A new podcast for word nerds! Ep #1: Meet The Bibliotherapists (Toni interviews Tanya)

Hello everybody,

Welcome to the first episode of our brand new podcast, The Bibliotherapists, a new series from Substackers and community builders,

Tanya Lynch

(EASE Retreats) and

Toni Jones

(The Shelf Help Club), exploring the healing power of words.

This podcast is a love letter to reading and writing and storytelling.

And also Substack, the place where our eyes met across a crowded Zoom room (thanks to some matchmaking by Sparkler

Claire Venus (she/her) ✨

), and our idea for a show featuring our favourite writers from the platform was born…

Our DREAM line-up of Substack writers and authors for Series 1 includes (clockwise from top): Beth Kempton, Laura Pashby, Anne Boyd, Tamu Thomas, Emma Gannon, Jen and Salima (Women are Mad), Claire Venus and Lucy Pearson.

As a therapeutic journalling coach (Tanya) and self-help evangelist (Toni) we both spend our lives immersed in words, using them to support ourselves, and others, and we both consider ourselves Bibliotherapists.

Bibliotherapy: The use of books for therapeutic purposes, to improve psychological well-being. Through the incorporation of carefully selected literary works, therapists can guide people in treatment on a journey of self-discovery.

We believe that books are magic, and that journalling saves lives.

We want to inspire and support reading and writing as serious therapeutic tools that can support your mental, emotional, spiritual and even physical health (did you know that 30-minutes of reading lowers your stress levels and blood pressure as much as yoga?!).

And as two ex-media birds, we also love a good old gossip with interesting people.

So creating a podcast combining all of these things was really a no-brainer. And coming up with the name and the content ideas was easy.

Next, we made a wish list of writers we would LOVE to speak to. And - amazingly for a brand new podcast - they said yes!

So we’ve spent the last two months interviewing some incredible writers and creatives, including

Beth Kempton

,

Claire Venus (she/her) ✨

,

Women Are Mad with Jen&Salima

,

Anne Boyd

,

Laura Pashby

,

Lucy Pearson

,

Tamu Thomas

and

Emma Gannon

to close Series 1.

We’ve had SO much fun creating this podcast, speaking to these incredible women about the books that have shaped their lives and their relationships with themselves, the books they wish everyone would read, how they use reading and writing to support their mental health, and the books they are reading right now.

We’ve learned a lot.

We’ve also added more books than is reasonable to our TBR lists and imagine that you will be doing the same, for which we are very much ‘sorry not sorry’.

Show notes! In this episode Tanya references (clockwise from top left): Any memoir by Deborah Levy, Elizabeth Sprout, Helen Garner or Joan Anderson, Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg, Atomic Habits by James Clear, Toast by Nigel Slater and The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

And so here it is… out in the world, as a weekly digital aural retreat for you.

Today we are releasing two ‘meet the hosts’ episodes as a way to introduce you to Tanya and I (at 8am and then 12pm UK time) and then we’ll be dropping one new episode every Friday morning for the next 8 weeks.

We can’t wait for you to listen. Please share with the people you love, let us know what you think, and - of course - what you are reading right now…

Toni (& Tanya)

xx

PS you’ll be able to listen to these podcast episodes on all the usual outlets but we’ll only be sharing the video recordings here on Substack…

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