Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of IHeart Radio.

Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. This episode is going to be a longer one, part of the series where I interview fascinating people about how they take their days

from great to awesome and any advice they have for the rest of us. So today, I am delighted to

welcome Mary Laura Philpot to the program. Mary Laura is the author of two books of essays. I miss

you when I blink and bomb shelter. She lives in Nashville. So Mary Laura, welcome to the show. Hey, Laura. Thanks for

having me. Yeah, thanks for doing this. So why don't you tell our listeners a little bit more about

yourself? Okay, I live in Nashville. As you said, I'm a brand new empty nester, which has

thrown all of my routines just completely out the window and upside down.

I'm a writer, so, you know, there's some portion of my day or my life that's always spent

typing and kind of putting my thoughts into words. I'm an outdoorsy person. I'm not in like a,

you know, camping kind of way, but then I like to look out the window at birds

kind of way, which is what I'm doing while I'm talking to you right now on the other side of my

screen. There are birds on the roof outside my office. And yeah, I'm just like a happy little

middle-aged hermit right now. It's great. I love it. I love it. So maybe you can talk a little bit about how your

career has evolved. I know you've always been writing in some capacity, but you've done a couple

other different things. Yeah. Yeah. So early, early on, like in my 20s, I did corporate

communications. So that was how I had like a job with health insurance, was writing for

companies or organizations.

Probably my favorite of those jobs was I worked for the American Cancer Society's National Home Office for a while.

And I loved that.

I felt like I had a sense of a mission, but I was also getting to kind of do that good brain-crunchy work of working with words every day. And I

transitioned sort of out of that and into freelance writing when I had my first baby. And it was,

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