Some Writers Keep Talking
Or: what happens when a retired ER nurse, novelist, and Psychic/Medium gets a Substack.
My son figured this out early. He'd hear me mid-story, mid-theory, mid-whatever-had-caught-my-attention that day, and say,"Help! I'm talking and I can't shut up!" He wasn't wrong. Writing it down turned out to be the better solution—for all of us.
Characteristically Speaking was born as a blog, years ago. Now it’s this—a Substack where I put down what I can’t keep to myself, and you, bless you, can read it at your leisure.
I’m Jo Taylor. I live in Daphne, Alabama, on the particular edge of the Gulf South where the light does something in the late afternoon that I’ve never been able to adequately describe, though I keep trying. I’m a retired ER nurse, a novelist, a poet, and a Psychic/Medium who is pragmatic to the nth degree—which is either a contradiction or the most Southern thing about me, depending on who you ask.
I write character-driven literary fiction about the private courage of ordinary women. My debut novel, Margaret of Thibodaux, is out now. My second novel, Mimi and Maurice, arrives September 8, 2026. My poetry collection, Postcards, is also available if you want to know what I sound like when I’m being brief.
Here on Substack you’ll find all of it—fiction, poetry, nursing stories, metaphysical rabbit holes, life in general, and the occasional photograph that stopped me in my tracks. I see the world through my own particular lens. Ray-Bans at the moment, unapologetically Gen X.
“Cassie wasn’t the alive version either.”
— from Postcards: Collected Poems and Short Stories
If you like stories that stay with you. If you’ve ever thought the ordinary moment was actually the extraordinary one. If you believe words are worth slowing down for—
You’ve found your place.
Pull up a chair.