Welcome to Hearth Talks

A new YouTube podcast and improved Substack for women over 40 seeking growth, connection, and purpose through creative self expression.

For those of you who know me, I’ve been on Substack for four or maybe five years now. I’ve gone back and forth on what to focus on, have posted every other week then disappeared for months, and I generally have been trying to figure out how best to position my publication.

With that said, I’d like to introduce you to Hearth Talks - a video show and Substack for women over 40 seeking personal growth, connection, and purpose through creative self expression.

The video above will explain my motivation and what I’m trying to do with Hearth.

Technically, everyone is welcome to be part of Hearth Talks - I’ve focused on women over 40 (well, 35 to 40 and up) who are seeking more from life because it’s what I know, and I believe my content will resonate most with that demographic.

There will also be information about my indie writing and publishing career also because that’s my form of creative self expression.

(Watch on YouTube)

What is Hearth?

Hearth is for women over 40 seeking personal growth, connection, and purpose through creative self expression.

Creative self expression includes writing, art, music, theater, movement and other inspired modalities.

Through creativity, play, and exploration, women have the opportunity to:

• Find purpose in their second half of life

• Discover their “Why”

• Explore and unlock creativity

• Build meaningful community

• Become an embodied leader

• Work through fears and blockages

There will be more than the YouTube Channel and Substack, but more on that later.

Thank You

I’ve put the transcript of the video below, in case you prefer reading. I also want to thank you for being here. Just by reading this article, you are supporting my work - and I need encouragement as much as the next person. So thank you for sharing your time with me.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please leave a comment or get in touch. I’m still figuring things out, and I’d love feedback from anyone with something to share.

More to come - thanks again!

Transcript

Here is a transcript of the video, in case you prefer to read rather than watch:

Diane Hatz (00:01)

Hi, and welcome to Hearth Talks. This is a chat show and platform for women over 40 who are seeking personal growth, connection, and purpose through creative self-expression.

If you're wondering what creative self-expression is, it's writing, music, art, dance, movement, theater. It's anything expressive. So it could even be gardening. I mean, whatever that fuels your passion.

So welcome. I’m Diane Hatz. I am your host, your guide, and hopefully your friend at some point. So a bit about me later though. This is take 4032 and yeah, you might hear a little bit about me, but I was thinking next video. I'll talk about my background. What is important is that I am one of you. I'm seeking purpose and meaning. Over the past

Two years, I got the courage to dive in head first and I am writing fiction full time. I tell people I'm on sabbatical because they understand that I'm not at a point where I'm ready to retire.

So through creativity, play and exploration, women like us have the opportunity to find purpose in our new phase or second part of life, discover our why, explore and unlock creativity, build meaningful community, become an embodied leader, and work through fears and blockages.

When we talk about fears and blockages, I had this, it's gonna sound silly, but I had this fear of walking into a store on my own that I had never been in before. And I lived in Manhattan and it was all small stores. So it took years for me to be able, well, honestly, to be honest, it's only been the past five or seven years, maybe less than that, that I've been able to work through that. And I used to really shame myself and I'm like, why? I mean, we all have quirks, we all have something and let's celebrate who we are. It's what makes people beautiful, you know? It's the non-perfectionist things I think that are what give a person a personality.

So what is Hearth Talks? Or what is Hearth?

Hearth Talks is part of a bigger brand, experience, platform, whatever you want to call it. Besides this YouTube show, it will be a Substack and a private newsletter. There'll be pop ups in Santa Fe. Our first one, I'm calling Women Writers in the Wild. I actually just got back. I scouted a place, not the middle of nowhere, but some people might think that, but it's by these, I think they're 12th century petroglyphs.

We're just gonna go a bunch of women out in the desert. We're gonna read, support, chat, and dance. We are going to dance with the prairie dogs, and there are prairie dogs out here. There are also tumbleweeds, which I just thought, I still think is so cool. So we'll have the pop-ups in-person events. Within a couple years, I'm hoping to do a three-day, 300-person in-person event here in Santa Fe.

The YouTube show and the sub stack and the pop-ups, it's all a build up to the bigger event, which is sort of the foundation of Hearth. And then there'll be an online community, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, down the road personally. I used to belong to this club in New York called Norwood. It was a private club for creatives. And if you know anything about private clubs, it was the anti-Soho house. We used to dance on the couches, like when the owner would go home.

So much fun. I miss Norwood. So I would love to have like a private membership club and not exclusive on a financial basis. It's more exclusive on a creative, are you fun basis slash retreat center. So that's way down the road. We're going to show this hearth talks right here. I am starting with videos.

It will be probably me doing this like a talking head until I get comfortable within a couple months. Hopefully I will start doing interviews. I don't consider myself an expert. I'm a connector, maybe a guide, but I have been on a spiritual and healing journey and I have wanted to write since I was 15 years old.

I have, I'm doing it and I hope I can share my experiences and find ways to help you sort of unblock yourself if you have been fearful of doing that thing you've always wanted to do. So as I said, my creative expression is being an indie writer and an indie publisher. And I don't know if you can see, but these are my first two fiction books, Rock Gods and Messy Monsters and Fallen Spirits.

As I said, I wanted to write fiction. So I was 15. I even have a master's degree in creative writing. I wrote rock gods. Rock gods was originally written in the, I say early 2000s. Got so many rejections. was so just not prepared and devastated.

So I just packed it away, got lost in my career and it was age 59. I lived in Manhattan for 30 years, finally got my ass out of there and moved sight unseen, rented a place online. was locked down, but moved to Santa Fe, didn't know a soul. And after I was here for about a year, I locked myself down and said, I'm doing this. I committed, I committed. I had some money saved.

I don't know why I thought I could buy a place in New York. I mean, maybe 40 years ago, I could have, but I had saved some money. Total aside, my apartment in the East Village like a tenement walk-up, buzzer always broken - they slap some paint on it, cut it into a two bed, bath. It's renting for $6,200 a month!

Someone I just met, her friend on the Upper West Side, she's paying $18,000 a month for what was a rent controlled apartment. Oh, New York—New York has lost its soul.

One of the reasons I'm out here in Santa Fe is there are a lot of creative people. There's a big creative community. the universe has brought me here. okay, I'm talking about me. Sorry about that. So why hearth talks women's midlife review, formerly the midlife crisis. It runs from approximately ages 40 to 65, which surprised me.

Like I'm apparently still in my midlife review, which is true. mean, I can feel it. But it also it's over 50 million of us women are going through this right now or facing a lot of transitions, including regrets over not pursuing a passion, physical and mental effects of perimenopause and menopause.

That includes anxiety, panic, depression, uncontrollable anger and sadness, fatigue, sleeplessness and more. And I guarantee you I've had most of them. If you Google the 34 symptoms of menopause, you will get a list. I was shocked. I thought it was me and it was my hormones.

There's also job and career loss. I was not just pushed out of my job. I was pushed out of my career. It was heartbreaking at the time. It's a blessing. I never would have left. I never would be doing this now. And trust me, I still have days where I'm scared shitless, but I am so proud of myself because I'm doing it. And I keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. And the thing that I keep hearing over and over again, it's perseverance. We need to persevere. If you keep at, keep at, keep at something that you love, you will find success on whatever level that you define success.

Besides job and career loss, there's loss of identity, just feeling lost in general, questioning career relationships and family life, sense of time running out. Now with the sense of time running out, I sort of put it in perspective.

There was this woman in Midtown Manhattan staying in a hotel, had a day of meetings. She's in her bathtub, in the bathtub in the hotel room and you know, she's hanging out and there's a skyscraper next to the hotel that they were building and the crane that, you know, brings all the materials up and down. Just it broke away from the building crashed into the hotel onto the roof onto her head. She died and it just shows you that you never know. So it doesn't matter if you're 90.

I mean, I hate to say it but there are people who are 30 who are not gonna see their 31st birthday, like, we just don't know. So getting over that feeling, and I have it every now and then, I just think, God, did I waste my life? And it's one of the reasons I'm doing Hearth. I'm gonna go down laughing, and I'm gonna go down trying new things. I also believe that we should all do at least one new thing a year, try to get up to three, but just one.

So with this video show, please be patient with me. I'm committing to one video a week. It might take, you know, a couple months for me to get there, or maybe I'll just really get into this and just pump them out. I don't know. So other things besides sense of time running out are divorce and partner changes, aging and change in looks. So my mom, my grandmother, she had these, you know, lines like a lot of women. I mean, it's just normal. And I'm starting to obsess.

And I had a meeting with my healer and I told her that and she just said, I don't see anything. I'm like, oh, that's all I see when I look in the mirror. So my goal is not to fix it. It's part of life. Like these wrinkles, I earn them. I am proud. I am proud. I am proud to sit here in front of you and to say, I am alive and I am me. And I think that all of us should, you know, when you get to 40 and up, ah, man, we did it.

So my goal is to age gracefully. And you know, we all do what we want to do. Let's just say, and I'll talk about my Tony Robbins experiences among many that I've had, I spent $10,000 to go to a week-long Date With Destiny to learn something I already knew, which is I need to love myself first.

So part of it is just to accept myself as I am. I'm digressing. So also there's caregiving responsibilities for children and parents, death of friends and loved ones and children leaving home. So through fun, play and creativity, my hope is that hearth is going to help women like us handle our life transitions with knowledge, grace and a community of like-minded women.

What do I think the outcomes of the show will be? I'm hoping to help women who long for something more find what that is and to take that ember that they have and to help ignite a spark and then encourage them to go out and reignite their lives or to, you know, just go for it. I don't care if you want to make log cabins out of toothpicks, do it, you know, and there'll be a community of women behind you cheering you on.

And I think that is missing for a lot of people. And regarding building community, that's a large part of what I'm hoping to do with Hearth Talks. Like this is not my show, this is our show. I'm hoping that I will be able to interview a lot of you. You know, I think once you get to 40, everyone has a story. I don't care if you think it's interesting or not, I will at least find it interesting.

Let’s celebrate each other. If you go to the Hearth Talks homepage, the channel page on YouTube, there's now a community tab that YouTube has just started. You can post your own videos, your own photos, you can leave comments, essays, know, join us, join the conversation. You can also leave comments below, but I'm sort of hoping we can turn this into a gathering and a conversation, not just me yammering on.

So bottom line, I want us to laugh and to have fun while we're also learning about how to be our best selves as we dance into the best part of our lives. And for some of you, this might sound silly and you might be like, yeah, yeah, fun, fun, fun. But what about, you know, facing retirement and I don't have money. Not that we're going to deal with that, but we want to make you feel less afraid of things.

Fun, play, creativity is how people heal. It does way more to help a person than just reading texts and talk, talk, talk. This is about getting inside you and feeling what's in there and then expressing it. And I would be honored to be part of that in your life. I also want to say, I watched a lot of YouTube videos about how to do a podcast, yada, yada, yada.

And the one thing I keep hearing is nobody cares and nobody's going to watch it. So if one person, my goal is one person to like or comment or to do something. If that happens, I'm a success.

And if that's you, I just want to say, thank you. Thank you so much for being part of hearth and hearth talks and subscribe. Join us, do whatever you want. It's your life. Thank you so much.