"Just do the next true thing." - Phyllis Cole-Dai
How working artists make their lives work
I’m thrilled to bring you this month’s Artist Interview, with writer and creative Phyllis Cole-Dai. We connected on Substack (!), a true testament to the power of this platform to build community.
Phyllis is a multi-talented author who has written fiction, memoir and poetry. She has also recorded music, and runs her own Substack,
. She has a book forthcoming in September of this year, and currently lives in South Dakota with her husband, son Nathan and two cats.Since this was Phyllis and my first time ‘meeting,’ here’s a little audio of our conversation before we got into the nitty-gritty of things.
It was such a joy to speak with her, so read on for our conversation on spirituality, writing, creating from your ‘true spot’ and so much more.1
Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
In terms of actual questions, we'll start off nice and easy here. What is your job?
My job is to have fun doing what I love to do. I am a full-time creator. I live off of my husband—that's the joke that we have, but it’s also true. During our married life, which is almost 30 years now, we've had an agreement that he would provide the primary source of income, and anything that I could bring in would be icing on the cake. That has been a tremendous gift for which I will always be grateful. I get up in the morning and usually by eight I'm working in my studio or by the fireplace, depending on the season, and usually I quit around 6:30 In the evening.
Oh, wow, it sounds like a really full day.
Oh, it is. But I love what I do. So the hours go by really fast.
I saw on your website that you have a number of different pursuits, where you're not only writing but you’ve recorded your own music. In addition to writing, what else would you consider as part of your creative practice?
Well, I would say that my creative practice is just using whatever abilities that get called forth by my circumstances to try to make the world a better place—poetry, storytelling, literature, music, newsletters . . . “Making the world better” might sound a little corny, but that's what I've always felt is my purpose here, so I take responsibility for that. I get a lot of joy out of pursuing that. Joy is one of my guideposts. I have more creative ideas and opportunities than I actually have time for. So I have to sort those out. One of the ways to sort is to ask if a project would be in line with my purpose and come from a place of joy.
I really like this idea of checking in with yourself, is what I'm being presented with in line with my purpose? To take us back a little bit, I was reading in Staying Power that as a kid, you had a teacher who really encouraged your writing, so I'm guessing you were into books as a kid. Was writing books, something you always wanted to do? Or when did develop as an interest?
I can remember in second grade—my teacher was having us write poetry, and rhyme and rhythm came very naturally to me. She was very encouraging, and I remember wanting to be a poet, whatever that meant to me then. This grew into love of other kinds of writing. As I went through school, I always had at least one teacher per year who was really influencing me and cultivating my love of writing. Now, the teacher I think you're referring to was Mrs. Lazza, in my fifth and sixth grade years. She was this itty-bitty Greek-American woman who, over the summer, would send me writing assignments through the mail. I was living in this tiny consolidated school district of three country towns. So we didn't have a lot of resources. The teachers didn't get paid much. But each summer Mrs. Lazza would basically give me a correspondence course. For me, to be taken seriously at that age was so important! My parents were farmers, and not college educated—they didn't know what to do with me really, as a creative person, although they were creative in their own ways. But they knew instinctively that they should feed my love of writing. So my dad gave me his old manual typewriter. I felt so important when I'd be sitting and going clickety-clack. (Even today I pay homage to my parents by using the image of a manual typewriter as part of my author branding.) At the same time though, while growing up, I was getting these messages that, “Well, this is really cool that you love to do this now, but when you become an adult, you're not going to be able to make a living.” So I got sidetracked for a while as I was trying to figure out how to be a grown-up and also be a writer. I was looking for occupations that would allow me to write on the side. I went and got a degree in this and a degree in that, and I tried this and tried that. It all came to a head when I went to jury duty. I was working on my PhD in English at the time. And I'm sitting there for two weeks in the jury pool waiting to be called to a trial, playing cards and chit-chatting, and people would ask me, “What is it exactly that you're studying?” I would start telling them and their eyes would glaze over. This was one of those moments when it became clear that I wasn't in alignment with my purpose. At the end of jury duty, I said to my husband, “What am I going to do? I'm miserable.” And he said, “Look, if you don't want to finish your PhD and go into academia, you don't have to. If you really want to write full time, then let's make that work.” And that's where we entered into this agreement that we've lived by ever since. There it is in a nutshell—the pathway that I took. It was very circuitous. Our son today is a junior in college, and he's scared to death because he doesn't know the one thing that he wants to do with his life. We keep telling him, “That's okay. Explore, experiment, there's no wrong turn, just keep following your instincts. There's no right way of doing this.”
I resonate a lot with that. For one, I'm technically not using my college degree, I was a Political Science and French double major. And I worked in tech for almost 10 years, so I very much relate to the getting sidetracked. I also do not have a PhD; I only have an MFA. And I like teaching in the sense that I like dropping in and like working with people and talking about books, but I'm just not interested in being a part of that bureaucracy. I don't want to be on committee, I'm not interested in becoming a full-time professor.
I remember going into the office of David Citino, a poet who was on the creative writing faculty. I respected him very much, though I had never had him for class. And I asked him, “How do you hold the academic side of you together with the poet side?” David looked at me and gently said, “You know, some people can do it, and some people can't. Knowing what I know of you, you are so single-minded about your creative work that I think it would be hard for you.” The moment he said that, I started crying because he had named the truth for me. It wasn't that I wasn't flourishing as an academic. But the more that I flourished in academics, the more estranged I felt from my creative work. I felt like I was leaving my true self behind. So again, there was a teacher who knew how to teach—this time by saying, “Maybe it's best for your spirit to not be in this environment.”
Absolutely. That's also something I'm navigating myself. There is this definite push and pull between Okay, you know, I've got to I've got to plan my next class, and I want to write. I am excited about what I'm teaching this semester, but as I was putting my syllabus together, I was like, oh, yeah, you really gonna have to grade all these papers, huh?
Yes. Now, we can use this term “sidetrack.” But I'm a great lover of compost heaps. Nothing is ever wasted. Everything that I've ever studied, everything I've experienced—even if, at the time it felt like Oh, this is not where I belong—it now belongs to me. It is part of what has made me, and I create from that now. So, it's all good. Even the hard parts, even the stuff that feel just feels icky—it all belongs.
All of it influences the work. I think I remember reading that you were an English major in college. Was that spurred on by your continued love of literature?
Yes. This was my one of my first efforts to find a job to sustain me while writing. I thought I might be an English teacher or a history teacher. Then, actually, I decided I might engage in the ministry. I went off to seminary long enough to figure out that I was too heretical. To tell you the truth, I don't like living inside boxes that other people have defined for me, or even in the boxes that I have built for myself. I'm constantly trying to climb out of them. So while I am very interested in spiritual practice and engagement, I don't belong inside of an institution.
I was going to ask about your Theology degree.2 Because I know spirituality and religion are two different things. But does your spirituality practice include religion, or is it something else?
By birth, I was rooted in the Christian tradition. Then I became heavily influenced by Buddhism and other traditions . . . Everything can be a doorway into deeper understanding. I have come to understand my own spirituality in terms of creativity—that life itself is a creative practice. We can't be alive without practicing creativity, problem solving, making something that was not there before—at least, not in the way that we have brought it forward. Music, food, story, poetry—such things don't require us to have a belief system. If they flow from or touch our true spot, they can bind us together in liberating and healing ways.
I love what you said about the doorway, it's such a lovely image.
It's the nature of almost every creative project that I’ve undertaken. There has been a doorway that I have been invited through by some experience or dream or person I've encountered. It's like the Muse smacking me up the side of the head and saying, “Pay attention! You're being led into something that you didn't understand before.” I love the magic of that. The serendipities. The synchronicities. The flow. It’s hard to find language to describe the process, but I know when I'm in it. I have to learn how not to fight it, but to cooperate with it and trust it. I have to “keep faith” with it and with myself. It's kind of like we go through life carrying this backpack, and we don't know exactly what's in there. Along the way, we get to continually reach in there and pull something else out that we didn't know that we had with us.
To go off of the dreams for a second, this is kind of an odd question. But do you lucid dream at all? Because I dream very, very vividly, almost more than any other person I've ever met. So when I was reading parts of Staying Power, I was like oh, man. we sound so similar in this regard.
I dream too much, because I don't sleep well due to some physical issues. In a way, I'm glad for that, because I feel very fed by dreams. Sometimes there is lucidity—I know that I am in the dream state, though I can’t manipulate the dream content. Sometimes the dream content comes through in such a way that I know that I'm supposed to share it without revising it. Once I wake up, I have to figuring out the best way to do that. I don't try to explain where that content comes from.
Like tapping into that collective subconscious. Because I had an experience where the novel I'm working on currently came to me in a dream a few years ago. I had been working on another project entirely, and it was New Year's Eve 2017 to 2018. And I woke up on New Year's Day and 2018 was like, I don't… I don't know what just happened.
Have you read the Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert?
No, but I own it. I need to.
She tells a story about how she had once started a novel. Then life circumstances compelled her to shelve it for a little while. A couple years later, she ran into the author Ann Patchett—the first time they’ve ever met. And Ann starts telling Elizabeth about a novel that she's working on. It's the same story! The novel didn’t involve the kind of subject matter that Ann could have replicated by chance. Gilbert says that it's almost like these projects are energy patterns floating around in the ether, looking for someone to “download” them. And if we download them, and then don't honor them, then they go away, and they find some other place to land. Whether we look at this “downloading” as metaphor or as reality doesn't matter, I've experienced it. So I try to encourage people to pay attention to the Muse’s nudge, because nudges are downloads trying to happen. If we pay attention to one nudge, then another will come, and another. It's a magical process—like if you pay attention to your dreams, you'll start remembering more of your dreams. But if you don't pay attention, you're gonna think, “I don't dream.”
You may have answered this already. But what is your favorite part about being the writer and creator that you are today?
Number one: I never know what's going to be asked of me next. I try to live ever more openly and be curious and honor what I meet. That takes me to number two (which is getting more important to me as I get older): I get to rub shoulders with other people who want to create, who want to be compassionate, who want to help make the world a better place, though they don't always know how to do it. My online community on Substack is called
. We Rafters use the arts and spiritual practice to buoy ourselves up as we're going through life. I'm in daily conversations with people who, even up into their 90s, are still trying to figure out who they are, how to give themselves permission to be who they are, and how to express themselves in some way—in writing, music, gardening, whatever. These are all creative choices. I find myself “being Mrs. Lazza” to many of these people. I try to give them some sense that they're not alone in asking what they're asking, or in believing that there's something in themselves that's worth sharing. I affirm with them that there can be joy in a world where things are topsy turvy (to put it mildly). This word “joy” can give a lot of people problems. I’m not talking about sticking our head in the sand or being pollyannish. I’m talking about being deeply grounded in gratitude that we get to be alive and express who we are—and that has benefit of others. Nobody can stop us from doing this. We can control our minds, hearts, and spirits. So, if I can inspire that same conviction in another person, so that they feel like, Hey, I am here with you, and I want to look at who I am, and what I can give the world—well, then there's two of us. Then pretty soon, we’ve got ten. A hundred. Marge Piercy, in her poem “The Low Road,” expresses exactly this. We end up with an army of people who are ready to change the world, just by being who they are and linking arms with others who are convinced of doing the same.As a sort of the corollary of that, is there anything that you don't like about being this creative person and having this creative practice?
I used to resent the business and marketing side of things, because I felt like it was taking me away from the real work. But I have learned to reframe that. I try to see those aspects as relationship building. Nothing is wasted. If my primary focus is simply to make money, that is not going to work for me. I want to have a conversation with people that provides mutual benefit. So now my work is much more organic, and so is the life of whatever I create. Some of my books have a limited readership and lifespan before they go the way of all flesh. But other books—written even twenty years ago—are still selling, and I'm still getting emails from readers. I give a book life, then push it out of the nest and see where it's gonna go. I try to help it fly, at the start. But then I move on to the next project.
Like the practice of non-attachment.
Somebody describes that as letting go. But a friend has gotten me thinking that it's better to say “let it be.” That’s a very different dynamic.
Again, you kind of have answered this, but to officially ask it, do you consider yourself a working artist?
A working artist? Yes. Absolutely. But I think every person is creative. They just may not look at themselves that way.
That's true. Especially from the creative framework that you were talking about. I don't know a lot of people who would think of themselves that way, and which is both a shame and I think just life sometimes.
We live in a culture that tends to not know how to value creativity other than in a consumerized sense. So, even many people who are self-consciously creating don't feel like they're legitimately creative if they are not selling something, or if they’re not credentialed by some program, authority or institution. They’re running around with impostor syndrome. Can’t we lighten up a little bit? Let’s assume that everybody we meet is creative in his or her own way. And they may also be carrying wounds related to their creativity. Those wounds or anxieties may be getting in the way of their owning or expressing their gifts and abilities. To me, when we're expressing who we truly are and what we're truly capable of, we live with more gratitude and joy. What would the world look like if each of us could tap into that more than we do?
Absolutely, even just stepping out of that mindset of, oh, I have to be credentialed. I have to be making money from this otherwise, I don't matter. It goes back to the non-attachment, just like the joy of actually creating something regardless of what, what impact it's going to have on the world.
An inspirational figure in my life right now is a retired DC firefighter who will be 93 in July. He’s an Irish tenor. Several times a week, he goes out with his guitar to sing for people. Plus, he sends poetry to people and reads it to shut-ins. In so many ways, he uses the arts as connective tissue in his community. Maybe the reason he’s still doing that 93 is that he's been doing it, in some fashion, all his life. Surely those of us who are younger and more able-bodied can find something of ourselves to share!
I was going to ask this question later, but I'm going to ask it now, because I think this ties into your of ethos around Substack. But the question is: how did you get into Substack and what drew you here? I think the answer probably has a lot to do with what you were talking about just being able to communicate and connect with people artistically.
Before Substack, I’d never found a way of being on social media that felt consistent with who I am. When I say social media, I'm talking about Facebook, Instagram, and what used to be Twitter. I was always looking for a more ethical and organic alternative. Then, about a year and a half ago, my friend
, suggested that I look at Substack. Carrie is an amazing singer-songwriter (among other things) who has a Substack called . Substack isn’t perfect—there’s no such thing—but it was set up on a different model from other platforms. So this is where I'm building my community, . I'm not going to cede the soil to those who want to spread hate on Substack. I'm not going to abandon the platform. I’m going to stay rooted here and do what's possible. I’m very grateful that I made the switch. It's all a work in progress, ever evolving. But yes, it's very much an extension of everything else that I do.I'm not sure how to word this just to given how you've described yourself and your practice. I was going to ask do you have any like artistic practices outside of your writing or that you do for a creative outlet beyond writing, but it sounds like you consider so much of what you do as part of that practice that I don't know if that resonates.
Yeah. So, for example, I love to go on hikes or camping with my family. But my mind will still be creating. It never shuts off. I don’t have trouble with writer's block or creative block. If I don't know how to proceed with something, I don't look at it as a block. It's like, oh, wow, I get to explore different directions I might go with this . . . I have enough privilege in my life where I am able to do that. I want to live like wide open blue sky. Alberto Rios has a poem called “We Are of a Tribe.” He talks about how the sky has no borders, no edges, and we all dream of the sky, where we all belong. That’s how I want to live my life—without borders between what's creative and what's not, what's spiritual and what's not, who’s family and who's not . . .
Absolutely. This, this question might resonate a little bit more, but do you do anything in terms of your own personal development within your creative practices? The way I phrase it is, like, continuing education, but is there anything you do?
I wish I had more time for this! But I do like taking poetry workshops. As I'm getting older, it's harder for me to write novels and book-length nonfiction, so I’m instinctively turning to more short form materials, like poetry. On
I sometimes host poets to present Zoom workshops. Because I'm hosting, I get to participate!It's a win-win.
I have another novel coming out in the fall called The Singing Stick. While doing the research, I’ve gotten to meet some amazing people. For example, there’s a Dakota man named Vine Marks. He’s in his 80s, and he is a native flute player. One of his flutes has been passed down through generations. I was able to spend hours with him, learning about the Dakota flute tradition. Up until that moment, I had thought, Wouldn't it be cool to own a native flute and learn how to play it? Well, I will never do that now. From the Dakota perspective, this is traditionally a man's instrument, and I want to honor Vine and other Dakota elders in this regard. Vine has stretched my understanding of Dakota culture and music and this particular instrument and the stories attached to it. Most of this won’t overtly be in the novel. But it’s there. And it has made its way into me. This is another example of “continuing education.” If I stay open to the projects, continuing education finds me.
I have a hard time finishing [my work.] I don’t have a problem starting, but then I put them down and come back a little later to work on it. And so I've done that a couple of times with my novel, and I'm at the point where I'm like, this is the last time you're doing this, you just have to stop, you have to send it out.
I am a hybrid author. Some of my work is traditionally published, and some of it I do myself, depending on my goals for a project. But I have a wonderful editor—an amazing person! And my work with her is continuing education, too.
Was there anything that you found really helped you develop to where you are now? The multiple people I've interviewed so far often talk about there was this one person who believed in me, or there was, you know, someone who just showed me that this kind of career was possible, or I took this class. So that's more of what I'm asking if there was anything that helped you realize, like, Ah, this is, this is showing me what's possible and how I can be.
Let me ponder this for a minute. There are so many people, and I've already mentioned some of them . . . But I had a teacher when I was a senior in high school. His name was Mr. Umphress. And one day he handed back an essay that he’d assigned us to write about some book. My essay had a D- grade. I went up to Mr. Umphress after class, very distraught. (I'm a perfectionist in recovery!) I said, “You know, I thought this was a pretty good paper.” And he said, ‘It was the best paper in the class. But it’s not the best paper you could write.” At that age, I was very much somebody who paid attention to what other people thought of me. That was part of my perfectionism—wanting to be acceptable, especially as a female in a male dominated culture. But I think this experience taught me in a very harsh way that I needed to look at my own standards for myself. To trust my own judgment of my abilities. To be accepting of myself while also believing that I could always do more, and be better. Nobody else should be the arbiter of that. The gatekeeper that I have always struggled with the most is not the agent, the editor, the publisher, the reading audience—it’s the gatekeeper inside myself. And I think that I first began to understand that because of Mr. Umphress.
That is harsh, but that is a really good that is a really good lesson yes, it could be it could be the best paper in the class, like you said, but you're not living up to your potential.
I don’t think he meant for me to take from it what I took from it. I think he was trying to spur me into higher achievement. But I did take something from that experience that was valuable.
Exactly. Before I get into my couple of my final couple final questions here: if someone, if your son say, were to come to you and say like, I'm interested in living the kind of life you have mom, is there anything you would want him to know? Or want someone else to know before they embark on this journey?
I would want to say, you are enough. Start where you are. And then start again, where you are. And then start again, where you are. And you do not have to be good. That’s Mary Oliver in her poem “The Wild Geese.” Live in your body and find what animates you—what's true. Do the next true thing. If that's writing in your journal, if that's cooking a meal, if that's doing the lawn, if it's participating in a protest march . . . do the next true thing. When it's true, you can feel it in your body. When you are living from your true spot, and making from your true spot, there's no distinction between living and making. With our son Nathan, my husband and I have always said to him, “The best thing that we can do is love you. And our love will give you the safe place that you need to express who you are—to live out who you are.” What we do for Nathan, I would like to think that I do for people on The Raft and for people who read my books. It's a privilege to think that somebody bothers to read anything that I write. How many words are flying around in the world at any one time on any given day, and somebody latches on to a couple of mine? If my work lands with someone, then it was because they had a landing spot waiting. Then they can take my work and run with it the way they want to. I don't have anything to do with that. So don't look at me for answers. I'm just trying to figure it out like everybody else.
Where can people find you?
·
is my online community, hosted by Substack:
. I'm no longer active on other social media.
· Website: https://phylliscoledai.com
· email: phyllis@phylliscoledai.com
What's coming up next for you?
My novel The Singing Stick is coming out this fall. On page one, Fiona Richter, who lives in Massachusetts, has a nor'easter bearing down on her town. She calls 911 because her husband Simon has gone missing. He is 80 years old and suffers from dementia. She doesn't know where he is. And his clarinet has gone missing with him. The novel takes us into this swirl of secrets—and into the power of music and love across time. The novel wrestles with some hard stuff. I have deep affection for the characters. And that novel will come out as my husband and I will be getting ready to move across country after having lived here in South Dakota for a quarter century. Nathan will be graduating from college around that same time too. So it's going to be a momentous year or so in in our family's life.
That sounds exciting. Now the final question. Is there anything else that I didn't mention?
I have been very windy.
No, this has been lovely. If you think of anything, you can let me know.
This came up in my mind a couple times during this interview. I have a memoir called The Emptiness of Our Hands, which is about a period of 47 days that I lived by choice on the streets of Columbus, Ohio. I went out on the streets to just practice being present to everyone I met. I was accompanied by a friend, my co-author James Murray. One of the things that became very important during my time on the streets was the notion of letting go of outcomes. You and I touched on this briefly earlier in our conversation: letting go, letting be. I think about this, especially in terms of everybody who's fighting for justice, for reproductive rights, for the planet itself . . . Whatever it is, let’s just do the next true thing, then let go of the outcome. We don't know how things ripple out from what we do. When we send a book out into the world, we don't know who it's being read by or how it's touching them and how its effects will ripple through their lives. When we drop off food at a neighbor's house because they're not feeling well, we don't know how that will ripple for them. I would just ask people to not demand perfection—to not demand a certain ending. Just do the next true thing.
Maybe that's going to be the pull quote!
Thank you have so much time for doing all the things that you do. I'm delighted that you invited me to be part of this madness.
Thank you for thank you for reaching out. This was lovely.
Phyllis on her coat: My "I Am Part of Everybody" coat, which carries the signatures or names of countless people who believe in the power of community. The coat has inscriptions in at least ten languages—I've lost count. I invite your readers to email me (phyllis@phylliscoledai.com) if they'd like me to add their name. I'll then send them a photo of their name on the coat.
Phyllis holds a BA from Goshen College, a Master of Theological Studies from Methodist Theological School, and a Master of Arts from The Ohio State University.