131: MEMOIRIST: Molly Pennington on writing a memoir, being a professional writer, and mid-life career changes (astrology!)

Memoir Body, Healing Story with Janelle Hardy

Molly Pennington, PhD, is a consulting astrologer and award-winning writer.

I’m truly excited to share this conversation with Molly because she is, hands down, one of the most incredible writers I know, and I can’t wait for her to get her memoir published so I can read it and share it with as many people as possible.

She’s also a phenomenal astrologer, deep thinker, and someone who delights in learning.

In fact, Molly is also an alumni of my transformational memoir-writing course, The Art of Personal Mythmaking. She’s taken it twice, and we talk some about her experiences in my course and how it’s supported her memoir writing but also her healing path.

But first, a little more about Molly. And, soak it up. It’s her bio, written by herself, so although I’m reading it, it’s all Molly’s wordplay…

Molly always wanted to be a writer and she suspects she was a real one long before she dared admit to it. As a child, she fell in love with books and reading. She wanted to know the true personality of every member of the alphabet and contemplate why and how a good pun could shimmer.

Eventually, she became a writer by trade, and brazenly enjoyed her skilled affront to all things literary as she composed zip-tinsel copy for products she could never care about while churning out listicles, sometimes for the more futile periodicals slumming in the back corners of the internet.

She has worked in most of the ways a keyed-up logophile will: editor, essayist, joke writer, ghost writer, speech writer, copywriter, caption writer, content writer, in sum, as a Freelance Writer. “Freelance” does originate as an adjective (reliant on a pen = sword metaphor) to describe marauding soldiers-for-hire beholden to no one, except themselves.

Pennington wields her “lance” with rowdy elegance and surefire handicraft on projects to which she is under contract as well as when she is free.

She is at work on her memoir, Mad River: Autopsy of Father/Daughter Love & Hate, that chronicles how she discovered her father’s 38 page suicide diary that recounts a performance of death and confession—after which she’s plunged into an odyssey where she uncovers the mysteries of the father she never knew and could never have imagined. A disturbing, illuminative, and finally, transformative process.

She received a PhD in Critical and Cultural Studies from the University of Pittsburgh where she taught courses in English, Film, and Visual Culture for 13 years. She’s won several writing awards (prestigious and obscure) and is eschewing here the convention of listing them out.)

Recently, she experienced a fusion between her prior academic obsessions and her study of ancient astrology. Both interests in structural archetypes found a kindred alignment with her joy in articulating experience as lyrical and poetic.

She is a lifelong theorist around the ways we make meaning-- around the ways puns and similar word plays and metaphors, can shimmer. You can find her astrological chart consultations at Baroque Moon Astrology and her writing life at Molly Pennington.

It was so lovely to connect with Molly, and I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy listening in.

• Writer site: www.mollypennington.com
• Astrology site: www.baroquemoonastrology.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/baroque_moon/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/baroque_moon