Hello everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind,

and make you brave. I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Speaking with Joy.

You are joining me and what I have been calling in my brain the escapecast.

We are all living through this wild thing that is the COVID-19 pandemic,

finding ourselves more housebound than usual.

And so rather than talking about that all the time, I wanted to just

provide fun episodes of good distraction, of things to learn about, and also just to invite on people

that I enjoy and love reading their stuff online, but haven't had the time to talk to you before

now, but now we are all, I would say stuck at home

doing nothing, but obviously we're not stuck at home doing nothing. But we all know that we're at home,

and so I know that I can call people and say hi. And one of those people who I wanted to have on

my podcast for a long time, but just hadn't figured it out until now is Haley Stewart. So welcome on the show, Haley. Thanks so much for having

me. It's going to be fun. I know. It will be really fun. So Haley, tell us a bit about who you are,

and then we can try to figure out how we met, which I think the answer, which is primarily through

Twitter. I think so. So sure, I'm Haley, and I'm a wife and mom of four kids. I'm a writer and a podcaster.

And living in Central Texas, my husband is a whiskey maker, except for the time being he is a hand sanitizer

maker. The distillery has switched gears. So you guys are doing that. So they're making hand sanitizer.

Here in San Andreas, the local breweries are doing the same things. Mm-hmm. So they're just making

huge vats of it for hospitals and doctors offices and stuff. And I think

they're going to start putting it in little pump bottles for different places around town. So

I told him, I was like, I feel like you're part of the war effort. You know, like, it's like some

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