We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Yuliana Kim-Grant. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Yuliana below.

Yuliana, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

I am one of those with a few hypenates where my career is concerned, which speaks less to any grand plan than the way life has unfolded for me. I received my MFA in Creative Writing Fiction from Emerson College, December 2001 right after 9/11. The reverberation from that event was the impetus for us starting a family. I guess something so calamitous has you examining one’s mortality and, in our case, a need to create a family of our own. Had 9/11 not happened, I doubt I would have started a family right after finishing my MFA and in essence the start of my career as a novelist.

After having our son I spent a few years revising my first novel, a process that had many ups and downs as I juggled my writing life and new life as a mother to a young child. In 2007 my family relocated from LA to NYC, a move I had been desperate to make for years. While the move was a dream come true, it also created new stresses as I navigated the jungles of getting a child into a NYC school. All of this took time away from my ability to work on my novel. Finally in 2011 after countless rejections, my first novel was published by a small press. Like all writers, after the publication, I faced the daunting prospect of selling the book, a skill I learned was wholly divorced from the act of writing itself. I found myself traveling and trying to sell my book all of 2012.  I look back at this period with some amazement as I was also sadly losing my battle against my depression.

I had been dealing with postpartum since the birth of our son in 2002. As I write this now, I realize how little was discussed about postpartum 20 years ago, much less mental health in general. I had made the decision to forgo taking medication to treat it because no doctor or therapist could guarantee the medication wouldn’t somehow affect my creative process as a writer. Again, it is amazing how little was available in terms of information and the various treatments available to help someone like me.

At the end of 2012, I had a full mental breakdown and ended up in the psychiatric unit of a hospital in NYC. This event, I suppose, more than any other has shaped me as a writer and human. It is the event that has created the many career hypenates in my current life. The time I spent in the hospital was a reckoning of sorts since I had to face the harsh reality of my mental illness and the reality that sheer will would not suffice in managing it. In order to be able to leave, I had to agree to medication to manage my depression. To this day I manage my illness with a pill and I can say that this pill did not stop me from writing nor change my process as a writer. In fact it is what helps me to function as normally as I can and to engage with my career and life in general more fully.

The time after leaving the hospital was the hardest I have ever faced. Sometimes it felt as if I had been broken in two with no road map of how I could pull the two torn parts of myself back together enough to be recognizable. As part of my “healing” I attended yoga classes, something I had done before my hospitalization. Unlike before, the classes and being on the yoga mat became a refuge of sorts as I, bit by bit, started the difficult process of understanding who I had been, who I was, and who I could possibly become. More importantly, it helped the internal battle that raged and still rages within me about one living with a chronic illness that still carries a certain stigma.

In 2014 I took my first 200 hour yoga teacher training not with any grand scheme to be a yoga teacher, but to better understand how this practice had helped me and continues to help me. Shortly after I finished my training, I was offered an opportunity to teach at the studio where I had done my training. One class led to another and before I knew it, I was teaching nearly full time. I would eventually end up teaching all over NYC for Equinox.

As a yoga teacher my intention was to provide a space for each student to find refuge from whatever they needed refuge from as I had found. The more I taught, the more I realized how little I knew and how much more I needed to learn to be the best teacher to the students I was serving. The 200 hours turned into an additional 300 hours of training. I always say that the 200 hour training is like getting one’s high school diploma. The additional hours would be like getting one’s BA and so forth.

Using my own experience of how integral yoga had been in my own healing, I started a yoga therapist training program in 2008 that I completed in 2010. My work as a yoga therapist has provided me with a space to help those in need find their way to helping themselves to feel better from whatever ailment had brought them to me. It was while working with my numerous clients that I came up with the idea of my podcast Phoenix Tales, a platform to empower women to tell their stories of overcoming challenges. Again, the completion of my 200 hour yoga teacher training offered me no clues to my eventual career as a yoga therapist and podcast host.

Currently, I am working on the final revision of my second novel. Last summer after a relapse of my depression, I made the decision to stop teaching group classes and to reduce my private client business to just a couple of long time clients. My relapse was a reminder that like all those living with a chronic illness, I had to focus on managing my own.

While all three careers are discrete in disciplines and industries, one main theme connects them for me: helping others find a connection to themselves and to their humanity whether it is through storytelling or through moving their bodies.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

In the Chinese calendar, I was born in the year of the horse, an animal not meant to be caged but meant to be free. Much like a horse, I find the need for the freedom to move, whether it is project from project or place to place. Movement is very  necessary for my general well-being and creativity. Being an artist allows me that freedom. While there are many challenging days when I am at work on a novel. Yet the briefest moment when the writing goes well is a feeling that can’t be matched by much else in my life. The ability to create a world, characters, and a story that might have the potential to resonate with one person is something I know is a true gift. I’ve learned from my winding, sometimes circuitous journey, that this gift is not meant to be squandered or to be viewed as a hindrance.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

Every artist’s process is individual to the specific discipline and to the specific process of each artist. As a writer, I write line by line. That is, I never have an outline for any of my books. Instead I may embark on the project with a whisper of an idea. For example, sometimes I can hear a character’s voice or other times I can imagine a dramatic situation that would propel the narrative forward. Beyond that, I usually have no other road map. As I write, line by line, the character’s voice will emerge. It’s at this moment that the narrative will start to take shape or I start to feel my way to a story. While this process is not ideal for all writers, I find the discovery and mystery of what happens when a character comes to life thrilling. These moments of discovery reveal so much about my unconscious, subconscious, and general observation of the world. It is these moments of discovery that keep me writing.

Understanding that my process is not ideal for many, if I were to offer one bit of advice, it would be for all of us to slow down enough to hear what your instinct, unconscious, subconscious and consciousness are trying to communicate. I think this ability to slow down to let all of the more mysterious parts of our mind have a say is what can differentiate you in whatever field you work. When one lets go of rigid thoughts and notions, that’s when the most creative thoughts and ideas can emerge. I guess some would call this ‘stepping outside the box’. There are times when what your gut is telling you will appear as crazy or delusional, yet it is communicating this information for a reason. Had I not followed my instinct, I would never have applied to an MFA program, taken a yoga teacher training, and taught a yoga class, much less embark on a career as a yoga therapist. That’s not to say that this is an easy thing to do since there are so many pressures in our culture to always color within the lines, in essence, to never take real chances because of the possibility of failure. I know it’s a high wire act without any net whenever I sit down to write a book, plodding away, trying to discover the story as I write line by line. If I were to let my fears dictate how I work, I would never write at all.

I guess that’s a long-winded way of saying that being too rigid or dug in on what you think your career or life should look like may rob you of an opportunity that could change your life in a way that might make everything more meaningful.

Contact Info:

• Website: yulianakimgrant.com
• Instagram: @yulianakimgrantofficial
• Facebook: yulianakimgrantofficial
• Linkedin: Yuliana Kim-Grant
• Twitter: yulianakimgrant

Image Credits
Lyan Bernales Photo