How we produce healing in a world that has forgotten who we are

A conversation with author and poet Kaitlin B. Curtice

Oct 27, 2025

Hi friends,

I am so excited to welcome my friend and teacher, Kaitlin B. Curtice to Field Notes! For those of you who don’t know Kaitlin Curtice, she’s an award-winning author, poet-storyteller, and public speaker.

As an enrolled citizen of the Potawatomi nation, Kaitlin writes on the intersections of spirituality and identity and how that shifts throughout our lives. She also speaks on these topics to diverse audiences who are interested in truth-telling and healing.

She’s the author of several books for both children and adults including Spring’s Miracles: An Indigenous Celebration of Nature and Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God, which won Georgia Author of the Year, Religion, 2020. She also writes essays and poetry for The Liminality Journal here at Substack and spends her time supporting other authors as they navigate the world of publishing. Nowadays, Kaitlin lives near Philadelphia with her partner, two dogs, and two kids.

Kaitlin is also a dear friend. We go way, way back to the early days when Twitter was actually fun and we were in a shared blogger era, but she’s one of the rare ones who holds on to people. She has generously spoken at Evolving Faith and even contributed to my own collaborative book A Rhythm of Prayer (you’ll find her on page 107). Her work now has taken on a beautiful and generous interfaith expression as she advocates for an inter-spiritual approach.

Basically, I adore Kaitlin. She has a wisdom, grace, soulfulness, and groundedness that brings goodness. I have loved watching her evolve in public as she has become more fully herself, both on the page and off.

And! Kaitlin’s newest book came out earlier this month!

It’s called Everything is a Story: Reclaiming the Power of Stories to Heal and Shape Our Lives.

Everything is a Story is such a beautiful book: brilliant, healing, transformative and the best kind of companion. I made the mistake of reading it on an advanced PDF the first time - I say “mistake” because this was a book that I needed to mark up with highlights and underlinings and dog-ears on pages so that I could revisit certain passages over and over again so I was mighty glad I had preordered! I think you all would love it as a companion in these waning weeks of 2025 turn us towards contemplation and reflection.

I hope you find something in our conversation to tuck into your own story as you carry forward.

A Conversation with Kaitlin B. Curtice

Sarah: I’ve heard you say exactly what Simran Jeet Singh writes in his beautiful foreword: “stay in the spiritual fire, let it cook you.” It’s a phrase inspired by Rumi, I know, but it is so you. When did that phrase first come into your life and how do you offer it to people now? What do you hope they carry from that phrase?

Kaitlin: I still remember the moment I came across this phrase from one of Rumi’s poems—I was sitting in my favorite red chair in our house in Atlanta, right before my book Native came out, before the pandemic hit. I read those words and knew they would change me forever. Isn’t it amazing when something like that happens, when we read something or watch a film or hear a song and we know, right there in that moment, a portal has been opened that we’ve walked through and we will never be able to walk back out again? Those are the moments that make being human so incredibly sacred. In our Potawatomi culture, we are Bodewadmi Ndaw, the people of the place of fire. We are fire keepers, not just literally, but metaphorically. I believe that we are here to help remind ourselves and others what it means to tend to our spiritual fires, to not let them go out. But that also means we have to be willing to be slowly cooked over time. I don’t want us to burn out; but I want us to be steeped in what it means to be people who are dedicated to telling stories of solidarity, care, and fierce love.

I don’t want us to burn out; but I want us to be steeped in what it means to be people who are dedicated to telling stories of solidarity, care, and fierce love. - Kaitlin B. Curtice

So, as a Potawatomi woman who is also steeped in my spiritual mystic life, and in my Celtic spiritual life, I’d say that staying in our spiritual fire is one of the most important things we can do, and it’s how we produce healing in a world that has forgotten who we are.

Sarah: You’re a poet-storyteller. I know that the nature of publishing these days often wants us to choose one or the other - and to be more marketable! How do you hold onto your identity and your vocation as a poet-storyteller?

Kaitlin: This was a very intentional choice for me as a “label”. You know as well as I do, Sarah, that writing bios can be so strange, and it’s this intense moment where we have to pause and ask how we not only want to see ourselves, but how we stay true to who we are while also using labels that are digestible to the outside world, and yet to a world that needs us to market ourselves. I am a poet, and I live and love stories, and I could never separate the two. So I thought, what if every poem I write is telling some sort of story? Whether it’s a story about my own inner spiritual landscape, or a story about the witch hunts in Europe (yes, there’s a poem in the book about this!) or a story about the empires of the world, poems tell stories. I cannot separate the two, and I’m done trying. I am a poet-storyteller, and the more people are curious about this and want to ask what I mean by that, the better.

Sarah: You write a bit about prayer and at one point say, “Maybe prayer is just about acknowledging that we often don’t know what the hell we are doing, and that’s okay.” I loved that and it has me wondering about the permission we may need to allow prayer to evolve. What have you learned about prayer since you stopped needing it to be a certain way?

Kaitlin: You know, I am tired of trying to know everything, or trying to have the answers, or trying to find the courage to know what to do and then to be all loud and proud about it. Most of the time, I don’t know what we should do, so I write. I write my way through that, or I sing my way through it while I play piano and write songs at home, or I weep my way through it with friends as we lament. Prayer is that liminal space of what the hell is going on, and in a time when we want to be so sure of everything (especially our opinions on social media), it’s really nice to hold space in which we just…sit there with our proverbial hands in the air. Prayer is me asking my ancestors to guide me. Prayer is me wondering if a god is listening. Prayer is me believing in humanity even at its worst. Prayer cracks everything open and we don’t know if those cracks will ever get sealed up again, and we’ve got to be okay with that.

Prayer cracks everything open and we don’t know if those cracks will ever get sealed up again, and we’ve got to be okay with that. - Kaitlin B. Curtice

Sarah: One of the more surprising chapters in the book for people may be the one about stories and sports! And yet you really do make room for how the stories of sport and recreation also create worlds in us. Why do you think those of us who tend to a more “spiritual” leaning struggle so much with sport as a story-telling encounter with ourselves or even God?

Kaitlin: This chapter was a really fun one to write, and I knew it would possibly be an interesting/challenging one for some of my readers, but I couldn’t not write about the role of sports in our stories. Think about any culture, country, around the world, at any time in history—in one way or another there were sports, competitions and ways that communities were coming together to test certain skills. I did not grow up in an athletic family. I was really intimidated by sports in high school, even though I secretly wanted to be on the volleyball team. It wasn’t until my 30s that I started exercising regularly and rock climb with my family, and I wanted to write about that in the book for two reasons:

In case there are others out there who have told a story to themselves that they’re just “not athletic”—that’s a story we need to stop telling. I have chronic illness and a very sensitive system; integrating a sport into my life has been incredible for my mental, spiritual and physical health, and I don’t want anyone to feel held back by their own circumstances. If you want to try the new thing, do it. I’m cheering you on!
I wanted people to see that the cultures of sports we’ve created really do say a lot about us and the stories we tell about community, and at some level that becomes a part of our spiritual lives as well (for better and for worse). We live in Philadelphia and do I care about football? No. Did I recently buy an Eagles shirt at a thrift store? Yes, because I recognize the ways we build community around sports. Sports tell our story.

Sarah: Near the end of the book, you shout out an episode of Doctor Who as an example of the truth that the ordinary, small, tiny acorn moments, are the things that change everything. First of all, love a Doctor Who reference anytime, anywhere as you know. But I’m wondering how you see that same ordinariness or smallness in us as overcoming evil these days. When we feel small and too ordinary to make a difference, how does that become a good story?

Kaitlin: I knew you’d enjoy that shout out! When I tell you I cried through that scene, I mean it. Multiple tissues, saying over and over again to my family this is so beautiful and so powerful. And when I think about the ordinary, the small, I think about the kids in our lives, who we underestimate constantly. There’s been some research going around remind us millennial parents that we are sheltering our kids far too much. They’re not getting time to play outside or run around neighborhoods; they aren’t exploring the woods enough or making critical decisions on their own because we are terrified to lose them, but my god, they are brilliant and well-prepared in their ordinariness. I think we fear being ordinary, we fear being “small” like the children in our lives. But if we re-evaluated all of that, if we told stories differently, we’d see that our ordinary acts of resistance and care are incredibly important.

If we told stories differently, we’d see that our ordinary acts of resistance and care are incredibly important. - Kaitlin B. Curtice

I don’t need to be the most special person on the planet to make a difference, and neither do you. You don’t have to leave it up to the “experts” because they’re the ones who can really bring change. Come to understand the power of ripple effects—every move you make in your life, every time you reorient yourself toward a story of love and kinship and solidarity with someone else (or with yourself!), you are shifting our consciousness. When you pick up my book and read it and let something sit with you, and then you let that thing change a small sliver of your life, all those slivers begin to add up and lead to the changes that we need on the larger level. Do not doubt the power of the ordinary—it’s where we begin.

Sarah: You write about how we long for the courage to be nuanced and expansive as our stories change. You created a practice for letting go of beliefs and opening up curiosity for new beliefs. Why was that important to you to include in the book?

Kaitlin: I felt so strongly that I needed to include a section on the ways we shift beliefs because, especially as we age, I think that’s a question we ask—are we too far gone to change, is it too late, are we allowed? Of course we are. I write at The Liminality Journal, and it’s people from a range of ages and backgrounds, and they are all gathered there with me to explore the ways in which we just don’t know. We are all gathered there because we want to focus on the questions, the gray spaces, the moments when we don’t fully know what to do or what to believe. And I love that community because of this.

I grew up in a really conservative small town in Missouri, and now I live in Philadelphia. I have, throughout my adult life, stretched and let go of beliefs and picked up new oanes only to put them back down again. I’ve remained curious and been terrified and held on and asked more questions. I want us to understand that, even in a world in which everyone is yelling at everyone else to pick a lane or check a political party’s box or proclaim what you believe 100% or don’t post that post at all, we are all trying to hold onto ourselves and one another. We are all trying to decide which beliefs still fit within us, and which ones ask us to expand beyond them. I feel, personally, part of my role as an author is to offer word-medicine to others so that they can have a little more courage to know they’re not alone in asking big questions. As I often say, my books aren’t about giving people answers; they’re about helping us ask better questions.

Our other 2025 conversations have included:

If you have any suggestions for next year’s guests - I’ve got a few in mind already! - let me know in the comments.

Sarah Bessey's Field Notes

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