Sept. 2, 2025

Healing Through Words: Kelly Watt's Journey from Trauma to Transformation

Send us a text In this heartfelt episode of Living the Dream with Curveball, we welcome international Amazon bestselling author and poet Kelly Watt. Kelly opens up about her transformative journey through trauma, using her writing as a powerful tool for healing. She discusses her latest work, "The Weeping Degree: How Astrology Saved Me from Suicide," a poignant collection that explores the lingering effects of childhood abandonment and sexual abuse. With a focus on the themes of trauma, heali...

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Send us a text

In this heartfelt episode of Living the Dream with Curveball, we welcome international Amazon bestselling author and poet Kelly Watt. Kelly opens up about her transformative journey through trauma, using her writing as a powerful tool for healing. She discusses her latest work, "The Weeping Degree: How Astrology Saved Me from Suicide," a poignant collection that explores the lingering effects of childhood abandonment and sexual abuse. With a focus on the themes of trauma, healing, and the redemptive power of storytelling, Kelly shares her experiences with astrology, Buddhism, and various healing modalities that have shaped her path. Listeners will gain insights into the importance of community, activism, and the art of writing as a means to process pain and foster empathy. Join us for an inspiring conversation that underscores the belief that our wounds can ultimately become our greatest gifts. Don’t miss out on Kelly’s insights and her upcoming projects, which promise to further enrich her readers' lives.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Welcome to the Living the Dream podcast with Curveball. if you believe you can achieve.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Welcome to the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, a show where I interview guests that teach, motivate and inspire. Today I am joined by international Amazon best selling author and poetry, Kelly Watt. Kelly writes about trauma and she uses her writings and poetry to talk about trauma and their effects and how to help people get through it. So we're going to be talking to her about everything that she's doing and everything that she's up to.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>So, Kelly, thank you so much for joining me.

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> Kelly Watt>Thank you so much for having me, Curtis. It's a pleasure to be here. And thank you for the introduction.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Oh, yeah, I appreciate it.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

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> Kelly Watt>Sure. so I'm a writer. I was born in Canada and, I'm the author of three books. My first novel was called Mad Dog and I did a second travel book called Camino Meditations. But I'll be talking about my third book, today, which is a collection, as you were saying, of poetry and, flash prosecution called the Weeping Degree. And, the Weeping Degree, its full title is how the Weeping Degree, How Astrology Saved Me from Suicide. And it tells the history of a trauma following the ripple effect of childhood abandonment and sexual abuse as it echoes throughout the narrator's life.

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> Kelly Watt>So I use my own life, of course, as a template, and the theme of the book is that trauma slowly transforms through time and healing from a wound to a gift. And I try to explore many avenues of healing in the book, which I did in my own life. And astrology and Buddhism are paramount, I think.

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> Kelly Watt>so you can think of me too. Hashtag mental health awareness. And a lot of the book is about coming to terms with the lingering effect of violence, which is, something many people, experience this life.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Yeah.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, talk to the listeners about how you got into writing in the first place.

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> Kelly Watt>Ah, that's a good question. Yeah. So how do they get. You know, I really started writing from a very young age.

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> Kelly Watt>And, I was taught to read on the books of Dr. Seuss, which people might. That, that will date me somewhat. And, I, I spent my early childhood in an unofficial foster situation. My mother was a single mom and had to work, of course, and, I didn't have a father in the picture at that time. And one of the positives, you know, it's funny, there's often a silver lining in things that are not so great in our lives. And of Course, I didn't want to live away from my mother.

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> Kelly Watt>But I did live, in, as I said, unofficial foster care from Sunday nights to Fridays. And in this one particular home that I was in, I, remember being very upset one day and, the caregiver taking me into a room which was the playroom. And on one wall of the playroom was a, library of books. And she said to me, one day you'll learn how to read these books, and you'll get to travel the world. It's a way of.

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> Kelly Watt>Books are a way of experiencing other people's experiences, a way of broadening our own scope and a way of, developing, I think, compassion for ourselves and for others. And I was intrigued by that. And, I remember just being in awe of those books at that time and.

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> Kelly Watt>And saying, you know, one day I'm going to read these books. I'm going to.

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> Kelly Watt>And as I got older, of course, then I wanted to write them.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, you turned it. You turned to astrology and poetry to heal your past. So talk to the listeners about that decision and why you decided to do that.

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> Kelly Watt>Yeah. Yeah. So, Yeah, first I'll digress, a little bit.

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> Kelly Watt>The book is called the Weeping Degree. And the Weeping Degree is an astrological term, and it refers to the 28th to 30th degree, or the last little section in an individual's, astrological chart, or rather each planet in astrology. You know, the. The chart is, of course, a circle. And we have different planets and different parts of that circle.

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> Kelly Watt>Everyone's individual in that way. And the very last section of a. Of a house is called the Weeping Degree. And it's. It refers to a time of descent or demise. It kind of marks the place where everything falls apart. You know, relationships flounder. Our, dreams are lost before the new energy comes forth, the new life bursts forth. And so the 29th degree kind of forms a theme and a spine of the book where the most devastating of experiences, those that elicit the most tears, often paradoxically, provide the richest soil for change and new growth.

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> Kelly Watt>And when I was going through a very difficult time in my life, I was quite depressed and suicidal. I friend, encouraged, me to go see an astrologer. And what was interesting about that experience for me is the astrologer said to me, this is a very difficult chart that you have. You have a very difficult path and particularly early in life, but later in life, your life will improve.

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> Kelly Watt>And if you embrace, healing these difficulties in your Life, they will transform.

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> Kelly Watt>And it gave me hope and it also gave me a sense that the universe was a benevolent, benevolent place, that things were working themselves out in time and I needed to have faith I guess, and stay the course. So I started working on this book many, many years ago. I often, I loved that term, I love astrology terms. And you know, in every school of thought, every philosophy, there's different language. And the language can be really, interesting and provocative. And I thought, oh gosh, I really want to write a book about the weeping degree and how we all go through these times, you know, where things fall apart, where things fall away from us and how do we get through them.

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> Kelly Watt>But I started out trying to do it as a non fiction book and it just, just never really gelled. And then the pandemic came along and again my friend who was the astrologer said to me, you know, if you would turn your mind to writing poetry, I think you might find it will come quite, it will flow quite nicely for you if you take that risk.

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> Kelly Watt>And I thought, oh gosh, you know, it's. I've been writing nonfiction, I've been writing novels. So this was a real pivot. But of course everyone was pivoting during the pandemic. And I joined a poetry community online, started taking poetry courses with a wonderful American poet named Judith Hill. And ended up becoming a part of this wonderful community. And we brought all our poems together. And as soon as I started taking this course with her, the poem started flowing. And the class was called Manuscript Clan, I think.

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> Kelly Watt>And it was for people who had been collecting their poems for a long time. And I said, judith, I haven't been collecting poems. I stopped writing poetry when I was 17. But I want to try my hand at it. I want to come back to it. And I have this idea for a book. And she said, just come, just do it. And I think the, the pressure partly of having to write every week, just, you know, just galvanized me, just set off that spark. And so I was able to write and just let it flow and it really just fell onto the page in a very short period of time.

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> Kelly Watt>And the other part of it too was that we had this wonderful poetry community of like minded souls all coming together from, you know, very various different places, Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. And yeah, we were all sharing, you know, our love of the word and our experiences in life, some of our deepest and darkest experiences. And it was a, it was a really healing, it was A really healing experience. A really wonderful experience. And that's how the. How the book was born, essentially.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>What are some of the other healing tools that you used on your journey?

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> Kelly Watt>Oh, my gosh. Yeah. So many. So, the book is divided into three parts. I can. I can maybe riff off this. The first part is called the Home for Little Girls, and it's about, trauma and separation, from a parent.

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> Kelly Watt>And the second part is called the Buddha and the Pink Futon, which is about the geographical cure and traveling the world. And, I was very fortunate to, Oh, and the third part I should finish off was called. Is called Hands across the World, which is about people coming together and sharing their stories and how collectively we heal one another.

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> Kelly Watt>But the Buddha and the Pink Futon refers, to a time in my life where I was very fortunate to go to, do my last year of high school in an American school, missionary school in the Himalayas in India. And I ended out after that in a Buddhist monastery and started studying meditation. And that was my first inkling into the fact that my, mind was really beset with incredible fears and, meditation, sitting in the tent, learning to just be with my own thoughts and to be kind to myself. Kind of open that door of consciousness. And I began to remember, basically a lot of the things that had happened to me. So. So Buddhism and meditation was kind of the first door, I think, that I walked through. And one of the things I discovered, of course, when I was sitting with my own thoughts was that, you know, I had a lot of emotional distress and I needed to deal with that. And that led me into getting into therapy, psychotherapy, and m.

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> Kelly Watt>I was in psychotherapy for many, many years. Many, many years.

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> Kelly Watt>Decades. And that really changed my life.

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> Kelly Watt>And I also got involved in feminism and feminist spirituality. And so it took me on that healing journey was really, in many ways the greatest gift of my life, ironically. And, I feel quite grateful to it. And in the end, the last technique probably that I learned, and this I actually learned from myself was, eft, which is emotional freedom technique. And. And that really, Other people might know of it as tapping. It's kind of like psychological, acupuncture, I like to call it. That's a quick way of describing it. And that really helped to shift, the energy, the stuck energy. And Yeah, it was kind of a closing healing section for myself. It really helped me to let go of places that I felt that I was really stuck.

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> Kelly Watt>Really old fears, phobias. I had A terrible phobia for many years, and also, you know, anger and resentment. So, this.

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> Kelly Watt>Our. This whole last three decades in the world, I would say, has been an explosion of healing modalities out there for trauma survivors. And, in many ways, these modalities are a real gift to people around the world. I really think that violence is, It's like that Denzel Washington, movie, you know, where people pass violence from person to person. I think that that's. That's true. And that when we heal ourselves, we really heal the world and everyone around us.

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> Kelly Watt>And there's many ways to do that. And of course, writing is.

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> Kelly Watt>Is a part of that too. They say that, there's all kinds of studies out there now saying that literature, particularly fiction, which I thought was really interesting, increases people's empathy and tolerance and understanding for one another.

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> Kelly Watt>And certainly we need that now, I think, in the world, and maybe we've always needed it.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, you've also used activism as a method of healing as well.

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> Kelly Watt>Yes, that's true. I'd forgotten to mention that I, At a certain point, in my healing journey, I connected with two wonderful women activists, and they were dealing with, They were traveling to the UN and speaking about, human trafficking, the violence that young children experience. And we gave several talks at the un. We were at the. I, think it was the, 2006. We presented at, a symposium based on violence against the girl child. And it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. We were in New York City and there were over 6,000 people there. You know, women from all around the world, all different colors, all different backgrounds, all different clothing. And it was just this gathering, you know, all these altruistic people who are there essentially just to make the world a better place. And it was, yeah, one of the highlights of my life to speak there. And, very, very moving to meet all these other women and all these people who really are working for the benefit of the planet.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, tell us about any upcoming projects that you're working on that listeners need to be aware of.

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> Kelly Watt>Yeah, yeah.

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> Kelly Watt>got a couple of things coming up.

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> Kelly Watt>I'm just up north right now. I don't know if you can hear. Somebody's just turned on their lawnmower. So anyway, I hope. You hope it's not, It's not too loud. So, I'll be reading at the Artist House in Ottawa, Ontario in September, and there'll be an open mic afterwards. And I want to encourage people to go to my website because I list all of my upcoming events there@www.kellywatt.ca.

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> Kelly Watt>and I'll also be hosting a flash prose class titled finding your epiphany in September on Zoom. So if people want to sign up for my newsletter there, I will be sending them the details about that. And you can also follow me on Facebook or Instagram.

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> Kelly Watt>Elliewhatt author and my book the Weeping Degree is available on Amazon and also in Spark. And I'm working on a new novel. it's a war novel actually.

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> Kelly Watt>So yeah, I've got a couple of projects on the go.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, talk to the listeners real quick. I know you're an international Amazon best selling author, but, but talk to the listeners about the awards you have gotten for your, your writings.

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> Kelly Watt>Oh, thank you. Yes, thank you. I was very fortunate to have the book that we've integrated to come an International Amazon Bestseller, August 2024. And really I have to thank my fans and friends and family who really were just so supportive in coming out and buying the book. That's of course what makes a book a bestseller and you know, writing many, many people, many people put in an effort to make a book a success. The book also went on to become a finalist in the Wishing shell Book awards in the uk And I was really thrilled about that as well.

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> Kelly Watt>my, yeah, my, I also won short story awards and things for shorter pieces of fiction and non fiction and been a long list on the long list several times with the CBC here in Canada. So yeah, I'm grateful to have ah, had a lot of support around this book particularly and it's really been a lot of fun. I've been on a podcast tour for the last couple of months and it's really been a lot of fun to speak to people about healing, about writing about all the things that I love.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, throughout your website again and also close us out with some final thoughts. Maybe if that was something I forgot to talk about that you would like to touch on any final thoughts you have for the listeners.

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> Kelly Watt>Yeah, sure. So once again, you know, at. Kelly Watt author, please follow me on Instagram. I like to post my favorite quotes and my favorite poets and you can also sign up for my newsletter@ah, www.kellywatt.ca and I just want to say, you know, ah, the message of the book that I wanted to leave with readers and listeners is that ultimately I think the universe is a benevolent place. It's, it's people that kind of mess it up and that it is possible to crawl out from despair that our we can heal our wounds and in time they will become our gifts. And this is one of the reasons why I really loved your tagline. If you believe you can achieve. I think, first you just have to have that belief and to start and act as if. So I wish everyone well out there.

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> Kelly Watt>And thank you so much, Curtis, for having me today.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Oh, well, thank you for coming on. And listeners, please be sure to check out Kelly's writings. They are great and amazing. Follow us on your favorite podcast platform and visit www.craveball, uh337.com for more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Thank you for listening and supporting the show. And Kellie, thank you for all that you do. And thank you for joining me.

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> Kelly Watt>thank you, Curtis. It really has been a pleasure.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>For more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast, visit www.craveball.com 337.com until next time, keep Living the dream.