Sherry Sidoti joins the Spotlight this week to chat about her memoir, A Smoke and a Song
Author Name: Sherry Sidoti
Book Title: A Smoke and a Song: A Memoir
Book Genre: Memoir
Release Dat: August 1, 2023
Publisher: She Writes Press
Welcome, Sherry! Please tell us a bit about your book.
A Smoke and a Song is a story of my stumbling toward belonging and wholeness while reckoning with the complexities of inherited trauma, longing, and loss. It is an invitation to seek the wisdom inside our wounds with humor, tenacity, and despite it all, love.
What was the spark? What drew you to write a memoir about this experience? What made you want to tell this particular story?
Writing found me months into the COVID-19 pandemic. I, as the rest of the world, was taking major inventory of what mattered most. I had just turned fifty, was menopausal, and on the cusp of empty nesting. I was moving out of the home where I lived and raised my son for eighteen years, on a sabbatical from my twenty-plus year career of teaching yoga, not to mention newly engaged. My fiancé and I purchased a parcel of land where we planned to build our “second-chance” life, literally from the ground up. Every aspect of my life as I knew it, was up for review.
Amid all of this, came the news: My mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Unable to sleep, I’d wake in the wee hours of the morning. Memories long-since forgotten came bursting to the forefront again. Creative, spontaneous inspiration followed the memories. During the dark time of the morning that the mystics call “the shamanic hour,” I’d get up, make coffee, do a little breath work, move my body, meditate, then sit outdoors, and cathartically write until the sun came up.
Many months of early morning writing happened before I thought of weaving these stories into a book. I simply wanted to create and make art. I joined a weekly writing group and began to get feedback from the others that my writing inspired them to make connections about their own healing, relative to their own experiences, and that perhaps these stories were meant to be shared more widely. I took to the call and began to find the “connective tissue” of my pieces. What started as disorganized, frazzled, written snippets of my life, shaped into A Smoke and a Song.
From your perspective, what’s the hardest thing about writing and researching? And what do you love most about it?
What is hard about writing and what I love are two sides of the same coin. I love to be in “the zone”, filled with spontaneous inspiration, riding the sweet spot of creative flow— it is exhilarating! But equal to the elation that comes with writing come the roadblocks— overthinking, dullness, isolation, mental restlessness, to name a few. And memoir writing has its own unique set of challenges: How do we write about our transformational life experiences without triggering old pain points and traumas? Can I write my story without hurting the people in my stories? Is writing about my life a self-indulgent exercise or can it be medicinal for others? These are the questions that haunt me when I write, and my creativity is too easily hijacked by doubt, worry, and imposter syndrome. To allow art to come into the world through me, I need to get out of my own way sometimes. To fall back in love with writing, I remind myself to take time away from writing and “get to living.” I put down the pen and turn to nature, lean into my relationships, and simply, try to have more fun. It is in the tiny everyday moments that the inspiration is found, and I can return to the page again.
What’s capturing your imagination these days outside of reading and writing?
I am a new chicken-mom, and our first baby chicks just hatched! It has been fascinating to observe the devotion the mama hen exhibited in the gestation process. She sat on her eggs, in some transcendental zone, and barely left her spot in the coop for twenty-one days straight! And now I have these tiny fuzzy little day-olds to watch as they figure life out. Watching them is meditative and life-affirming. They are adorable, awkward, and funny!
Any new writing projects in the works?
One of my mother’s last wishes is that I complete a writing project she had been working on but cannot finish herself as she is currently on hospice care and nearing the end of her life. This ask is such a deep honor and one I intend on committing to after my book is released in August.
Cuba, Waiting (Page Publishing 2024) is a mosaic of stories about an American journalist named Jenna who travels to Cuba to write an assignment about classic cars and their owners, and ends up falling in love with her emotionally unavailable subject. It is a fictionalized account of a real-life decade-long love affair my mother had with a Cuban doctor in her late sixties and seventies.
Where can readers find you?
(see events page for upcoming events and retreats)
Yoga & Writing retreat to El Cuyo Mexico, March 17-24th, 2024
IG @sherrysidoti
FB Sherry Sidoti
Thank you, Sherry! A Smoke and a Song is out now.
A Smoke and a Song
January 2021, ten months into the global pandemic, Sherry Sidoti’s mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer—so Sherry prioritizes a trip to Manhattan over long-awaited empty-nesting and her “second chance” with fiancé Jevon. With new life blooming and loss looming, she is beckoned to answer the question that has haunted her since childhood: is freedom found in “letting go,” as the spiritual teachers (and her mother) insist—or is it found by digging our heels deeper into the earth and holding on to our humanness?
A Smoke and a Song is Sherry’s story of her quest to make meaning from the memories homed in her body. Told with tenacity, tenderness, and wry humor, Sherry stumbles towards self-actualization, spiritual awakening—and, despite it all, love. This is a story steeped in art and spirituality that explores the complexities of transgenerational maternal bonds, attachment, loss, and leaning in to our wounds to find the wisdom.