CHAPTERS: Leslie Stephens

Every (life) chapter has at least one memorable moment, sentence, or story.

Every (life) chapter has at least one memorable moment, sentence, or story. What are yours? In Chapters, I ask creative people to reflect on the stories of their lives and respond to any of the below prompts (in whatever way they wish).

In the latest installment, we hear from Leslie Stephens—author of You’re Safe Here, creator/writer of Morning Person, and counselor-to-be—who shares memorable moments, vivid dreams, and delicate truths.

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Photo courtesy of Leslie Stephens

Leslie’s Chapters

I. Slow Story

Early in my separation from my husband, I (literally) stumbled across Mary Oliver’s poetry in a bookstore on a road trip through Georgia. The experience of opening her collection, Devotions, to the poem, “I Don't Want to Be Demure or Respectable,” fundamentally changed me—and I’ve tried to maintain that shift toward a conscious awareness of the preciousness of being human ever since. Doing that means taking time to slow down, which is in direct contradiction to the running-out-time pace I’ve maintained most of my life. Most mornings, after walking my dog, Toast, and eating breakfast, I read a poem from Devotions, three times through. The first time is to just read it; the second is to notice things like cadence and double-meaning that I missed the first time, and the third is to understand how I relate to it. Poetry requires slowing down, and Mary’s poems are a salve that reminds me to slow down in my own life and, ultimately, pay attention to the things that matter.

II. Love Story

Divorce makes you realize how fragile love can be—I loved my ex and believed we would be together forever, then watched ten years crumble in the space of a single month. I’m currently in my first serious relationship post-divorce with someone who sees my flaws and loves me for them rather than in spite of them. I have a lot more anxiety in this relationship that I’m working through—what’s the point of investing in a relationship if you know how easily it can end? But my partner’s compassion for me is teaching me, slowly, how to love myself completely, regardless of my accomplishments and accolades. It’s included a lot of unlearning and relearning, but I can feel my knot of anxiety loosening the longer we stay in it. Creating a love story with myself has taken the pressure off of our relationship, which, in turn, has made it stronger. 

III. Short Story

Claire Keegan’s novellas and short stories stick with me long after I’ve finished them. “So Late in the Day” is told from the perspective of a man confined by his myopic narrative, tallying the amount his fiancé, who recently left him, cost him as his resentment grows. In doing so, he misses the ways in which he failed her and the immeasurable beauty of life, instead holding tightly to his own anger and resentment.

Photo courtesy of Leslie Stephens

IV. Scary Story

As alienating as it may be, I think it’s important to remember the scariest story, which is that we all die at the end. Yes, it’s morbid, but since sitting with clients as part of my master’s in mental health counseling, I’ve never been so aware of the lengths people go to forget it. We spend our lives avoiding existential discomfort, which I believe ultimately creates more pain. It’s important to maintain an awareness of the scary truths, to examine them, and to try to understand where they come from so we can hold them more gently. It’s a lifelong task that requires a lot of slowing down and a lot of self-compassion. For this reason, I love reading works by Buddhist psychologists and thinkers like Mark Epstein and Alan Watts. Pema Chödrön’s The Places That Scare You is also a wonderful place to start.

V. Inside Story

I spent a lot of time alone growing up. My family lived in Laurel Canyon, in the hills above Los Angeles, a neighborhood rich with musical history (my drive home from school went past the “very fine house” Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash shared), but with very few children. We lived on a double lot, so I spent hours each day in the unlandscaped wilds of our backyard, turning trees into spaceships, searching for Totoro, and reading books in trees. Indoors, my mind races with external to-dos, but the outdoors have always unlocked my own interiority. On hikes in the Pacific Northwest, where I live, I turn back into that curious kid, becoming an amateur arachnologist, imagining different ways of living and letting my own mind and imagination wander.

Photo courtesy of Leslie Stephens

VI. Bedtime Story

I have had insomnia my entire life, so bedtime is always rife with anxiety, which makes my difficulty with falling and staying asleep a self-fulfilling prophecy. When I finally do fall asleep, I have incredibly vivid dreams. Last night, I dreamt that I was in a boat chase on Tokyo Bay. In the midst of it, my boyfriend was hit by a poisonous beetle, and the second half of the dream took place in Shinjuku, where I’ve never been, in search of an elixir to bring him back to life. When I can’t sleep, I like to read books and memoirs that aren’t plot-driven, as my dreams tend to be. The liminal space of sleeplessness is the perfect time to soak in certain poetry and writers like Sylvia Plath, Rachel Cusk, and Sheila Heti.

VII. Travel Story

When I was in my early twenties, a friend of mine moved to New Zealand to study wine. I was an editor at a food website, making very little money, but I decided to take a week off and visit her on the cheapest flight I could find, which turned out to be an eighteen-hour leg from New York to Guangzhou, followed by a nine-hour layover, then a thirteen-hour flight to Auckland. Forty hours of travel on the way there, forty hours on the way back. An eternity later, in New Zealand, my friend and I rented a compact sedan and slept in the front seats, rolling the windows up to secure towels as drapes. Over the course of four days, I drank wine on Waiheke, saw glow worms illuminate underground caves, went skinny-dipping in Coromandel, slept on a stranger’s couch in a town of Art Deco buildings, and accidentally hiked eighteen miles across the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, or “Mordor.” It was chaotic and spectacular and worth every ounce of discomfort—although I book my flights more discerningly now. 

Photo courtesy of Leslie Stephens

VIII. Leslie’s Story

After graduating from Wellesley College and the Columbia Publishing Course, Leslie Stephens worked on the Editorial team at Food52 in New York before heading west to Los Angeles, where she served as the Vice President of Content for the brand, cupcakes and cashmere. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Eater, Apartment Therapy, and Tasting Table. Her weekly newsletter, Morning Person is among Substack’s most popular paid newsletters and her debut novel You’re Safe Here will be released in June 2024 by Scout Press. Leslie is currently earning her Master's in Professional Mental Health Counseling with a Specialization in Addictions from Lewis and Clark College. With her degree, she hopes to treat adults and adolescents struggling with addictions, through nature-based therapy. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon with her hyperactive pit-mix Toast.

Photo by Paige Jones

Thank you, Leslie!