Anna Mitchael, THE WILL TELL YOU THE WORLD IS YOURS: On Little Rebellions and Finding Your Way

Totally Booked with Zibby

Zibby Owens

Entertainment, Parenting, Arts, Inspiration, Reading, Moms, Books, Connection, Literary

4.5 • 644 Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Zibby chats with writer Anna Mitchael about her lushly written and emotionally resonant collection of vignettes, THEY WILL TELL YOU THE WORLD IS YOURS, which traces a woman’s life from birth through midlife, capturing the subtle and seismic ways the world shapes her—and how she eventually pushes back. Anna reflects on the origins of her vignettes, many of which were inspired by personal memories or images, like a childhood Easter photo, and then delves into themes of motherhood, relationships, and the tension between creativity and productivity in a content-hungry world. She also talks about her years as a columnist and editor in Texas, and shares how embracing her “weirdness” ultimately led to her most authentic work yet.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest, best-selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators, whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive
0:24.0	look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't
0:29.3	have to.
0:30.3	Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day.
0:36.2	For more information, go to zibbymedia.com
0:38.7	and follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens.
0:44.5	Anna Mitchell is the author of
0:46.4	They Will Tell You The World Is Ours
0:48.0	on Little Rebellions and Finding Your Way.
0:50.6	Anna is a Louisiana-born writer based in Texas.
0:53.3	They Will Tell You, The World is Yours, is her third book, but her first about the spiritual life. Welcome, Anna. Thank you so much for coming on totally booked. I'm so excited to talk about. They will tell you, the world is yours, one, sorry, on little rebellions and finding your way. I need my glasses on. It's so pathetic. Anyway, congrats. Thank you. Yeah. No, it's a, it's a long title in subhead. I had a lot to get in there. But it works. It's like tells the story. You get a total sense of what it's like. Okay. Talk about what the book is about. Talk about how it's taken you all this time that you had this idea so long ago. and it's finally given to fruition. I'm so happy to hear that. Yes. So the book, it's different.
1:32.7	It's 85 vignettes, little short pieces, and they basically just track a woman's life from birth
1:39.3	pretty methodically all the way up through midlife. And it's the beginning of the book,
1:45.3	it kind of ramps up as she's just growing and learning and taking everything in and just really
1:51.6	not even realizing all the ways in which the world is influencing her and kind of turning her
1:56.2	and directing her. And then there comes a point where she starts to see what's going on. And there's just
2:01.5	kind of her reaction to that, which sometimes is kind of a beautiful and hinging and sometimes
2:08.4	is messy. And then there's the resolution in the end. So I have written vignettes, I think what
2:15.3	you're referring to, a very long time ago, about more than two
2:19.2	decades. And I was told at that point that they were not publishable, which is probably very true,
2:26.9	like very good advice. I was starting out, hadn't published anything. And so I walked away from it.
2:31.8	I was like, well, I'll just learn to go write a novel and do all those things.
	...

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