Episode 162 transcript: From Wall Street to Farming & Fiction: Jeanne Blasberg’s Courageous Journey
[00:00:00] Jeanne: So many diet-related illnesses and chronic illnesses, I think, stem back to the chemicals in the groundwater and in the food.
And we are very low-tech people, and we thought putting more organic matter back in the soil and creating a microbiome where healthy food grows. That's even the deep science that a lot of people don't understand, but it intuitively makes sense that if you basically eat something that's got everything you need.
If you eat a well-rounded diet of vegetables and well raised protein and I think if our country would just put as much like the farm bill is huge, but it really goes to the big producers and if they took even a iota of that money and put it towards regenerating the soil and the kind of farming that my husband and I do our healthcare crisis might be a lot different.
[00:00:52] 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 Jeanne Blasberg, and she's an award-winning and bestselling author and essayist. Her novel The Nine was honored with the 2019 Forward Indie's Gold Award and Thriller and Suspense, and the Gold Medal and Jurors’ Choice in the 2019 National Indie Excellence Awards.
Eden. Her debut won the Benjamin Franklin Silver Award for Best New Voice and Fiction, and was a finalist for the Sarton Women's Book Award for historical fiction. Her novel Daughter of a Promise, which came out on April 2nd of 2024, is a modern retelling of the legend of David and Bathsheba, completing the trilogy that she began with Eden and the Nine.
She is a teacher of Writing and a Lifetime Learner who co-chairs the board of the Boston Book Festival and serves on the executive committee of Grub Street. She also bought a farm with her husband. They moved to Verona, Wisconsin. This was a favorite conversation. We had such a wonderful time talking about how she decided to leave Boston with her husband, buy a farm in Wisconsin, and start farming with very little experience at all, and also how she decided to move from writing essays in nonfiction to her fiction books. It was such a wonderful conversation and example of living a really full life, living the width of one's life, and we explored so many different topics. I really enjoyed our conversation, and I hope you will as well take a listen.
Jeanne, welcome to the Live the With of Your Life podcast. Thank you for joining me.
[00:03:08] Jeanne: Thank you for having me, Aneta. I'm so happy to be here.
[00:03:11] Aneta: I'm so excited to talk to you for many reasons, but I think you're the first guest that I've had who is such a prolific writer, and you also have such an interesting full life in so many other ways. So I'm really excited to dive in. But do you mind just sharing a little bit about your background? For those who may not be familiar with you?
[00:03:31] Jeanne: Yeah. I'm 58 years old. I've got three grown children, who are my pride and joy. The oldest is 30, the youngest is 27. And being their mom, I think, was something that took me out of the working world. But I dove headfirst into a lot of community and nonprofit work when they were born.
Before I had kids, though, I was in a world of finance. I worked on Wall Street, and then I worked for a major retailer in strategic planning, and worked through a bankruptcy with them, and did a lot of mergers and acquisitions with that company. So I was in this fast-paced money world. We raised our kids in Boston.
Where my husband grew up, it was a terrific place to be. Although he'd lived there all his life. So we started to feel, especially during COVID, after we lost parents and our kids were out of the house, we decided to change things up, and we sold that house that we'd raised our kids in, and we bought a farm in southwest Wisconsin.
So that's like where I've been located in my overarching picture. But when I left that world of finance and kind of corporate life, and I was home with my kids, my last outside-the-home job before my third was born. I was writing case studies for a retailing professor at Harvard Business School, and that writing life was one that I really felt suited me.
I was able to write and also be home and fit it in with the kids. I was a strict, early bedtime type of mom. That job ended when my professor retired. But I still had this desire to write, and I had always been a reader and had taken creative writing courses in college.
I was in the closet with it. I didn't really tell my friends or even admit to my family that this was something that I had ambition towards or goals. So Boston is a wonderful town, and there are so many universities, and I was able to take some classes at night and just get into the practice of writing and writing with some groups and some mentors.
And I set a goal of writing a novel. I had this idea for a story that was somewhat of a personal story, but I, of course, turned it into fiction, and 10 years later, I had my first book. So it's been a really long road. I published my third novel. They all tie together thematically, and I can get more into that later.
But I would say if I had to describe myself and my background, it would be a mom, a creator of things. And I'm also an athlete. I love to be outdoors, and I played a lot of racket sports at a high level.
[00:06:31] Aneta: How did you decide to buy a farm in Wisconsin? Having lived in Boston on the East Coast and in finance, we could just have these stereotypical images of what that life could have been like, and then deciding to move to the Midwest and to buy a farm, did you have any farming experience?
[00:06:52] Jeanne: Nope.
[00:06:54] Aneta: So, how did you decide that this is what you wanted to do?
[00:06:57] Jeanne: So my husband has worked as a consultant to a major consumer packaged goods company for most of his career, and most recently with a lot of food companies that make different kinds of processed food. We both care a lot about our health and wellness. So he was having this existential crisis about what he did for a living versus what our values were and the type of food and healthcare we had access to. And I mentioned I'm an athlete. I've always taken care of myself more in the name of my sport, but also for longevity. And I'm not preachy, I'm not perfect, but it's something I know when there's a choice, I usually take the healthy choice, and the beautiful thing is that I have the choice.
So we were in the middle of this somewhat existential moment, especially during the onset or kind of the first six months of COVID. Getting healthy food was challenging, and getting fresh produce and vegetables was challenging. We had this local restaurant that was accessing food that they would've bought from suppliers or a farm, and then you could go to the restaurant and pick up fresh tomatoes and things like that.
But otherwise, I don't know what we would've done. And the broken food system really became something that we were shocked about. And also, it just got us thinking and talking as a family a lot about food insecurity during that time. And at the same time, we were watching a lot of documentaries and Netflix and things as people did during COVID, and we watched Kiss the Ground, which was this great documentary about farms and how much they're tilled and what that contributes to climate change and also to the desertification and loss of our nation's top soil. So that documentary ended, and I think I was just at the state where I was ready to do anything big and different, and I said, John, we should just buy a farm.
We should just buy land, and we should not till it, and we should cover crop, and we should just heal the top soil. And being more of a pragmatic person in our relationship. He said, but we don't know how to farm, and who's going to buy our food? And I was more on the side, let's just buy the soil, we'll figure this out.
And anyway, we kept that idea in our heads and drove around the country. Had cabin fever after the first year of COVID, and he was working remotely. And as a writer, I can work remotely, on all these long road trips, we were looking at land, and then thinking about how this would work.
Like, how would we do this? How do we get somebody to work with us? And it was just something that seemed too difficult. So we put it up on a shelf until the following 4th of July weekend, when an old family friend I knew lived in Madison, Wisconsin, but he'd gone to UW. Apprenticed on a farm.
Now, he was working in a kitchen as a chef, but he really wanted to get back into farming, and I almost looked at him like it was a joke because John and I had been talking about this with a lot of people, and it was almost like we put it out there in the world, and the world sent us our answer.
So this young man convinced us to come out to Madison, where we spent different trips on and off for about a year looking at properties and also meeting the founders of a fast casual restaurant chain. It's like a salad bowl or a grain bowl concept. And they wanted to align with their own proprietary local organic farmer.
So all of a sudden, we had someone who could help us farm and be on the property year-round, and we had a customer. So it felt like things were really falling into place. And then we found the perfect farm that was for sale. The team started coming together. It was really a leap of faith, and I don't think we would've done it if we weren't as naive, because if we knew then what we know now, I don't think I would've done it.
We're two years in, and it's amazing, and things are progressing slowly, but probably progressing as they should be progressing. But yeah, I was a vegetable gardener in my backyard and so naive, but the beautiful thing is that we are delivering thousands of pounds of fresh, organic vegetables to forage kitchens, which is the restaurant, and they're being served deliciously to the average person at a price point of about $12 for a salad.
So, people in Wisconsin, where these locations are, we have seven locations right now. Have access to food that was pulled out of the ground like the day before. And it's a great alternative to fast food. And anyway, we're going to be growing food as medicine. That's our mantra. But how did I get into it?
I had this crazy idea, and I had this intuitive feeling that it was what we were supposed to be doing. And it's made us both feel really satisfied and proud. Also, by the way, my husband changed his day job from consulting to those food companies. He works for the same consulting firm, but now he's in charge of their sustainability practice and food systems transformation.
Everything's aligning that our purpose is more around creating a new model for the food system on a small scale, but hopefully one that can be replicated.
[00:12:32] Aneta: I love everything about this, first of all, and I applaud the risk that you took to do something like this, but to believe so strongly in it. I'm reading a book on Ayurvedic medicine, and the quote in the front of it, and it's not exact, but it says something like, if your diet is bad, medicine is of no help. And if your diet is good, medicine is of no need.
[00:12:56] Jeanne: Need.
[00:12:57] Aneta: And it was something like that. And I'm like, that is so true. And we have become so disconnected from our bodies. We've become so disconnected from our food source and where it comes from. We've become so disconnected from even understanding that these foods and bags were manufactured. I don't know at what point we started calling some of these things that are available in the majority of the aisles in our supermarkets food.
[00:13:27] Jeanne: I know. My next book is going to put a character in this situation. But I truly believe that our healthcare system is just fixing the symptoms of what we've done with industrialized farming. So many diet-related illnesses and chronic illnesses, I think, stem back to the chemicals in the groundwater and in the food.
And we are very low-tech people, and we thought putting more organic matter back in the soil and creating a microbiome where healthy food grows. That's even the deep science that a lot of people don't understand, but it intuitively makes sense that if you basically eat something that's got everything you need.
If you eat a well-rounded diet of vegetables and well raised protein and I think if our country would just put as much like the farm bill is huge, but it really goes to the big producers and if they took even a iota of that money and put it towards regenerating the soil and the kind of farming that my husband and I do our healthcare crisis might be a lot different.
Maybe not for people who are in their fifties and sixties now, but I'm more worried about our kids and our grandkids and the earth we're going to leave behind for the future. All of these drugs that have become popular, like Ozempic and the wavy that people are taking to lose weight. They're working; our government is thinking this is a great solution to obesity. In the meantime, all these people are malnourished.
And so now in the new pill form that people are trying to develop for these drugs, they're going to add supplements. And at what point are we going to be where the land is just not used for growing food anymore, and people are just taking drugs and eating supplements all the time? And so much of culture is also enjoyed around the table with our taste and our smells and our community. There's a lot that the food system impacts, and so we are really excited to be at like ground level and hopefully can create a model that inspires and motivates people to get on the bandwagon.
[00:15:43] Aneta: I applaud what you're doing, and I am encouraged that there is more dialogue and conversation again around this. And it's interesting, today is actually election day when we're recording this. So if it's obvious, we'll go out later. I'll be curious to see if Bobby Kennedy does the things that he is hoping to be able to do as he looks at the food supply and looking at the food companies and the connection with pharma. Are you optimistic in terms of some of the dialogue or the conversations around this and the people that are sitting around the table right now?
[00:16:16] Jeanne: I was impressed by a webinar I logged into with Kennedy around farming and the food system, and he seemed he really get it. So that was one thing. But things have been held up in Congress right now around the Farm Bill. There's been a real stalemate, and I don't know, I don't know if the folks around the table are the lobbyists for big farms and industrial farming, in these chemical companies are pretty powerful.
I don't know that I'm ever that optimistic when it comes to politicians and the ability to be swayed by lobbyists and money. So yeah, I'll just end it there. I think really what I think is that we need a ground swell of consumers to vote for better food, both in their grocery stores and in restaurants.
Organic farmers aren't going to become mainstream if our only outlets are CSAs and farmers’ markets. You have to demand this kind of food where you shop, and that starts to make a difference. Not necessarily going to be people in Washington that I'd look to. I'd look more to the consumer being more educated and demanding products that are available, but it's just not the easiest thing right now. So we need to figure out how to make it make the channels more open to small farmers as opposed to just the big ones.
[00:17:40] Aneta: I love that. So, what can folks who are listening, what could we be doing? Because I always tell people to focus on what's within our control. What do you think that we each can be doing? How can we let our grocery stores and the places where we shop, the bigger stores, bring more organic produce? What have you found to be most effective?
[00:17:59] Jeanne: In my local grocery store in Wisconsin, it's crazy. There's a good grocery store, and then there's a grocery store that's close to the farm, and the one that's close to the farm is often most convenient. And I'll go in there for different types of items, but I'll cruise through the produce section.
I'm like, you've got pineapples and bananas. That's cool. Those aren't grown anywhere around here. And then I'm like, the farmer up the street has the best spinach. Can I get that here? No. Why not? I don't know, I just ask, sometimes ask the manager, ask someone Do you have something? And they'll be helpful.
There are so many great farms around here. It'd be really great if you carried local, regional, seasonal food. So I had that option. I would encourage people to go to farmers’ markets too, but that's not going to move the needle on mainstream availability.
The busy mom who's working a job and is cruising through the grocery store to make dinner, or cruising through someplace, has 15 minutes to pick up food, can't plan around a CSA or a farmer's market. You have to start demanding that these places offer it, and then you have to be willing to buy it because once it shows up, it's not always going to be the cheapest option.
My other thing is just remember, you can pay for your organic lettuce now at a higher price, or you can pay the hospital later. Really, a lot of these things are fairly toxic if you think about where they grow and how many chemicals are in that soil.
[00:19:27] Aneta: Yeah, that's so true, and it is a great perspective to say sometimes we have to not always go for what's most convenient. Or what is cheapest? And over time, if enough of us do that, we can start to make a difference. Anytime I travel to Europe, I love the food there. I feel better. I sleep better.
Weight just comes off. Inflammation goes away, and I'm eating delicious food. All the time. Cooked great ingredients, tastes so much different. Everything. And even like when I was in Portugal, we were looking, I was in the Douro, the wine industry, the wine valley.
They're the wineries. So they don't use pesticides on any of their grapes. They plant olive trees in between the vines because the pests will eat the olives, and then they'll leave the grapes alone. And they're like, and one olive tree lasts a thousand years.
And I'm like, why? And so I've stopped actually drinking a lot of California wines because of the pesticides and because of just some of the practices there, which is not good. And so there are solutions, but sometimes we just don't necessarily select those solutions.
[00:20:40] Jeanne: Yeah. We are in a capitalist system, so money talks; that's your vote. Talking about election day, how you spend your money is your biggest vote.
[00:20:49] Aneta: Yeah. So true. So I want to talk about your books because you mentioned that this is your third book that you published.
[00:20:57] Jeanne: Yes. And three books, but hundreds of thousands of pages to get to those three books. And I write a lot of essays as well. But yes, my third novel is called Daughter of A Promise. In a way, it's a culmination of these three books. I'd like to think of them as an arc.
They share some characters, and they share some settings. And thematically, like the first book is called Eden. It's a multi-generational saga focusing on the matriarchs in a family. They all share over the generations a Rhode Island summer home called Eden, and it's really an exploration of what paradise is and what's a prison.
They each have an unexpected pregnancy and based on the era in which they lived it was handled differently and they keep secrets around those. They each keep their situation a secret, but things come to a head one year. The second novel is a mother and son story, said in a boarding school there's a scandal.
She thinks this boarding school's going to be the ticket to his future, a golden future. But this young man is scrambling to solve a crime and to avoid being the scapegoat for something he didn't do. And then, my third is a very unconventional love story between a young woman who starts her career on Wall Street in 2019 and then has a very unexpected and mutual, like reciprocated attraction with an older man, her boss. So it's verboten obviously, but it is the retelling of a biblical story. So I've taken the story of David and Beth Sheba and instead of telling it back in ancient times from the male perspective, I've told it in modern times from a female point of view, and it's my feminist slash me too take on having agency as a young woman, not being perfect, making plenty of mistakes, but understanding where your power lays in the end.
[00:23:04] Aneta: These sound amazing. I can't wait to get my hands on all of them. Do you recommend that because there is an arc that they should start with the first book?
[00:23:12] Jeanne: No I think that, you'll see in my writing, I am very much about these domestic relationships, the inter-family drama and mother, daughter, father, daughter, mother, son. But sometimes there's the absence of a parent and that's almost as powerful on somebody's personality and character as the presence of a parent.
And I think the thing that's fun about them is that you'll recognize characters and places and whether you read it Eden first and then you revisit these people as they're older in the following two books. That's one way to do it. But also to read the more Modern or my latest book and kind of read Eden as a prequel to like where all this happened.
It'd be like reading what am I thinking of? Lord of the Rings, but then going back and reading the, and everything of the genesis story of where these people came from. Yeah, I don't think they go in any arc, but I do think like the mother, daughter. And the generational thing was the story that really had me wanting to become a novelist.
There's a story I grew up with about who I was and about my entry into this world. That was something that I've struggled with for a long time. And then my husband, we found out he had a long lost brother, somebody who'd been given up for adoption, and he found us, and he's a wonderful member of our family.
He and I connect on the craziness of what ifs, what if, you had stayed with this family or what if I had been given up for adoption or what if there's so many what ifs when there's an unplanned pregnancy that affect a kid, and so I wanted to create a family, not my own family, but where all of these things happened and there was this big reckoning that was in store.
You read the book and the characters in the novel know a lot less than the reader. They all think the big drama is going to be having to sell their house. But no, the big drama really is about accepting people back into the family. So anyway, not to ruin it, anyone.
[00:25:38] Aneta: Amazing. No, that sounds so good. How did you decide to start writing fiction? Because you said you wrote essays. Did you primarily write nonfiction before?
[00:25:48] Jeanne: Yeah, so great question. I wrote a lot of nonfiction those years I mentioned after working at Harvard Business School, when I had little kids at home, I took this wonderful class in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I think I took it for five or six terms in a row, and it was called Writing From Your Own Experience, we'd get these prompts and then, there might be a prompt, take a walk and notice something, notice a neighbor's porch, or think of an object that you see all the time on your walks. And then write about that object and the story behind the object or where it comes from or something.
And it could be any random prompt like that, but my essay would always get back to my mother and my relationship with my mother. And so I really had a lot to work out in these early essays about my relationship. My mother was an alcoholic. She had me when she was very young. She died over 20 years ago.
There was just a lot to work out and I did it on the page and my poor classmates had to listen to this week in and week out. But once I'd worked through a lot of those topics and had some therapy, I was still obsessed with what we inherit, what we pass down, what we take on, how we're formed, how we resist taking things on.
And those were really the topics I wanted to write about. So my essay writing informed kind of the themes I was obsessed with. And then I thought it was easier to create fiction in order to create a structure for these themes. But I do continue to write personal essay on my creative life on parenting. On the farm.
Most recently, I write about once a month and I publish an essay on my Substack. I have a lot of folks who are intrigued about this kind of Green Acres life I've decided to live, and I'm very honest about the ups and downs on the farm. Yeah, that's kind of the essay writing, I find a great expression of what's going on in my life or has gone on in my life.
And the fiction writing, I feel is like more of an artistic pursuit where I'm really trying to hit on some universal themes that I think a lot of people relate to..
[00:28:07] Aneta: Have you always viewed yourself as a creator?
[00:28:10] Jeanne: Yeah. When I was like, I think when I was in fourth or fifth grade, I wanted to be an inventor. I wanted to be a scientist. I was swayed away from the sciences by getting some bad grades in a chemistry class or something in high school. But, yeah, I'm an only child. I have a very active imagination. I've always built worlds, whether it was dolls or dollhouses or writing, I always had a very active interior life.
[00:28:39] Aneta: And how do you balance farming, learning everything that there still is about, that obviously advocating for food, and writing.
[00:28:48] Jeanne: It's not easy right now. The book came out six months ago and it was already in the can when things got hot and heavy with the farm, because we just bought the farm in April of 2022, but we really didn't plant anything until April of 2023 and then there was this terrible drought.
I count 2024 as like the legit, first good season. Anyway, that's to say and the heavy lifting of that novel was already figured out. Since the farming has started, I am limping along with my writing routine. I try to write in the mornings but, I'm giving myself some latitude because this is such an important pursuit and I actually do see all these learnings impacting future writings, and it's really what I want to talk about. I think it's so important. How do I fit it in? I try to take care of myself. I try to get enough sleep so I can get up and have energy to do what I want to do before the days.
Jeanne, what about this? What about that? And the onslaught starts and I guess one lesson I've learned being almost 60 years old, I think I said I was 58. I'm actually 59. I just turned 59. But being this age, I think you realize you can get a lot done, but you probably can't get it all done at once.
Like when is the time when everything has its season? When am I supposed to be doing x? And like we've had the harvest on our farm. I've kind of retreated to this mountain home my husband and I have, and we are taking two weeks to just detox and get some sleep and get our creative work done and work through all the tasks and then start being ready to think big again.
So I think you have to have the self-awareness and the ability to know what's important and not beat yourself up, that you can't get it all done at once. For example, I don't think I could have gotten that first novel written while my kids were in high school or even college. There was a lot going on in terms of their needs.
And I'm an empath and everybody's life is I feel somewhat like I need to process what's going on with other people. That's not a good thing. But I'm just saying if you take care of yourself and you create time throughout the day and you create good years, healthy years, there's time to do a lot of things in a somewhat long life.
I still have a lot in me and my grandmother didn't even live past 57 and my mother passed away at 59. So I feel like, yeah, I'm doing well and my next 30 years or so, I want to do something important.
[00:31:29] Aneta: I love that. How has farming changed you?
[00:31:32] Jeanne: Let's see. People travel all over the world for broadening experiences and I traveled into the heartland to learn and expand and meet people who are so smart and self-reliant. And I really admire the knowledge around nature and natural systems and survival that I've learned. So I think it hasn't really changed me because I've always been open to learning, but I think there's this irony in going inside the country and feeling a broadening component to your life. I'm a lifelong learner, but there's so much to learn even from your neighbor.
How else it's changed me. Like I think when we bought the farm, we were like go. Let's cure the world. Let's do all this. You can only go as fast as the seasons. There's a season to plant. There's a circadian rhythm to the day. The sun and the moon have their own schedule.
They don't care about our human urgency and, are fast-paced wanting to like check boxes. And so there's this tension between surrender and doing your best all the time. And so I have always understood that surrender is a good thing, but there's just no other option but surrender in this process.
[00:32:51] Aneta: Yeah, and I just imagine that actually getting your hands in the dirt is so grounding and it's so healing in many ways
[00:32:58] Jeanne: Well, yeah, I mean, has it changed me? I would say I have access to has made me feel amazing. The work and being close to nature has healed my soul. It's a lifelong work to heal those wounds, and this has been incredible. And then just the beginner mindset puts you, I'm like a 25-year-old kid starting a new job and trying to figure out all the lingo and the jargon and what needs to get done when, and so yeah, inside and until I look in the mirror, I don't really remember how old I am. I'm in this new beginner's mindset and a brand new place, and it's like I turn the clock way back.
[00:33:38] Aneta: So good. Is there anything you miss about Boston?
[00:33:41] Jeanne: I love my friends, my friends are lifelong friends and we do have opportunities to see each other. I had a beautiful house in Boston and people always say, don't you miss that house? But it was a house for a family, and I say what I miss is having my kids in eighth grade, sixth grade, and fourth grade, but I don't think I'm getting that back.
No, I don't want to take care of a big house. Yeah, Boston is a great city. We lived there in these prime years. My in-laws lived around the corner. My kids got to be with their grandparents all the time. And we're not getting them back, unfortunately. We had all these great sports teams.
Boston usually had this like losing reputation and then all of a sudden my kids are watching championship teams and rooting for stars. And we had a lot of fun as a family in that city and they all got great education. So I love it. That place served an amazing role in my life.
But being an old woman dusting the windowsill and waiting for my kids to come home for Thanksgiving. I just was like, I'm not that person. I'm out of here.
So.
[00:34:53] Aneta: Thank you for sharing that. I love that you have such a full life and I think that people who listen to this podcast, one of the things I always wanted to do is to highlight that we can have a really full life and not everything has to, makes sense. It could be exactly like this collage of passions that make you come alive.
So I'm very curious what do you have in store for the next 30 years? Are there certain things that you're already thinking about doing or things, I don't know if you have a bucket list or it's on your vision board or just something that you think about.
[00:35:25] Jeanne: Yeah, I had to put my bucket list to the side when we decided to buy the farm because this is taking pretty much all our resources and that's fine. I'm happy with that. But I guess if we could really make something out of this farm, I envision a time when people are coming to stay on the property and we're having these long farm table dinners, and it's a place like it's a destination for education and connection.
I guess my ambition is really to do this well and to have it become something that lives past us and like my kids actually they come out to Wisconsin, they all live in Brooklyn and they're loving it too. I don't know. I feel like this place is going to be something important. I've been married 35 years and I don't take that for granted.
And investing in my relationship with my husband is also something that's really important to me because he has been my rock and my like sustenance emotionally. And I do know that I take and I take from him, so I have to also invest in that relationship. And when you're married that long, you go through a lot of phases.
There's like the young fun stage and then the young parents, and then the older parents and the more social stage. And I think together as a couple, we're trying to figure out, this farm has been great for our relationship, but there's also, I'm constantly thinking about how much my family and my marriage means to me.
Instead of going out and having a bucket list of things that are very external I'd like to read more. I'd like to write more. I'd like to go for more long walks. I'd like to spend time with my dog. So I feel like I have those luxuries right now. That's really all I want.
[00:37:12] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:37:13] Jeanne: I'd like some, good winter of powder and to ski a hundred days, these simple things
[00:37:20] Aneta: No, it sounds like it's a slowing down and not in slowing down, doing less, but almost like a savoring, it's a word I've been using a lot lately, is just to savor the moments.
[00:37:32] Jeanne: Yeah, I think as you age you realize that having stillness and having peace is the greatest luxury of all. Especially on a day like today, we talked earlier before we started recording, just knowing that, regardless of what's going on in the outside world or who, looks like they're having a lot of fun on Instagram.
There's this like knowledge that we are what we need on the outside and we can manifest that and just be who we need to be. But having a simple life that has no drama, that is the ultimate luxury.
[00:38:08] Aneta: I agree with you. So folks are interested in your books, and maybe interested in learning more about the farm, which I don't know if there's a way for them to do that or if they're visiting Wisconsin and want to come, where can they learn more about you or can they support you?
[00:38:24] Jeanne: Thanks. So I have a website called jeanneblasberg.com and that website links to all my books and where they can be purchased. They're for sale wherever books are sold. They're distributed through Simon and Schuster, so they're not hard to find. They're not always on your bookstore shelves because some of them are old.
But they are available if you request them from your local bookstore or library or shop online. And then I also have a link to my newsletter on my website. So if you're interested in my essays or learning more about the farm, which is called Flynn Creek Farm, F-L-Y-N-N, Creek Farm. There's lots of writing and links to that farm on my website.
And the farm has its own website and Instagram, which a young woman who works on our farm does an amazing job with the pictures on the Instagram. And then if people want to come visit or be in touch, we are about 20 miles southwest of Madison, so we are in the southwest part of the state, not far right in the Driftless area. Not too far from the Iowa border and Northern Illinois. We're right in the heartland there. It's beautiful.
[00:39:36] Aneta: That sounds amazing. Well, I definitely want to come to visit. I was thinking when you are ready. I think it would be cool to do a retreat there, have people come, maybe work the land, grow the food, have it prepared, do some beautiful things outside.
[00:39:49] Jeanne: I am, so on that bandwagon. Aneta and the challenge, right? Well, I'm trying to establish, places for people to stay. So the infrastructure for hosting like 20 or 25 people involves like beds and bathrooms. And so one of the first thing, one thing I did this past summer was put a yurt out in the land and try to experiment if that would be a comfortable place for people to stay.
And that might work. I've got to do that times 10 or 12. And still trying to figure out like how much comfort people would need or expect and how to provide that. And maybe it's more like glamping, but still people are going to want some sort of bathrooms. And so that's all this stuff, like putting it in the land involves a lot of a red tape and be master planning. So I am on that big time and you'll be the first to know when we're open for retreats.
[00:40:43] Aneta: I think we should just put it out in the universe like you did everything else. And we've put it out here on this podcast. We will wait and see and we'll have an update for folks if when that happens.
[00:40:53] Jeanne: Maybe one of your listeners is experienced in this area and has some sort of a solution for housing people out on the land. I've looked at different styles of tents and everything it all. To me, always comes back to that hygiene and comfort station because if you're staying for a couple of nights.
[00:41:12] Aneta: Yes. There are some needs.
[00:41:17] Jeanne: Exactly,
[00:41:18] Aneta: And Jeannie, I ask everyone a final question. We'll definitely include all those links in the show notes. What does it mean to you to live the width of your life?
[00:41:26] Jeanne: I think, the width is such a great dimension to talk about because I've talked about like the length of my life and the chronology of my life, but really in the present moment is where I envision the width happening. And every morning I meditate and one of the things I finish my meditation with is a statement that's just helped me release all my fear-based thoughts.
So if you can live a life that's not confined by fear-based thoughts or fear-based thinking. Yeah, the sky's the limit. I think as soon as you start letting go of fear, you start receiving all the possibilities. And so to live the length is a lot different than the width, and I love that you use that word. I will think about making every day as wide as possible.
[00:42:20] Aneta: That's beautiful. Thank you Jeanne, for what you're doing. I think that what you're putting out in the world is amazing and we're so lucky that you decided to take some risks and do some really cool things, and I look forward to getting more updates and hearing what you are doing next. Thank you.
[00:42:38] Jeanne: Thank you, Aneta, for inviting me and giving me a platform to talk about it to your listeners.
[00:42:43] Aneta: Of course.
Thank you for listening to today's episode. If today's conversation inspired you to dream again, break out of your comfort zones or reflect on what it means to you to live more fully, then please follow this podcast because every week you'll hear more stories from people just like you who took imperfect action towards their goals, created more joy and are living the life that they always dreamt of living.