Hi Leigh! I’m so excited to be talking to you. I’m a huge fan of your newsletter, and your last issue really hit home. How did you start writing Moon Lists?

That's so nice. It’s funny when you make something and just put it out in the ether and hope that anyone reads it, it's always so lovely when it resonates with someone else.

Moon Lists has taken different iterations and has been this slowly-building thing for a long time. My background is working in archives. I thought I wanted to be an archivist and work for museums. I've always loved getting into the weeds of research. That's what I did right out of school. My favorite part was the ephemera: the things in someone's archive — an artist, a writer, or a historical figure — that had no real value, but felt the most interesting to me. It was like someone’s shopping lists or a personal note to themself written in the margins of their notebook. I noticed that I gravitated towards pulling meaning from those disparate sources.

But the archiving thing was pretty lonely. You just spend your whole life in a dusty basement. So I started doing more writing. I found I was writing these [reflective] prompts for myself as a way to get deeper into an idea. Over time, I would share them with my friends. Like for someone's birthday, I might write them a list of questions to think about for their next year. It very slowly grew with friends and other folks around me encouraging me to share my prompts in other ways 

It's always been loose because I've always struggled to keep up a formal journaling practice. But at the same time, I always want to dive deeper and have rich conversations with other people. I found that getting in there in other ways, [with prompts] that could speak to someone who might be averse to prompted journaling, might be an entry point for thinking a little bit differently.

It's totally ad hoc and something in response to my own curiosity.

That's amazing. I’ll sometimes go online and look for journaling prompts. I've tried the five-minute journal thing, and sometimes I've written for five minutes and gotten nowhere. And maybe that's okay and part of the point that you don't have to have a crazy revelation to make writing worthwhile. But I really appreciate that you include examples. It makes the process of reflecting so much less intimidating and helps get my brain to work differently.

For me, there's something really daunting about being asked something really big. Like if someone asks, "What's the biggest lesson you've learned in your life?" With something so grandiose like that, my brain goes empty. I find it's so much more interesting and immediately connective when I go really close to the ground, reflecting on things that are really recent with tangible examples. That feels like a secret backdoor to getting deeper, either with yourself or in a conversation. It's a sneaky way of subverting a canned answer.

Do your examples come from your own life? In your recent prompt, ‘list one thing that keeps you tethered to the planet,’ you gave ‘your grandmother’s hand-me-down cast iron skillet’ as an example. Do you actually have your grandmother’s hand-me-down cast iron skillet?

I do! They're almost always pulled from my own life. I shouldn't be a fiction writer because I can only come up with my own examples. They’re usually all personal or secondhand things I've lifted from friends