I've chatted to High Priestess Kim Gardner, continuing my interview series Authors on Their Own Writing. Kim talks about her new book,
Carpo, and her personal journey of healing trauma through working with the goddess of autumn, ripening, and empowerment:
Q: Out of all that you've written, which is your favorite published work?
A: Without hesitation, it’s my work on Carpo.
Every writer has pieces they are proud of intellectually, frameworks that are airtight, arguments that are sharp, prose that does its job. But Carpo is different. It’s the work where I stopped writing from behind a professional shield and put my actual heartbeat onto the page. It wasn't built from detached analysis. It was pulled straight out of lived survival, meaning it asked far more of me than anything else I've ever put into print.
Q: What’s it about?
A: On the surface, the book traces the mythic footprint of Carpo, one of the ancient Greek Horae who presided over autumn, the harvest, and the quiet ripening of the earth. In mythology, autumn isn’t merely about abundance, it is the season of descent, of turning inward, of shedding what cannot survive the coming winter.
Beneath that archetypal frame, however, the book is a deeply intimate chronicle of walking through the terrain of Complex PTSD and ADHD.
Trauma fragments our relationship with time and safety. Neurodivergence often makes a rigid world feel like a constant friction burn. For years, living at that intersection felt like carrying an invisible storm. Carpo became my way of making sense of that storm. The book explores what happens when we stop treating our wounds and neurodivergent brains as deficits to outrun, and instead approach them through the lens of ripening, recognizing that true healing isn't linear, that gathering our fragmented pieces takes its own season, and that genuine self-reclamation only happens when we learn to sit with our hardest truths without turning away.
Q: Why is it your favourite?
A: Because there was nowhere left to hide, and that terrifying exposure became my greatest source of freedom.
In my professional life, competence is often measured by control, poise, and having the answers. Writing Carpo demanded the exact opposite. It forced me to strip away every polished layer of defense and speak candidly about dissociation, emotional dysregulation, hypervigilance, and the profound exhaustion of masking just to get through a day.
It is my favourite because it turned private grief and internal chaos into tangible medicine. When you take the experiences that made you feel most isolated and broken, lay them bare, and discover they resonate as a roadmap for someone else’s healing, the pain transforms. It gave purpose to every dark corridor I had to walk through.
Q: Tell me a bit more about yourself and anything else you’ve written.
A: My life and craft exist at a crossroads where organizational discipline meets deep, unvarnished human truth.
Professionally, I’ve spent over two decades in human resources and strategic leadership, stepping into complex, high stakes environments to untangle organisational knots. My work focuses on building cultures rooted in psychological safety, operational clarity, and accountability. I help leaders bridge the painful divides between field reality and executive intention. Much of my writing in that space explores the hidden drag on human potential: the silent friction, unaddressed conflict, and organizational latency that stall execution.
Yet the older I get, the clearer it becomes that we never leave our humanity at the office door. I recently published a book exploring precisely this dynamic: the quiet, pervasive ways our unexamined life experiences, developmental wounds, and survival strategies follow us straight into boardrooms, project sites, and team dynamics. We often disguise our trauma responses as perfectionism, hyper-independence, or conflict avoidance, wondering why our work environments burn us out. My writing aims to give people the language to see those mirrors clearly, bridging the gap between internal self-awareness and how we actually lead and collaborate in the real world.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m currently writing the natural continuation of this seasonal journey: a book centered on Thallo, the goddess of spring, blossoming, and Carpo’s mythic sister.
If Carpo represents the autumn work, the descent into the soil, facing the shadows, gathering the harvest, and learning how to endure the pruning, Thallo is about what happens when life insists on returning. It explores the vulnerability of breaking through the frozen ground, navigating the tender uncertainty of renewal, and stepping boldly into bloom after trauma. It’s an exploration of emergent potential. It is about what it takes to stop merely surviving the winter, and instead learn how to inhabit your full, vibrant expansion.
Carpo is published by Moon Books in the Pagan Portals series, and you can find the details here. It's due to reach shops in November but can be pre-ordered now.
You can also view Carpo on Amazon.
(Please note: I earn commission from some links)
Previous related posts
https://www.badwitch.co.uk/2026/07/authors-on-their-writing-feminist-witch.html
https://www.badwitch.co.uk/2026/08/author-interview-irish-writer-geraldine.html
https://www.badwitch.co.uk/2026/07/authors-on-their-own-writing-green.html
https://www.badwitch.co.uk/2026/09/authors-on-their-writing-primis-nati-on.html
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