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[0:00] Susan Blackwell: The Spark File podcast may contain profanity and other adult content.

[0:04] Laura Camien: Please use your discretion.

[0:10] Susan Blackwell: When I bump into something that inspires me, I jump in my spark file.

[0:18] Laura Camien: Spark file to be something that I wanna make or how I wanna be.

[0:23] Susan Blackwell: I pump it in my spark.

[0:26] Laura Camien: Spark file.

[0:28] Susan Blackwell: I jump into my spark slide.

[0:32] Laura Camien: Let's open up the spark file.

[0:37] Susan Blackwell: Welcome to The Spark File, where we believe that everyone is creative, but smart creative people don't go it alone.

[0:44] Laura Camien: Hey, I'm Laura Camien.

[0:46] Susan Blackwell: Hey, I'm Susan Blackwell, and we are creativity coaches who help people clarify and accomplish their creative goals.

[0:52] Susan Blackwell: You ought to know that just by listening to this podcast, you're joining a warm and wonderful clan of creatives.

[1:00] Laura Camien: Hold up. You might be asking yourself, what exactly is a spark file?

[1:00] Laura Camien: A spark file is a place where you consistently collect all of your inspirations and fascinations.

[1:11] Susan Blackwell: Every episode, we're gonna reach into our very own spark files and exchange some sparks.

[1:16] Laura Camien: And from time to time, we might even talk to some people who spark us too.

[1:21] Susan Blackwell: And your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take some of these sparks of inspiration and make something of your own.

[1:28] Laura Camien: So without further ado, let's open up the Spark File.

[1:34] Laura Camien: Hi, Laura.

[1:35] Susan Blackwell: Hi, Susan.

[1:36] Laura Camien: It's podcast day.

[1:40] Laura Camien: And I think it's a very special episode of The Spark File because I think you are sparking me.

[1:46] Susan Blackwell: So special, Susan.

[1:47] Laura Camien: I have got a spark for you.

[1:49] Laura Camien: It's a bit of a dark spark.

[1:51] Susan Blackwell: I love a dark spark.

[1:53] Laura Camien: I know you do, and I really appreciate that because every now and again, a dark one springs forth from the depths of me.

[2:04] Laura Camien: And today is that day.

[2:07] Susan Blackwell: Good.

[2:09] Laura Camien: So what I wanted to say up top is get ready for a bit of a wild ride. This is not the spark I chose.

[2:16] Laura Camien: It is the spark that chose me today.

[2:19] Susan Blackwell: Awesome.

[2:19] Laura Camien: I was planning on writing about something else completely, but then I had a dream a couple nights ago that was so vivid, so vivid, Susan, that it set me off on a whole new direction.

[2:31] Laura Camien: Like I said, it's a dark spark, but it also includes an idea that I was gonna share last year, but I never did.

[2:39] Laura Camien: But it's all still swirling around in my head. So guess what? I'm gonna pour all these goodies out on the table for you, and we'll get into it.

[2:49] Susan Blackwell: I love it.

[2:51] Laura Camien: Okay. Well, here we go. So a few nights ago, I had this very vivid dream.

[2:58] Laura Camien: It was really creepy, and I feel like I should give a warning. The dream itself isn't violent, but this spark is going to veer into some true crime and violent crime.

[3:09] Laura Camien: So if that is not for you today, that is a heads up.

[3:14] Laura Camien: Awesome. And all of a sudden, I feel like really vulnerable sharing this dream.

[3:19] Laura Camien: But in the end, I think this dream was a warning for me in some kind of way. So I'm gonna share it.

[3:25] Susan Blackwell: Okay.

[3:25] Laura Camien: I'll say one more thing. It may not seem like it at first, but if you hang on to the end of this spark, which is admittedly held together by a tiny thread, I promise you, we will circle back to how all of this relates to your creativity and potentially how you might be inspired by it in your creative work.

[3:47] Laura Camien: Okay, so let's get into the dream. In this dream, I was traveling to a remote location with a friend, like a farm or a ranch of some kind.

[4:00] Laura Camien: I'm not really sure why, but when we arrived there, we're met by this small, kind British man. He greets us and he shows us around.

[4:10] Laura Camien: And of course, I was charmed by his accent. No surprise there. He had glasses, thin hair. He was wearing a button-up shirt, short sleeves with pens in the breast pocket, you know, just as non-threatening as you can possibly imagine.

[4:27] Laura Camien: Maybe middle-aged, small, shorter than me. So we look around and we start to get comfortable. And this man is talking to my friend about their acting career.

[4:41] Laura Camien: And I decide, you know, we've been traveling, ugh, I need a shower. So I take my clothes off, settle down because it was not in any kind of sexual way.

[4:53] Laura Camien: It was just like matter of fact. I'm just going to take my clothes off and get ready for this shower. But I strip down and then I just kind of kept sitting and listening to their conversation.

[5:06] Laura Camien: I didn't go anywhere.

[5:07] Susan Blackwell: Right.

[5:07] Laura Camien: So you're still in the dream. You're still in the same room.

[5:10] Susan Blackwell: That's right.

[5:11] Laura Camien: You don't go to the bathroom and take your clothes off. You're in the same room with them.

[5:14] Susan Blackwell: Oh no. I'm just, yeah, I'm just there.

[5:15] Laura Camien: Casually stripping.

[5:18] Susan Blackwell: Got it.

[5:19] Laura Camien: Got it. Yeah. I'm just like, I'm gonna take my clothes off because I need to take a shower.

[5:23] Susan Blackwell: Yeah.

[5:23] Laura Camien: And then I get sort of like wrapped up in the conversation and I just sit there, you know, in the nude.

[5:30] Susan Blackwell: Yeah.

[5:30] Laura Camien: Eventually, my friend went upstairs, and the man turned to me and said, And now let's talk about your acting career.

[5:39] Laura Camien: And I said, Well, that's nice, but I'm not pursuing an acting career. And he said, Yes, but you could have one.

[5:46] Laura Camien: And he proceeds to compliment me in a million different ways. And he mentions the name of this British casting director that I need to meet.

[5:54] Laura Camien: And he's writing all these things down for me as though he's just being really helpful. I'm still naked, but it doesn't seem weird.

[6:02] Laura Camien: It just seems like I'm relaxed and just hanging out and just taking in these kind compliments.

[6:09] Laura Camien: Like in the dream, the being naked kind of represents just having like let my guard down.

[6:14] Susan Blackwell: Yeah.

[6:14] Laura Camien: Do you know what I mean?

[6:16] Susan Blackwell: Totally.

[6:18] Laura Camien: So he says he needs to run upstairs for a minute. He'll be back. He leaves his notebook with me.

[6:23] Laura Camien: And I remember very clearly in the dream, looking at his handwriting. It was like chicken scratches and sort of half sentences.

[6:33] Laura Camien: It was weird, but there was enough there that in the dream I thought, yeah. I mean, these are these are kind of the basic bullet points of what we just talked about.

[6:44] Laura Camien: In a few minutes, he comes back into the room and I don't look up at first. I'm still looking at the notepad.

[6:49] Laura Camien: But then very gently, he sets this kind of small rifle on the bed beside me, and it's pointed toward me.

[7:02] Laura Camien: And it's just out of my reach, but it's right beside him. And he also has these kind of handcuffs. They weren't metal though. They were weird. They were kind of like puffy.

[7:16] Laura Camien: But I knew what they were. And I knew in this dream what was about to happen. And I had one of those moments where like everything collided in my brain at the same time.

[7:29] Laura Camien: Like I think in the dream I said, oh, like it all just kind of came together. And he said, I know we had a connection though, right? Sometimes it goes that way.

[7:44] Laura Camien: Oh, you're in danger, girl. And all of a sudden I knew he had already killed my friend when he went upstairs.

[7:54] Susan Blackwell: Uh-huh.

[7:55] Laura Camien: And I said, Is my friend? And he nodded, yes.

[8:01] Laura Camien: All the possible solutions ran through my head all at once. There was this feeling that like there's only one outcome here. And it's not good.

[8:13] Laura Camien: And then I woke up. Now, there are people who interpret dreams for a living. I am not one of those people, but I can tell you that I woke up with this overwhelming feeling regarding what the dream was about.

[8:29] Laura Camien: I felt like it was a very strong warning to me that it is lovely to attract new and wonderful people into my life, but I also need to keep my wits about me and be a little more cautious and not trust people so easily.

[8:47] Laura Camien: I thought of one of our clients, sweet Jennifer Rose, who recently we were in office hours and we were talking about something totally different, but she reminded me of that saying open your heart wide and build a fence around it.

[9:04] Laura Camien: So all day long this dream stays with me. And I kept thinking about the book Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll, which I almost shared with everybody last year as a spark, but honestly, I also read Wellness by Nathan Hill around that same time, and we all know how obsessed I was with that book.

[9:25] Laura Camien: So I never did get around to writing a spark about Bright Young Women. But I can tell you that I think about this book probably at least once a month.

[9:35] Laura Camien: And it like it has stayed with me, and now I've had a dream that relates to it. So you're gonna hear all about it today.

[9:43] Laura Camien: Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll is a work of historical fiction. It's based on the heinous crimes of Ted Bundy, who is never named in the book, by the way.

[9:57] Laura Camien: It's clear that's who it is about because it's based on the facts of his case, but he's never named in the book, which I think is such an awesome fuck you to a man who wanted to matter so much.

[10:10] Susan Blackwell: Yeah, fuck him.

[10:11] Laura Camien: Just fuck you. We're not even gonna say your name.

[10:16] Laura Camien: That was it. So in the book, and for the rest of this episode, we will just call him the defendant.

[10:22] Susan Blackwell: Great.

[10:23] Laura Camien: The story really centers the victims and their voices rather than this tired old story that we've been told about how fucking charismatic and handsome this killer was.

[10:35] Laura Camien: I think the book is really genius because Jessica Knoll has written a true crime thriller, but the focus is shifted to examine the role of rampant misogyny in our culture, particularly what it was like in the 1970s, the police incompetence that allowed him to continue killing women even though he had been caught several times, and the media sensationalism that helped law enforcement shape a narrative that we have all bought into and has been told and retold and repeated a million times that this guy was some kind of brilliant, irresistible genius.

[11:15] Laura Camien: So in the book, we have two narrators. Each of them are composites of people. So none of the names are names of the actual people in the book, but they're composites of people representing various folks who were impacted by the murders.

[11:31] Laura Camien: Each of the narrators is trying to find out what happened to one of their friends. They discover, of course, that the disappearance of their friend in Seattle, the murder of their friends in Florida are related, and eventually these two narrators meet to help put the pieces together.

[11:49] Laura Camien: So for anyone who needs a refresher on this particular serial killer storyline, here's an overview.

[12:07] Laura Camien: Washington State and then a spree in the Pacific Northwest and Utah. He was first captured in 1975. He was convicted of kidnapping in Utah.

[12:20] Laura Camien: But by then he's connected to a murder in Colorado.

[12:23] Susan Blackwell: So he has moved to a Colorado prison where he escapes.

[12:27] Laura Camien: I'll get back to that in a minute.

[12:29] Susan Blackwell: Wow.

[12:30] Laura Camien: About a week later, he's recaptured in Aspen, Colorado.

[12:33] Susan Blackwell: And later that year, he escapes again.

[12:36] Laura Camien: Wow.

[12:37] Susan Blackwell: He immediately travels to Florida where he murders a 12-year-old girl, Kimberly Leach, and two women, Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman at a sorority house, the Kai Omega sorority at Florida State University.

[12:51] Laura Camien: He's caught by the police in Pensacola, Florida in February 1978.

[12:56] Susan Blackwell: He goes to trial.

[12:57] Laura Camien: He's eventually sentenced to death for the Florida murders, and he is executed in 1989.

[13:04] Susan Blackwell: Since then, there have been a zillion stories about him, several movies about him, a documentary about him.

[13:13] Laura Camien: All these stories focus on the lore, this extremely exaggerated narrative.

[13:20] Susan Blackwell: The stories we've been told focus on him being stunningly attractive, charismatic, almost like women couldn't turn him down if they tried.

[13:31] Laura Camien: We apparently all go weak in his presence.

[13:35] Susan Blackwell: But as Jessica Knoll dug deeper in her research, the facts of the case do not match these stories at all.

[13:43] Laura Camien: In actuality, if you talk to women who knew him or survived him, at best, he was described as nothing special, average, mediocre intelligence, mediocre looks, and personality.

[14:01] Susan Blackwell: Pretty basic.

[14:03] Laura Camien: At worst, he was described as someone you would know there was something off about, creepy.

[14:10] Susan Blackwell: So while we've been fed a story that he was undeniably attractive in so many ways, what Jessica Knoll found was that that wasn't true about him, but it was true about his victims.

[14:23] Laura Camien: The women he chose were exceptional and extraordinary.

[14:28] Susan Blackwell: And I'll get to that in just a moment.

[14:31] Laura Camien: So while the folklore surrounding him, the tall tales told by so many in the media and law enforcement were basically that his charm was so effective, no woman could maintain her defenses with him around.

[14:45] Susan Blackwell: In actuality, the facts are that his technique to ensnaring women was nothing to do with a woman being so smitten by his looks or his personality.

[14:56] Laura Camien: How he did it was sometimes he dressed as a police officer to lure women in and make them feel safe, but more often he preyed on the empathy of women by simulating some sort of physical injury or disability, asking for assistance or needing help in order to get close to potential victims.

[15:17] Susan Blackwell: This whole ploy was later used in the plot of Silence of the Lambs, if you recall.

[15:22] Laura Camien: There's a passage in the book about the morning after the sorority house killings.

[15:27] Susan Blackwell: The main character in the book, our narrator, had to tell the sorority sisters in the house that two of their friends had been killed in that house last night.

[15:37] Laura Camien: Here's the section that I underlined.

[15:40] Susan Blackwell: Why, someone asked straight away, her eyes dry.

[15:44] Laura Camien: It was a gridded teeth, why?

[15:47] Susan Blackwell: The outraged kind that demands an answer.

[15:51] Laura Camien: I read about us in the paper, the way we hurled the word why around the church service we attended later that morning.

[15:58] Susan Blackwell: The press made it sound like the question was rhetorical, as though we wailed it melodramatically.

[16:04] Laura Camien: But it was always a serious question.

[16:07] Susan Blackwell: Why did this happen?

[16:09] Laura Camien: One day we would get our answer, and it's not the one you think.

[16:14] Susan Blackwell: Right here, right now, I don't want you to forget two things.

[16:19] Laura Camien: He was nothing special, and what happened was not random.

[16:26] Susan Blackwell: So the reality simply doesn't match the folklore we've been told about him.

[16:30] Laura Camien: So why and how did we get these stories and why do they keep being told?

[16:37] Susan Blackwell: Thankfully, Jessica Knoll has offered a new and different perspective.

[16:41] Laura Camien: One of the things she focuses on is the defendant's escape from police custody, not once, but twice in Colorado.

[16:49] Susan Blackwell: Jeez.

[16:50] Laura Camien: She points to this as perhaps the genesis of the folklore, because the real story would have made the Colorado police seem like the Keystone cops.

[17:00] Susan Blackwell: They had to say, this guy is so slick.

[17:00] Laura Camien: This guy is so smart.

[17:06] Susan Blackwell: You don't understand.

[17:07] Laura Camien: This guy could charm his way out of anything.

[17:10] Susan Blackwell: When in reality, he just charmed his way past the guards and the security in Colorado twice.

[17:16] Laura Camien: Which makes me think of that scene in Team America where he goes, You're an actor.

[17:20] Susan Blackwell: Act your way past those guards.

[17:23] Laura Camien: Anyway.

[17:25] Susan Blackwell: I mean, truly, the real stories of his escape make the law enforcement in Colorado look bad.

[17:32] Laura Camien: Wow.

[17:33] Susan Blackwell: The first time he escaped prison in Colorado, he had chosen to represent himself because he was a former law student.

[17:41] Laura Camien: Did he graduate with anything?

[17:42] Susan Blackwell: No.

[17:43] Laura Camien: He just was a student for a little short while and was a law student.

[17:47] Susan Blackwell: And he thought himself to be exceptionally smart.

[17:51] Laura Camien: So the judge, presiding on his trial, decided to excuse the defendant from wearing handcuffs and leg shackles and had allowed him the opportunity to visit the courthouse law library so that he could research his case.

[18:07] Susan Blackwell: One day, while taking a break from court during a preliminary hearing, the defendant spotted an open window in the library and decided to act.

[18:17] Laura Camien: He would later describe the moment as simply the guard went outside for a smoke, the windows are open, the fresh air is blowing through, the sky was blue, and I said, I'm ready to go.

[18:30] Susan Blackwell: And walked to the window and jumped out.

[18:33] Laura Camien: Wow.

[18:34] Susan Blackwell: Genius.

[18:35] Laura Camien: Mastermind.

[18:36] Susan Blackwell: Clearly a mastermind.

[18:38] Laura Camien: The second time he escaped the Colorado law enforcement, he employed the highly sophisticated plan we all used as teenagers.

[18:46] Susan Blackwell: He created a decoy using books and blankets to make it appear like he was asleep in his bed, and proceeded to climb into the crawl space above his cell, crawled through the ceiling, dropped down into the jailer's apartment, and from there he simply walked out the front door.

[19:03] Laura Camien: Wow.

[19:04] Susan Blackwell: Yeah.

[19:05] Laura Camien: Mastermind.

[19:06] Susan Blackwell: Again, Jessica Knoll presents this all as potentially ground zero for the stories we have now spent 40 years being told about this sociopath.

[19:17] Laura Camien: One of the characters says in Bright Young Women, law enforcement would rather we remember a dull man as brilliant than take a good hard look at the role they played in this absolute sideshow.

[19:30] Susan Blackwell: And I am sick to death of watching them in their press shirts and cowboy boots, in their comfortable leather interview chairs, in hugely successful and critically acclaimed crime documentaries, talking about the intelligence and charm and wiliness of an ordinary misogynist.

[19:50] Laura Camien: This story is not that.

[20:10] Susan Blackwell: And they reported to the police that she clearly found him annoying, though she still agreed to leave the beach with him.

[20:20] Laura Camien: Grumbled to her friend that she was pretty sure she was about to go dance with a felon as she begrudgingly accepted his request for a dance at the nightclub next door to the sorority house the same night of the murders.

[20:35] Susan Blackwell: Women got that feeling about him, that funny one we all get when we know something isn't right, but we don't know how to politely extricate ourselves from the situation without escalating the threat of violence or harassment.

[20:51] Laura Camien: That is not a skill women are taught, the same way men are not taught that it is okay to leave a woman alone if what she wants is to be left alone.

[21:02] Susan Blackwell: The character in the book goes on no one was lost or struggling or unhappy, all of the things that predators usually seek out in their victims because it makes them vulnerable, and vulnerable people are easier to subdue.

[21:19] Laura Camien: I've thought about this for so long.

[21:22] Susan Blackwell: I've tried to make sense of how someone who didn't stalk his victims in advance ended up going after the best and the brightest.

[21:32] Laura Camien: And I think that's it.

[21:34] Susan Blackwell: The thing they all had in common, a light that outshone his.

[22:25] Laura Camien: This is from the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper.

[22:28] Susan Blackwell: The headline was The Defendant Making Judicial Gains, and included comments like the defendant appeared relaxed and confident in his own defense, asking articulate, well contemplated legal questions in a calm, deliberate voice.

[22:44] Laura Camien: The article called him a fit young man who has succeeded in putting the prosecution on the defense.

[22:52] Susan Blackwell: Now, what was rarely mentioned is that he had a legal team, including one incredibly competent woman, and the way that that team had to work with this man in order to keep him satisfied reminded me of the people who have to work with the person in the Oval Office right now.

[23:10] Laura Camien: In the book, Noel describes the trial the way the team had to manage him by calling inconsequential witnesses to the stand just so that he could parade around having someone to question without actually torpedoing his own defense, would later remind me of a toddler given one of those play cell phones, because that's what all the adults have, and he is not a baby.

[23:46] Susan Blackwell: And once he jammed his jail cell keyhole with toilet paper so the guards couldn't get in when they arrived to escort him to his arraignment.

[23:55] Laura Camien: For this, he was called cunning and clever in local newspapers.

[24:04] Susan Blackwell: He was described as a quote, terrific looking man with light brown hair and blue eyes, rather Kennedy-esque.

[24:13] Laura Camien: During the trial, the judge, Susan the judge, referred to the defendant at various times as young man, cowboy, compadre, partner.

[24:29] Susan Blackwell: And here's the kicker.

[24:30] Laura Camien: At the sentencing, the judge told the defendant that someday soon a current of electricity would pass through his body until he was pronounced dead by the warden, and added quite absurdly, take care of yourself.

[24:46] Laura Camien: The judge says, I say that to you sincerely. Take care of yourself. It's a tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity that I've experienced in this court. You are a bright young man. You'd have made a good lawyer, and I'd have loved to have you practice in front of me. But you went another way, partner. Take care of yourself. I don't have any animosity, and I want you to understand that. Bug. Let's talk about the loss of humanity. Let's talk about the 20 to 30 women whose lives were taken by this asshole. My God. So then the judge allowed the defendant to address the court just because he wanted to, which he did for 34 minutes, professing his innocence. Oh my God. The author writes this.

[26:02] Laura Camien: Again, because it doesn't fit the narrative that this guy is some kind of savant. Instead, according to the author, the defendant flaunted his true nature with audacious displays of ineptitude time and time again. We should be irate that effort and money has gone in again and again into dusting off the story and telling it for a new generation only for the filmmakers to wear the same blinders as the men who wrote the headlines 40 years ago. So part of the beauty of this book to me is how Jessica Knoll manages to illustrate how this folklore came to be and who gained from the story being told this way. Law enforcement could save face, newspapers could sell papers, movies could sell tickets. Yes.

And as women, we were sold a brand new fear. The idea that gorgeous, brilliant, charming men among us could be serial killers, and we would have absolutely no indication that anything was off about them. But there's so much more to the story. It feels like we're trained to constantly be thinking about both the impossibility and the possibility of something like this happening to us. Like chances are it won't. But as we're walking alone in a parking lot, we all know the odds aren't zero. One of my favorite things about this book is how it made me think differently about the victims of all kinds of crimes, and how often we're told that they were somehow weak or they were targeted because they exhibited weakness.

But this story imagined that these women were the brightest among us. But that too feels scary. How I needed to be careful with the energy that I put out there and who I attracted into my life, keeping my guard up. So I tell my sister about this dream and my assessment of it. And she says, hmm, who do you think that warning was from? Just out of curiosity. And I'm like, well, me, I think. I think it was my intuition. And she's quiet for a minute and she says, hmm. You think there's anyone else that warning could have been from? And I say, oh, uh, you mean like mom? Because my sister, who obviously knows firsthand the relationship I have with my mom, reminds me that this sounds a lot like the kind of things my mom would say to me to get me to dial down my personality or keep me from what we call the crime of outshining.

Right before I moved to New York, my mom chastised me in public in front of other people, saying, if you go around smiling at strangers like that in New York City, you're gonna end up dead in a dumpster within a week. Oh. And of course, I know now it has more to do with her fears than mine, but you know, there's validity in her fears. But my sister's point was isn't it possible that this warning was from the fearful side of me that was taught that I need to tone it down and try not to be so, you know, me, I guess. I'm not saying that there aren't strong arguments for a nugget of truth in both versions of this story or interpretations of this story, but that is exactly what leads me to my what do we make of it?

Think of all the stories we've been told. That old adage, there are three sides to every story, yours, theirs, and the truth. I actually think there's way more than three sides to every story. So if that's true, then there are an infinite number of ways to retell or reimagine all of the stories that we have absorbed. Newton's law of motion, right? For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. I think this applies to stories as well. Every action within a story, somewhere, there's another person or people with an opposite version of this tale, or an altered version of this tale. There are limitless creative ideas that open up when you imagine telling a story from a different perspective or point of view.

Or, like in the case of Jessica Knoll, you listen for the voices that are missing in an existing story. You give them space and a platform to tell their version of the story. This is so often true of many different groups in history that are predominantly left out of the stories, little to no mention of what they were doing, how they were contributing, or how things affected them. So even though this is a little bit of a dark spark, I would love it if it simply helped to open our minds to alternate possibilities. We can believe the stories that have been told to us, but we can also imagine the versions that have not been told. We can assume the worst will happen, or we can open our minds to the opposite.

At one point in the Bright Young Women's Story, our narrator is given a book, a statistician's guide to black swan events. Most people have only heard the term black swan as related to ballet, where it's a character in Swan Lake representing the duality of good and evil. That's not this. According to this book, a black swan event is a highly improbable event, but also one that, upon closer examination, was predictable. The sinking of the Titanic is an example of one. So is World War One. These are outcomes that are referred to as outliers on an economist model. And you can imagine that violent crime has a certain predictability to it as well. This character goes on to say, but not all black swan events are bad.

Some people use the models to play the stock market and get filthy rich. The point is that nothing can be predicted, really. And you want to be sure to expose yourself to luck too. Things can go catastrophically wrong, but they can also go so right as to be profoundly transformative. In fact, the book emphasizes through some key relationships that sometimes certain people are your black swan event. And if I listen to my mother's warning, I might have missed out on meeting some extraordinary people and having some extraordinary experiences. So I will take the warning I received with a grain of salt from this dream and consider a version of being that both keeps me safe to the degree that I can control that and allows for the possibility of profound transformation and extraordinary outcomes.

[33:30] Susan Blackwell: Laura, that was spellbinding. I love that book. I love that book, and I love it as a spark for what is a way into a story, what dimensions of stories haven't been told. I think that's a brilliant way in. If you're a writer and you're listening to this, listen to what Laura Camien is saying. I mean, it's really, I think it's a really imaginative point of entry.

[34:04] Laura Camien: Thank you, Suze. I think that it's akin to a spark that we did recently called Creation by Recombination, right? Where anybody who's like, oh, that story's already been told. Yes. Yes. Every story's already been told. And what Jessica Knoll did was like, hmm, maybe there's a totally different way to tell this story. Maybe there's a totally different point of view to this story. Maybe most of this story is kind of bullshit anyway, and there's a whole different version. So when you think about that, there's so much possibility in it.

[34:42] Susan Blackwell: Yeah. And everywhere, everywhere you look. I hope it inspires some folks. That's it's great. Thanks for bringing that book back to my consciousness, and thank you for bringing up this idea of just a different way in to storytelling. Whose story have we not told? What perspectives are yet to be told? I just think it's fantastic.

[35:06] Laura Camien: Thanks, Suze. I appreciate that. It's a goodie. Ah, I guess that's it. This episode of the Spark File was made on the lands of the Lenape and the Mohican people. And as always, we hope it put another bunch of sparks in your file. Listen, if there's a spark you'd like us to explore, or if you'd like to learn more about how to coach with us to accomplish your creative goals, you can email get creative at the sparkfile.com or reach us through our website, thesparkfile.com. We'll even happily take your feedback. But you know the price of admission. First, you need to share a creative risk that you have taken recently.

[35:42] Susan Blackwell: You can follow us on social at the Sparkfile. And be sure to subscribe, rate, and five star review this podcast. It really helps other listeners to find us. Also, if you like this podcast, we hope you'll share it with people that you love. And if you didn't like it, you can flip the script right on out of here. Bye!

[36:00] Laura Camien: Bye! Something lights you up and gets your creative sparks flying. We're writing you a forever permission slip to make that thing that's been knocking at your door. It's your turn to take that spark and fan it into a flame. You know, you gotta take it and make it, friends.

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