EPISODE 726 - Eleanor Vincent - Disconnected, Portrait of a Neurodiverse Marriage

Author and memoirist Eleanor Vincent joins Dave from her home in the San Francisco Bay Area, reflecting on a life shaped by place, creativity, grief, and late-life love. She traces her journey from snowy Midwestern roots to California, where a long career in journalism taught her the discipline of daily writing and the power of working alongside other writers. That early newsroom experience became the foundation for her later work as a creative writer and memoirist, and she now champions community and “hive energy” as essential antidotes to the loneliness of writing.

Eleanor describes how a childhood steeped in books, theater, and nightly reading aloud opened the door to literature and showed her that a life in the arts was possible. Stories became both inspiration and survival tool in an emotionally unstable home, teaching her early on that reading and writing could be forms of healing, escape, and hope. That understanding would prove crucial decades later when tragedy struck.

Her first memoir, Swimming with Maya, grew out of the devastating loss of her nineteen-year-old daughter after a horse-riding accident. Rather than simply recording events, she spent a decade shaping her grief into a crafted narrative that others could enter, emphasizing that memoir is an art, not just catharsis. Writing was only one strand of her healing; therapy, spiritual practice, movement, friendship, and time all played vital roles. The book ultimately became both a tribute to Maya’s life and a testament to organ donation, showing how her daughter’s death helped save and transform other lives.

Eleanor’s new memoir, Disconnected, reflects a more seasoned writer grappling with a very different kind of heartbreak: a late-life marriage to an undiagnosed autistic partner and the unraveling of that relationship during the pressure cooker of Covid lockdown. She explains how neurodiverse couples often live inside what therapists call the “double empathy problem,” where both partners are trying hard yet neither feels safe or understood. Shutdowns, masking, and associated traits like alexithymia and demand avoidance created a tragic dance of miscommunication that conventional couples therapy could not repair. Ultimately, Eleanor chose to leave the marriage, drawing on hard-won resources and support that many partners in similar situations lack.

Throughout the conversation, she returns to her core motivation as a writer: to transform difficult experience into page-turning stories that genuinely help people. Whether writing about child loss, organ donation, or neurodiverse relationships, she aims to give readers language, context, and companionship for situations that can feel isolating and impossible.

Key takeaway: Memoir becomes most powerful when it combines emotional truth with craft, transforming raw pain into a story that offers understanding, companionship, and practical hope to others walking through their own seasons of loss, love, and change.

https://www.eleanorvincent.com/

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EPISODE 725 - Veronica Iniguez - Captain and Me at Sea! Sometimes, the greatest mysteries are hidden in plain sight

About the author
Veronica Iniguez is a debut author, born in the vibrant heart of Mexico and now embracing the desert magic of Arizona. She is a proud mother of six wonderful children. As an educator, she is passionate about inspiring young minds through learning and discovery. When she’s not homeschooling her little ones, she’s helping other children learn to read and develop a lifelong love of books. This book reflects her passion for storytelling, creativity, and helping children thrive.

Book - Captain and Me at Sea! - Captain and Me at Sea! is an adventurous picture book chronicling Captain, a brave pirate, and a feathered companion, Me. Captain and Me are on a mission to navigate the sea to seek a mystery! During their journey, they get themselves into a tangled mess, encounter a scary storm, and then find themselves exhausted. Despite the obstacles, Captain and Me complete their mission, realizing the mystery was their own shadow all along! Captain and Me at Sea! is a story that reminds us that sometimes, the greatest mysteries are hidden in plain sight, waiting to be discovered with open hearts and curious minds.

https://www.inispress.com/

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EPISODE 724 - Ellen Meeropol - Literary Late Bloomer and Author with a Love for Island Life

Ellen Meeropol is the author of six novels (Sometimes an Island, The Lost Women of Azalea Court, Her Sister's Tattoo, Kinship of Clover, On Hurricane Island, and House Arrest) and the guest editor for the anthology, Dreams for a Broken World. Her work has been honored by the Sarton Women's Prize, The Women's National Book Association, and the Massachusetts Center for the Book.

A literary late bloomer, Ellen Meeropol began seriously writing fiction in her fifties, but her first publications came much earlier. At age twelve, her essay, "I am a Square Dance Orphan," was published in a national square dance magazine and she wrote a monthly feature column for her high school newspaper in the Washington, D.C. area. Ellen studied art at Earlham College and the University of Michigan.

After working as a day care teacher and a women's reproductive health counselor, Ellen became a registered nurse and then a nurse practitioner, working at a children's hospital in western Massachusetts for 24 years. During that time, she authored and co-authored two dozen articles and book chapters about pediatric issues and latex allergy. She was honored for excellence in nursing journalism by the nursing honor society Sigma Theta Tau and received the Ruth A. Smith Writing Award for excellence in writing in the profession of nursing. In 2005 Ellen was given the Chair's Excellence Award from the Spina Bifida Association of America for her advocacy around latex allergy and spina bifida.

In 2000, after decades of reading voraciously and thinking that "someday" she would write, Ellen started writing fiction and studying craft, earning an MFA from the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine. In 2005, determined to spend more time with the characters demanding her full attention, she left her nurse practitioner career.

https://www.ellenmeeropol.com/

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