Episode Details

What if the reason it's so hard to let go of your stuff isn't that you're disorganized—but that you're a really good storyteller?

In this episode of Clutter Free Academy, Kathi Lipp brings together three of her great loves—decluttering, writing, and her longtime friend Susy Flory—for a conversation about the one skill most cluttery people are missing. Kathi's theory? People with clutter aren't bad at storytelling. Pick up almost anything in a cluttered home and the owner can tell you exactly where it came from, who gave it to them, and why it matters. The struggle isn't the story. It's the editing.

Susy Flory is a memoirist, collaborator on two New York Times bestsellers, and the founder of Shake Ridge Press, a publishing house devoted to true stories by real people. Her actual job is deciding what stays in the story and what gets cut—which turns out to be exactly what listeners need to learn to do in their homes.

Your Home Is Telling a Story. Is It the One You Want to Tell?

Kathi and Susy talk about how a home—like a book—can get so crowded with "good stuff" that the reader (or the guest, or you) can't find the heart of it. As Susy puts it, when there's too much in a space, "it's just a pile rather than a storyteller." The goal isn't an empty house. The goal is a home where the things you kept can actually be seen.

In This Episode, Listeners Will Learn:

• Why the object isn't always where the story lives—and how that realization makes letting go so much easier
• The simple, low-tech tool Susy uses to decide what makes the cut (hint: it involves a pen and paper, not a system)
• How to handle the inherited things that don't actually tell the story of the person who gave them to you
• What to do with that mishmash box of photos, letters, and journals someone left behind
• Why "edit one scene at a time" translates perfectly to "one shelf, one drawer at a time"
• How to "shop your own house" for meaningful pieces instead of buying something a thousand other people already own
• Kathi's seasonal rotation trick that keeps sentimental items special instead of letting them fade into background clutter
• Why outside validation—a safe community—matters just as much in decluttering as it does in writing

Permission to Let the Good Stuff Go

Writers have a phrase for this: murder your darlings. Sometimes you have to release even the really, really good stuff to get what you actually want. Kathi shares that after years of editing both books and her own home, she rarely regrets what she's let go—and Susy explains why imagination, not willpower, is the tool that finally gets you unstuck.

Kathi also gets a preview of the first three memoirs coming out of Shake Ridge Press—stories of a Green Beret who decluttered parts of himself to learn to lead with love, a mom and her autistic adult son on a journey to bring his father home, and a preacher's daughter raising the rule-breaking boy who grew up to become a beloved professional wrestler.

Whether you consider yourself a writer or not, this episode offers a fresh, gracious way to look at the stuff in your home: not as a moral failing, but as a first draft. And every first draft gets to be edited.