Writer’s Block: Heather Hendrie

ALL LIT UP: Tell us about your book Where the Eff is My Red Tent. What can readers expect?

HEATHER HENDRIE: Where the Eff is My Red Tent is the book I always needed. It contains the answers I desperately sought for decades. On its pages, I have gathered my experience and painfully-earned wisdom. My greatest hope is that anyone who, like me, has Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) and didn’t know it, will find this book, and through its pages, find both solace and solutions. I don’t want anyone to have to have to secretly suffer these ups and downs, alone.

Written through the lens of my own lived experience, this book traces a life impacted by cyclical despair, rage, overwhelm, and at its root, an invisible culprit that I didn’t know how to name. For years, lacking the information and the supports I really needed, I did my best to override, minimize, medicate, invalidate, and endure symptoms that, at times, made life feel impossible. For decades, I believed something was fundamentally wrong with me. What I eventually learned was that something was wrong, but it was never me; it was the systems meant to support me.

Through an intimate blend of memoir and cultural critique, Where the Eff is My Red Tent asks what we lose when menstruation is made invisible or stripped of meaning, when cyclical bodies are forced to perform as if they are linear, and the suffering that continues under harmful systems when root causes are neither understood, nor addressed. The longing for the “red tent” becomes symbolic of the care, community, and answers so desperately needed, and so long suppressed. 

This book is for anyone living in a body that moves in waves rather than straight lines—for those who feel themselves vanish and return each month without language or witness, and for those who love them. Where the Eff is My Red Tent is not a guide, nor a self-help manual. It is a love letter to those who are suffering. It is a naming. A remembering. And a quiet invitation to stop blaming ourselves for what was never our fault in the first place.

ALU: Is there one stand-out moment or experience you had that helped you realize you wanted to become writer?

HEATHER: Not really. I’ve always known I needed to write, but I didn’t realize exactly what I had to write. I also always knew that the most important book I had to write would be memoir, so for years I scrawled out my cyclical suffering in page after page of my journals.

Looking back, I now know that I had to find the answers, and to get safely to shore myself before I could write this particular book for others. I had to live the story first. In therapist-speak (the other hat I wear), I could say that I had to move into the post-traumatic growth phase of my journey before being equipped to truly offer guidance in a supportive way to others.

ALU: Why do you write?

HEATHER: I was basically born with a crayon in my hand and have collected words ever since.

In my earlier life, I loved to write poetry. After getting my first period, my writing changed dramatically, and I started to write for my life, for survival. I wrote in loops, repeating the same things, time and again, truly a reflection of what my brain was doing in those days. At the time, I knew of no better way to try to understand what kept intermittently happening to my brain and to my body so I filled journal after journal with my distress, and my occasional, monthly epiphanies. I’d scrawl out my anger and pain to try to process and release it, and highlight the brief glimpses of peace, wisdom and calm that I’d find after each period, highlighting these bits I’d strive to remember and to hold onto for the next month, for the next time the wheels fell off.

Now that I’m well, I write in order to connect with, support and offer peace to others. My hope is that through my stories, they may find their way to shore sooner.

ALU: Which writers have had the most impact on your own writing?

HEATHER: I’ve been influenced by so many books and writers over the years and am a longtime lover of bookstores and libraries. One great joy of having published my Awfully Hilarious anthology series is that it has brought me back into deeper connection with the world of words, writers, and books!

If I had to choose just a few of the writers who have been most influential in terms of this latest book, I’d say it’s Glennon Doyle through her book Untamed; Elizabeth Gilbert, and in particular her latest book, All the Way to the River; Brene Brown with The Gifts of Imperfection; Augusten Burroughs with everything he’s ever written; and always, always, the work of the mystics, the dreamers, and the nature poets, like Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, and Gary Snyder.*

(On that note, I likely wouldn’t be where I am today without the influence of all the beat poets—I did attend Naropa University, after all!)

*I also can’t get enough of Joy Harjo, Terry Tempest Williams, and Rainer Maria Rilke—the list goes on!

Heather Hendrie is an award-winning author and founder of the Awfully Hilarious project that arose to smash stigma with humour. Heather lives in Whistler, British Columbia, where she can be found in the forest walking on trail with clients through her True Nature Wilderness Therapy clinical counselling practice. Heather celebrates joy and play daily—and her inner child insists on wearing all her favourite patterns at once!