Kim Gardner on Carpo: a personal book about autumn, trauma, and ripening

The useful part

Kim Gardner & the Autumn Goddess Pages Home Books Spells Divination Craft Contact Events Friday, 11 September 2026 Author Interview: Kim Gardner & the Autumn Goddess I've chatted to High Priestess Kim Gardner, continuing my interview series Authors on Their Own Writing. Every writer has pieces they are proud of intellectually, frameworks that are airtight, arguments that are sharp, prose that does its job.

How it works

• Beneath that archetypal frame, however, the book is a deeply intimate chronicle of walking through the terrain of Complex PTSD and ADHD.
• My work focuses on building cultures rooted in psychological safety, operational clarity, and accountability.
• 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.
• 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.

What to take from it

Because there was nowhere left to hide, and that terrifying exposure became my greatest source of freedom. It is my favourite because it turned private grief and internal chaos into tangible medicine. It was pulled straight out of lived survival, meaning it asked far more of me than anything else I've ever put into print.

Example or evidence

• Carpo is published by Moon Books in the Pagan Portals series, and you can find the details here.
• Out of all that you've written, which is your favorite published work?
• 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,...
• 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.

Details worth keeping

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.

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