PART ONE OF TWO | Trigger warnings: Emotional abuse, suicidal ideation

Morgan sits down with Lindsay Lion Lord — neurodivergent, legally blind visual artist and recent MFA graduate in Fibres and Material Practices from Concordia University in Montreal — for a conversation that is raw, funny, and fiercely honest.

Lindsay opens up about receiving her diagnosis of retinitis pigmentosa just as she was finishing her MFA in visual art — a degree she spent years fighting to pursue after growing up in a hyper-religious, evangelical household that told her the art world was 'dark' and not to be pursued. From the time she was a little girl teaching herself to draw from Highlights magazines, art was the one area in which no one could criticize her. In a home where her feelings were too big, her personality too much, and her light constantly being dimmed, her exceptional talent in drawing became her refuge.

After high school, and without a clear path forward, Lindsay joined Teen Mania Ministries — an internship program she now identifies as an abusive psychological cult, later documented in season two of Shiny Happy People on Amazon. She describes what life inside looked like: ten days of sleep deprivation and isolation from family during something called Gauntlet Week, six people to a tiny dorm room with no privacy, constant self-policing and peer surveillance, and deeply misogynistic "relationship advice" delivered to rooms full of 18-year-old women by male leadership. She also opens up about the secret boyfriend who was abusive, the 'trial' before the Honor Council where even her own advocate turned on her, and the split-second decision — at 19 years old, alone in a room full of people telling her she was wicked — to trust herself anyway. She orchestrated her own dismissal, packed her things in the night, and left the next day. What followed was being shunned by roughly a thousand peers and staff members overnight, coming home to Kansas, and then being kicked out by her parents.

Morgan and Lindsay dig into why cult dynamics aren't as far outside of everyday life as we'd like to believe — the parallels between authoritarian religion, dysfunctional family systems, Greek life, and other institutional structures that use isolation, sleep deprivation, and self-policing to maintain control. They talk about what it means to stop doing the work of your oppressors for them, why telling your story is necessary, and the ongoing unglamorous work of therapy, inner child healing, and learning — slowly, imperfectly — to take up the space you were always meant to occupy.

Support my work by reading & subscribing to Chronically Candid on Substack at morgannbarrett.substack.com

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There's something quietly full-circle about this episode. Kelly Esparza — editor in chief of FLARE Literary Magazine, freelance editor, and writer living with lupus — was a stranger to Morgan until Kelly accepted her very first piece of published writing into FLARE. That single acceptance set something in motion. And now they're here, talking for the first time face to face (virtually), about what it means to build something out of a gap you noticed, to lead with honesty and generosity, and to keep writing through the challenges of chronic illness.

Kelly didn't start FLARE because she had it all figured out. She started it because she went looking for stories about chronic illness and came up mostly empty. Newly diagnosed with lupus, freshly graduated into a pandemic job market, she decided to make the thing she wished existed. She expected maybe a handful of submissions. What she got instead was a community.

This episode moves through a lot of territory — lupus and what it actually looks and feels like from the inside, the strange exhaustion of being a young person with an old person's joints, the grief that comes with measuring your energy in spoons, and the peculiar sweetness of finding people who just get it without you having to explain. They also talk about what it costs to create something — a literary magazine, a novel, a chapbook of grief poems about your own body — when your body is the thing you're writing about and the thing that keeps getting in the way.

Kelly shares her path to editing through internships and volunteer work with publications like Sonora Review at the University of Arizona and Free State Review, and how that experience shaped everything about how she runs FLARE — including her commitment to responding to submissions within 24 hours, keeping access free, and sending rejections that feel like they were written by someone who actually read your work, because they were. There are also exciting updates on Kelly's fiction life: she recently signed with a new literary agent she met in person at a book festival, and is working toward going on submission to publishers in the fall with her adult speculative mystery. Plus: her chapbook A Spoonie's Guide to Self-Acceptance, a small collection of lupus poems published by Bottle Cap Press — which Kelly explains with the kind of enthusiasm that makes you want to immediately go find a copy.

By the time they get to the closing questions — the ones that are, as Morgan admits, not exactly fun but absolutely worth asking — this conversation has become something warmer and stranger and more honest than either of them probably planned. The kind of conversation two chronically ill writers with a lot to say tend to have when they finally get to connect.

Timestamps

[0:00] Introductions, Kelly's background in writing and editing, and the origin story of Flare Literary Magazine

[17:00] What lupus actually is, Kelly's long road to diagnosis, and life after — symptoms and treatments

[40:00] The emotional weight of chronic illness, how FLARE actually works, and the editor's perspective on community, rejection, and what it means to believe in someone's work

[1:18:00] Kelly's fiction journey, A Spoonie's Guide to Self-Acceptance, dreams for FLARE's future, and the closing questions

Support my work by reading & subscribing to Chronically Candid on Substack at morgannbarrett.substack.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Fireside Friday!

In this cozy, unfiltered solo episode, Morgan checks in with a few life updates before reading a poem close to her heart. She shares about the decision to step back from millennial nostalgia content on Instagram — a move that felt harder than it probably sounds, given how well it was performing. But when she fast-forwarded in her mind and asked where is this actually taking me, the answer got quiet. Her end goal is being a published author, and she's trying to make sure everything she's putting energy into is moving in that direction — her Substack, this podcast, her Instagram — all of it feeling more like one cohesive thing and less like ten different versions of herself.

Then there's home life, which is its own kind of beautiful chaos. The twins are five and a half, about to start kindergarten, and have each lost two teeth — which Morgan finds both fun and a little disorienting — wasn't she just five-years-old losing her first teeth, like, yesterday?

Morgan reflects on how hard it was to be fully present in the early years of her kids' lives, how the weight of constant caregiving made it nearly impossible to just enjoy the little people in front of her. And she extends herself some grace for that, while also sharing how much more she's settling into this phase — the one where they're funny and weird and asking a lot of questions about death. (Winslow's current theory: we turn into skeletons, and then into roses. Which, honestly, love that.)

The episode closes with Morgan reading a fully renovated poem she first wrote in 2023 — a raw, honest look at body image, the ever-shifting ideal, and what it means to try to make peace with your body while your daughter is observing and absorbing your attitude toward your body. It's tender and complicated in the way that Morgan's writing always is: sitting with something uncomfortable without pretending to have resolved it.

This one's short, personal, and exactly what Fireside Fridays are meant to be.

Support Morgan's work by subscribing to Chronically Candid on Substack at morgannbarrett.substack.com

Support my work by reading & subscribing to Chronically Candid on Substack at morgannbarrett.substack.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.