My final interview, with author Chloe Langr, felt like it was personally addressed to me.
Fittingly, Chloe’s contribution to this quarter’s box was her recently published book: “Letters to Women: Embracing the Feminine Genius in Everyday Life".
After a week of interviewing incredible women about the physical, emotional, and spiritual manifestations of their femininity, it was exciting to get to hear Chloe describe the book she compiled on that very topic:
“About four years ago I had been wrestling with the idea of the feminine genius. It felt like a vague idea or buzzword. I wanted to get into the nitty-gritty of it. So I started a podcast and asked each guest how they live out the feminine genius in their daily lives.”
She always dreamed of publishing these women’s musings and testimonies as a book, but it was never the right time or season. That is, until she was approached by Tan Books last year. Thrilled, she jumped at the chance to “introduce women to other women”.
I asked her to describe the challenges and successes of a project of this magnitude entailed, but she just pointed it all back to God and His glory. “What was the most surprising”, she told me, “was how the holy spirit worked through the letters in ways that I couldn’t have imagined. Whether it was how many women said yes to writing for the book or just getting to read the letters as they came into my inbox and seeing how vulnerable women were for women they didn’t even know yet.”
She told me that she finished the project in total awe of the many different ways that feminine genius manifests and I quipped something about the incredible way her own feminine genius had manifested in the most beautiful way possible: in the building community.
And believe me, Chloe is no stranger to building community. In fact, just days before our interview, she delivered her newborn daughter into the world. Laughingly, she told me that this past month had been the “month of the book and the month of the baby”. I marveled at all this woman had been able to create, just by being who she was made to be.
Finishing our conversation with a nod towards this Little Catholic Box’s theme, I asked her if she had ever felt the feminine genius in her own body. With remarkably vulnerability, she explained to me that when she first created letters to women, it was during a season of infertility and miscarriage: “In the darkest part of that season, my womanhood felt irreparably broken. So I was coming to terms with my body and maternity, and the fact that they did not look like what I thought motherhood would look like. I created the podcast at a time when I wasn’t feeling like enough of a woman. Once I sat down with the women in this podcast, I was able to lean into a completely different aspect of motherhood.”
Humbled and grateful, I thanked Chloe for all that she had birthed into this world: literature, community, and new life.