8 Questions for... Kimberley Warner

Spotlight on Unfixed

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Kimberly Warner

is the founder and director of Unfixed - a multi-media company that explores how adversity can broaden our definition of what it means to live a “good life.”

1. Why Substack?

I’d like to offer something useful to your readers but I’m going to be honest, I don’t dare call myself a writer; though I’ve had a fifteen-year career in film and photography and don’t call myself a filmmaker or photographer either. I think I have a problem with labels. And if you read my memoir, you’d know it’s taken 40+ years to form some sense of identity other than chameleon-ing myself around others. While I won’t be able to share constructive, literary advice here, I can offer a glimpse of the freedom and playfulness available when a no-expectations / no-goals approach leads the way.

I didn’t research or strategize before I began my Substack Unfixed. I tend to be pretty impulsive when it comes to any creative endeavor, jumping in and then figuring out how to swim. I learned about Substack when I subscribed to Andrea Gibson’s newsletter years ago but only read her posts in my inbox and never opened my own account. Sure, I wrote. I wrote treatments and scripts for film, I dabbled in poetry with my husband, writing odes to a particular season for the better part of a year. I even fell in love with my husband through words—living seven miles apart but fingertips on keyboard the only intimacy we shared for five months. Writing was a muse, but I largely ignored her, or would binge and then stow her away. I think her power frightened me, her power to change the course of my life, awaken me from habit and question my assumptions. Like a ruthlessly honest friend, she made me better. But because I didn’t nurture our friendship, she was also fickle, and the blank page brought up feelings of abandonment, betrayal, and worthlessness.

But when life threw me the proverbial curve ball in 2014, I flailed, and writing became a torch while still very much in the dark. In 2018, and dizzy as f*%#, I sat down at my husband’s computer and started writing the story I had been living for the previous four years, trying to sort out events, timelines and the messy unraveling that scribbled my narrative into a colossal pile of nothing. I didn’t stop writing for eight months, often spitting out a paragraph at a time before the confused signaling in my brain forced me horizontal. It was an arduous but clarifying process. When I finished, I put the memoir on an external drive and largely forgot about it. It had served its purpose.

Fast forward another five years—more healing, more clarifying, more strengthening—and I decided to share the manuscript with my mom, brother, and aunt; after all, the story was also directly and indirectly about them. With their blessing and encouragement, I followed a wild hair to widen the circle and share on Substack.

2. How long did it take you to find your groove?

Can you ask me this in the afterlife?

3. How has it changed you?

Writing my story privately, as I already mentioned, was a clarifying experience. And I needed that. But what I didn’t know is that I also needed to claim myself, my story, in a larger context. The writing helped detangle my story, helped me identify themes that brought meaning and a sense of agency, but sharing with a community of kind-hearted, generous, interested and wildly interesting humans brought that clarity into my body and grounded my experience of being human in community. Through sharing on Substack, my story—the pain, grief, perseverance, and peace, all of it—became less personal and more universal. I saw how my own journey of navigating the dark became a road map for another just entering in. I love the Seneca quote, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” We are all doing that with each other over here and it’s quite enlivening for this introvert.

Until I discovered Substack, reading and writing were solo endeavors. Written words were tucked away into forgotten folders. Treasured books, read under a blanketed dark womb, and then abandoned lifeless on a shelf—only their characters lived on in memory like long-lost friends. Never did I think writing and reading could be so immediate and intimate; a sharing or a reading within hours or days became a conversation, a hug delivered on soft consonants, quips that looped laughter all day long, a teary joining of minds.

And though I can’t even put face to most in this community of friends, each transcends time and space—five-dimensional beings that swirl into omnipresence; they reside within, beyond, and are yet more real, nourishing, and delightful than a toasted cheese sandwich.

So how has it changed me? Transplant a skinny sapling standing alone in a plowed field into the Redwoods and ask her the same question. I echo her.

4. What mistakes have you made?

I didn’t enter into this Substack/writing endeavor with any expectations other than to have a digital platform for a few inner-circle family members and friends to read my memoir. So without any pre-conceived idea about how that process should look, it’s hard to identify any mistakes. I’m winging it and true to my only flying-dream-to-date, I crash headfirst into the branches of trees daily. But no one seems to care, so I don’t either. It’s fun up here.

5. To pay or not to pay?

Still working on getting Substack to allow payment in kittens. When that happens, yes please—PAY.

6. What artistic and technical choices have you made?

I’m not sure what goes on up in my brain, but I think it functions a little differently than…what I think it’s “supposed” to do. I don’t think in clear sentences, I think in swirling, looping windstorms, and often have no idea what I’m trying to say until my fingers start tapping the keyboard or my mouth begins moving in conversation. I recall life less in words and more in senses—pictures, sounds and metaphors often land me closer to my intent than any sort of linear thought process. Because of this, stylistically I write mostly in prose, but not because I’m a scholar in this area. It is simply the shortest, most fluid distance between my brain and my heart.

One of the more playful choices in my memoir included a ping-pong poetry exchange with my late biological father. I never met him, though I have volumes of his poetry, so I decided it would be a fun exercise to “respond” to his words. As I learned more and more about him, it was comforting to feel how much DNA we shared—his temperament, his affinities — but I found myself longing to touch the “nurture” part of our relationship as well. Playing a game of “call and response” with his poetry was an intimate (albeit imaginary) exchange where I could reflect on his choice of words, his rhythm, alliterations, the details of a craft he studied and honed throughout his short life. Engaging with him in this way made me feel like his kid — the eager, pig-tailed child, the anxious, bun-headed dancer, the young adult longing to know her purpose. Through his stanzas, his imagery and even his choice of punctuation, I became his student—nurtured by his life’s work and in turn, nourishing me in my own.

7. What’s been the effect on your writing?

Writing feels like fishing in a giant, understocked lake. Most of the time, I float on the surface with my pole, trying to hook words and phrases that represent the ideas and scenes lurking in the deep only to end up with a sunburn and a boat full of seaweed. I do enjoy the challenge however and a day drifting aimlessly isn’t a day wasted. I wish I could send you a version of this interview that includes all the backspaces, nonsense and gaping-mouth pauses where I stick my face on my cat’s belly, listening for my chthonic friends. Maybe I’ll make a film about this process someday, or not only my process, but yours too. I bet our white spaces, office spaces and head spaces are all a bit more Mariana Trench than we care to admit. It’s a dark, dizzying void in here. That said, thanks to Substack, I’m immersed in the best writing program on the planet and every day at 4pm, I relish settling in with my phone (yes, I read you on my phone, the computer screen is too big and bright for my brain), a plate of apples and sunflower butter to accompany my muse binge. And my list of muses grows by the day so in a few months’ time I may have to figure out how to make money reading. I don’t know if all this reading is affecting my writing, but it certainly is motivating, mind-expanding, and restoring my faith in humanity as I engage with this wide circle of big, beautiful minds and hearts.

8. In it for the long haul?

I’m a skinny tree in a forest of Redwoods, remember? I have a lifetime of growing. So yes—as long as all of your life-giving mycorrhizal networks continue sharing.