Jan Peppler's "Finding Home" Newsletter Explores How and Why We Soulfully Connect to People and Places

Peppler talks about the psychology — and our ever-evolving notions — of home.

Welcome to Writers On Writing, an ongoing series profiling passionate writers behind the scenes. Today, we hear from Jan Peppler, PhD, founder of Finding Home on Substack.

Photo courtesy of Jan Peppler, PhD

1. In which genre do you write, and what’s your Substack newsletter about? Tell us about as much – or as little – as you feel comfortable. 

Finding Home explores everything to do with our relationship to home. How we soulfully connect to people and places.

My writing is rooted in my graduate work and my dissertation on the psychology of home. But I’ve discovered that folks like my writing much more when it’s not academic. They connect their own experiences with home when they read about my relationship with home. This requires me to write in a much more personal way than I originally intended. Something I hear quite a bit is that I’ve made folks think about something in a new way and honestly, that’s the best compliment I could ask for! 

2. What’s the main message of your work, and what do you hope your readers will gain from reading your writing?

I hope readers will reconsider their connection to home. Understanding how we connect to home and why we connect in those ways (which are individual and not one-size-fits-all), allows us to feel at home wherever we are in the world. 

I think so much of the discomfort in our lives stems from our relationship to home. 

I have two primary thoughts about home that are not found anywhere else; meaning, no other writer makes these connections. 

The first is that Maslow’s 5-tier hierarchy of needs represents the archetype of home. The first four needs (shelter/food, safety, belonging/love, and self-esteem) are the responsibility of our parents to provide for us as children. Then, at the top of the pyramid is our need for self-actualization, or what Carl Jung calls individuation. It’s our need to fully become our own people, responsible adults to contribute to the world. It is this need that makes it possible for us to then create home for ourselves and for others, no longer relying on our parents to provide for our needs.

My second contribution to this topic is how our childhood experiences create imprints on our psyches that forever shape our relationship to home. Many have written about the influence of childhood but I would go further and say certain experiences become stamped into our unconscious and become our norm as adults.

Obviously, this is pretty heady stuff so I don’t write about these ideas as directly as I just stated. 

3. Was there a moment of inspiration that inspired you to launch this newsletter?

Absolutely! I started my blog (the first incarnation of this newsletter) when I was in Italy at the beginning of the Covid19 pandemic. I had been there only 6 days when the entire country went on lockdown. I decided it felt safer to stay put than to return to the States, but everyone I knew was worried. I figured a blog was the easiest way of keeping everyone informed. When I eventually returned home after four months, people in 42 countries had read my posts. Unfortunately, my international readership dropped once I was back in the States, but my American readers encouraged me to keep writing.

4. Who or what inspires you as a writer?

People inspire me.

5. How would you describe your writing life?

Planned and spontaneous.

I keep notes on things I want to write about and often work on pieces for days, even weeks. Other times, something specific or timely inspires me and I finish a piece in a few hours.

6. What would we see if we walked into your writing workspace(s)?

Right now you would see a small oak table with a wobbly leg in the middle of my flat with many windows. On the table is my Macbook, composition notebooks, piles of loose paper and lots of pens of all colors. All around me are bookshelves crammed with books.

Basically, I can write just about anywhere as long as I can see outside. I need to face a window when I write. 

7. Do you have an ideal time/place in which to write?

I’m a creature of light so I do my best work during the day and particularly in the morning before the demands of life catch up with me.

8. Where do you find your inspiration and ideas?

Inspiration stems from life: experiences and conversations. I read a variety of magazines, journals, and news publications that inform a lot of what I write but the clarity of my ideas most often comes while talking with friends. 

9. Who’s your audience for this project? Is it specific, or is it broad with disparate groups?

In general, I think we take home for granted when we are young. We are distracted by other things (jobs, personal freedom, new experiences) and don’t really begin to consider what home means until we are older or when we create a family of our own. 

So my largest audience is folks in middle life, people who have multiple experiences with home and are now trying to discern what experiences are most valuable. For much of our lives, home is associated with our parents or the place we grew up. Or with our life-partner and the family we have created. But when our parents die or our marriage ends and our children move away and our home town is far away, we begin to think about home differently. It’s time to reevaluate what home means to us. If we no longer need to live in a place because of a job or family, where do we want to live? Where can we live that will feel like home? What are the specific things we are looking for that make us feel most comfortable, most grounded, most cared-for, most connected? Those who are looking for these answers seem to gravitate to my writing.

10. When are you most likely to write productively?

Whenever I don’t feel the pressure and distractions of daily life. It’s hard to let go of the “I need to’s”: clean, work, pay bills, respond to emails, etc. I typically need chunks of time rather than stolen minutes. So again, my most productive time is usually in the morning. I would like to write more at night but my dog expects to be cuddled in the evening so…

11. What does your life look like when you’re not writing?

Even when I’m not writing, I’m thinking about writing. I’m teasing out ideas. I’m reading or talking with folks or exploring places - all of which nurture my writing. Oh, and I’m walking my dog or playing with her. Taking dog breaks gives my mind time to work out an idea, a sentence, or a strategy. But it’s more than that - my dog is one of my strongest senses of home. She is a constant.

But if you mean specifically what am I doing when I’m not writing… I work for the U.S. Census Bureau, so every day includes knocking on doors and talking to strangers. I really enjoy this work and feel privileged to do it. Data that the Census accumulates impacts so many areas of our home life. Most folks don’t realize how essential their participation is in shaping our cities and towns, forming  public policies that affect us all, and creating funding for houses, schools, roads, and more. I even use this data often when writing, which is yet another example of how people inspire me.

12. What gives you the most angst about it?

My insecurities about people’s expectations. What do people  want to read about? How much of my own life do they want me to reveal? Is one post a week enough? If they’re a paying subscriber, do they expect more?

13. What’s been the most surprising part about launching your Substack newsletter?

Discovering that I CAN produce quality writing on a weekly basis, and discovering that people are actually interested in what I write. I am always so humbled and grateful when something resonates enough for someone to like it and comment. 

14. How has this effort changed you as a writer? As a person? 

I’ve allowed myself to be more vulnerable. Or perhaps more precisely, I’ve allowed myself to share the emotional, confused, insecure, not always as sure or confident or in control person that most folks assume I am. I’m more willing to drop what I would call “the public persona” - the face we typically show the world. I’ve come to trust my readers as my friends. I’ve always been an incredibly honest person but I’m also guarded. If you’re an acquaintance or someone I’m friendly with, I tend not to reveal too much about myself. You may think I’m sharing personal things because of my style of communicating and my comfort in talking about hard subjects. But the truly intimate and painful parts of myself I keep hidden.

Writing Finding Home has helped me trust my readers as friends and not merely as acquaintances. Every time I reveal something painful and intimate, I’m surprised by my readers’ responses. I discover I’m not alone in these less-than-desireable emotions and my readers feel seen and heard. This is actually a huge deal and I’m not sure I’m adequately expressing the magnitude of how it has affected me. 

I guess in short, my Substack readers have made me more honest and trusting. They seem to hold a space for me, a space that honors our mutual human experience. That’s a pretty extraordinary thing.

15. What advice would you offer someone who’s considering taking on a big writing project? 

When I think of a “big writing project,” I think of writing my dissertation or writing a book. My dissertation took fifteen months but seemed relatively easy because I was so clear on my audience. Writing my book about home is more difficult. So I’m not sure I’m a good person to offer advice!

16. How do you jumpstart your motivation when it wanes?

I take care of myself. If I don’t feel like writing, I take a break. I sleep more. I do other things. I’ve learned to trust that taking care of myself is most important. My energy goes up and down and experience has taught me not to worry about that too much. The words always come back - sometimes I just need to give myself space and time to allow them to return.

I’ve also learned that sometimes a lack of motivation means I’m on the wrong track - I’m pursuing the wrong approach. I need to step away until the idea gels in a new form. I think as writers, and in life in general, we need to trust our intuition more. Lack of motivation, fatigue, any kind of dis-ease is trying to tell us something. We need to stop what we’re doing. It’s like dealing with an infant or a dog - neither speaks in words so sometimes you just need to hold them and try to intuit what’s going on. I think we need to do more of that with ourselves.

17. Did you set goals for your newsletter launch, or just follow your gut? How would you say things have gone so far? 

My goal was to write a public post every week, which I have largely done. I also planned to write installments of my memoir, An American in Italy During Covid-19, which is the journey of how I finally embraced myself as a writer. This was meant to be the bonus content for paid subscriptions. Only, after 23 installments, I doubted my ability to write in the memoir genre and stopped. So I fear I may have let some of my paid subscribers down. I’m still trying to figure out what “added value” looks like for these subscribers.

I now have 251 subscribers, which is wonderful. I’m grateful for each and every one and wish I could have personal conversations with each of them. 

My goal this year is to finish editing my book on Finding Home which explores in depth my two original ideas to the field of home and our relationship to home. Repeatedly I’m told that to land a book agent and a publisher, I really need to have a much larger following. So I hope to grow my readership up to 1,000 or more this year. 

18. What advice would you offer to someone considering launching their own Substack newsletter?

Do it. Just do it. 

Photo courtesy of Jan Peppler, PhD

To learn even more about Jan Peppler, PhD, visit JanPepplerHome.com.

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Christine Wolf is an award-winning essayist, memoir coach, and owner of Writers’ Haven LLC, a cooperative workspace for writers. Are you a writer in search of a coach? Would you like your writing profile featured in this series? Reach out to Christine at www.christinewolf.com/contact/.