Finding a Place to Land: A Journey Through the Pages with Author Sherry Sidoti
Sherry Sidoti is among the talented writers I’ve met through the sisterhood of She Writes authors. Aside from this publishing connection, we share similar histories. Like Sherry and so many others, my smooth path had suddenly become rocky terrain as life brought me unexpected challenges. And while our circumstances were not the same, we both found ourselves holding the past and the future, probing the place where meaning intersects with memory. In each of our situations, everything came into focus, and through our heart’s evolution, we were left with powerful new perspectives. By turning to the page, we made space for new revelations as we wrote the chapters of our books. Mine: Nobody’s Daughter, A Memoir of Healing the Mother Wound, and Sherry’s: A Smoke and a Song. In this interview, Sherry offers a few glints of the golden truths she mined along the way.
On Writing A Smoke and a Song :
“This is a story steeped in art and spirituality that explores the complexities of womanhood, transgenerational maternal bonds, attachment, loss, and leaning into our wounds to find the wisdom.
Navigating the changes in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic was exhausting, Sherry notes.
“I was pivoting two back-to-back online yoga training courses, so I decided to take a sabbatical from teaching. Quite simply, I was ‘tapped out’ with little left to offer others on their healing journeys. I had just turned fifty, was menopausal, and on the cusp of empty nesting. I was in the middle of moving out of the home where I’d raised my son for eighteen years (the home I busted my ass to keep after my divorce!). Newly engaged, my fiancé and I purchased a parcel of land where we planned to build our ‘second-chance’ life, literally from the ground up. Every aspect of my life as I knew it, was up for review.“
Amid all of this, came the news: My mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Unable to sleep, I’d wake daily at 3:22 a.m. (side bar: that is my mother’s birth date, which was not surprising!). Memories long-since forgotten came bursting to the forefront again. Creative, spontaneous inspiration followed the memories. I’d get up, make coffee, do a little breath work, move my body, meditate, then sit outdoors, and cathartically write until the sun came up. Over the next two years, what started as disorganized, frazzled, written snippets of my life, shape-shifted into my memoir, A Smoke and a Song.
Q & A with Author Sherry Sidoti
Tell us where you’re from…
I am a New York City gal, through and through.
What sparked the idea for your book?
It was important for me to share my truth as I remember it. I used a practice called “Five Sense Awareness” to return to memories with my full self. While this supported richer, more embodied writing, it was also quite triggering. I often exited writing time trapped in the fight-or-flight response of the sympathetic nervous system. To re-harmonize the parasympathetic response of ‘rest and digest’ I had to practice re-orienting into the present, resourcing my body, and re-grounding. The simplest and most effective technique was to throw on a great tune and literally shake my entire body for three to five minutes, then go outdoors and put my bare feet on the earth.
As for editing, there is no absolute truth, and memory is fallible. Writing our story can heal, but there will always be the potential that it can harm, and even with the best intentions, we cannot always predict the outcome of how the people in our stories will feel about what we share on the page. This conundrum pushed me to edit with two clear intentions, murdering many darlings along the way:
If it is not my story, it is not my story to tell. In other words, instead of just writing my character’s stories, I’d write only about the moment I heard or learned about their stories from them.
Show what happened with me, never to me. This approach helped me to evaluate my own experience within the storyline with more honesty and self-reflection without taking on the role of the victim. It helped me to see my relations and experiences holistically from all sides with unconditional compassion for myself and others.
The greatest challenge and reward have been the many difficult conversations with the people in my life that hadn’t yet been had. Writing my story demanded that I look at the ways my past continues to ‘hook’ me today and commit to my continued healing from them.
Tell us about the people, places or things that inspire your creativity…
By our very nature, we are born from a moment of creativity, it is our birthright. To be in the spontaneous flow of inspiration, I sometimes need to just get out of my own way. It is in my personality to be consumed by my creative projects— I tend to get hyper-focused, hole-up, and forget to be more actively engaged in living, which only dulls my creativity. There are so many easy remedies—walks in nature, a hang with my girlfriends, play with my chickens, moments with my hubs. I set alarms on my phone every two hours to remind myself to get away from the computer and into my life.
Is there any section, chapter or line from your book that you’re most proud of?
My favorite chapter in the book is ‘His Lamb.’ It was written minutes after my son drove off to move out of our home and into his own apartment. I was living the “feels” of saying goodbye in real time. It was an overwhelming moment— I was cracked open, raw, desperate even. All I could do was spill that pure emotion to the page and give it a place to land.
My favorite lines from this chapter:
I try not to smother mother. I wish I could summon some witchy wild-woman strength of every empty nest survivor and swallow their wisdom whole. I wish I could wrap both my arms and both my legs around his lanky frame and squeeze every muscle until there are no squeezes left. I wish I could whisper, “Don’t go.”
But I do not.
What are your next projects, writing or otherwise?
One of my mother’s last wishes is that I complete a writing project she had been working on but cannot finish herself as she is currently on hospice care and nearing the end of her life. This ask is such a deep honor and one I intend on committing to after my book is released in August.
Cuba, Waiting (Page Publishing 2024) is a mosaic of stories about an American journalist named Jenna who travels to Cuba to write an assignment about classic cars and their owners, and ends up falling in love with her emotionally unavailable subject. It is a fictionalized account of a real-life decade-long love affair my mother had with a Cuban doctor in her late sixties and seventies.
The Book
January 2021, ten months into the global pandemic, Sherry Sidoti’s mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer, so Sherry prioritizes a trip to Manhattan over long-awaited empty-nesting and her “second-chance” with fiancé Jevon. With new life blooming and loss looming, she is beckoned to answer the question that has haunted her since childhood: is freedom found in “letting go” as the spiritual teachers (and her mother) insist, or is it found by digging our heels deeper into the earth and holding on to our humanness?
A Smoke and a Song is Sherry’s quest to make meaning from the memories homed in her body. Writing with tenacity, tenderness, and wry New York City humor, Sherry stumbles toward self-actualization, spiritual awakening, and, despite it all, love. This is a story steeped in art and spirituality that explores the complexities of womanhood, transgenerational maternal bonds, attachment, loss, and leaning into our wounds to find the wisdom.
