Mary Adkins – from law to literature

Processing the personal struggles through words.
A negative experience in a college creative writing class derailed Mary Adkin's writing ambitions for nearly a decade, and sent her on a whole different path than the one she had planned.
Mary studied public policy and went to law school, but when it came to working in the legal profession, Mary quickly realized that being a lawyer was not her true calling, and she made a bold decision to leave the profession after just seven months.
Mary transitioned to tutoring to support herself while dedicating her days to writing. Despite initial setbacks and self-doubt, she eventually completed her first novel, and has continued to write, with each new novel being distinct in its storyline and tone.
In this episode Mary opens up about her recent memoir, You Might Feel a Little Pressure, which explores her personal experiences with miscarriages and how they transformed her life. She emphasizes the importance of writing as a means of processing and sharing personal struggles, hoping her memoir will provide comfort to others going through similar experiences.
In addition to her writing, Mary helps other adults write and publish their books through her program, The Book Incubator. She shares insights into how her own challenging experiences with feedback have shaped the supportive and constructive environment she now fosters in her program.

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Researched, edited and produced by Claire Waite Brown
Music: Day Trips by Ketsa Undercover / Ketsa Creative Commons License Free Music Archive - Ketsa - Day Trips
Artworks: Emily Portnoi emilyportnoi.co.uk
Photo: Ella Pallet

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Chapters

• 3:01 Childhood Creativity
• 5:10 Derailment by a Negative Creative Writing Class
• 8:29 Legal Profession Not All its Cracked up to be
• 13:39 Writing the First Novel
• 16:14 Themes and Stories of Mary's Novels
• 19:57 Writing a Memoir on Miscarriages
• 22:30 Helping Adults Write Books: The Book Incubator
• 23:31 Learning from Past Teaching Experiences

Transcript

0:30

And it was such a terrible experience that it really derailed me for almost a decade. On my first day as a lawyer, I knew that I was in the wrong profession. It was like, I feel like I am in a play. This is not my life. I am in a play. I'm acting as a character who is not me. This is someone else's life. I took a huge pay cut. I still had a lot of student loan debt that I had to start paying back. But no part of me regretted that decision because my quality of life was just so much better. I was so much happier. Because even if you have 99 positive reviews, the one that's not is the one that lingers and that you lie in bed thinking about. So it's like, don't Hi, I'm Claire, founder of Creativity Found, a community for creative learners and educators, connecting adults who want to find a creative outlet with the artists and crafters who can help them do so with workshops, courses, online events and kits. For this podcast, I chat with people who have found or re-found their creativity as adults. We'll explore their childhood experiences of the arts, discuss how they came to the artistic practices they now love, and consider the barriers they may have experienced between the two. We'll also explore what it is that people value and gain from their newfound artistic pursuits, and how their creative lives enrich their practical, necessary, everyday lives. This time I'm chatting with Mary Adkins. Hi, Mary. How are you? You're very welcome. It's lovely to speak with you. Tell me, first of all, what gets your creative juices flowing Well, I'm primarily a writer. I write novels. So that's really my my main thing. Although lately I've gotten into cooking and making bread and I'm thinking about signing up for a sewing class. So I'm diversifying a little bit, but primarily Yeah, oh brilliant. That's new to me since we last spoke, the cooking and the sewing. It is, yes. Brilliant. Okay, so did writing and other kind of creative activities, did they feature heavily in your childhood and were they encouraged at home, Very much so. I was a big writer as a child. My mom still has all the stories I wrote when I was a little girl. The first story I ever wrote was called The Baby, and it's about a princess who has to live with a baby who won't stop crying, and so she throws it in a dumpster and then feels bad and rescues it. And it's definitely when my little sister was born, I think I was writing that story. So like, I was always creative. At home it was very encouraged, and I think I also, just my personality type, I really, even from being a little girl, like I loved affirmation from adults. And so I really steered toward things where I'd get that kind of affirmation, which for me was more creative and less, for example, athletics. I was not the sportiest. And as soon as it was clear to me that that wasn't going to be what I was very good at, I set that aside. I was never a sports person. We bought my son cleats over the weekend and my husband said, it's such a big deal to get your first pair of cleats. And I said, I've No, I completely agree. I do like my husband's input for buying sporty things. I'll go to Cathlon and go, Oh my God, this is so scary. I've got no idea what's going on. So did you plan to continue that? Was it part of your, if you had a plan for the future Yes, absolutely. I plan to be a writer. I mean, I When I was applying to college, I remember I applied for creative writing scholarships. I just knew that I wanted to write. It was very clear to me. And then I got to college and I was getting a liberal arts degree. So they required, you know, the curriculum included just like a diverse array of things across the sciences and the liberal arts. But as soon as I had an opportunity to sign up for an elective, I signed up for a creative writing class. and just thought that that was going to be what I did. And it was such a terrible experience that it really derailed me for almost a decade. So I did not do well in this class. It was a short story writing class taught by a local author. So she was She was not a full professor, and I only share that to say, looking back, I don't know how much teaching experience she had. She had publishing experience, she was a published writer, but the way that she ran this class In my memory, it was very critical. It was like we were critical of each other. She was critical of us. And I didn't do well in it. I made like a B minus, I think, on my first story. And that was really, you know, like I said, I was someone who loved affirmation. So I was like, had always made sure to be a straight A student. Like I would like lose a leg before I didn't make an A. So to get a B- at the thing I loved most when I had worked really hard and at a school where we had pretty significant grade inflation. So like B- weren't really a thing. Like it was, you know, as long as you kind of tried your best, maybe you'd get a B, but like B- was the equivalent of a D or an F. And I just thought, well, I must not be as good at this as I thought. I must not know how to do this. I must not know how to write fiction. And so I didn't take another creative writing class in all of college. I just redirected. I majored in public policy. I went to law school. And that was an interest too. I've always been interested in the law and justice. So it's not that that didn't interest me, but it wasn't my first passion. My first passion was the creativity. Now, to skip ahead, the ironic part is that I'm a novelist. If I've had any career, it's been that. I became a fiction writer professionally. I look back on that time now when I was 18, and I had that one professor who I gave so much power over defining me and I don't blame myself for doing that because I was young and a novice and I didn't know better. I thought, well, she must know who's good at this and who isn't. But it does make me sad. And now as a teacher of writing, I work with adults, so mostly older than college age. But it's very interesting to me that so many adults have stories like this about being in some kind of class setting or workshop setting early on, where there was like one teacher who somehow ended up, you know, they ended up leaving that class thinking that they're not good at this, and then they don't do it again for years and Yeah, it's not new. It's so sad that it is not new to me, having had 90 plus guests on this show, that I have heard that a number of times, whether at school, even, you know, even quite a young age, which is even sadder, right the way through. Yeah, it's... a recurring theme. But the good thing is in this show is we have the encouragement to actually hear that people do get back to it. So we will get back to that. But tell me about law and public policy and I majored in public policy in college and then I applied and went to law school. I always liked being a student. I like to learn. I still love to learn. Sometimes I flirt with going back to school just to study something for fun, you know, like sewing. But I just like being in the classroom setting. It's always been a true joy of mine. So I really liked law school. It was fun. I liked learning. Reading cases is basically just reading stories. You know, they all start with the story of somebody that has a problem and then it has to be solved through the law. So I, in a way, law school was kind of a distraction in the sense that from kind of like the trajectory my life was going because I was having fun. But then I got out of law school, and on my first day as a lawyer, I knew that I was in the wrong profession. It was like, the way I described it to people, even that day, it was crazy how much clarity I had immediately. It was like, I feel like I am in a play. This is not my life. I am in a play. I'm acting as a character who is not me. This is someone else's life. And so it's not that it was so... Because people are like, you must have been so miserable. Because I quit after only seven months. I was only ever a lawyer for seven months. So you must have been so miserable. And it's like, there were aspects of the job I didn't like, for sure. But it was more this sense of just being in the wrong life. It was very strange. Like, oh, this is not my life. I've wound up in the wrong place. Almost like I were driving on a trip and I just landed in the wrong city. Like, that's almost what it felt like. And so by my second day, I was looking for ways out. And people say, you must have been so miserable. But I hadn't even had time to be miserable yet. So it wasn't that. It was just this sense of, this is just wrong. I'm not supposed to be here. This is wrong. I'm supposed to be writing. I just had this clarity. I need to be writing. And so when I started looking for jobs on my second day, It was just for jobs that would pay my bills so that I could have time to write. My parents were very weirded out by all of this. Like, you just graduated from law school and you just started a new job. But I just had this clarity around it. And it took me seven months to find a job that would allow me to actually be able to afford to live, so pay my bills, and give me time to write, which was tutoring. And so I would tutor mainly in the evenings because I was tutoring adults, many of whom had work or school. And so I would write during the day and tutor at night. And I did this for about seven years. And during that time, I was just being creative in the day. I was working on what would become my first novel and then my second novel. And I was writing other things, too, writing essays, personal essays. I really liked writing a play at one point. So it was a really happy time. I mean, I had to change apartments. I took a huge pay cut. I still had a lot of student loan debt that I had to start paying back. But no part of me regretted that decision. because my Wow, that's amazing. So you were writing in all sorts of genres, but going back to the unhappy experience of writing fiction, did you include that in this new life that you had straight away, or were you still a bit wary of going Okay, so I still assumed I could not write fiction because of that college experience. And so I was writing all nonfiction. I did not touch fiction. I was only writing personal essays. I decided I was going to write a funny memoir that was humorous about my escapades as a child. A lot of those were popular at the time, and so I thought maybe this is my way to get a book published. And so I pitched that book to a literary agent, and he wrote back and said, This is a very 90s book. Like, I could have sold this in the 90s, but I can't sell this now. But I like your writing. Do you have a novel? Do you have a novel? Like, who says to someone, do you have a novel? Of course, I did not have a novel, but I had had a secret novel idea that I hadn't told anyone because I thought, I'm not good at fiction. I shouldn't do fiction. But this person had just asked me if I had a novel. So I wrote back, well, I do have this idea for a novel. And I wrote a little paragraph about it. And he wrote back, that sounds so great. I love this idea. Write the novel and then send it to me. And that's why I did it. This one person is responsible for my entire what became my career because he gave me permission to just try it. And he didn't become my literary agent, by the way. Years later, he didn't want the novel, but that was fine because it didn't really matter. I had Yeah. So it took you time to write it? How were you feeling when you were doing that? And were you feeling confident? Did you feel there were holes in your knowledge or confidence or Oh, absolutely. You know, it's interesting looking back. I think because I had had such a bad experience in that one creative writing class, I sort of swung to the other end, like I was like a pendulum that swung to the other extreme. And I did not sign up for a class. I did not read a book. I googled how many words are in a novel. And then I just wrote until I hit that dumper. And it was so much fun. I mean, I remember like I wrote a lot of it in bed. I'd just be sitting up at night and wake up in the morning and just start adding to it. And it was, I felt alive. Like it was just fun and exciting. And this is in many ways why it did take me six years because that draft was extremely messy and not just messy. I mean, it was a first novel draft, but it wasn't, um, It needed a lot of revision, I guess is the way to put it. It needed structural work. It needed character development. It needed a consistent theme. And so I worked on it for years and years. I wrote many drafts of it. But that first one, I just still have warm, fuzzy feelings about Yeah. And you're still tutoring and writing other things Yeah. So did you send it to When I was done, I did send it to that literary agent, and I never heard back from him. He ghosted me. But I found another literary agent who became mine, and she sold that book and then my two subsequent novels after that. So my next two novels I wrote more quickly, and those I worked on in really different circumstances. My second novel I wrote after having a baby, in the months after having a baby while I was Yeah, still nursing and everything. So that was a really specific kind of creative experience. And then my third novel I wrote during the pandemic. So that was also a very specific kind of Yeah. Yeah. And do they follow similar themes They're all really different. All three are really different stories. The first one, for instance, is really funny. There's a lot of laugh out loud moments. There's a blog in it, and the blog is included in the novel. I put a lot of internet comments on the blog, so there's a lot of humor around our online communications and how ridiculous those are these days. And then the second one is more dramatic. It was about a sexual assault on a college campus and the follow up from that. So the hearing at the university and how the university deals with it. And it's really examining justice. That novel called Privilege is really where my law background comes in. I got to explore my interest in justice and legal proceedings. And then the third novel is about a caterer to a billionaire family Where are these stories coming from that are so different? That's like part of the fun for me is just waiting for the next idea, like when it's going to appear and it feels kind of magical. I find that really interesting too, like how ideas come. And mine were all really different. I mean, the third novel, the one that's set in Palm Beach, Florida, had a lot of different iterations. Like it started out as one thing with certain characters, and then it changed, and the title changed a bunch, and even the setting changed. But the second, my second novel, the Justice one called Privilege on a college campus, I remember where I was when I had the idea. It kind of just like downloaded into my brain fully formed. I was walking down the street near my house and it was summer. I had on sandals because I remember looking at my feet as I was walking, so I didn't trip on anything because the sidewalk was uneven. It was like, oh, it just came into my brain and then it never changed. The premise didn't change, the characters didn't change, the title didn't change, the title came to me. I would love for that to happen again because that was awesome. That was Do you ever have any concerns about how other people will Oh, definitely. I find the publishing process very stressful. It's very it's the opposite of the creative process. It's like being perceived in the world and having it be out there and then wondering what people think. I mean, I did learn pretty early not to read reviews and I do really try not to do that because it usually doesn't end well. Because even if you have 99 positive reviews, the one that's not is the one that lingers and that you lie in bed thinking about. So it's like, don't do that to yourself. So yes, Yeah. Yeah. Well, good for you for not reading the reviews. There was a time when we didn't have reviews or we had to wait for the newspaper to read reviews for theatre shows and you didn't have instant reviews for Anyway, you said about your almost memoir about the younger you, but you're writing a memoir now I believe as well, aren't you? Can you tell me a bit about that and why Yeah, so I just completed my first memoir And it is very different than that first one that I pitched years ago. So this one is about a year of miscarriages, that I had three miscarriages in about nine months, and how that experience was life-changing, or the better, actually. Like how it led me to a sense of wonder and to really examine how I was living and my relationship with my body. Those had been unexamined before. at least to the degree that this year of losses led me to. And so that's what the memoir is about. It's called You Might Feel a Little Pressure. I'm in the process of pitching it to publishers right now, so it's still very And was it something that you felt obviously you needed it for yourself? Did you think, well, you're saying that you're pitching it, so I guess you do think you Oh, absolutely, because I've always found comfort in reading, particularly memoir. I mean, I read a lot of fiction, too, for fun. But when I'm struggling through something, my go-to is to read other people's stories of having gone through it. It just gives me so much comfort. It helps me see it in new ways. And so when I had my first miscarriage, I thought, I need to go find memoirs about this. There must be a lot. And there were virtually none. I found one. And so once I kind of came out of that year and felt like, wow, I really have a lot that I'm unpacking and that I want to say about it. And I was still in it. Like you said, I've always processed through writing. And so I thought, I want to process this year through writing in a way that I don't just by thinking about it or even talking with others or even talking with a therapist. Writing is so different for me. I would like for this to be a memoir that I could share with other women. I was really thinking of women going through something similar as kind of who I was writing it for. I wasn't thinking of it as I was writing as like, the whole world needs to read this. It was more like I was imagining myself, you know, 18 months earlier and what Yeah, yeah. As well as writing your own work, you also help other adults to I started a program called The Book Incubator a few years ago and it's It's all the stuff that I kind of wish someone had told me back when I was those six years that I was working on my first novel. Things like, you know, just keep going. Like the first draft, you just need momentum, like get it done. And then how to revise and then how publishing works. I didn't know how publishing worked or the different paths to publishing, what my options were. And if I if I wanted a big publisher, how do you even go about that? What does that look like? So I created this program and it's a year long and it's really for adults who want to write and write a publishable novel or memoir, because those are the things that I and the other instructors in the program are experts in. So not kind of like business books or how-to books. We don't do that because we don't know about that. So it's really the long form narrative, whether it's fiction or nonfiction. And we work with people to write, revise and pitch And I've just thought of this question now, so you're not prepared for this one. With your own teaching and the other people that you have that teach with you, do you ever look back at or learn lessons from that particular professor and know how not to do things or how you don't want to Oh my gosh, absolutely. Yes. I mean, for instance, there's no peer feedback because I think feedback is a skill. People need to learn how to give feedback and they also need to learn what even to look for. You know, like there's just so many things that go into giving good feedback. And so I think it's actually a very vulnerable thing to expose your creative work to feedback from someone else. And so, yes, that is a direct reaction to that experience. Our feedback only comes from professional editors in the program who who've been doing this for a living. So they know how to talk to writers, they know how to say helpful things in a way that doesn't shut down a writer, but is actionable, like gives them things that they can actually do to make it better, which Yeah. I like that phrase, it doesn't shut down the writer, because that's exactly what happened to you. You were shut down. Exactly. Yes. That's a very positive outcome and learning from a rubbish situation as it was at the time. But going forward now, do you have plans for the future near or far? Creatively, you mean? Well, you can tell me other stuff as well. Well, we have a soccer game this weekend. I am. I'm starting a new novel, which is exciting. And it's a fun one. It's one I'm having a lot of fun with. So I'm bringing some humor back into my work. And I'm really trying to read it for myself. It's interesting because it was a dream come true that I was able to publish novels and I would get these book contracts and actually get paid for my work. It becoming a professional career was a dream come true. But at the same time, naturally, writing turned into work. It was how I was paying my bills. I had deadlines. I was supporting my family with money I was making through writing. And so it's just interesting. I realized at some point, oh, mentally, I've gotten to this place now where the thing that used to be really fun and playful is now what I think of as work. And for me, that doesn't make for great inspiration. You know, like the idea of, I don't know, it's just not inspiring to think of it as work. So I'm really trying to bring back in that playfulness that I had once upon a time. And it's harder now. It's harder now, You've touched on another theme and it's good that you're able to notice it and address it by doing something different about it. But that theme of when you turn your creative thing into a thing that makes you money, it makes it a different animal. That's fabulous. Thank you so much, Mary. Tell us how people can connect with you. Remind us of the names Yeah, so my novels are When You Read This is the first one, Privilege is the second one, and Palm Beach is the third. And if they want to check out the program I run, it's thebookincubator.com. And I also have a podcast. I don't interview guests, but it's just me talking, sharing some writing tips and strategies. And it's called The First Draft Club. So they can go check that out if they want Brilliant. Good for podcasting. Yay. Love it. Thanks so much, Mary. I've had a lovely chat. Me too. Thank you, Claire. Thanks so much for listening to Creativity Found. I hope you enjoyed this episode and gained some value from it. 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