate. The world was locked down for Covid a few weeks afterwards, and I was alone in the cottage he had inherited from his great grandparents in East Hampton, New York. I was living with the weight of all of his family’s generations of books, objets, and memories. It was only after his death that I could say without doubt that I now had a real calling to write. His death has given me the gift of a purpose. A calling to write his story and mine, and have an everlasting conversation on the page. To say it plainly: this little book of ours has kept me alive. I know of no other reason to keep going.
I guess I feel that there is nothing more important for a dash at immortality than a book. Nicholas’ courageous life, starting as Jennifer, and transitioning to Nicholas, becoming sober, and dying with such grace, deserves a book. I need to give my husband the gift for his life and what he has given me. Really I want to resurrect my husband on the page. It’s a big ask. I’m never sure if I’m quite up to it. But without such a mighty call I might not be writing at all. To leave Nick and his stories in the dark is just unacceptable to me. So fear is what really keeps me going. The impermanence of life, the ticking clock, and wanting to keep my promise to write our story down. I’m not sure if I would still be writing if I hadn’t suddenly had a reason and a focus.
Nick left behind a lifetime’s worth of her/his own attempts to put this story down on typewriter after typewriter. He may have finally gotten around to it had the lawn not needed to be weeded by hand, or the potatoes peeled in a certain way, the socks hung on special clips in the basement to dry, or each chicken soup made from scratch. All of these meticulous daily tasks that marked the time of our days.
In exploring the boxes he left in the attic I discovered all of the letters and drawings he made growing up as a girl named Jennifer, and then all of her aliases over the years. Peach, and Jackie Katz, Gabriel, and Gwynnefahr. I’ve come to understand that Nicholas and I are co-writing the book together because there is so much of his own writing included. I also understand that if the book we are co-authoring together is ever going to be finished and I am going to slide it into the bookshelf in his family home, then I need to account for my days.
Do you struggle to write, and why?
I started my Writers Daily Dive group so that I would be accountable to this book of ours. I could only think of one way to show up for our book every day, and that was to be accountable to showing up for others. Working with other writers together in silence is a profound experience. I realize now that I have made a writers clock. A way to mark writing days so that I can feel their passing in relation the time I have left to write. The days actually accumulate into something. A book accumulates.
I have depression and it kicks the shit out of me, leaving me feeling that nothing is really worth it. I have times when I have to completely stop because I lose the plot of my story. Why even do anything? But the book is more important that I am, and it keeps me in the groove. A purpose is everything, I now understand. I know that I am not always in the frame of mind that a writer needs to have. I feel pointlessness keenly. I am by nature and by turns melancholic, and I can lean into perfectionism. From day to day my idea of myself as a writer and my writing vacillates wildly. Monday I am a nobody. Tuesday a genius. By Friday a terrible imposter. The only thing I can do is take the average of all the days by showing up for an hour a day.
What story from your life feels most unfinished?
The story from my life that remains most unfinished is how to end our co-authored book. I am so in-process with it on Substack. This platform is really shaping the book. I have started serializing diary entries that I kept after the disasters of 2020. I thought of posting these as a way to edit and decide which diary sections to include in the book. But these have turned into a sort of book in themselves, which is now also turning into a podcast. It’s amazing how Substack changes your idea of what you are capable of doing.
What is the role of imagination in shaping your reality?
Imagination is strange creature when you are writing from your lived experiences. It’s funny because sometimes I apologize in advance to Nicholas in our book. I tell him that I have to embellish certain things because the memory is not fully there anymore. It’s our imagination that is doing the shaping of our memories, after all. But I think we all have the license to do that. Why else be a writer if you can’t decide to shape the truth? Since memory is already a distortion, then why not? I think Nick would appreciate the mix of the very real and imaginatively remembered going into our project. But I still ask his permission.
Now I have this funny notion that it will be the book that will have to finish my story and write me now. I am 62 and I have been at this project for 5 years. The book will have to tell me what should happen next, and since it has kept me alive for 5 years, it will have to write my ending. Sometimes I think the book will end with me entering long-term Buddhist contemplative retreat, which is what I have been studying since 2020. That would be such a perfect ending for our book, I think. But I know the book will have to decide.
Watch the following video for a deeper dive into Kara’s work.
Writers Daily Dive
Writers Daily Dive—hosted by —is a growing fellowship of writers dismantling perfectionism one hour at a time. We meet Monday-Friday at 1:00 EST on Zoom. We chat, mute, and write in silence together. It’s a little bit genius. The first session is free, and after that is $10/month or $100/year.
Jump headlong into the cool water of the fresh first page at Writers Daily Dive!
For the month of March, there will be a special FREE meeting each Saturday at 11:00 a.m. EST as a collaboration between FORD KNOWS and the Writers Daily Dive writing group.
Join Troy and Kara for a 12-minute speed writing session, followed by sharing and chitchat. The only feedback allowed is “Thank you” and no one is obligated to read or appear on screen. A writing prompt will be provided on the call for anyone who needs a little help getting started, but you can write about anything you wish.
(That’s all five Saturdays - March 1, 8, 15, 22, and 29th - at 11 a.m. Eastern. Free!)
Zoom meeting link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86382041826?
pwd=WlN6Z2IvaW03K1R3Y1FCR1ZiclVrdz09
Writing Prompts
Please feel free to share your answers in the Comments.
Write about a time when you felt the presence of something unseen—whether it was a memory, a lost loved one, or a moment of deep creative inspiration. How did this intangible presence shape your experience?
Many artists and writers find comfort in small, repetitive tasks that ground them in the present. Describe a personal ritual that serves as a bridge between the mundane and the creative.
Imagine discovering a box of letters, journals, or recordings from someone significant in your past. How does reading their words change your understanding of them, yourself, or your shared history?
For a very personal example of that last prompt, you can still read the first three chapters of my soon-to-be published novel, Lamb, for free.
Books mentioned in this episode:
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver - and thanks again to
And a special mention of a new book arriving in retailers TOMORROW by co-authors , Ally Malinenko and Liz Parker:
The Other March Sisters
Read excerpts and notes from the authors on Publication Day, tomorrow on Qstack
Giving all the “Little Women” the stories they deserve at last, this imaginative historical novel and companion to the much-loved classic draws Meg, Beth, and Amy March from behind the shadow of Jo – Louisa May Alcott’s alter-ego and the “author” of Little Women – as vibrant and unforgettable characters grappling with societal strictures, queer love, motherhood, chronic illness, artistic ambition, and more.
“An intriguing take on some of the most beloved—yet, paradoxically, overlooked—characters in fiction. ” —Shana Abé, New York Times bestselling author of An American Beauty and The Second Mrs. Astor
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