EPISODE 4
April 26, 2021
Andrea Barton is an electrical engineer, turned career consultant, turned writer. She’s lived in the U.K. and spent 12 years with her husband and two sons living in Nigeria, the United States and Qatar before repatriating to Melbourne Australia, where she’s from. As a result of her years and experiences abroad, Andrea has compiled and edited two anthologies on the expatriate experience. She also wrote nine stage productions tackling social themes. In Nigeria by request, she wrote about child trafficking, malaria, gambling, safety, and heart disease. Eight of Andrea’s stage productions were produced in Lagos, and two were performed at Woodlands Preparatory School in Houston, Texas. Andrea is also an accomplished dancer, and in this episode, she talks about how she combined her writing, dancing and stage production as she moved country-to-country.
Andrea’s website is https://brightsidestorystudio.com/
TRANSCRIPT:
Louise: Hello, welcome to Women Who Walk. I’m Louise Ross, author of Women Who Walk the book, the inspiration for this podcast. And just as I did for the book here, I’ll be interviewing and unpacking the journeys of impressive, intrepid women who’ve made multiple international moves, for work for adventure, for love, for freedom. You can find show notes for each episode, and my books, on my website LouiseRoss.com.
[00:00:49] Hello listeners. And welcome to Episode 4 of Women Who Walk. My guest today is Andrea Barton. Andrea is an electrical engineer, turned career consultant, turned writer. She’s lived in the UK and spent 12 years with her husband and two sons living in Nigeria, the United States and Qatar before repatriating to Melbourne Australia, where she’s from.
As a result of her years and experiences abroad, Andrea, in partnership with a colleague, compiled edited and wrote two anthologies. The first, Nigerian Gems: Expatriate Tales of Adventure, is a compilation of stories and photos from more than 40 expats from eight different countries about expatriate life in Nigeria. It was published by the Ishahayi Beach School Foundation to raise money for a school in a remote area outside Lagos, Nigeria. The second anthology, Papua New Guinea Pearls: An Expatriate Perspective, was commissioned by ExxonMobil. Its anecdotes give readers the chance to picture themselves living, working, and playing in Papua New Guinea.
[00:02:12] Writing under her pseudonym, Jo Demmer, Andrea wrote nine stage productions tackling social themes. In Nigeria, by request, she wrote about child trafficking, malaria, gambling, safety, and heart disease. Eight of Andrea’s stage productions were produced in Lagos. And two productions were performed at Woodlands Preparatory School in Houston, Texas.
[00:02:47] Also under her pseudonym, Andrea has written the Sam and Sue adventure series illustrated by Whitney Van Nuis. These rhyming children’s picture books are set in different locations such as Doha in Qatar and Port Douglas in Australia, allowing kids and their parents to travel vicariously.
[00:03:09] On her website, BrightsideStoryStudio, she writes the Winding Narrative Blog, where she shares her writing journey. She also interviews authors, small business owners and anyone with their own winding narrative, which is how I met Andrea, as she interviewed me and then wrote up our conversation as a blog post. As editorial head of adult non-fiction and fiction at New Authors Collective Australia, she helps writers craft fiction or memoir.
[00:03:42] Beyond her writing and production work, Andrea is an avid ballroom and tango dancer. I can attest to this as I’ve seen a Facebook video of her dancing with her tango teacher and as someone who also loves dancing tango, I was seriously impressed.
[00:04:14] Welcome Andrea. Thanks for being available. It’s Monday morning here in Lisbon and late Monday afternoon where you are. Set the scene for us. Tell us where you are.
[00:04:26] Andrea: I’m working in Mansfield at the moment, which is a country town, the gateway to the high country in Victoria, Australia. It’s a beautiful setting outside my window. I can look out over Lake Eildon. It’s very Australian setting with lots of gum trees. There’s actually some kangaroos hopping around our front paddock at the moment. It’s an idyllic place to be writing.
Kangaroos in Mansfield. Photo by Andrea Barton
[00:04:51] Louise: I know that area too, because I used to ski up there. Are you and your family skiers?
[00:04:57] Andrea: My husband and kids are very keen skiers. They do go up to (Mt.) Bulla quite regularly. I’m a little bit scared of heights and don’t really like the cold, so skiing’s not quite my thing. I tend to stay home and enjoy the peace and quiet when they go.
[00:05:13] Louise: If you don’t like the cold, it would not be your thing. You have a very eclectic background. You transitioned from electrical engineering to career consultant to writing. Tell us how that came about.
[00:05:28] Andrea: It’s been a journey. I think it’s one of those things where you learn a lot about yourself as you grow up. And as you experience some things you learn that they’re maybe not for you and you need to find something new. I did electrical engineering at university, which was really a case of I didn’t really know what else to do. And I was good at math and science, so that seemed a good career prospect. After uni, I went and worked for Telstra, which is Australia’s biggest telecommunications company. I very soon figured out that actually I was more interested in people than I was in things and perhaps I wasn’t in quite the right career. I went back to study. I did a post-graduate diploma in organization behavior, which I loved, and that led me to working for what’s now called Right Management Consultants as a career consultant working with either high achievers within organizations or with people who’d been made redundant from their organizations.
[00:06:24] I was helping people figure out what they wanted to be when they grow up, which was exciting. Often people found new directions. Some people went back into similar roles, but it was something I loved – the whole coaching counseling aspect.
[00:06:38] Louise: At some point then you transitioned into writing, but was that as a result of you spending, what a dozen years abroad with your husband and family?
[00:06:49] Andrea: I always had a hankering about writing. I always thought it would be a nice thing to do. When I had my first son was when I really started writing and I thought, Oh, maternity leave. I’ll have lots of time. Well, anybody who’s had a kid will quickly tell you that you don’t have lots of time on maternity leave, but I did make a start. And then of course, once I went back to work after maternity leave, I didn’t have time to do anything much.
[00:07:15] When the kids were three and five – I’ve got two sons – my husband was offered a job in Nigeria, which was a big hurdle for us because we were pretty nervous about it. There was a lot in the press that was not so good about Nigeria. We decided to take the leap and I had to give up my job because there wasn’t a Right Management Consultant in Nigeria and they didn’t really do career development there. So that was really when I decided, okay, if I can’t do the career thing, if I’m going to be getting out of corporate and out of that style of work, then this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to be a writer.
[00:07:51] Louise: I read on your website that you referred to yourself as a trailing spouse. I got to tell you Andrea, it’s one of my pet hates.
[00:08:02] Andrea: It’s not a popular term!
[00:08:04] Louise: Yeah. It’s not. The reason for that is that I think women such as yourself make enormous sacrifices to accompany their spouse abroad, sometimes to locations that are very challenging, particularly with family. These days the term is accompanying partner or supportive spouse. While you were in Nigeria, you were raising two sons and you were writing and you were doing stage production. Can you tell us a bit about that?
[00:08:36] Andrea: I got into dancing by accident in Nigeria. I had a couple of friends who were learning salsa and we had an amazing teacher, Buddy Agedah, who came to our compound to teach dance. And one of the girls in the group left, they went back home, as happens, when you’re friends with a lot of expats, you lose friends along the way who leave the country and they move on to other things. So they needed another person to fill out the gaps. I didn’t really know what salsa was. Sounds like fun. I’ll give that a go. I did and completely fell in love with it. It was just something that was in me that I had not really expressed before.
[00:09:13] As a kid, I always wanted to be a ballet dancer, desperately passionately wanted to be a ballet dancer, but I gave up ballet when I was about eight or nine. When I started salsa in Nigeria, it was like, this whole new world had opened up to me. I started working more closely with Buddy who was doing a lot of dance and stage productions. And I said, well, I’m a writer, how about we collaborate?
[00:09:36] He was really just doing individual dances that were performed one after the other. But my concept was to integrate it all into one story. Really, I was writing what was effectively a musical, but we didn’t have singers. We had dancers. We used existing music, and the dancers acted the story as a narrator would tell the story and then where a singer would get up and sing, instead they were dancing.
[00:10:02] Really, really challenging and really good fun. And we had a long time trying to get funding to produce some of these things. Ultimately the breakthrough we did was a charity performance for the Lagos Yacht Club. There were a lot of things went wrong with it. There were a lot of huge hurdles, but we got there and it was an incredible buzz to actually get the whole thing on stage something that I’d written and pulled together. I danced in it as well. So it was a huge, amount of fun.
Music and Dance on the Lagoon, Lagos Yacht Club. Photo by Andrew Barton
[00:10:29] Louise: Wow. I’m just … how impressive that is! In your introduction, I mentioned that you had nine productions in Lagos, is that right?
[00:10:39] Andrea: Yes. And they weren’t all while I was still there. I did several while I was there, but I kept working with Buddy, and with Gbenga Yusuf, who also had his own dance company. He moved to Benin for a time, and then back to Nigeria, and they both were asking me to write different things. So that was one of the things I did when I moved to Houston, which was great that I was still writing and still getting things produced. But it was also really challenging because I wasn’t there most of the time to see what was being done and to have any control over the production, how it evolved.
[00:11:14] The very first one that I did after I left, I was flown back to Nigeria to do it. We did a series of productions for ExxonMobil and because I had been so instrumental in doing it, and they moved me before the show was produced, they agreed to fly me back for it. But after that, the shows were produced and I never saw them. That was tough.
[00:11:36 ] Louise: That would be disappointing not to see your work on stage. There’s a couple of things that I want to touch on. You said in Houston, which is Texas in the United States and that’s where you and the family moved after Nigeria, but you also mentioned that ExxonMobil had funded the productions. I mentioned in your introduction that they also sponsored an anthology that you and a colleague collated and edited. Is now the time to talk about that?
[00:12:06] Andrea: They were two separate projects. The dance productions for Exxon was actually Mobil Producing Nigeria, they were done as a thank you for their staff, stakeholders, and key players in their organization. They were productions that we put on that were paid for by ExxonMobil, but they weren’t open to the public. They were for Exxon people. We did four or five in a row annually. It kept going after I left. So I was still writing for it, but I wasn’t there to oversee any of the production elements. Buddy, had to do all of that through Dance & Art Alive. But then when I was in Houston, separate from that, we had done an anthology about Nigeria and that had been done not with ExxonMobil. It was for a School Foundation. But the model of the book, which was tales by expats about expat life was popular. And companies took it up to give to employees who potentially were moving to that country to give them a sense of what it would be like to live there.
[00:13:08] My partner, Gail Collins, and her husband then moved to Papua New Guinea. People there who had seen Nigerian Gems, were having trouble attracting staff to PNG. It’s a hard-to-staff location. There’s a lot of people who are a bit frightened about going there; it’s very different from most of the Western countries that many Exxon employees are from.
[00:13:28] They wanted to have a similar thing to Nigeria Gems, so we did Papua New Guinea Pearls, which was the companion book. This time it was sponsored by Mobil for Mobil. It wasn’t available to the public for sale, it was more of a gift for employees or people who were thinking about moving there.
[00:13:46] We had a storytelling party that was really good fun. We got as many people together as we could. We had an open mic night where people would just get up and talk about things that had happened to them there. We were furiously taking notes. Of course we recorded it all. Then we’d write it up and then send it back to them to confirm all the details. And of course they’d add a lot more depth and some people submitted their own stories as well. And then we wrote stories from our experience while we were there. I stayed with Gail and Jim in their apartment in PNG. I was there for a week or 10 days and we pulled it together pretty quickly, actually, it was a pretty full-on project.
[00:14:23] Louise: One of the things that I’m aware of is that despite that you said that you had to give up your career to accompany your partner, your creative life really flourished once you were abroad.
[00:14:35] Andrea: It did. Yes. And I would never have had the opportunity to do that if I’d stayed here and worked at a corporate job forever. I’m eternally grateful. I didn’t always feel grateful at the time. When you’re battling to get funding for something and not getting it, uh, there are moments where you say, why am I doing this? I’m never going to get anywhere and it’s hopeless and all the rest of it. But when you do get there, then it’s like, okay, it was all worthwhile.
[00:15:03] Louise: I think that’s part of the creative journey though. Isn’t it? Sometimes it does feel like an uphill battle. Nevertheless, you do it. So from Nigeria, you go to the United States, you’re living in Houston, Texas. And at this point, are the boys in school?
[00:15:21] Andrea: Yes. The boys were three and five when we went to Nigeria. They started school in Nigeria. I guess in grade two and grade four when we went to Houston and we were there for five years.
[00:15:32] Louise: As a family, how did you adjust from a developing country experience to a full-on, Southern United States experience?
[00:15:42] Andrea: Each member of the family found it a little bit different. For Andrew, the thing with the working spouse is they go straight into a job. If it’s with the same company, there are certain elements that are the same. Of course every country that you work in, there are differences as well, but you’ve got a format, so Andrew was pretty happy. Going to Houston, it was pretty much straight into work. And he loved the lifestyle there and got into boating.
[00:16:05] For the boys, they were straight into school. I was so lucky with the boys. They were very adaptable. They made friends very quickly. They always made it easy for us. I just cannot thank them enough. They were just amazing kids. I was the one who struggled in Houston, because in Nigeria I’d become kind of a personality. I was someone in Nigeria and I came to Houston and I was nobody. I decided first thing I wanted to do was to get back into dance because it had become such a big part of my life. And I went to a franchise studio in Houston and found a great teacher actually.
[00:16:42] But, suddenly I had to start paying way more. I had been taking dance lessons every day. I couldn’t afford to do that. If I wanted to do a performance it was a showcase, and I had to pay them to perform, where I had been paid to perform. It was like, hang on this isn’t right. So it was a real come down for me.
[00:17:01] After a while I realized franchise studios just weren’t what I wanted to do. I ended up leaving, and I found another teacher, Martin Balmaceda, who very sadly passed away last year. But he kind of saved me when I was in Houston, because he totally got the creative combination of writing and dance. Working with him allowed me to get myself back together and start feeling like I was producing something again.
[00:17:27] All of the shows that I did for Nigeria, I worked through with him. He was a great source of inspiration and helped me find music. We did dances for those dancers, even if we weren’t performing them. It allowed me to get back into that creative side.
[00:17:43] Louise: You did have a couple of pieces produced in Houston as well, for a local school?
[00:17:49] Andrea: Yes. The children were going to the Woodlands Preparatory School, which is a very small school. Our move had come at a point where we couldn’t get into the bigger public school, a private school that most expat kids went to. They weren’t fully booked. They said don’t even bother putting in an application. So we went to this smaller school, which was great, except that they didn’t have a drama department or a music department. When I was having difficulty getting any traction to do any shows or anything in Houston, one of the mothers said, Well, why don’t you do a school production?
[00:18:21] I wrote two shows. Actually, I wrote three. We produced two of them. I got the kids to help me, which was a fun, collaborative project with Matt and Ricky. The school was all for it. I had another colleague there, Jackie Fox, the choreographer, she was amazing, so we teamed up together and co-directed. It was very challenging. I developed a huge respect for teachers during that time.
[00:18:47] Louise: You start dancing and again produce a couple of shows for the local school and at the five-year point, you launched to another country. This time the Middle East. Tell us a bit about that.
[00:19:03] Andrea: The Middle East was really fun to start with. The desert landscapes were amazing. The culture was really interesting. You have these images of what it might be like living there and it wasn’t as scary as what I thought it might be. I was always very conscious of not doing, not saying the wrong thing. There are certain things, for example, if you give somebody the finger, that is something you can end up in jail for. It’s a serious offense. I was also very careful about what I posted in social media. I wasn’t blogging at that point, but I just felt like I had to be a little bit careful while I was living there.
Photo: Zekreet, Qatar
[00:19:42 ]Louise: Was there any cultural sensitivity training through ExxonMobil?
[00:19:48] Andrea: We did have a bit, yes. Somebody showed us around. We were given accommodation, so we didn’t have to look for accommodation, but they helped us buy cars and figure out how to get our driver’s licenses and all of those sorts of things. They did have some coaching. That was really helpful. And everybody knows you’re supposed to cover your shoulders, cover your elbows, cover your knees.
[00:20:07] Louise: The boys at this point, what, almost 8 and 10, and in school there as well?
[00:20:12] Andrea: They were going into sixth and eighth grade, might have been seventh and ninth. The school was amazing, American school again. Particularly the high school had an incredible director and both the boys really enjoyed school there.
[00:20:27] Louise: While the kids are in school and your partner’s working and you can’t really dance as much …
[00:20:33] Andrea: I did have a dance teacher to start with, but he was getting increasingly frustrated because of the limitations and restrictions on what they could do. And he was an Argentine tango dancer, and he wanted to bring people in for that, but it just didn’t really fly so he left. I just didn’t have a teacher after that. I wasn’t dancing anymore, which was awful.
[00:20:51] At this stage I had been frustrated. Although I’d done the school productions in Houston, I hadn’t done any professional shows. And Martin was actually the one who said to me, ‘why don’t you write a novel instead. Go back to that’. I’d actually written a musical and I was working with some composers and trying to get that going, but they never reached fruition for various reasons. So I thought, okay, I’ll try to write a novel but I didn’t really know what I didn’t know. I set myself the goal of being traditionally published, which is a goal I’m yet to realize. I’m getting closer. I have a literary agent now, and I’m starting to get some traction, but I still have not achieved that goal.
[00:21:33] Most of the time, while I was in Doha, I was writing. I did do a course with Curtis Brown Creative, which is a novel writing program, very useful. I started to realize how much I really did not know about how to write a novel. It wasn’t like I got to the end of the course and felt like, Oh, I know what I’m doing now! Of course I knew more about what I was doing, but I needed a lot more help.
[00:21:54] I’ve got four draft novels at various stages of completion. One’s been pitched and didn’t get picked up. One got long listed for an award, but I haven’t yet been picked up. I’m getting closer with each one. I now know a lot of the mistakes that I was making that I can go back and fix. I’m still hopeful.
[00:22:13] Louise: In Qatar, basically what you’re doing is evolving your writing skills. You’re working on a novel, you’re getting support, through Curtis Brown. It’s a really rich time for you, as you find traction with your writing. Perhaps with the cultural limitations of the Middle East, it fosters this new wave of creativity for you.
[00:22:33] Andrea: Yeah, that’s a good way of looking at it.
[00:22:35] Louise: I’m really fascinated by the process of your repatriating to Australia. When did that come about?
[00:22:44] Andrea: We’ve been back about five years now. It happened suddenly in the end because my son was having some health issues and we weren’t confident they were being addressed appropriately in Doha. I basically decided we’re going home. Andrew agreed. He had to stay to finish a project. I came back with the boys six months ahead of him. I’d heard a lot about repatriation. A lot of people had said it was the hardest move they did because everything wasn’t new and exciting any more. But I didn’t experience any of that; there was so much going on in my life at the time. I didn’t have any chance to even think about what I was feeling in relation to repatriation. I had health issues with my son. My mum had had a stroke. We had done a renovation while we were overseas. It was not quite finished. I moved into a partially finished renovation and of course my husband wasn’t there.
[00:23:32] I was just putting one foot in front of the other and I was trying to keep writing and trying to get an agent and trying to finish books. It was just, keep on keeping on.
[00:23:41] Louise: There are a lot of negative stories about repatriation and the reason I brought it up is it’s one of my biggest fears. I’ve lived out of Australia since the mid-eighties and every now and then I think, will I return? And It’s a little scary to me to repatriate to a country that I don’t really know anymore. And yet for you, I think that there were things in place that really helped you with that process. One was the health of your child. You had to make sure that his health was a priority.
[00:24:12] Andrea: That’s right. We’d been away for thirteen years at that point. But every year we had gone back home. We were very strong about making sure that the kids had some roots here. We kept an apartment that we could live in when we were here so they had a space that was their own. We made a point of seeing their grandparents and aunties and uncles and friends and families so that we kept in touch.
[00:24:33] Every year we spent probably five or six weeks back in Melbourne. I think that really helped. Of course, we’ve got family here and it was wonderful to be able to see them, that to begin with, you’re spending, you’re sort of OD’ing on all the social activities. Suddenly, you’re seeing this side of the family, that side of the family, friends, and trying to keep up with everything else that was going on. It was like, Oh my gosh. It’s a good thing, but you have to make space for it in your life. We were lucky that we had a support network here. We had things to do, and we just got on with it.
[00:25:05] From Nigeria to Houston was tough for me, because I was leaving so much behind. I realized I have to have something that’s portable. That was the beauty of me going back to novel writing. When I moved to Doha, I was fine because my job kept going as well. Where Andrew went from office to office, I went from office to office. Now I’m completely portable. I can work here. I can work in Melbourne. I can work in Doha. In Nigeria, wherever you want to take me in the world. I can keep writing and editing as well. I can do that wherever I am in the world.
[00:25:34] Louise: So then your writing life in Australia, talk us through that.
[00:25:40] Andrea: I’ve written four novels, now. One based in each of the countries I’ve lived in. I did finally land an agent with a novel that was based in a fictional Middle Eastern country that obviously was modeled from Doha. That book has been pitched to agents. It got taken forward to a number of meetings, but it just never got picked up.
[00:26:00] The second one was set in Nigeria and initially it was part of a series, all of these books were connected, but once the first one wasn’t picked up, there were bits that just didn’t make sense in the second one anymore because the things that happened in the first book hadn’t happened. I rewrote the second one as a standalone, which was a huge rewrite! There’s probably as much in a substantial rewrite, almost as drafting the initial work.
[00:26:25] That’s on submission at the moment. It hasn’t yet been picked up sadly. I’m working on the third one, The Godfather of Dance, which is set in Houston, inspired by my dance teacher, Martin. I’m really sad that he didn’t see me publish it. I’ve written one set in Australia as well, which is in draft format that I’ll come back to once the time is right.
[00:26:46] Louise: Once again, these country moves have really generated a lot of inspiration for you cause you’re writing about them now.
[00:26:55] Andrea: Absolutely. I would be a completely different writer if I hadn’t had those experiences.
[00:26:59] Louise: And you’re also an editor?
[00:27:01] Andrea: One of the things you find as a writer is that you need to read other people’s work and edit other people’s work to understand how to edit and how to write. And so there’s a lot of what we call beta reading, where you swap novels with somebody else who’s writing in a similar genre and you critique their novel, they critique your novel, and then you go back to work.
[00:27:22] I did a lot of this over the years and found I really loved it and people were giving me really positive feedback about my critiques and what they were getting from it. I’d also paid a lot of editors and saw what they did. Then when I got my agent, one of the things that they do is offer beta reading service. I did one for one of the authors there and my agent saw it and asked if I would join his editorial team. That was like, Oh wow, I’ve got a job offer. Like a real job! I’ve been working with him for nearly two years now. That allowed me to develop my skills, develop my confidence. I’ve got a couple of authors who are being published this year, that’s really exciting. First one’s coming out next month by Lisa Darcy, it’s called Lily’s Little Flower Shop, a romantic comedy. And Susannah Hardy’s coming out with Loving Lizzie March in, I think it’s June or July. That’s really satisfying and rewarding.
[00:28:18] Off the back of that, I gained enough confidence to start my own editing company. I now own and run Brightside Story Studio, which I love doing. Sometimes I work with authors who have finished a novel and they come to me and I do a structural edit or a line edit depending on what stage they’re at and what they want.
[00:28:37] In some ways I love this more because I’m involved right from early on: I do mentoring and coaching. It will be somebody who has not completed a novel yet. They’re just starting out, but they need somebody to keep them on track and make sure that they’re producing.
[00:28:50] Every client’s different. They’ve each got thrilling, exciting projects that they’re really committed and excited about, and I love them as well. It’s kind of bringing together aspects of everything I’ve done. It’s bringing aspects of the coaching that I did back when I was career coaching, the structure and logic from when I was engineering, the creativity from when I was dancing. All of that comes together in this editing. I feel like I’ve come home. This is what I’m meant to be doing
[00:29:18] Louise: Your life sounds full and rich these days. So dare I say, what’s next?
[00:29:26] Andrea: It’s more of the same. The goal is still to get that traditional publishing deal. I am getting closer. I just haven’t quite got there yet. The only way you know you’re going to fail for sure is if you give up. I’m going to keep pushing that along. And I want to develop my clientele with Brightside Story Studio so I can get more authors to share their stories and get their stories published as well. With New Authors Collective, we’ve seen some success and it’s very exciting, there’s been a few bottles of champagne cracked open. Hopefully there’s more champagne on the horizon.
[00:29:56] Louise: That sounds great. As I finish up, how can listeners find you or those that are interested in your editing skills, how can they find you?
[00:30:06] Andrea: My editing website and blog are all on brightsidestorystudio.com. I’m available on Facebook and Instagram as AndreaBartonAuthor or on Twitter as AJBartonOnline. I’m happy to be in touch with people, any of those ways.
[00:30:23] Louise: Thanks Andrea, and thank you so much for being available today. This has been a fabulous journey through four countries and the evolution of your creative life.
[00:30:35] Andrea: Thank you very much for having me, Louise. I’m very much appreciate it.
[00:30:41] Louise: Thank you for listening today. And if you would like to read a transcript of this episode, you can find it in the show notes on my website, LouiseRoss.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review Women Who Walk on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser.