What happens when your family's ideology prevents you from helping the person you love most?

That's what happened to today's guest, Kathleen Blackburn.

Kathleen Blackburn was the oldest of five children, a 12-year-old from Lubbock, Texas, whose evangelical family eschewed publ­ic education for homeschooling and wove improbable scientific theories into literal interpretations of the bible. Then her father, a former air force pilot, was diagnosed with stage IV cancer at the age of thirty-eight, and, as Kathleen writes in this searing memoir, “it was like pouring gasoline on the Holy Spirit.”

Stirred by her mother, the family committed to an extreme diet and sought deliverance from equally extreme sources: a traveling tent preacher, a Malaysian holy man, a local faith-healer who led services called “Miracles on 34th Street.”

What they didn’t know at the time was that their lives were entangled with a larger, less visible environmental catastrophe. Fire-fighting foams containing carcinogenic compounds had contaminated the drinking water of every military site where her father worked.

Twenty-five years later, Kathleen's memoir, Loose of Earth,  reckons with her past, her upbringing, the loss of her father, and the environmental story that shaped the landscape that for years she called home. Kathleen now lives in Chicago and teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago.

You'll Learn:

• The difference between shame and regret, and which one is useful
• How literature can be an antidote to violence and silence
• What we do when we're told there's nothing we can do to help someone we love
• And so much more...

Learn more about Kathleen:
Website
Instagram

Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts

"This is my go-to podcast for inspiration and to discover new approaches to embrace the challenges in my life." If that sounds like you, please consider rating and reviewing my show! This helps me reach more people -- just like you -- find strategies and insights to do the things that feel undoable. Click here, scroll to the bottom, tap to rate with five stars, and select “Write a Review.” Then be sure to let me know what you loved most about the episode!

Also, if you haven’t done so already, follow the podcast. Follow now!

Sign up for my newsletter and learn more about these remarkable stories at www.jessicafeinstories.com

Order Jessica's memoir, Breath Taking: A Memoir of Family, Dreams, and Broken Genes

Music credit: Limitless by Bells