The Space in Between: An Empath’s Field Guide

by Signe Myers Hovem

One of the blurbs offered for my book The Space in Between: An Empath’s Field Guide generously states that I “put words to the wordless,” which honestly, was the most gratifying praise I could have received. It also partly explains why it took me so long to write my book—nearly ten years of countless revisions, exploring how to articulate my intuitive sensory existence.

For many empathic persons the world can be confusing and isolating; particularly for those who are unaware that they receive extrasensory information from the environment and unwittingly accept what they feel as their own. Or for those who are aware that they are empathic, yet feel a disconnect due to a lack of definition and understanding of what that means within society. Most dictionaries, in fact, place the origin of “empath” in science fiction and fantasy, which hints at the difficulties people with such sensitivities and abilities face in communicating how they experience the world. 

How do you validate your sensory experiences of feeling emotions, thoughts, and physical discomfort of others when even the dictionary—the authority on language—only affords you an existence in science fiction or fantasy?

The effort of giving language, and thus form, to the nebulous-yet-visceral experiences of an empath undeniably challenged me. My intention throughout my writing process was to demystify the empathic experience for anyone, empath or not, and that meant I needed a way to let the reader into my world. The irony is not lost on me that “world building” is typically a task for fantasy and science fiction writers and not one for a nonfiction writer describing the physical world we all inhabit in the here and now.

And there’s the rub; empathic or not, we don’t all inhabit the same view or perception of the world. Once I recognized that the dictionary’s definition of an empath revealed more about the collective mainstream beliefs and biases than what an empath was, beyond labeling it a paranormal ability, my book’s structure emerged, as did my sense of purpose. I would be a guide to the reader, supported by ancient Greek poet Pindar’s prompt, which has been my personal touchstone and is quoted in the early pages of my book: “Learn who you are and be such.”

How do we, as individuals, learn who we are? From an early age we are told who we are, or who we should be, by our family and our society. Though this telling may be more about safeguards than outright intentional suppression, this standardized approach to life influences the collective perception of what’s true and possible within human experience. Any person who envisions or experiences a contrary reality to the mainstream version will undoubtedly be pushed to question personal truths. At the very least, they will be challenged to be authentic in a world of conformity.

Self-awareness and acceptance are pivotal mindsets that, once embodied, open life up to self-actualization and authenticity. For an empath, that journey involves an evolutionary arc from being an overly sensitive person trying to survive in their environment by feeling separate, to becoming an engaged and functional empath who witnesses what’s out of balance and honors that connection. Along this arc is gaining the understanding that the physical world is an energetic expression. Intuition’s wheelhouse is the ability to sense the energetic realm, which is how an empath can sense others’ displaced and unprocessed emotions, thoughts and physical discomfort.

Writing The Space in Between: An Empath’s Field Guide , I needed readers to grasp a unified sensory system that includes intuition—while removing the science fiction and fantasy bias. To build awareness of our relationship to the energetic world, I created field guides for five different landscapes: The Field of Reflection, The Field of Definition, The Field of Sensing, The Field of Experience and Awareness, and the Field of Mystery. Each of these fields provided me with insight and movement in my own journey toward a balanced perception of the world and my place in it as an empathic person, wired for extrasensory reception and connection.  

I hope readers, empath or not, will embrace the inherent wisdom offered by an empathic nature: the fundamental truth that we are sensory, energetic, creative, and multi-dimensional beings; and we are all connected.

The Space in Between: An Empath’s Field Guide offers questions for reflection at the end of each chapter, inviting the reader to understand their own sensitivities, their own capacity to care for themselves and others, and to embrace the larger conversation their sensory nature holds with the world and humanity. I hope they feel seen, heard and witnessed as I name and define my experience as an empath.

Signe Myers Hovem is the author of The Space in Between: An Empath’s Field Guide . She has created homes on five continents over twenty years, raised four uniquely sensitive children, pursued a special education lawsuit appealed to the US Supreme Court, volunteered in a hospice in Texas and an orphanage in Azerbaijan, worked as a spiritual counselor in Houston Texas, and taught workshops and trainings in the art of being an empath and the power of language in many countries around the world. She splits her time between Boulder, Colorado, andOslo, Norway. For more information, please visit https://www.smhovem.com

Lyn Liao Butler on Debuting During the Pandemic & Research When Writing Literature of Place

Today's guest is Lyn Liao Butler, author of The Tiger Mom's Tale and the upcoming Red Thread of Fate. Lyn joined me today to talk about the experience of debuting during the pandemic, how having an active lifestyle helps with her writing and mind / body balance, as well as how important research is when writing in a specific setting.

Listen to the Episode Now

Putting the Main Character’s Sexual and Gender Identity in the Reader’s Hands

By Kazim Ali

Making Krishi, the main character of my new Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, The Citadel of Whispers, a gender-neutral character was never supposed to be a big deal. In the classic line of books, the protagonist characters—the character the reader assumed the persona of—was always written as gender neutral. It was the marketing and art departments of the original publisher that had to make decisions about what the cover would look like and what the internal art would look like. It was felt at the time that though girls might read a book with a boy protagonist the reverse might not be true. While most of those early books depicted a boy in the cover art and internal art, the text itself never really gendered the character by either behavior, appearance, or in the action of the text.

It was a short leap from that concept to the notion that characters themselves in the book might have various relationships to gender. Not only did I carefully construct the main character, Krishi, as someone who could either be identified as a boy, a girl, or gender neutral, but other characters in the book also have different relationships to classic gender stereotypes and to fantasy stereotypes as well. For example, Krishi’s two main friends have abilities different that one might expect. Zara, a girl, is the best fighter in the school but is also upset at having to cut her long hair to conform to the gender-neutral appearance that all Whisperers are expected to have in order to be better spies. Saeed, a small boy, is often thought of as physically weak but at several points in the story he manages to defeat fighters bigger and stronger than him by his cunning. 

Tough independent girls appeared many times before in children’s literature of course, but it was probably Sally Kimball, created by Donald J. Sobol as part of his Encyclopedia Brown series, who was the first real bruiser. She was 10 years but often bested larger boys, often giving 14-year-old Bugs Meany an actual black eye to match the metaphorical black eye he got when Encyclopedia exposed his role in various petty crimes. Sally wasn’t a well-rounded hero. She was the muscle to Encyclopedia’s fey, retiring brains. It’s interesting to note that the not-quite-feminist icon Buffy Summers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was also not overly noted for their intelligence. The first round of girl action heroes could be as buff and butch as the boys but she couldn’t have it all.  

The Whisperers in The Citadel of Whispers, know that in their work they have to be able to pass as anything. The book actually opens with a martial arts class in which the students—boys and girls and everyone else—have to engage in combat while corseted into restrictive dresses. Their normal clothes are gender neutral tunics and pants, and their hair must be uniformly shoulder length, neither longer nor shorter. Other characters in the book also defy gender expectations. The combat teacher is an athletic woman, while the dance instructor is a slim man; the rogue-like pirate ship captain (think the Han Solo-type) is a sixty-something year old woman with a penchant for taking swigs out of a flask and smoking tobacco from a long pipe.

 Since fantasy is a genre with such historic tropes (around both race and gender), I knew I couldn’t write a story with the same figures. Princess Leia of Star Wars is a warrior woman for sure (I once heard that if you calculate the ratio of shots fired to successful hits, Leia is the best shot of all the characters in the series), but her primary attribute in the original trilogy still leaned into the traditional role of damsel in distress in need of rescue. It wasn’t until the sequel trilogy that the world around her had evolved enough for her to be fully depicted at what was only winked at in a few scenes of the original: she was the political and military leader of the resistance.

I also wanted to work against the norm of most fantasy milieux: a pseudo medieval European context in terms of the castles, the costumes, the social roles. Rather than Tolkien or Lewis (or Brooks or Eddings, who drew from those two), I drew instead upon the wonderful Amar Chitra Katha comics of my childhood, describing Indian architecture and giving most—but not all—the characters Indian names. Innovation is also a firm tradition in speculative fiction. When Anne McCaffrey created her world of the dragonriders of Pern with the first novel in 1968, she created a matriarchal political structure in which homosexuality was an ordinary part of life. The characters who disapproved of it were seen is reactionary and out of touch and were almost always villainous in the context of the story.

Like Krishi, most characters in The Citadel of Whispers, have their own relationship to gender, some more traditional—like Sandhya, the martial arts instructor, or Etheldreda, a gardener with big plans—and others, like the master Whisperer Shivani or the sullen new student Arjun, each disrupt expectations a reader might have. There are trans characters, revealed as such in the text, and others might be read that way. There is at least one character who is written as a drag performer, but is not revealed that way in the text. Hey, I have to save something for Book 2!

In the end, the point was not to be “political” about gender but to be inclusive. The point was to write a book that any boy or girl could read and not feel excluded from, more importantly any young person who had a complicated relationship to their own gender, or wasn’t sure what it meant to them, could read this book as well and feel that they had a home in it. An imagined world ought to include everyone with an imagination.

KAZIM ALI is an award-winning LGBTQ+ author and the Chair of the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His new book The Citadel of Whispers,, is available now. Learn more on his website kazimali.com