[00:00:00] Stephanie: I didn't recognize how different I was until I was about 44 years old. I said to my husband, who was home at the time, I said Joe, can you hear people's thoughts? And he's no, and at 44, I broke down in tears because my whole life, Aneta, from being a baby, I have been able to hear people's thoughts. I'll be in a grocery store, and I'll hear some of what they're thinking, and multiple people, I'll hear it's just like walking into a room with a full conversation.
[00:00:39] Aneta: We often hear people wishing us a long, happy, and healthy life, but what if the length isn't what matters most? What if instead, it's the breath depth and purpose of each day that matters most? Welcome to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My name is Aneta Ardelian Kuzma, and join me weekly as I interview guests who have made changes in their own lives to live more fully with intention, gratitude, and joy. Be prepared to be inspired by their stories of how they shifted their mindset, took courageous action, and designed the life that they always wanted to live.
Welcome back to Live the With of Your Life podcast. My guest this week is Stephanie Milowski, and she's the author of Clairvoyant Stories from A Highly Sensitive Life and the World's Smallest Letterpress, which is a whimsical book about the art of letterpress printing. She's a design prodigy who began college at just 14.
She earned her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, a full scholarship, and leader in MFA from the University of Michigan. Her remarkable career includes working at Herman Miller. Studying Under Design Luminaries at Yale Summer Program in Switzerland, and receiving a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Stephanie's also illustrated children's books for major publishers, designed hundreds of book covers, and created holiday cards for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As an artist and entrepreneur, her letterpress work gained recognition when she hand-bound 1200 books for Oprah Winfrey. She lives in Michigan with her family, her dogs, and enjoys coffee and sprinkled covered donuts.
We had such an amazing conversation about her background, her history, and just the work that makes her come alive. I loved our conversation, and I think you will as well take a listen.
Stephanie, welcome to Live The Width of Your Life podcast. I'm so excited to have you here with me.
[00:02:31] Stephanie: Thank you so much for having me. This is phenomenal. Love being here.
[00:02:37] Aneta: You and I were just talking about how interesting the universe works and how we find connections. And so I always love to start with, like, how did I meet the person that I'm talking to today? And you're another wonderful introduction from our friend and editor, George. And it's just so fascinating to me that in this big world of billions of people that we can find ourselves having a conversation in very different parts of the world.
So I'm super excited. And I want to say thank you to George for the introduction.
[00:03:11] Stephanie: Yeah. Thank you, George.
[00:03:14] Aneta: How did you meet George?
[00:03:16] Stephanie: So that's interesting. I found a book on Amazon that just drew me in, and I contacted the author. And I exchanged some stories, things that have happened in my life. And he wrote back and he said, geez, you should write a book. And I said, yeah, I said, you're not the first person who's told me that.
And I said, I just don't know how to go about it. I'm not a writer. I'm an artist. I'm a designer, and he said he was an attorney, and he said he wasn't a writer either, but I think he was a writer. But he said, I'll help you. I'll tell you, this is what you do: you write 500 words a day. That's what you strive for.
Just start. He said with 500 words. And then he said, go from there. And he said, and when you're ready, here's my editor. And that was George. And I just love that he was so forthcoming and sharing, everything, how he did it. A lot of people don't share, especially in my field and graphic design, it's very guarded and you don't find a lot of designers that are willing to and I apologize to any designer out there, but you really, it's kind of, they covet what they know and who their clients are.
And because it's your bread and butter. But he was open with sharing how he wrote the book, how he found George and everything. And George designed the cover for him and it was really nice. So that was how I met George and call him like an angel in the book.
In my corner in my office, so it helps so much because I am not a writer either. But he would probably tell me otherwise right now.
[00:04:56] Aneta: Yes, you are. And George is George Verongos, and we will include his full information in this because if anyone needs an editor, he's amazing. But you have written two books, Clairvoyance: Stories from a Highly Sensitive Life, and then The World's Smallest Letter Press: A Not So Ordinary Day.
First of all, I love the titles. So tell me a little bit about these books.
[00:05:18] Stephanie: So Claire Voyage the subtitle is Stories from a Highly Sensitive Life. And I've always lived in this. I think it's like another World. I wonder if other people can relate with this, but I just have lived a life in my own world. I was highly sensitive, highly creative from a very young age.
It was noticed I was put in special art classes and at a super young age and I don't know, the way that I've grown up, I was the youngest of four children. My parents were done parenting by then. And I was on my own from a really young age. I don't really remember my parents doing like what I did for my kids.
For me, I was really on my own, and I gravitated to other kids that were like that. One of my best friends lost both of his parents, and those were the kind of people that I was gravitated to, the people that had the backgrounds and stories, and that were highly sensitive.
So we gravitated toward each other and helped each other. But I didn't really recognize how different I was until I was about 44 years old. I'm married now with two children and this person that I was working for, I had developed shingles, which was awful on a business trip from New York.
This is in my book, I hopped on a plane and I noticed a young girl slumped over on her mom's lap and it looked to me like she had chicken pox. And I was so worried because I thought, here I go. I've never had chicken pox. I'm in this closed space with her now, like a couple rows behind her.
I'm going to get chicken pox. Sure enough, within 24 hours, I developed shingles, which is basically chicken pox. And my boss at the time, who I was working for, she said, hey, here's this book I think you would really enjoy it. You've got time now to read. I was in what I call a dress and just itching all over and just [00:07:30] staying put in my house, and I read this book and my boss told me, she goes, it's very academic but it'll be a good read. You got the time, read it. So the book was titled Extraordinary Knowing by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer. And it was a PhD and it was written like a textbook, but in the middle of the book she starts talking about a client that she had.
She was a psychotherapist and she talked about a client that she had that came in and just described this highly sensitive, highly intuitive nature about herself that she would see things before they happened and the premonitions that she had were stronger and getting stronger and she could also hear people's thoughts.
And I was like, wait a minute. And I had to re read that paragraph over again, and I was like, wait, this is news? This is incredible? This is extraordinary? That somebody can hear people's thoughts? And I put the book down, and I said to my husband, who was home at the time, I said, Joe, I said can you hear people's thoughts? And he's no, and at 44, I literally broke down in tears because my whole life, Aneta, from being a baby, one of my first memories was I was probably, I think it was eight months old in a crib. I still can feel the feeling of being in that crib with not being able to use my legs pulling myself up to the crib.
I had very early memories and that my whole life I have been able to hear people's thoughts. I'll be in a grocery store and I'll hear some what they're thinking and multiple people I'll hear it's just like walking into a room with a full conversation.
That's what I hear. And sometimes I can tune it out and when I tune it out, it's almost as if it's a vacuum sound. That's how I described it. If you hear somebody vacuuming in another room, that's what I hear.
[00:09:37] Aneta: Like it's muffled.
[00:09:38] Stephanie: Muffled. Yeah. So I asked my husband that day and he's no, I don't hear, no, I can't hear people's thoughts. And I just started just crying because I realized that I spent most of my life with that ability thinking that everybody else had that ability. I just felt that was a way of being human, that's what we all were like. I don't know if you could say took it for granted or what, but I just assumed that everybody was like that. It didn't even come to my radar to even think that until I read it in her book that it was extraordinary.
[00:10:17] Aneta: All right. I have to pause here, Stephanie, because I have so many questions about this. So were there relationships that you had with people, with friends, with family, with your husband, even where you heard thoughts that clearly they were not speaking out loud that hurt you or that..
[00:10:34] Stephanie: Yeah, you could hear contrary thoughts. I could hear contrary thoughts. So then I'd say really do you mean that? Because I heard it. So Relationships, work, everything had been a struggle for me. For instance, I had a lot of misbehaving, what I call misbehaving men in my career.
And a lot of times I would see it coming, but I would think here we go again, and they know what they're doing. And this is the story that keeps repeating itself. Now looking back having the knowledge of, yes, I could hear their thoughts and everything, how I could have gone and stopped that had I known they weren't like me, just the whole narrative would have been so different for me and it wouldn't have been such a struggle if I would have known that people weren't like me, and this is the way that, I could deal with them now.
It would have been, yeah, it would have been totally different. Much easier.
[00:11:30] Aneta: So what did you, I would imagine, but what did you do after you found out? So now you're 44 now you've had this conversation with your husband where you both are looking at each other okay, you can do that. You can't do that. Like, how has your life changed since then? And did you try to find other people like you? I'm just trying to think what Would have happened to me.
[00:11:54] Stephanie: I had a really close friend. Her name was Terry. I had known her husband before through work. He was a printing, a printer rep. And so I'd worked with him for years and then Terry also sold paper. So as a designer back in the nineties, you bought a lot of paper for printed projects and stuff.
So I knew Terry through work. So Mike and Terry and anyway, she would come in and talk to Mike, because I was teaching at the time, college courses. She would come in and talk to my students about what she did with design and how she worked with designers. And after her visit once to my class, I said, would would you like to meet for coffee?
And she says, sure. Yeah, let's meet. And at that point I was like, you know what? I don't have anything to lose. I don't really know Terry all that much if she thinks otherwise of me, but I'm just going to tell her. I can hear people and I receive messages and I have dreams and I get feelings...
And I said, I'm just going to tell her, I'm just going to come out with it. And over coffee, I told her I said, I don't care this might be the last time you talk to me, but this is what's happening in my life. This is what I've discovered about myself. And it is what it is. And she said, Stephanie, and she's the kind of person, kind of friend that if you tell something like that to, she's going to go and do all of the research about it.
So she made it like her mission to learn everything there was about Highly Sensitive People. and Then we would meet weekly after that. And she would say, okay, this is what I've read. And she would want to know what's been happening in my life. And it was just this huge support that I had in her that allowed me to just learn how to just be myself and learn strategies about how to deal with things in work or relationships and things like that, because it is different when you're a highly sensitive person.
[00:14:01] Aneta: Wow. so can you be highly sensitive, but also not be clairvoyant
[00:14:07] Stephanie: Yeah, the clairvoyant I believe, I got that from my grandma. I think because my grandma we always said would get feelings. We had this all knowing she lived on a farm up in Ludington, Michigan, and one of the examples was that everybody was working in the farm out in the fields and she would start preparing this huge meal.
My mom would be like, why are you doing this? It's just us four or whatever. And she'd say, no, we're going to have a lot of people. And sure enough, she would have a lot of people. So she always knew ahead of time, she saw things. And I guess her mother would read tea leaves.
So I think it could be genetic. I'm not sure where I got it, but it is what it is. Yeah, like I said I did not know a thing about it until I was 44 and then just having Terry just the [00:15:00] encyclopedia and now the expert of it she just has helped me and walked me through it and just helping me to accept who I am and just being able to work with it.
[00:15:11] Aneta: Yeah. Have you been now receiving other gifts or have you discovered that you have additional gifts beyond being able to hear the thoughts?
[00:15:22] Stephanie: Yeah, I receive the biggest, I think is just an all knowing of receiving information about people. I'll just downloaded about a space or a person. Terry's helped me too. The biggest thing about this is that I spent from, zero to 44, just a complete sponge, just like a walking sponge of just being able to absorb somebody's bad day or somebody's bad thought or their, emotions, I was a sponge to everything and carrying it around, and that's pretty heavy when you've got your own things that are going on, but you're also absorbing everybody else's stuff.
So all of that baggage is just like a magnet to me. So anyway, that's been the biggest challenge is how do you block that out? And that's what Terry has helped me with. I write about it in the book, but it's like zipping myself up into a white cloud a sleeping bag of protection and that does as odd as that sounds it really does work.
So when I'm going grocery store, I'll do that Terry always says when she brushes her teeth, she does it, because she learned too that she's highly sensitive and a lot of people are, and you just don't realize. The biggest thing is just that we're all energy. Thoughts are energy, everything is energy and you're just absorbing it.
And I've learned to block it and open it up when I need it to be open, but or sometimes, honestly, I forget and I forget to zip up and then I'll receive a message and it will be really odd. I'll just be walking the dogs with my husband and all of a sudden one time I said to my husband, I said do you work with an Abby?
And he's like, yeah. And I said she's pregnant. I'm like, okay. She's going to come in and she can tell you that she's pregnant and he's she just got married and or she's getting married or something. And anyway just last week, my husband said, do you remember Abby? And you told me she's pregnant.
He's she's pregnant. Or I got downloaded that there was a Keith that he worked with that was ill. And my husband said no he's great. He's at work. And 24 hours later, my husband came back home one day and he's just shaking his head and he said, Stephanie, he's like, I have to tell you, he's like, Keith came in and make a long story short.
He had forgotten about this Keith, but there were two Keith's that he worked with and this one was ill and he ended up passing away. I told Joe, I said, you're going to be the one person that he wants you to know that what's going on in his life. I said, he's coming to you to tell you. And sure enough it played out exactly what I told him would happen.
[00:18:05] Aneta: He shouldn't doubt you anymore, I think after some.
[00:18:09] Stephanie: And that's what has happened in our relationship, in our marriage. He's learned to trust my instinct and to not to argue, not anything. Just say, okay. Yep.
[00:18:21] Aneta: It's interesting because I can tell when people are pregnant too. Like I just thought it was, I don't know, sometimes this inner knowing. And sometimes I'll forget that I do stuff like that with people and they'll remind me, they're like, do you remember, I didn't tell anybody.
And all of a sudden you looked at me and you're like, do you know that you're expecting? Like I've always done that, like that's one of those things or I'll have dreams, but I never really looked into, I always thought that was just, I don't know, something that people knew or could do or so it's interesting, I guess that maybe some of us have gifts we just don't know that we have, or don't have the language for what it is.
[00:18:59] Stephanie: Or that there's never been a magnifying glass or spotlight on it, as life just goes so fast you just don't really have time to think and ponder about it or realize that, or have a friend to discuss it and disclose it. I was having dreams that were coming true.
I was seeing things that nobody else saw, yeah, I would see them in a flash. I saw just driving down our street one day, turning the corner. There's a pond and I was driving in my car and I saw all of a sudden yellow tape. It was completely marked off. And I saw police cars and then I do blink and it's not there.
And the next day I drove same route and there it is. And someone had, the,in the early ly morning hours. driven off the road and went down into the pond. But to see that beforehand, and there's a little bit of a frustration with this too, is that I would receive these messages through dreams or like this visual but there's nothing I can do with them.
There's nobody I can call and, say, hey, tomorrow at 1 a. m. This is going to happen. So there's a little bit of a frustration there and that's where also Terry comes through too for me is that this whole zipping up you can do it when you sleep as well so that you can't be contacted basically with the other.
[00:20:30] Aneta: Fascinating. And I do think it's familial because my mom and my grandmother both kind of my mom has dreams that have definitely come true. And my grandmother actually told us the day she was going to die. And she had a massive heart attack that day and died exactly on Christmas day, she told us. But I want to talk about your interesting background too, because you enrolled in college at the age of 14.
[00:20:54] Stephanie: Yeah...
[00:20:54] Aneta: You mentioned Rhode Island School of Design. Tell me what it was like to be such a young age, as you said, the youngest of four, maybe early independent streak, just based on who you were and maybe the parenting that you received. But, was that terrifying, going to school at 14?
[00:21:12] Stephanie: No, it was not terrifying because I felt like I was finally with my tribe. My art teacher who I absolutely adore Michael Maben, he was leaving the school system my sophomore year. I started school at the age of four. So I started early. When I was a sophomore in high school, my art teacher said, look, I'm leaving the school district.
He was going to work at a prison in arts and he said, why don't you apply to Grand Rapids Community College and take art classes there? He said, I think you're ready and he was just like a father figure to me. So I thought if he had the confidence in me, I had the confidence in myself, that I could do this.
So I just applied and at the time, I think I needed $10 as an application fee or something for the college. So I paid it and I think I just told my mom one day that I was going to college. I didn't even ask my parents and I didn't need their help because I have the bus system. So anyway I just needed money for the bus.
That's all I needed. And, tuition at the time was free if you were in high school. Yeah, I just started and I think that the [00:22:30] bus was probably the most frightening just the characters that I ran into. But, yeah, I started at 14. I started with just a basic drawing class. That was one semester.
And then the second semester was life drawing. So that was drawing from a live nude model. And so at the age of 14 that was interesting. And my mom, dad, again, I don't know, they were just like oblivious. I think really at that time they were so done with parenting that I was on my own.
And I would take the bus down and my sister would pick me up. And the class was four hours long. So I would get out at about 10 o'clock at night and I remember just a couple of years, like when my mom was 78 years old, I finally told her, I finally confessed that in my life drawing class a lot of times we would get out early the whole class, because they were older adults, they would go to this bar called the Cottage Bar in downtown Grand Rapids.
And they would just go to the bar and the nude model would just put on her robe and slippers and walk to this bar. And my teacher didn't want to leave me because I was so young.
So he said, come on along, I'll buy you a Coke. I packed up my stuff and I went with them, but then at 10 o'clock at night they all dispersed from the bar and nobody walked me back to the college,
Which was about good five, 10 minute walk. So I would have to walk through this park in the dark, and I'd have to run back to the college and act like I'd been waiting there.
And then my sister or my mom would pick me up then. But I never wanted them to know that because I thought, if my parents know I'm at a bar and I'm 14, they won't let me take the courses anymore. Yeah, I did not tell my mom that. And she was laughing and she told me that at one time in the class, we had a presentation, a big show of our work.
And I guess my teacher ran over to her and said he wanted to shake her hand and meet the parent who allowed her 14 year old daughter to take a new art class.
[00:24:49] Aneta: She knew anyway and you're holding on to this like secret.
[00:24:53] Stephanie: Yeah. So I think from a very young age, I knew what I wanted. I knew what I was here to do. I was an artist and I wanted to create at all costs, and that was just who I was.
[00:25:08] Aneta: I love those stories and it's so interesting looking back and going, that was an interesting decision that my parents made.
[00:25:16] Stephanie: Yeah,
[00:25:17] Aneta: But you went on to RISD and you had an opportunity to work with so many amazing designers. So tell me a little bit about the experience of being a young college student because you continued on there and some of the work that you did that really just cemented the fact that you were doing what you wanted to do, as you said.
[00:25:34] Stephanie: yeah. I just having that portfolio from having two years of college courses, I had what I call a leg up because I had the nude modeling drawings. I had college drawing material. Plus I had the recommendation letters from my professors and my art teacher in high school and I received a full ride scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design.
So at 17, I think the only out of state I'd gone is to Florida a couple times with my family. I never went to summer camps or anything. I was the kind of student who I would spend Friday nights in my room at home working on the pencil drawing. And I had friends that supported me, they would say, what did you draw last night or what were you working on?
And yeah, that's just who I was. And so when I went to RISD again I felt like I was with everybody who understood me. It was just like that spoke the same language and it was amazing. In my dorm on my same floor was Eddie Hemingway and Eddie is now a children's book illustrator, but he was Ernest Hemingway's grandson.
I just met just incredible people. And the faculty were just top notch and just out of this world. So at the age of 17, I was just immersed in this world and able to be, and, supported of just who I was as an artist and I wanted to do the best I could and what some of the best advice I got actually about college was from my community college professor.
His name was Dick Steen. He said, put yourself on top of the ceiling floating above your art classes. And he said, do three times better than the best person in class. And so that's what I strive to do. I just worked hard and strive to be better than the best.
[00:27:34] Aneta: Wow.
[00:27:35] Stephanie: yeah, but the faculty that I met were just incredible. Freshman year one of my professors was lead to jazoo and I'll never forget one of the assignments was to create a relative. And so my relative was this woman who worked in our cafeteria her name was Donna, and she was about a foot and a half shorter than I was. She was Portuguese. We absolutely loved Donna. And I actually asked her if she would be my relative.
And so during a critique, I had her storm into the critique. And we had a family argument that was an assignment. And afterwards I got a standing ovation from everybody and Lee actually bought me a cup of coffee and it was such a great community, as an artist, it was almost demanding of you that you exhaust all possible ideas.
That's what the biggest thing at RISD that I learned is just how to exhaust all possible creative ideas. And it was just a wonderful place to do it.
[00:28:44] Aneta: Yeah. Everyone that I know that's gone to RISD just has the most wonderful things to say and they've all are very successful in their life. So how did you discover like what your path was going to be once you graduated? Because going into the creative space, sometimes it's hard to really get your footing.
[00:29:02] Stephanie: Yeah. It is very hard, very competitive. I don't want to say it's luck because I work hard at it. I just meet the right people and I don't know what it is. After graduation, my parents insisted that I come back to Michigan. And then everybody at RISD said, if you're going to move back to Michigan, work for Herman Miller, which is legendary design.
And so I applied to Herman Miller and they were accepting three interns. And I was one of the interns, the apprentices to the creative director, Steve Frick home. So I interviewed with Steve Frick home and I got the job and I'll never forget because in my interview and I have it in my bio on my website, but he said to me, you're more.
And he used the F word, creative than the whole bunch out there. And he later told me, it wasn't so much my work as my [00:30:00] ideas. He said he had never met anybody like me. And that was, I think, a credit to Rhode Island School design and my professors, because yeah, we just exhaust all possible ideas. And have the capacity to think outside of the box and create.
[00:30:15] Aneta: I just thought of something. So my daughter also as a graphic designer. And she used to always share stories of just how brutally honest the feedback is, and when you're in design school. And so knowing that you could hear people's thoughts, was your experience when you were younger in art school, that what people were saying was actually what they were thinking also?
[00:30:40] Stephanie: Oh, back then, I didn't know I Thought that everybody was like me. I just knew that I was with highly competitive people and I just became super highly competitive. And I was concerned more about my work than their work, in a way, I was aware of what they were doing, what they were thinking but they were also trying to beat me, they were trying to understand what I was going to do.
And, I was in a class freshman year where during a critique the teacher Luis Alonzo was his name. He was amazing. He took just a sharpie and just would do a red X on everybody's work. But you would work, hours and hours on and I would not have, I never got a red X on my work. And that's what I strive to do. I strive to make him happy with my work. And yeah, I just did the best I could possibly do.
[00:31:36] Aneta: And you've worked on so many amazing things. So what were some of the highlights of your career? You're obviously still in the middle of your career, but what have been some of the things that you look back and you're either really passionate about or really proud of?
[00:31:49] Stephanie: I think, I can go back to one of my senior project at RISD was I designed a series of lunch bags called Save Me Lunch Bags, and I printed endangered species on them. And you have to remember this is before people started bringing insulated lunch boxes.
[00:32:06] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:32:07] Stephanie: I'm aging myself here, so I think I printed 10, 000 lunch bags, but I had 10 different animals. And the idea was that children could eat their lunch and learn about an endangered animal. And so I did a woodcut illustration on one side, and I wrote the copy on the other, and I think that was probably one of the best pieces I've done because it combined everything that I love to do. I do love to write, and I do love illustration, and then the design of it, picking what is the best material to teach young kids, and when do you have a captivated audience? At lunchtime when they're sitting and they can share and exchange, and I think one of the proudest moments, one of my friends, one of my best friends from high school, she became a bus driver and she called me one day and she said, Stephanie, I just saw a little girl hop on my bus carrying your lunch bag.
And that was it. That was a pinnacle, that was just great. And then when I got actually Tippi Hedren phone call, yeah,
[00:33:07] Aneta: Yeah
[00:33:08] Stephanie: The actress from the birds, she phoned me personally one day to just compliment me, to talk to me about the project and that she loved them. And yeah, it was amazing.
That was before cell phones, the phone rang in my parents house and I picked it up and it's Tippi Hedren.
[00:33:25] Aneta: Doesn't she have, I don't know if she's still with us, but she had an animal conservation
[00:33:30] Stephanie: Sanctuary. Yes.
[00:33:32] Aneta: Okay. Sanctuary, yeah.
[00:33:34] Stephanie: She purchased my lunch bags to sell them. Yeah, they were all over the world and zoos and gift shops. And I had a distributor and 19 years old and yeah, I was just going for it. So that was a great project. I worked on a gelato. Palo Zolo's gelato. They sell worldwide as well.
I rebranded their whole packaging. And that was an amazing project as well. So when I was at RISD my senior year, when I had my review, my final review one of the professors that I work close with, Inga Druckery, she said, you're going to have a difficult time, Stephanie, when you get out there because people want to put you in holes, it's a cookie cutter thing.
They want, are you a designer or are you an illustrator or are you an industrial designer or are you a copy editor or writer, and I was all of those things. And she said, so you're going to have a difficult time. People are going to want to put you in a category and you're a Jill of all trades.
Anyway. It has proven to be a little bit like that but when I went to Herman Miller it was all about design. It was all about graphic design. They did utilize my bookmaking. I made a beautiful box for Max Dupree found one of the founders. I also sold one of my books to Linda Powell, who is a creative art director there, and so they appreciated that side of me as well and nurtured that side of me, which was appreciated. But yeah, it's been a journey.
[00:35:06] Aneta: And you also are an illustrator. You've done book designs.
[00:35:10] Stephanie: Yes. My latest book, the world's smallest letterpress shop is about my letterpress shop. That was something at RISD in the graphic design department. That we would take a semester and learn letterpress. So we worked on a Vandercook printing press and we learned how to handset type. And this is going back to the 80s.
So this is when, before Macintosh, those little Macintoshes. So yeah, we learned letterpress and I've just acquired printing presses over the years. I have five vintage printing presses. And, I call it the world's smallest letterpress shop because it is. It's about 10 feet by 11 feet and yeah, I recently illustrated and published a book about the shop because interesting things happen in that shop.
The equipment that I purchased from older printers who have passed on. And there will be days when letterpress printing is not a perfect process. Every print that you pull is different. There's no undo button. If you make a mistake, you have to unlock a chase, you have to start over sometimes.
You can break parts of the press and they're just not manufactured anymore or you have to get them manufactured. It's a process and there'll be times when I'm in the shop and it's just strange things will happen and I have to just stop and step back and say, okay, I hear you and close up shop for the day and then come back and voila, it's all different.
I've had it one time. I think the strangest what I consider strange is, I needed to adjust something on my press in order to be able to print and the tool was nowhere to be found and I asked my husband he's really my maintenance person and my engineer of the print shop. I asked him where it was and he said, yeah, he's like, I can't find it.
I've looked all over. He thought we had sold it or, and I said, yeah, I don't know what to do. And we both came to the conclusion that we were going to have to buy another one because it was just gone. We'd looked everywhere. The next day I came into my studio, my print shop, and there the tool was on my marble top table, my composing table.
And [00:37:30] I texted my husband at work and I said, thanks for finding it. He said, finding what?
[00:37:37] Aneta: Of course he did.
[00:37:39] Stephanie: He did not know. He didn't know what I was talking about. And he was like, how? And it just literally appeared. I wanted to capture a little bit about that mystery of the shop. And that's when the story came to me one day. And I literally, I wrote the story. I think it took me about an hour to write because it came so quickly.
I just think being how I grew up being highly sensitive and everything. I feel that when people pass on they don't really pass on in the traditional, like what we think they're dead and they're gone or whatever, it's really, their spirits are living with us side by side.
All day long. And that's what happens in that print shop. I have these spirits of these master printers right with me all day long and I can even call out and ask a question and they'll answer it. If I listen I can hear it. Or if I'm patient and I just close up shop the next day, the problem will resolve.
Or the solution will present itself. That's a big thing that I've learned over just my career. Plus being highly sensitive is just this view of death that I have is much different because yeah, when you hear spirits come to you that are supposedly supposed to be dead and gone, or transitioned to another space, why are they communicating with me?
Why are they sending me messages? And I think one of the big ones that I received that really changed a lot is after my husband and after I had that epiphany of the extraordinary knowing at 44 he and I were gardening and I love to garden. I grew up spending the summers in Ludington at my grandparents at farm and my grandma's sister her name was Florence.
And I grew up with spending time at Florence and Cecil, her husband their farm and they had raspberries. And my sisters and I would just attack those raspberry bushes like crows, and just devour raspberries. And my husband and I, one time we're planting raspberries in our garden and he was working quietly.
I was working quietly, a beautiful day. And all of a sudden I hear audible., Steffi, I love you. And I look at my husband who looks at me because he just heard this voice and he shoots up and runs to our gate, opens up the gate, runs down the driveway and I stand up and I'm just thinking, what just happened?
And he comes back and he shakes his head and his arms are just like, and I asked him, I said, what did you hear? Beause I wanted to hear what he heard as confirmation that he heard the same thing. And he repeated, Steffi, I love you.
And I said, yeah. And he said, who was that? And I broke down crying again. And I was like that was either one of two people that have passed on. It was my Aunt Florence, or my grandma. Those are the only two people that I would allow to call me Steffi. And the voice because they were sisters, they sounded alike. But of those two sisters, only one of them had raspberry bushes. And that was Florence.
[00:41:09] Aneta: Wow.
[00:41:10] Stephanie: And she had died in 1986.
[00:41:12] Aneta: Wow.
[00:41:13] Stephanie: Yeah it was really a magical thing because my husband, who is an engineer and his life is just so linear. There's nothing, there's no messages coming into him. It's a complete closed space unlike me. And so for him to hear it was such a gift that she came through and that he heard her.
And that was amazing. And that solidified my belief that when we pass on, it's not that we are gone forever. It's just a different way of being that we can't really see and comprehend here. We haven't come to that. It's just, we haven't gotten to this understanding yet.
[00:41:55] Aneta: What a beautiful place for us to end our conversation. I could talk to you for hours on end, Stephanie. You've lived such a beautiful life. And I appreciate you sharing even just a little bits of it. We will include all of the links for people to be able to access your book. And if they want to work with you and to hire you, I know you're still working as a designer is an illustrator. You have a lot of projects continuing to go on. I do have one final question for you, which is what does it mean to you to live the width of your life?
[00:42:25] Stephanie: To me, to live the width of my life means to live with authenticity of who I am and not to care about what other people think of me or what they're doing to just live my authentic self and to understand that we all learn from each other. So if we're all learning from each other, we want to be the best that we can for each other, not just ourselves, but for each other.
[00:42:56] Aneta: So beautiful.
[00:42:58] Stephanie: Well, thank you very much for having me. I don't get a chance to talk about this very much with my design aspects of my work. So it's nice to be able to talk about it.
[00:43:09] Aneta: I'm so excited. I definitely want to get a copy of both of your books and learn more about both of the things that are happening with the letter press in your studio, but also more of the stories of being a highly sensitive person. Thank you so much, Stephanie, for your time.
And again, thank you, George, if you're listening for continuing to bring me these amazing women into my life that I'm so grateful for.
[00:43:32] Stephanie: Yeah. Thank you for having me. And if there's anyone listening that, they identify with being highly sensitive or they see it in their children or anything and they have a question, they can always reach out. I'm more than happy to help people.
[00:43:46] Aneta: Thank you. Appreciate that, Stephanie.
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