Meet Julie Turley

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Julie Turley a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Julie, first a big thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and insights with us today. I’m sure many of our readers will benefit from your wisdom, and one of the areas where we think your insight might be most helpful is related to imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is holding so many people back from reaching their true and highest potential and so we’d love to hear about your journey and how you overcame imposter syndrome.

I’m not sure I’ve ever overcome imposter syndrome. It’s my old problematic friend. Maybe I’ve just learned to live with her. The older I get–and I turned 60 last year, soon after the great Courtney Love, who never seems to have suffered from imposter syndrome–the more I become aware of all that I don’t know, all that I’ll never be, and that maybe my imposter syndrome can be ridiculously empowering. So I’ve accepted not knowing how to do anything all that well. As a younger person, imposter syndrome compelled me to quit the thing before I could be unmasked, discovered–before I could fail. My new imposter identity is simple and freeing: I don’t know what the f*ck I’m doing–of course, I don’t–but I’m going to do it anyway. I’ll be the messiest pretender, the boldest sham, and that will be rad.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I’m a post-Mormon mother of two 20-something kids. Almost 30 years ago, I moved to the lower east side of Manhattan from downtown Salt Lake City with a new husband I’d never lived with before. We sublet an apartment on 2nd St and Avenue B from John Ranard, a photographer who had collaborated with Joyce Carol Oates on her book On Boxing. “Everyone here is connected to something bigger than themselves,” I remember thinking, awestruck. I walked around awestruck. The sublet was on the same block where Allen Ginsberg, decades before, had composed “Kaddish.” Richard Hell lived in the neighborhood, as did Allen Ginsberg for two more years until he died. Amiri Baraka had lived on East 3rd. You could see Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Kenneth Koch, et al at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church where Patti Smith first performed her poetry with Lenny Kaye on electric guitar, the proto Patti Smith Group. I was still officially a PhD candidate in the University of Utah’s respectable creative writing program, and had a small cache of little stories published in a few little literary magazines. We thought we’d live in the New York one year. I got a job as an assistant in the library for the American Craft Museum (now the Museum of Arts and Design), in the still gritty eastern heel of Soho. I rode my bike to work and to cafes where I put new little stories in notebooks. I rode my bike pregnant. First kid was born, and then the second, and I put my bike away, and most of my notebooks. I spent my days in the most interesting playgrounds, islands of artist parents (Philip Glass, to unabashedly name drop) and I pushed a double stroller loaded up with my kids into museums, New York City as playground. My PhD receded to a tiny de Chirico object on a remote horizon, then disappeared completely. I went to library school. My first librarian job was a microscopic weekly reference desk shift in a CUNY campus library. I was technically a librarian but that identity was still eclipsed by the mother one. Six years later, I was finally a full on, full-time academic librarian on the tenure track and was writing again. I had to. It was framed by a professional imperative, of course, it I brought back a receded slippery identity. With fellow mother/librarian Joan Jocson-Singh, I co-wrote the book-length ethnographic study on mothers in rock music, Heavy Music Mothers: Extreme Identities, Narrative Disruptions. We presented on our research at the Modern Heavy Metal Music conference in Helsinki, Finland, a dream come true. My marriage receded, not so dreamy, but I’m still mothering, of course. I always will be. One of my oldest friends, post-Mormon poet and mother of five, joke but not joke that we should collaborate on a book on parenting adult children. But at the moment, I’m writing about a women who was never a mother, but just as under-appreciated. My current book proposal is on legendary Plasmatics’ vocalist, solo artist, Grammy-nominated, ahead-of-her-time vegan and sex-positive network television talk show guest Wendy O. Williams. There exists no serious critical book-length biography about her. None! And I’ve been waiting for years for a writer to write one. Nobody has. So I will.

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?

My love of reading, writing, and listening to music on a little transistor radio sustained me through a childhood full instability, moves between states, and among many elementary schools and Mormon congregations, a dearth of food, support, and attention, a father who seemed disoriented a lot of the time, a depressed mother on the autism spectrum. Like many adolescent girls, I lost touch with my three essential loves, and it’s only now that I’m bring them back into full flower. David Bowie said, that “aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.” My advice is to always take Bowie’s.

What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?

At the beginning of 2024, my landlord wrote and told me I’d have to vacate, as he was selling the house I’d lived in since Covid lockdown. A week later, my mother died. As the year progressed, I broke my kneecap and had to have it surgically repaired. A person very close to me was knocked down by mental health issues, and because I never wanted to be told to vacate an apartment again, I decided to try and buy one, which was hard homework every night for months, gathering up my things while on crutches. Then as we all know about 2024, Trump won the election, and Kamala and Tim, who both share my birth year (which, in my magical thinking, meant they would win!), lost. The election result shattered me. Currently, I share my studio apartment with one of my children as she gathers herself for life on her own. I, too, am still gathering myself. And I write this on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, still battling the despair and sense of foreboding that his impending inauguration incites. Dealing with four more years of Trump feels like my greatest challenge. At the same time, I’m pretty f*cking privileged, and the only way I can face the next four years is to help the people I know who aren’t. The only response I have right now is to create something fantastic and healthy, channel the rock ‘n’ roll energy that has always fueled my hope and optimism. You should join me.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @heavymusicmothers AND @readingwearingrocking
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-turley-80b187b0/
• Other: Spotify: Heavy Music Mothers https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4ZsXJOIXmjR4AOvm6UgVMv?trackId=2nMdO2KxPS1Q3IABIusTGkBluesky: @libmetal.bsky.social

Image Credits

Pri the Honeydark