Jennifer Flint

1. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.
I’m 52 years old and live by the sea in the North East of England. Two years ago, I left a 25+ year corporate career in organisation development to specialise in leader development and to create space to fulfil my lifelong dream of a becoming a published author.

I’m passionate about being in service of people who are working to make a difference – particularly in the realms of social justice and wellbeing. In my work I often hold space for people to come home to themselves ... a space where they can take a mental breath, step back from the busy hamster-wheel of their life and re-connect with their intuition and power, so they can intentionally live and lead by design, not default.

During lockdown, I also bought an off-grid wooden cabin in Northumberland as an experiment with living a slower pace of life, which has certainly made me very grateful for hot showers and electricity at the push of a button!

2. Has writing always been a focus for you or was it a Plan B? 
Age 21, I decided my dream was to become a published author. This was undoubtedly influenced by my father in whose heart this ambition also burned. In the tradition of eccentric authors, he bought a large wooden shed as a writing studio which was installed in the damp, chalky basement of our terraced house. ‘The hut’ as it was affectionately known, was always padlocked when dad was not inside, which made it irresistibly mysterious and inviting to me as a little girl. What did dad do in there by the light of his paraffin lamp? I used to wonder whilst  pressing my face to the glass and inhaling the scent of pine.

In the end, whilst my father wrote almost every day of his life, he never succeeded in seeing his name in print, and a desire to ‘carry the torch’ for him grew inside me over the years. In 2005 I attended a two-day personal development seminar called ‘How To Be Brilliant’ which inspired me to finally take this mission seriously and I began working on a book about a lighthouse keeper inspired by my father’s early life. I spent the next eight years trying and failing to birth this book, going deeper and deeper into my personal development journey in an attempt to break through the powerful inner critic voice that kept telling me I was wasting my time and should give up because, frankly, I couldn’t write for toffee.

Then, after saying a definitive and unequivocal “No thank you” to motherhood in 2014 I felt a profound shift that catapulted me into a new phase of inner transformation; a spiritual quest fuelled by a burning question … How can I become a woman of substance if I’m not a mother?

This eventually led me to a shadow integration retreat which inspired me to get back into the writing saddle as my fiftieth birthday came into view on the horizon of my inner landscape.

Consequently, by the beginning of 2020, I redoubled my efforts to fulfil my dream: I took a leap of faith by stepping down from a senior corporate role and hired a coach to hold me steady as I climbed back onto the writing saddle once more. Then, by magical serendipity, lockdown happened and the same person who’d run the 'How To Be Brilliant' event back in 2005 set up an online writing challenge. To my surprise, I found myself writing Wild Egg - A Story of One Woman’s Search for Her Childfree Life, a fiction novel directly born out of my experience of becoming childfree by choice after a long street-fight with ambivalence. I resisted the call at first, afraid to share something so vulnerable, but was spurred on by a feeling I was being called to share my story … whether I wanted to or not!

My marriage also unravelled during lockdown, so the process of writing Wild Egg became a journey of healing and self-empowerment; a way to put a beautiful big full stop at end of a significant chapter of my life, and break free from the stories and identities that were no longer serving me, allowing me to turn over a new page and step into a more authentic version of me as a single childfree woman post-fifty.

Ultimately, I came to think of this process as connecting with the fertile womb of my own creativity whereby I birthed my authentic self as a direct response to choosing not to birth a child.

3. How do you explore ideas or find inspiration for your work?
So far for me, ideas have emerged in the aftermath of big disruptive life changes; times when I’ve been emotionally and psychologically broken open and have imagined myself, scratched, bruised and covered in dust, searching for something glimmering in the rubble that I can take forward and alchemise into gold. In this way, I deeply resonate with a line from Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert ... “ruin is the road to transformation”.

In each case, whilst I’ve been scavenging in the dirt, I’ve had a kind of creative download that’s come to me in the form of a title which initially doesn’t make sense: like a puzzle I have to solve. The title has then morphed into a metaphor which I’ve actively held in my imagination, continually holding it up to the light, asking questions about where it came from and what it represents, like a detective examining and re-examining a vital clue that will unlock the case and solve the mystery.

I then begin to gather visual images that relate to the clue, like a kind of pictoral mind mapping exercise, creating vision boards and other visual cues (such a mobile phone screen savers) which further fuel my imagination as I try to figure out what the metaphor represents. I tend to find this draws in serendipitous happenings – a chance conversation, a quote, an article in a magazine that seems to connect to what I’m thinking - and gradually energy builds around the idea, and I start having dreams and more creative downloads, especially in the shower or when I’m out in nature moving my body as the metaphor and title start to turn round and round inside my mind gathering momentum.

4. What does the process of writing involve for you?
For me, there comes a point in the creative exploration phase where I feel something ‘pop’; I feel a crystallising and stabilising of the idea in my body accompanied by an aha-moment where I get another major clue, a character or a significant storyline. At this point I create the kind of thing you might see in a detective show ... a large board where the faces of suspects and key pieces of evidence are connected together by lengths of string, and post-it notes denote questions or working hypotheses that try to make sense of the messy web of interconnections which are forming as new information comes to light.

At this point, my research around the subject becomes deeper and more focused until I feel I have enough of a handle on the story to start mapping a rough story arc, which at this stage still has significant gaps! I then choose an underpinning structure that will provide the scaffolding for the story (for example, with Wild Egg I used William Bridges 3-part Life Transitions model) and use post-it notes to map out key events.

Then it’s time to produce what Brene Brown calls the SFD (aka 'shitty first draft'), which for me is the most challenging part because it sucks so badly I want to give up constantly and have to really manage my not-good-enough/you-don’t-know-what-you’re-doing-here-loser, inner critic voice! In writing Wild Egg I came to call this part of the process ‘jigsaw writing’, because I wrote whatever scene came into my head in the moment that day,
rather than trying to follow the story sequentially. This required a kind of active surrender, trusting in the process that I could see enough of the ‘jigsaw lid’ to understand where a particular piece might fit in, but without understanding how the bits were all going to join together to form a coherent flow.

In writing Wild Egg I discovered a great technique for getting through this challenging phase was to commit to doing a series of 17-minute sprints, even if all I did some days was 1x sprint because I was busy working on my day job. This way I was able to sustain momentum and buoy myself up with a feeling of forward movement, however
infinitesimally small. And it was surprising how those 17-minute sprits eventually added up over time!

Once the SFD is complete, I follow the advice of leaving the thing alone for a good amount of time, not thinking or looking at it for a while to put some distance between yourself and the next phase of editing; I think with Wild Egg I left a gap of about six weeks.

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Then it’s the editing phase, which has a very different quality to it. After wanting to throw a tantrum and burn the SFD, I remind myself it’s normal to think it sucks! What kept me going during this phase with Wild Egg, was the famous Michael Angelo quote ... “I created a vision of David in my mind and simply carved away everything that was not David”.

5. And what does writing then also give you in return?
Writing enables me to make sense of my own lived experience by helping to crystallise the lessons learned and extract the wisdom in service of my future growth. The process gives me an empowering feeling - that I’m not just intellectually understanding something, but I’m mining deeper beneath the surface to extract the precious minerals so I can feel and embody the experiences I’ve had and discover a way to talk about and share these with others.

Writing also helps me to feel a sense of communion with my dad who sadly passed away in 2022 a few weeks after I published Wild Egg, and a connection to the mystery and wonder of an invisible realm that lies out there in the ether beyond the edges of what we are able to touch, taste and see through our five senses yet feels almost palpable through the portal of my imagination.

6. Has seeing your work in print changed how you view yourself, and also how you view your NoMo status?
Yes, profoundly so. I’ve now come to think of myself as childfree-by-calling rather than by choice; that I was destined to walk the NoMo path less travelled. When I look back now at the gut-wrenching existential angst I endured in making my decision to close the door to motherhood, it astonishes me that I found it such a difficult choice because being childfree feels so obviously right for me. Writing Wild Egg enabled me to recognise the extent to which I was gripped by pronatalist conditioning, believing there was something wrong with me for not wanting children and fearing I’d always feel somehow hollow and unfulfilled as a result, which could not be further from the truth.

Seeing my work in print has emboldened me to claim my childfree life and status, and to challenge myself with a provocative new question ... what does it mean not just to be childfree, but free-free? By the time I published Wild Egg, this question came to feel like a beckoning invitation from my future post-fifty-year-old-self, to break free from the shell of my conditioned self to become a more juicy, yolky version of me.

I have also gained a new sense of belonging and connection, as one more voice contributing to the global conversation about our right to have sovereignty over our bodies when it comes to our reproductive choices as women, which has infused my life with even more meaning and purpose.

7. Tell us about the wider reception that you’ve had to sharing your story - has it changed how others have viewed you and your identity as a non-parent?
I’ve been bowled over by the feedback to date from all over the world. Again and again, readers have told me they felt seen and validated through reading my character Hollie’s story and appreciate the depth, rawness and honesty of her inner journey.

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I’ve been surprised that the story has not only resonated with childfree or on-the-fence readers, but also women who are childless-not-by-choice and are biological mothers. In the latter case, I’ve had women admit to me that they never really wanted children but thought they should have them; others confess they never realised they had a choice; mothers saying its helped them to understand their daughters / granddaughters who are wrestling with this decision; and also midlife woman whose kids have flown the nest who are now grappling with the existential identity questions (Who am I beyond the role of a mother?) that Hollie faces in the story.

I feel it’s made me more relatable to other women, and also made me smile to hear myself referred to as an ‘elder’ and inspiration to women - particularly in their twenties and thirties, which is something I’m fully and joyfully embracing.

Honestly, prior to writing Wild Egg I never thought consciously about my childfree status, had never heard the term ‘pronatalism’ and certainly wasn’t aware that there was a whole community of people talking about this topic. I now feel proud to be part of this conversation and seeing myself as childfree has deepened my own sense of identity, meaning and purpose. I’ve also become braver in speaking out, having overcome the terrible vulnerability I initially felt about sharing my story, which has actually turned out to be one of the best things I’ve ever done. Reflecting on my own journey in the process of writing Wild Egg has also intensified my feeling of being at peace with my decision to be a NoMo, and I now feel proud of myself for taking the road less travelled.

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8. How do you feel about the current representation of childless and/or childfree people in literature?
I feel childfree and childless people are still woefully underrepresented in literature and on screen and that the portrayals we do see tend to be very simplistic stereotypes: we have a long way to go I feel, to move beyond the crazy cat lady, wicked stepmother, miracle-baby-happy-ending, selfish narcissist, downright weirdo tropes!

I would like to see multi-dimensional characters, especially positive childfree-by-choice role models, to help the next generation of women see that you can have a meaningful, interesting life without being a biological mother. Ultimately I’d love to imagine that we will reach a point whereby motherhood is no longer seen as the gateway to maturation as a woman, but one of a number of ways which are all equally valid and relevant.

Many readers have described Wild Egg as the Eat, Pray, Love of childfree by choice and I’d love to see Wild Egg adapted into a movie to help it have wider reach. You can always dream, eh?

9. What would you like the publishing world to know about non-parents, both as writers and readers, and our stories?
There is a growing, ravenously hungry NoMo audience out there who are desperate to see themselves represented in complex, gloriously messy technicolour. This is a growing global demographic and it’s only going to accelerate over the coming years, as more people question whether bringing a child into this world is their wholehearted choice, and grapple with complex ambivalence over this profound decision in the context of a fragile and unstable world.

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There is also a large untapped market of midlife women who are struggling with questions of meaning and identity beyond the role of being a mother, a phenomenon which has intensified in our post-Covid world as people reflect on what truly matters to them and grapple with their psycho-spiritual health.

10. What future plans do you have, especially for your writing?
Many readers have asked whether Hollie will make a return, saying they are eager to know what happens next. I’m currently exploring whether to write a sequel to Wild Egg (I already have a working title), or whether to turn my attention back to my original lighthouse keeper-inspired idea which continues to peck at my imagination. I’m waitingto  see what wants to emerge on this front but am certainly curious to see what it’s like to write another novel with the insight and experience I’ve now gained.

More broadly, I’m at something of a hiatus in terms of my paid work as a leadership coach. The question of what it means to be free-free continues to ripple across the murky pond of my mind and I’m wondering whether it might be time to take a different direction in my professional life, or add another string to my bow.

I’m particularly interested in the intersection between creativity, mental health and spiritual awakening, and curious to see what might be possible in this space.

In terms of Wild Egg, I’m still committed to sharing my story and keen to reach a wider audience and I’d love to do more podcast interviews and in-person speaking events during 2024.