A conversation with Cathleen Barnhart, an author, mom and cat whisperer! She has a B.A. in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University, and an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Cathleen Barnhart is the debut author of the middle-grade novel, That’s What Friends Do. She has a B.A. in Creative Writing and an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing. She has held more jobs than she can count, including process camera operator, waitress, perfume salesperson, and middle school humanities teacher, but being a fiction writer is her favorite job.
Cathleen shared that she was always interested in being a writer, from a young age. In high school, she took creative writing courses and was the editor of her school's literary magazine. Still, she was concerned about her ability to earn a living as a creative writer, and so majored in both professional writing and creative writing at Canegie Mellon University.
Her first job out of college was as in a management training program at JPMorgan, where she wrote to foreign banks about how to properly format their transfer requests! She left that job and went on to get an MFA in Fiction Writing at University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She got married and had her first child while she was still in school, and became an adjunct professor teaching freshman writing and literature while her husband finished his medical residency.
They eventually moved to New York, and Cathleen took a number of years off to raise her children. She wrote for a local newspaper, but ultimately decided to become a teacher in order to supplement her family's earnings and because she couldn't take the constant rejection of freelance writing! Though she loved teaching, she knew deep down that it wasn't fulfilling enough. When her salary was no longer a financial necessity, she took the risk, stopped teaching and became a full time creative writer.
“When I go to do school visits, I always say that I was the biggest impediment to becoming a published author because I had so much fear of failure.” Cathleen Barnhart
Key takeaways:
- Do things that take you out of your comfort zone. Cathleen described that, when she turned 50, she wanted to try new things and have new experiences. She started a blog and tried something new each month, including making a new friend, learning to can fruit and taking singing lessons.
- Ask yourself, what do I want to do that's really going to fulfill me and what's getting in my way? Cathleen realized that she wanted to write creatively and that she was her biggest impediment because of her fear of failure.
- Find activities and groups that support you. Cathleen joined several writing groups so that by the time she actually decided to leave her day job, she already had a community of writers to support her. She also found her exercise classes to be a supportive structure to her day.
About the guest:
Cathleen Barnhart is the debut author of the middle-grade novel, That’s What Friends Do. She has a B.A. in Creative Writing and an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing. She has held more jobs than she can count, including process camera operator, waitress, perfume salesperson, and middle school humanities teacher, but being a fiction writer is her favorite job.
She is married, has three mostly grown children, a dog, and a cat. When she’s not writing, reading, or walking Zeke, Cathleen fosters kittens and does CrossFit because it’s important to be sensitive and strong.
Website:- http://www.cathleenbarnhart.com/
Instagram :-https://www.instagram.com/cathleenbarnhart/
Facebook:- https://www.facebook.com/cathleen.barnhart
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Cathleen Barnhart: You know when I go do school visits and I talk about my writing, I say that I was the biggest impediment to getting, to becoming a published author because I had so much fear of failure.
Welcome to Making Change With Your Money, a podcast that highlights the stories and strategies of women who experienced a big life transition and overcame challenges as they redefined financial success for themselves. Now, here's your host, certified financial planner, Laura Rotter.
Laura Rotter: My guest today is Cathleen Barnhart.
She is the debut author of the middle grade novel. That’s What Friends Do. She has a BA in Creative writing and an MFA in fiction writing, and she has held more jobs than she can count, including process camera operator. I'm looking forward to hearing what that is. Waitress. Perfume salesperson and middle school humanities teacher.
But being a fiction writer is her favorite job, and Cathleen is also a good friend of mine. So welcome to the Making Change with Your Money podcast. I'm so happy to have you here.
Cathleen Barnhart: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here and to get to talk about my journey a little bit. So thanks for inviting me, having me on.
Laura Rotter: My pleasure. I'm going to start, Cathleen with the question I've been starting all these interviews with, which is, what was money like in your family growing up?
Cathleen Barnhart: Oh, wow. So, money was tight in my family. My father when I was born, my father was an undergraduate and yeah, and came from a middle class. Both of my parents came from middle class families, but my dad was a student.
Uh, when I was little. He ultimately got a PhD and became a professor. I was by that time six and my sister had been born, but starting salaries for professors, um, are not, um, generous. So, so money was really tight. Most of my childhood at the point that my parents sort of began to have a little bit of breathing room.
And I think we're solidly in the middle class. My dad, asked for a divorce and that kind of threw my mother and my sister and me back down the economic ladder. So, yeah. And I would say also for my mom, she had never expected to get divorced. She got married in the, in 1960, um, and marriage was for life. So she was thrown financially and I think also, um, sort of really lost emotionally with, with my parents' divorce, which happened when I was 13, which is maybe why I write fiction for middle school age kids because there's that period in my life was sort of so emotionally powerful.
Not in a good way, but you know that I think that there is a piece of me that is very much stuck in those years.
Laura Rotter: That's, that's so interesting. Where were you living at the time, just to get a sense of sort of the socioeconomic class you were,
Cathleen Barnhart: I grew, I grew up, we were, we moved to Gilford, Connecticut, uh, when I was six and when my dad got a job, um, at Yale.
And I lived in Gilford until I graduated from high school. So I, my whole sort of schooling years were all in Gilford, which is a very lovely, I guess it's not so small anymore, but at the time it was a fairly small town, very old New England town, very sort of deep roots. Founded in the 1600’s. I would say in the seventies, it, it began to, parts of it, it was a far, there was a lot of farmland there, but in the seventies a lot of that land got sold and there were, um, subdivisions, you know, being built and sort of more families whose parents or dads worked in companies or industry in, in and around New Haven.
So there was a big tire company. I think a lot of kids’ dads were, you know, worked at the tire company, tire manufacturing company anyway, so it became, it was like a far, I would say, a farming community that became sort of more of a white collar community over the course of my childhood.
Laura Rotter: Thank you. So it sounds like it wasn't an academic community, it was more…
Cathleen Barnhart: It was not an academic community.
I, there were maybe some, a handful of Yale professors who lived in Gilford, but most of the Yale professors that I knew of lived in New Haven, actually lived in New Haven.
Laura Rotter: So what's your earliest money, memory? And it could be even college like did you expect college to be paid for? What was, what was your, your individual experience of money growing up?
Cathleen Barnhart: Well, so I started working when I was very young. I had a regular job from the time I was probably12, actually maybe it was 12 or 13, around the time that my parents separated and, and started on the path to getting divorced. And I had that job because I didn't get an allowance. Nobody gave me money if I, there was a theater in my, in Gilford at the time, if I wanted to go to the movies, there wasn't someone to hand me money to go to to go to the movies.
First job I had was a, a cleaning. I cleaned, someone's.. a friend of mine and I shared a cleaning job, so she did. She went one Saturday and I went the next Saturday and cleaned this elderly couple's house and I did babysitting. I actually started babysitting when I was 11. But I baby, I had regular babysitting jobs by the time I was 12 or 13, where I babysat like Monday through Thursday after school for a couple kids.
Yeah. Yeah. So I was working when I was quite young. I would say that's probably my first sort of money memory when my parents got divorced. My, one of the agreements in the divorce decree was that my father would pay for college. He would cover all college costs. Um, but when it came time for college, he said that he would not do that even though it was in the divorce decree.
So I was very lucky actually that I was, I was able to get a lot of financial aid because, at the time, the financial aid, they, they were willing to take only my mother's income, so to determine my financial aid. So I got a lot of financial aid to go to college.
Laura Rotter: So that ultimately worked out for you. I do remember that you don't, you didn't have a traditional route, you didn't do graduate in your early twenties.
Like I.
Cathleen Barnhart: At the point that I was the, that I was graduating from high school, I had applied to co colleges only I think two. One was UConn and one was a small college in Chicago that had a technical writing program. And um, I went out, I got accepted to both places and I went out to visit this small college and I hated it really.
And I had never really wanted to go to UConn. It wasn't a good fit for me in a lot of other ways, I realized that I really wasn't ready to go to college. I was very lucky that my dad had sort of not had a traditional path either. He had started out in art school and then actually like failed out of art school and gone into the military and then gone to back to art school using his military benefits when he got out of the military. And then at the point that my parents met, he had decided he was gonna get sort of a traditional BA so he was 25 or 26 before he started, you know, a regular college. So I had that as a, a model. So I didn't, I didn't feel, I think quite the same pressure that other kids felt that like they had to go to college at the age of 18, and so I worked for two years. I worked full-time for two years, and I took some courses at a local community college and then sort of a year and a half into working. I always intended to go to college. I just wasn't ready at 18. So after a little bit of time working and taking some college courses, um, I then applied to college.
I knew then I wanted to, um, write, or I thought I wanted to write, and I didn't wanna be a journalism major. I didn't think that journalism was the way to go. So I had applied to Carnegie Mellon. Which had three different writing major tracks. You could be a creative writer, a professional writer, or a technical writer.
So, um, I, for who, for what I hoped to do, I, it felt, it felt like a good, what I was passionate about, what I loved to do. It felt like a good fit for me, so that's where I ended up.
Laura Rotter: It's great hearing that there was something that you were passionate about. I'm sure some of that, Cathleen, had to do that you didn't just go straight in at 18, because how many 18 year olds have a sense of what they're passionate about?
But what was that? I mean, you did note that you had been accepted to a school you didn't ultimately attend as a technical writing Major. How did you know, how did this occur to you that you wanted to be a writer?
Cathleen Barnhart: I was already writing; I took creative writing courses. My, I had a high, I went to a high school that had a very, diverse and broad set of courses, classes that you could take in in English and social studies there.
It wasn't like ninth grade English, 10th grade English, whatever. So I had taken creative writing. I was the editor of the high school literary magazine. And I worked. I also worked at a newspaper. That's where I was a process camera operator. What is the process? Know they don't exist anymore, but a process camera takes, um, a photograph and turns it into a pixelated image because at the time that that's, that's how photographs were printed in a newspaper. They had to be pixelated. So that's what I, I did as a pro and, and it did the process camera did other things. You could, you could enlarge, for example, an ad, you know, a black and white ad. You could enlarge it, you could reduce the size of something, but it was primary, primarily a way to pixelate photographs so that they could be interesting. Newspaper. Yeah. Yeah. So I was, you know, I was writing. I was writing in high school and I loved writing. I felt like it was something that I was really good at.
I will say I wanted to major in writing. I didn't really have a path after that. Like I wasn't, I didn't know what I was gonna do with that. Major in writing. I majored, I double majored in creative writing and professional writing because, excuse me, ultimately I thought like the creative writing was what I loved to do, but the professional writing was a way to get a job.
So a lot of the other students at Carnegie Mellon at the time got jobs with IBM, like doing manual writing. Uh, and I ended up getting a job with JP Morgan. Working and I was, I went into the bank. I went into a training program, but I was working as a writer. I was writing to foreign banks about how to properly format their transfer, their bank transfer requests. So, it was a writing job.
Laura Rotter: So, it's so interesting, Cathleen, because you, you talked about your upbringing and that certainly from the age of 12-13, you felt that money was tight. And yet it doesn't sound like when you graduated from college, you were that strategic about what you wanted to earn or needed to earn, or am I incorrect?
Cathleen Barnhart: Um, I was strategic that I wanted a job and I, I also really wanted to teach, but I felt like teaching was not, um, it was not a good career. I felt like teachers, you, there was a lot of. I don't know, stuff in the news about, you know, the people who ended up in teaching were people who had been like C students themselves, and they weren't really passionate about it.
And so I didn't see teaching as a sort of a viable career path. I, I guess I wasn't, I certainly wasn't thinking long term about what I was going to do and how much money I needed to earn. I just felt. Like I needed a, a, a “real job”. A job in the real world. Yeah. So I interviewed, I had a couple different interviews with IBM with different branches of, of IBM.
I had this, I, and I was very interested in the training program at JP Morgan because it was a management training program. And to me management was like teaching, but in a business where the salary would be better. And so, um, so that's why I pursued that job opportunity sort of most aggressively. Um, and when I got that then, then I was done interviewing I took that job.
.
Laura Rotter: and help me understand, cuz you talk about, and I was interested in how you kept the passion for creative writing alive, but that to me sounds like a very solitary thing, right? You're, you have the discipline to sit down and write versus teaching. Which seems like a very interactive, if you will, like, that you're, you enjoy being in a front of a group, leading a group. So, um, help me reconcile the two
Cathleen Barnhart:. I I'm not sure how I would reconcile those, to be honest. I think I, I don't think. Teaching came naturally to me when I, when I ultimately did teach, I don't think teaching came naturally to me. I do think I am a more introverted person. I'm very comfortable. Sitting in my study and writing, I like to see people and I have friends and I, you know, I have community, but, but I'm also perfectly happy being alone.
I don't feel lonely when I'm alone. So when I think that I wanted to teach, in part because I love learning and I love learning new things, and I love trying new things, um, I guess I wanted to share that. That enjoyment with students, but it actually took me a while as a teacher to sort of come into my own as a teacher.
I was very, I would say, stiff and not dynamic in front of the classroom. When I started teaching, I had to sort of learn how to be bigger. When I was at JP Morgan as part of my, uh, management training, I had to take a public speaking course. There was a woman in another department who was friends with someone in that department that I was friends with.
So this woman came back and said to her friend, there's this woman in my public speaking class. I've never seen anyone as nervous as she is. She gets up in front, you know, she gets up to speak and she's visibly shaking, and that was me. Wow. So, um, So I was not, you know, I mean that was a long time before I was teaching, but I was not necessarily comfortable being dramatic and dynamic and in front of people and talking.
Laura Rotter: So, um, that very much resonates with me. I remember my first job with a small middle market bank and I had to make a presentation in front of management and. I couldn't breathe. Oh my God. I was hyperventilating and that stayed with me for quite a long time until, you know, relatively late in my career. I had to make presentations frequently, and so I got over the fear.
But similar to you, I don't, I don't get energy by being in front of groups, or maybe I ultimately do, but when I'm anticipating it's, it's not my favorite.
Cathleen Barnhart: Yes. Yeah. I, I think I've, at this point in my life, I actually, I think I can fake it pretty well, and I do, I do, I'm much less nervous, obviously. I'm much less nervous than I used to be.
I spent a lot of years in front of a classroom and I, I've sort of gained confidence in my ability to, You know, hold people's attention and be interesting. And so I don't get as nervous as I, as I certainly as I got long ago. But it isn't, it isn't, it isn't what I would choose to do, you know, with whatever.
With my day or with my, with my, yeah, I would, I would choose to be alone in my study writing.
Laura Rotter: Interesting. So that brings the question I've been thinking about, which is, So what role did creative writing play in your life on an ongoing basis before you made the decision to make it primary.
Cathleen Barnhart: Early on in my, in my marriage, first of all, I got married when, in, when I was still in school, I was getting my MFA, um, and had my first child while I was still in school.
And Peter was also, Peter was in his residency. He had just started residency. And then I taught, I taught college freshman writing. I taught him a literature course. As an adjunct professor. Where I taught at Quinnipiac College in Hampton. I did that first until, until we moved to Westchester.
Laura Rotter: Oh, I didn't know that.
Cathleen Barnhart: I was teach, I was working as an adjunct professor at Quinnipiac. We came to Westchester and I had two more kids and didn't work. For a while I was just taking care of the kids, but for a short while, for a couple of years I really didn't work. And then I started writing for a local newspaper. I was writing for a local newspaper.
I wrote for, um, a Jewish newspaper. They ha they used to have a Westchester page or couple of pages and I wrote, I wrote some of the articles for that. Uh, the local newspaper was called The White Plains Watch.
Laura Rotter: Oh, I thought you wrote for the patch for there.
Cathleen Barnhart: No, it was before the patch. It was called The White Plains Watch, and I wrote for them for quite a while.
At the same time I was taking, I had decided, particularly in New York, it's very hard to be an adjunct college professor because there are so many starving writers. You know, in New York City trying to make it as writers who are perfectly willing to teach for just almost no money. So we looked at the, you know, the finances of, of me trying to teach as an adjunct here, here in Westchester or in New York.
And it just, it didn't pay. So I was taking courses to get certified to teach middle and high school English at the same time that I was writing for, you know, for various small newspapers. Had sort of just broken into like the national magazine market. I had three very small little pieces. I think it was in magazine called Working Woman.
And, but the constant rejection, I, I just couldn't, I was, so, I was debating between these two things. Do I try to make it as a writer thinking about writing for magazines and newspapers or do I go to teaching and the constant rejection of the freelance writing, I just, I didn't have the ego for it. I really just couldn't do it.
So at that point, I Focused fully on teaching and got, got my certification and then ended up teaching at a private school. So, um, so I didn't need the certification, although, Certainly having got, having student taught and um, I did a couple of maternity leaves. Having the experience was part of the reason that he hired me in the time that I was writing for newspapers, that, that's creative writing to me.
I loved that kind of writing and, but the teaching I would say was also very creative because I was cre, I was creating lessons, I was developing lessons. I was deciding. How do I want to expose my students to this material, to this idea, to this period in history. So I, the years that I was teaching, I really felt like, not the teaching itself, but the creating my lessons and creating my, you know, sort of creating the, the blocks of material that was that was creative.
Laura Rotter: certainly is. And though I'm, I'm smiling cuz I'm thinking of how you said you chose between the two and the rejection from, um, submitting articles to the magazine was too hard. I guess when you are getting instant feedback in a classroom when you're teaching, they may not be writing you a rejection letter, but I would assume, as you say, it's creative, that you're always titrating from the feedback you're, oh, this, they were bored out of their mind. This, they were engaged and it's an iterative process.
Cathleen Barnhart: Yes, and because I was teaching in a private school and because there was much less emphasis then, I don't know if it's the case now, but there was a lot less emphasis on sort of the core curriculum or meeting standards.
It's. It's not that we were not teaching, you know, we were, it was real teaching, but we weren't so bound to, you know, you have to cover this, this core curriculum item and you have to cover this core curriculum item. I could do a lot of really creative things in my classroom. Like when I was, we were, I was teaching them about ancient Rome.
They, one class was putting them into groups and they were each given, you know, some Roman, um, building and they had to build it out of blocks. And so, um, and I did a lot with art in my classes showing them. You know, art that corresponded with the period in history that we were studying. So I was able to be really creative and bring in a lot of, a lot of different ways of learning to the classroom, which I, which was creative and which I loved doing also.
Laura Rotter: And I'm curious, a quick question. When you talk about thinking about going back and, and working, was that a financial necessity or you were, your kids were, needed you less and you wanted.
Cathleen Barnhart: I think that, I think that Peter and I both felt that it was a financial necessity, partly because we wanted to send our kids to, um, a Jewish day school.
We wanted them to have that education. That combined with the fact that Peter was an academic physician, he had not, did not go into private practice, so he wasn't earning the salary that a private practice physician would earn. So those two pieces combined, we wanted certain things for our family, for our children, um, and we felt like we couldn't manage that financially just on Peter's salary.
I also, uh, again, I had worked from the time I was 12, I worked all through high school. I worked. Full-time for two years. I worked all through college. I always worked probably 20 hours a week all through college. I just, I didn't imagine myself as someone who didn't have a job. So I was, you know, happy and thrilled to be able to stay home with my kids when they were little.
But I, it felt like that was sort of a pause in my work life for, for all of those reasons. It was, you know, it was. I think we both, Peter and I both assumed that once the kids were sort of in school, that I would go back to work in some way.
Laura Rotter: Thank you so much for sharing that, and I, I hear several through stories.
One of them is again, this idea that it's part of your identity to be someone with a role in the workplace. And the other through story is the creativity, and I would love it if you would share, since I accompanied you on one of your journeys, you took on a project the year you turned 50. Could you share with our listeners what that project was and how it turned out?
Cathleen Barnhart: So the year I turned 50 was the, my first year of not teaching and of being a writer. And I knew I wanted to write fiction, but I also, I felt like I wanted to, I wanted to try new things. I wanted to, yeah, I wanted to have new experiences. I didn't wanna be stuck in a rut. So the year that I turned 50, I started a blog and I tried something new every month.
I tried, one month was canning. I learned how to can, one month was making a new friend. One month was not spending money other than, other than like grocery shopping, and that I would never spend money for that month, except in sort of a necessary way, like to buy groceries. I loved the, the blog. Um, I loved writing it.
I loved trying new things. I loved getting out of my comfort zone. It was hard sometimes it was really hard. One month was trying to learn to sing. I remember that. Yes. And I learned, I actually did learn a lot about sort of how to sing. It's not, but it's not natural for me. It's very hard for me. To sort of sing and carry a tune and, and it was uncomfortable.
It was really uncomfortable to, you know, to show up and, uh, with the voice teacher and practice. And it was hard, but it was, um, it was a fun year and a fun blog. I ultimately didn't, I did it for a year, but I really wanted to write fiction. I really wanted to be writing a book. So after that year, I moved more toward writing what became, That’s What Friends Do.
Laura Rotter: Cathleen, how did you make the decision to leave the work world and you know, transition your role to a writer full-time? Because that also sounds like a courageous leap given yourself identity.
Cathleen Barnhart: Yes, so a few things happened. First of all, my oldest graduated from high school and he went to White Plains Public High School, and when he graduated I realized that like he was gone.
You know, he, it's of course not that he's never come home and it's not that we're not very close, but like he was growing up and he was leaving and I wanted him to do that. But that part of, I could see the end of that part of my life that I wasn't always gonna be a mother, which was very fulfilling for me.
So that was one thing that happened and I really had this. He graduated from high school the same month that my youngest had her bat mitzvah, and I really was like, very much like struck that my kids were growing up and that I wasn't going to have, I wouldn't, wasn't gonna have that identity, the mother identity as a full-time identity in a few years, and much as I loved teaching.
It also, it wasn't enough. It just wasn't enough. The other thing that happened is that my husband got his chair, pulled him into his, the chair's office and gave him a raise just out of the blue. And that raise was equivalent to my salary for the year, which was very low cuz I was teaching at a private school.
So all of a sudden, Like I, my contribution to the family's financial situation had always been important. It had been necessary, but all of a sudden it wasn't, it maybe wasn't necessary. So tho you know, those things kind of combined, like I looked forward at my life and said, what do I wanna do that's really going to fulfill me and, and that was writing and that was, um, and writing fiction.
When I give school interviews or, you know, when I go do school visits and I talk about my writing, I say that I was the biggest impediment to getting to becoming a published author because I had so much fear of failure. That I, I wrote, I worked on, That's What Friends Do for eight years.
Uh, it changed in really profound ways over those eight years, but some of it was me being so afraid of the rejection of, you know, sending out part of the manuscript to agents and trying to get an agent that I, like. I, I didn't move forward, but ultimately, Actually because of the, sort of the gentle and persistent prodding of a friend of mine, a writer friend of mine, um, I did of course send the manuscript to an agent and got an agent.
And, but I real, it was really a question of like, being, being struck by the fact that I, my, a big piece of my identity was gonna disappear and what I had left was not going to fulfill me. It was not gonna be enough. For me, and then feeling like maybe I was at a point in my life where I didn't have to be a contributor you know, a reliable contributor to the, to the monthly family income.
Laura Rotter: And Cathleen, you, you alluded to, uh, gentle prodding from a friend. What supports did you have that helped you make the decision or that you con you turned to during the process for other women listening who might, uh, be considering something similar?
Cathleen Barnhart: So I, the biggest thing is that I had writing groups. I had been invited into a writing group by another writer friend of mine, Jennifer Lang, while I was still teaching, and I joined that group every summer, probably th maybe it was three summers before I ultimately stopped teaching. So I was, so, I had, I had other writers.
And I also was in some ways practicing, right? I was, for the summer when I wasn't teaching, I was writing and submitting to my writer's group and getting feedback and reading other people's write writing so that I, when I. Stopped teaching. I already had this community of writers that I had a relationship with and who were complete.
They met all year round, so they were completely willing to have me come join them for the, you know, for the academic year as well as the summer. And, uh, and then I had, I think very quickly, or maybe even before I stopped teaching, I, I had on and off been a member of a national organization called Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, which anyone who wants to write or illustrate books for children should be a member of.
Laura Rotter: And how, how did you hear about it? Is that through the book group or publications you read or Googling?
Cathleen Barnhart: You know, I, when I was taking the ED courses at, man, I was taking courses at Manhattanville College and when I was taking the ED courses, Manhattanville College has a wonderful children's write writing program.
And so I took a couple courses then, like I didn't need those courses for teaching, but I like a little bit I couldn't resist. And they also had, um, a summer writer's, like intensive, like a one week intensive, which I went to couple summers. I, so I think that it must have been through one of those two.
Place, you know, either the regular course or the summer intensive that I heard about SCBWI. So I met a couple women at, there's a, an annual conference in February in, in the city, an SCBWI conference, and I met a couple of Westchester women who were writing for children. And we started, uh, a writer's group that was specifically for people who were writing for children. I picture book through young adult didn't matter, but, so I had those two groups. I would say that that was a really big piece of my support when I, when I stopped having a full-time job.
And I also would say that my exercise was a, an important part of making that transition, that, um, signing up for a class, you know, and getting out, going to a yoga class or going to, uh, I did Soul Cycle at the time, going to a Soul Cycle class.
Was a way to give some structure to my day and to make sure that I got up and got out of my pajamas and, you know, moving on the day. And I would often actually sign up for particularly Soul Cycle classes in the morning because once you're signed up, there comes a point at which you can't cancel out or you lose the money.
And so it was, again, it was sort of an external prod for me to get up and get moving and to get something done with the day. So I would say that was, that was a lot of how I, I made the transition.
Laura Rotter: Thank you. And that just brings up another question, which is, How do you have the discipline and how do you have the discipline? Cuz I know, um, you're working on another book, I believe, to actually sit down and write.
Cathleen Barnhart: I don't think I am the most disciplined writer out. I know I'm not the most disciplined writer out there, and I have tried many, many different things, um, to try to, to try to sort of get my seat in the chair. I one, one thing I do is that I block out time every day.
So I know I'm supposed to be writing during that time. And if I don't write then, then I take it out of my calendar so that I remember that I didn't actually write that day or you know, so I'm honest with myself about when I'm writing and when I'm not writing. One thing that's actually relatively recent is that I had gone to a retreat with a group of other children's book writers who all debuted in 2020. And out of that retreat we have a, um, what we call a writing sprint, which is basically that we log onto Zoom at a certain time. Every Tuesday and Thursday at 1:00 PM Eastern Time and check in with whoever shows up on the Zoom. And then we, um, you know, close the video and close the audio and write to for a half an hour, write for 20 minutes and then check in again.
And then we do another sprint of writing. That's been incredibly helpful for me. It's a great way. To make sure that, again, that I sit down and do the work. There are times, there are times when it's easier, like if I'm, um, in the middle of something. It can be a lot easier for me to sit down and write. And then there are times that it's harder where I'm, I'm sort of stuck on something, stuck on a, how to move forward or, um, I think I need to make a change, but I'm not quite sure to what, um, you know, in the plot or in the character or something like that.
So sometimes it's easier for me to get sit down and do the writing, and sometimes it's harder.
Laura Rotter: As long as you're just sitting down, which is the hardest part I would think. I was actually gonna mention to you cuz I found something similar for non-writers. It's something called Focusmate. I pay $5 a month and I schedule co-working sessions with its people all over the world.
Mostly people younger than us. And that way, whereas I might linger downstairs before heading up the stairs, like I know that I have a Focusmate session at three o'clock and we introduce ourselves and say what we're working on and then we mute ourselves. We keep the cameras on, but we don't see each other cuz we're working on our laptops.
So you're not really staring at the other person. But I've found that as someone who is pretty disciplined, it's still helpful in keeping me in schedule. So it's interesting that you mentioned that you do that with other writers.
Cathleen Barnhart: Yes, yes. The other thing I do often is I set deadlines for myself. So for example, I owed my, not owed cuz my agent will take my writing whenever I'm done with the writing but I looked in the fall, we had meted. She wanted me to do revisions on one of the novels that I'm working on. You know, we discussed sort of, What she saw as sort of the problems, what she questions she had. And then I looked at my calendar and I knew that I wanted to get, and I wanted to get it to her, wanted to get my revision to her before she was taking, um, like three weeks off in December.
And I wanted to get my revision to her before. She took, you know, started her vacation so that we could then speak about it in January. So those, and she, you know, she says like, whenever you get it to me, it's okay. And is, that's fine. But for me to set that deadline and then to say to her, I want you to be expecting me to send you material, you know, the first week in December is a helpful way for me to, to sit down and write, sit down and revise, sit down and work.
Laura Rotter: Cathleen, you mentioned one of the novels you're working on. Are you working on more than one? Simultaneous?
Cathleen Barnhart: I'm working on two. One is a bl is a story about a girl whose parents have gotten divorced and her mother has begun dating a woman and the woman is Jewish, which Ellie and her family are not, and the woman has a six year old son.
So, Ellie very much wants to go back to her family the way it was and is fighting the changes, fighting not being the baby in the family, fighting, participating in Jewish ritual. So that's one novel. And the other novel is set, um, at the very beginning of the pandemic. In New York and is the story of two best friends in middle school who can't be together because of the pandemic.
One of them has lost her grandmother to Covid, but her grandmother left her a sourdough starter, and so she uses sourdough baking to connect to, to stay connected to her friend who she can't be with.
Laura Rotter: Oh, that's fascinating, isn't it? Thank you. So as we get to the end of our conversation, I'm wondering if you might think about Cathleen, how your personal definition of success may have shifted over your journeys and perhaps even financial success.
Cathleen Barnhart: I think for me, success is much less about, at this point in my life, a sort of, um, a goal or. I mean, I'm thrilled that I published a novel, and I definitely feel like that gave me some freedom. In some ways, I, I accomplished that goal. So success, but success is not about I'm gonna publish the next novel, or I'm gonna publish a novel that's gonna win the Newberry medal.
It's really that I get to live my life. I get to go, I each day, I get to do something that I really love doing, and to me that, that feels like both an incredible gift and an incredible and, and success, an incredible, I'm incredibly successful in that I get to do this thing that I really love every day.
Laura Rotter: How lucky are you? So few people really do have the ability to say that and, and, and the freedom. Financially and emotionally because we can be our own worse bosses or directors, if you will. So really is a testament to how you've grown along this journey. And so nice to be your friend and watching you do it.
Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for coming and being a guest on this podcast. Is there anything, um, other than the name of your book that you'd like our listeners to know about you and if they're on a similar journey.
Cathleen Barnhart: So I'm gonna say two things. The main, the name of my book is That's What Friends Do.
It is available in, um, hardback, paperback, and as an audio book. It is a middle grade novel, so it is. Written for middle school students, but many adults have read it. The other thing I would say, which I say all the time, again, when I'm doing school visits or something or talking to other writers, everybody's journey is different.
Every, every writer's journey is different. And I certainly spent a lot of time when I was younger saying I can't be a real writer cuz I don't journal every day and I can't be a real writer because I don't get up at five in the morning to write for an hour and I can't be a real writer because, but it turns out all those things that I don't do, I'm still actually a real writer.
So I would say that to other people who, who wanna write or who want to pursue whatever their passion is, like, I think it's really easy to compare yourself to other people and say, well, I can't. I can't be this thing I wanna be because I don't do it that way. And you do it your way.
Laura Rotter: Beautifully said.
Thank you so much for being my guest on this podcast, making Change with Your Money. Cathleen, it was my pleasure to have you.
Laura Rotter: I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Cathleen Barnhardt, author of That's What Friends Do, and I'd like to share some of my takeaways. The first one is, do things that take you out of your comfort zone. Cathleen describes that when she turned 50 she wanted to try new things and have new experiences.
She started a blog and tried something new each month. Things like making a new friend. Learning to canned fruit and learning to sing. Another takeaway is to ask yourself, what do I want to do that's really going to fulfill me and what's getting in my way? Cathleen realized that she wants to do creative writing and that she was her biggest impediment because of her fear failure.
And finally find activities and groups that will support you. Cathleen describes that she had joined several writing groups so that by the time she actually decided to leave her day job, she already had a community of writers to support her and extra added bonus to her exercise classes they serve to be a supportive structure to her day as a writer.
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Thanks for listening to Making Change with Your Money Certified Financial Planner. Laura Rotter specializes in helping people just like you organized, clarify, and invest their money in order to support a life of purpose and meaning. Go to www.trueabundanceadvisors.com/workbook for a free resource to help you on your journey.
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