{Note from me: I’m delighted to feature again a favorite guest of mine, author Lisa McKay. Lisa is a psychologist who specializes in stress, trauma and resilience. She’s also written a novel, a memoir, and several dating resources, while  her essays have appeared in a number of magazines. She currently lives in Vanuatu with her husband and two sons.}

Lisa, welcome back! Last time we connected, I’d just read your memoir, Love at the Speed of Email. Engaging, funny, honest, and deeply real, it remains one of my favorite memoirs. In it you explore several themes, one of which is love and romance at long distance. But the theme that continues to resonate with me is your search for home. How did you come to realize that this was the beating heart of your story?

Thanks so much for having me, and for your lovely words about the memoir. I loved writing this book, and I’m so thrilled that it has found so many of its “tribe” in the last two years.

I also love this question, because this theme around the search for home was not just the beating heart of the story for me—it was the whole reason I wrote the book in the first place!

After my first novel was published, when I was trying to decide what I wanted to write next, the topic that I kept coming back to and circling around was this search for home. I was so confused by the word home, and I felt driven to try to understand the whole concept of what home meant to me. I generally come to understand things in my life by writing about them, so I set out to write a memoir about the search for home.

It wasn’t until the third draft of the book that I decided to structure it around the very strange and romantic tale of how Mike and I met, and to explore issues about home within that structure.

So, you ended up marrying the guy you fell in love via email. And now you’ve co-written a book to help others who find themselves in a long distance relationship (LDR). How did that project come about?

After the memoir came out, I started to think about creative ways I could help market it. Since there is so much about long distance relationships in that book, and because that’s something I know a lot about, I decided to try to reach other couples by writing a book of discussion questions for couples in long distance relationships. I included the first chapter of my memoir in the back of that little book as a teaser.

Oddly, that little book of discussion questions for couples that Mike and I collaborated on three years ago has since earned at least twice as much money as the memoir. It consistently ranks in the “Family Activities” and “Parenting & Relationships” categories on Amazon. It has way out-sold every other book I’ve self-published.

Just recently took a look at this book of discussion questions and decided that it was OK, but not awesome. Then I decided that anything I had written that people were buying, using, and already really liking deserved to be AWESOME instead of just OK.

So I’ve re-written it to make it awesome.

Instead of 201 Discussion Questions For Couples, this book is now 401 Discussion Questions For Couples. It’s longer, stronger, tighter, funnier, and way more awesome.

[Tweet “Are you or someone you know in an LDR (Long Distance Relationship)? @LMWriting can help”]

You’ve written another resource that could be helpful for those not necessarily dating long distance: Online Dating Smarts: 99 Important Questions to Ask Someone You Meet on the Internet. The relevance of this should be self-evident, but what makes you an expert?

Practice, I guess. 🙂 I didn’t meet my husband until I was 31, and I met a lot of other people in the meantime, many of them via the internet first.

I think that sometimes when you meet people online you can “skip” a couple of “stages” that you go through if you meet face to face. If you connect with someone online you can forget to cover some of the basics, and you can imagine all sorts of things about the other person that may not (and often don’t) turn out to be true. So that’s why I wrote this little primer on internet dating, and another book for couples in long distance relationship: From Stranger To Lover: 16 Strategies For Building A Great Relationship Long Distance.

But before your memoir and then LDR guide books, you burst onto the publishing scene with your novel, My Hands Came Away Red. You wrote that book over a decade ago. Is there another novel in you waiting to be birthed?

Yes, I think so, probably more than one, but not quite yet. Having the boys (now 2 and 4) completely destroyed my sleep and eroded the big chunks of time I used to devote to creative writing. This is not how it works for many other writers. I know some people who write entire novels during the first year of their first-born’s life (cue the envy). I’m almost five years into this parenting gig, and I’m just starting to feel glimmers of energy and creativity for longer-form creative-writing project returning.

Speaking of birth, you’ve added another boy to the mix since we last connected. Tell us about your fam, where you are these days, and why.

Dominic is four now, and Alex is two. My husband, Mike, is the Country Director for World Vision Vanuatu, so we live here in Port Vila. We’ve been here just over a year. Mike took up his job a mere two and a half weeks before Cyclone Pam (the strongest cyclone that had ever been recorded in the Pacific at that point) destroyed much of the country. It wasn’t quite the introduction to South Pacific living we were anticipating!

As a wife, mom, blogger, psychologist living in Vanuatu, how do you see yourself making a world of difference?

Living here has provided me with some unusual opportunities to connect directly with people in need and help make a different in their lives. After Cyclone Pam, many of my friends and family gave money to help our house-lady, Cynthia, and her family start to rebuild their house, which was destroyed in the cyclone. And right now I’m helping that family start a sea-glass jewelry business to make extra income. I’m really excited about the potential this has to change their lives.

But on a day-to-day basis, I’m mostly focused on the same sort of stuff that would occupy me if we were living in Australia or the US. It’s all very dramatic-sounding to say, “we live on an island in the South Pacific”, but the reality is that most of the time I’m focused on running the website, doing my consulting work, grocery shopping, what I’m going to make for dinner, getting kids through the bath, and trying to drum up the time and discipline to get some exercise in the midst of it all. And the sort of “difference” I get to make varies widely across those different domains.

By running the long distance relationship website I (hopefully) get to help couples struggling to connect well across the miles. When I’m working with aid agencies, I hope some of the materials I write help people think about resilience and well-being and how to build those qualities in hard settings.  And as a mother (by far my most difficult, confusing, and important job) I hope to make a difference in the two little lives in our charge.

For those of us who claim a slightly less nomadic, globetrotting lifestyle than you do, how can we nonetheless make a world of difference in our ordinary day-to-day?

Great question, and this is totally related to what I was just talking about.

We all have people in our lives we love and care for—family and other friends. Most of us have jobs of some sort. I think it’s those things close to us—the ones that feel so ordinary most of the time—those are the areas where we make a world of difference in the long haul. It might not be a world of difference filled with drama and set in a refugee camp, but it is still a world that matters. And it’s easy to neglect that world of right now if we’re too focused on the future, or if we spend too much time wishing that our lives were different.

I’m not saying that thinking about the future is bad, or that we shouldn’t spend time thinking about whether we think that what we’re doing with our lives and our days really matters (and, if not, how we want to go about changing that). Those are important things. But I guess what I’m mostly trying to say here is that we should also look at each ordinary day as an opportunity to make a positive difference to the people in our path that day.

Thank you, Lisa! A pleasure to have you here, as always. 

To read other posts with Lisa on my blog, click here, here, and here. You can connect with Lisa online at LisaMcKayWriting.com.

After words: Friends, have you ever carried on a LDR (long-distance relationship)? What happened? Advice?