We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Alex Woodroe. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Alex below.
Hi Alex, so great to have you on the platform. There’s so much we want to ask you, but let’s start with the topic of self-care. Do you do anything for self-care and if so, do you think it’s had a meaningful impact on your effectiveness?
For me, self-care starts with honesty.
It isn’t always easy to be honest with yourself about what brings you peace and joy. You have to strip away all the things that other people told you you’re not allowed to do, or you have to do. You have to embrace that sometimes, you’ve made choices that weren’t really your choices, and work on undoing them.
Most people worry about the “care” part, whether they’re doing “care” right and whether certain activities count as care activities at all, but I’m not sure that’s the real focus. Anything can be care, if doing it makes your true self feel cared for.
I think I only really understood what the “self” part of “self-care” meant relatively recently, when I moved (for the umpteenth time) back into my home country, and realized that all these silly dreams I’d been having can actually be part of my life. Walking through the woods, building a fire every evening, growing strawberries, taking my dog on a hike, spending a Saturday reading in a hammock, painting. I’d lived with this romantic view of what a good life meant in my head for so long, but it took seeing my “self” as a real, whole person who deserves love and fulfilment to bring me to the realization that-hey! I can have all those things. Or, I can work towards the ones I can’t have right now.
And it started with buying myself a hammock, which is an easy enough step. But it had to continue with undoing years, if not a lifetime, of preconceptions about what a successful life meant, especially for someone like me: a woman born minutes after totalitarian dictatorship in a country that didn’t want women to a family that didn’t want children. I had to acknowledge that I’m programmed to only feel like I’m worth existing if I work three times as hard as anyone else, and my successes only count if they’re superlative, and I am only allowed to do things if I do them perfectly. That’s not a life philosophy that leaves room for self-care, or for having any notion of a self at all.
So it’s hard work, finding that self and telling her it’s safe to come out. Convincing her that all the little things she dreams of, they’re real and they’re there for her. But it’s worth it.
I don’t know whether finding my individual definition of self-care makes me more effective, so much as it allows me to navigate the world at all. Self-care is the home base you come back to, the place you set off on journeys from. There can’t be anything without it. When you don’t have it, that home space gets filled with so many other things that aren’t really you. And when you get it right, it feels like you can face pretty much anything.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I feel like the most fortunate of people—I get to write and be published, and I get to help others write and be published.
I’m the Editor-in-Chief of Tenebrous Press, a partnership between Portland and Romania, through which we publish wonderfully dark books from modern, unknown authors who bring so much creativity and power to storytelling. We truly see things in independent publishing that just don’t happen anywhere else. We’ve only been operating a few years, but can already boast a Shirley Jackson Award nomination, as well as raising thousands of dollars for charity through our publications. Our most recent charity project is THANK YOU FOR JOINING THE ALGORITHM, a special edition magazine number that’s coming out this winter, and all the proceeds from it will be going to organizations in the US and EU that are fighting to protect artists’ rights in the face of generative AI software takeover of the creative arts.
As a writer, I’ve just had my debut novel released through Flame Tree Press. Whisperwood is a mixture of all the things I hold dear; forests and ghost stories by the fire, but also Romanian folklore creatures and adventure and mystery. I’ve had my short stories published and adapted to audio by the NoSleep Podcast, Horror Library, and many other publications, and although the details are still a secret, I can confidently say the deals for two new books have been struck and I’m working on something extremely exciting.
In everything I do across both fields, my goal is to be the most annoyingly egalitarian person in the room. I want to give people the kind of support and encouragement and transparency I wish I’d had growing up. I want to tell people that they get to write, and paint, and be artists, and then prove to them that it’s true, and that no matter how tough it gets, someone will always be around to help them.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Adaptability: Time and again the ability to adjust to any situation, to change plans, to change the way I work has helped me and everyone around me. In the creative arts, there’s never one solution that fits more problems. Every artist is so different, what they have to say and what they need in terms of support is so different. And I’m sure this is true across many fields: being able to adapt is a game changer. If you want to improve how adaptable you are, get familiar with being just slightly out of your comfort zone, even in the smallest ways. Every time you experience a little discomfort and overcome it, you train your brain to see discomfort as just another path to something new and different. To success.
Diversity: In your social group, in your reading materials, in your skills and pursuits. Even in your hobbies. Like in nature, a healthy ecosystem is a diverse ecosystem, everything working together to create something great and thriving and long-lasting.
If you want to improve how diverse your life is, start by doing one thing you’ve never done before, even if it’s just a new restaurant. Keep that child-like awe on the tip of your tongue at all times, and be open to the new people and new experiences that come with trying new things.
Empathy: Not every skill is about how it makes life better for you; in fact maybe most of them shouldn’t. Some things are about how they make life better for the people around you. Learn to quiet your inner self and allow others’ experiences and feelings to fill that space, see the world the way they do, make an effort to understand what they need. Help people in the way they need to be helped, not in the way you want to help them.
And if you want to get better at doing this, I’d say, start with asking yourself three questions with every interaction: what does this person really want? What does it feel like to be them right now? What would make their day better?
One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?
Publishing is all about community.
As EIC, I’m always looking to meet more people who help connect stories with readers, especially in the realms of dark speculative fiction—Sci-fi, Fantasy, Horror. Booksellers, reviewers, podcasters, journalists, teachers, librarians, they’re our lifeblood.
We also love connecting with other editors and independent presses, and we’re always open for pitches from writers who have projects they’d like to propose.
And for all those things, we’ve got handy links: https://linktr.ee/TenebrousPress
As writer, of course what I want most is to connect with readers. All of my info can be found here: https://linktr.ee/AlexWoodroe
Contact Info:
- Website: https://alexwoodroe.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexwoodroe/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlexWoodroe
