Last we spoke with Maryam Kia-Keating, a Licensed Clinical Psychologist and a mom of two, she was already a full professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in its school of Education’s Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology. Nearly four years later, she still has all her skills and expertise and desire to empower individuals, families, schools and communities. She’s just walked through some unexpected doors. Find out how making decisions based around potential impact can open up all sorts of potential.
Last we spoke with Maryam Kia-Keating, a Licensed Clinical Psychologist and a mom of two, she was already a full professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in its school of Education’s Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology. Nearly four years later, she still has all her skills and expertise and desire to empower individuals, families, schools and communities. She’s just taken the time to discern where she could make the most impact, which has led her to walk through some unexpected doors.
In this episode, find out from Maryam out how making decisions based around potential impact can open up all sorts of potential…on Roads Taken Revisited with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
Maryam Kia-Keating is an author, psychologist, educator, and lifelong storyteller. After serving on the active faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara for 18 years, she is now Professor Emerita there. Currently she serves as the director of counseling at St. Margaret’s Episcopal School in San Juan Capistrano, California, and continues to serve as a consultant for children’s media. A producer of children’s media herself, she is the author of the forthcoming A Suitcase Full, a picture book inspired by her own journey across the world as a child. Find out more about the book (and how to pre-order it) at maryamkia.com.
For Maryam’s first appearance on Roads Taken, listen to Research in Action.
Maryam Kia-Keating: As we get older, we get more clarity, hopefully around what's most important, and we also recognize that we have less time left to just put our values first and really try to get to a place where we're. Making the impact that we want to make.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Last we spoke with Maryam Kia-Keating, a licensed clinical psychologist and mom of two, Sse was already a full professor at the University of California Santa Barbara in its school of Education's, department of counseling, clinical and school psychology. Nearly five years later, she still has all her skills and expertise and desire to empower individuals, families, schools, and communities. She's just walked through some unexpected doors to put them to use. Find out how making decisions based around potential impact can open up all sorts of potential on today's Roads Taken Revisited, with me. Leslie Jennings Rowley.
So we're here on a Roads Taken Revisited with one of our previous guests, Maryam Kia-Keating, and we're gonna talk about where she's been since we last spoke, and she's taken a couple of different turns, but certainly not straying from the core of who she is.
So Miriam, thank you so much for being here.
MKK: Thank you so much, Leslie.
LJR: Well, so the last we heard you were at the University of California Santa Barbara, and you were both doing work within what we might be thinking about academic confines, but then also making sure that you were reaching out to community. You are definitely reaching out to community in new ways now, but if you could take us on that stair step from where you were to where you are now, that would be great.
MKK: Yeah, so since 2021, I have been a little bit on the move. So I was in Santa Barbara for about 18 years working at the University of California Santa Barbara, so UCSB as a professor. And I kind of reached a point, actually, really around the time when we talked, I was already starting to really revisit something that I had held onto over decades of time, which was wanting to write and wanting especially to reach children, and it had always been placed on the back burner. My career path was extremely demanding and had so many milestones that I had to get through to become a licensed clinical psychologist, but then also a professor and get tenure and become a full professor and et cetera, et cetera.
Every time that I thought I'll just get to the next milestone and then I'll find time to do this passion of mine. And I found that I just kept, there was just a new milestone to try to reach. So I had been a writer, you know, since I was a kid. And then at Dartmouth I had taken some creative writing classes, which were some of my absolute favorite classes that I took, and I managed to pull together an English minor while I was there.
But my main major was psychology. So even in my, the way that I did my education, and it was always, it was there, but it was, it was always secondary because I just had so many demands wanting to become a psychologist, and I finally kind of reached this point of, okay, I've made it in the academy. I've done all the things, I've checked all these boxes, and I've written and written and written nonstop and published, but for such a narrow audience. My audience is mostly highly scientific, you know, people in a very narrow field, and I wrote a few pieces that were just for public consumption and got so much more feedback and so many people reading. You know, I wrote an article, for example, about the movie Frozen. My sister and I wrote it together. Got it published in, you know, mainstream media and I was like, oh, this is the first time so many people have read something I've written. And it's like, so it feels like it was just for fun. You know, we wrote like, why was Frozen so popular among. Children, you know, but I, I thought, well, gosh, you know, it's not just about getting attention.For me, it was really about impact. And I started doing some media consulting for some television shows for children. And that was so creative and so much fun. It didn't feel like work. You know, I was reading scripts. I still do this from time to time where I read script, but I'm coming at it to be, you know, an expert to provide some knowledge around mental health and representation and give them feedback about some elements of their characters or the storyline. One show that I worked on for preschoolers really wanted to take on, a storyline around restorative justice in a preschool show. And so it was like super exciting for me to think, here's all this research that I've done and all these scientific publications that I've had around these issues, and now how do you communicate these to little kids who are going to watch the show and what are they gonna take from it?
So being able to do that work and having it, you know, shown on Netflix or on, you know, the Roku channel and knowing the reach the number of people who are going to actually take in these stories was really powerful. And I thought, gosh, you know we get so excited in the academy for a few citations, which means just like someone from our field who—and those are really important too, and I've put a lot of time and work into all of that—but it's just a narrow, narrow group of people who will ever read what you wrote. And on top of that, I just felt just more and more. I was really seeing the idea of the ivory tower being so disconnected from reality and from people's lives, and I started to just really witness that difference in a more profound way and feel like, gosh, you know, we have a limited time on this planet. How do I wanna spend my life?
LJR: Yeah, I definitely struggle. I've been at my institution of higher education for 22 years and have often felt like there is a struggle between real, real life and this bubble that we create. And the bubble is so important for lots of different things and it's the freedom that everyone gets to really create new knowledge is great, but at the same time, it's like we wanna make sure that that knowledge gets really applied where it could be most useful. So I feel the struggle. I know the struggle and I can't wait to hear how you've, what, what you've done with it.
MKK: Yeah. I mean, I think that struggle is real. And then I also think that as we get older. We get more clarity, hopefully around what's most important, and we also recognize that we have less time left to just, you know, figure out, put our values first, and really try to get to a place where we're making the impact that we want to make. And so for me, I started thinking more about writing again and squaring away time wanting to move into children's books and not knowing a whole lot about the publishing industry and how that would all happen for me. So I actually started out by talking with a friend who was an illustrator. 'cause I wanted to write a children's book with, you know, a picture book for young children. That was sort of the first dream. And I thought my first step would be to work with somebody who is an artist because I didn't have that talent and I had no idea that that's not how to do it in the publishing industry at all.
But I thought, okay, that's what I'll do first. And so he and I actually sat down. It turned out that he had also. Had some, you know, he pulls open a drawer and had these children's books illustrated that he had kind of, you know, done over time, but never really done anything with them. And so we started talking and I started writing and he actually illustrated a whole book for me just over the course of time where we were meeting and talking and imagining characters and imagining storylines and even imagining a whole series and then it was like, oh wait, hold on. We need to figure out how this actually gets published and what, how do you, how do you actually move through the system on this? So my next step was really actually learning a whole. Industry that I didn't know anything about. And, and so from there, I, I ended up getting an agent and realizing like, unless you're an author illustrator, you're really just an author who's submitting manuscripts and then the publisher, if they should, if you should be so lucky as to get a publisher, they'll select an illustrator and kind of do the rest for you, unless you're self-publishing, which is a whole other deal. But I really wanted to go down the path of like, can I, can I get a book that will, you know, I knew I didn't have the time to actually do the whole thing myself. So I really wanted to go down the traditional path of publishing with a, with a publishing house. And so in that process I started talking with my agent about kind of the books, book ideas I had. And she was the one who really encouraged me to write a story that related to my own life.
And that wasn't necessarily where I had started. You know, I was sort of. Thinking very like fiction and creativity and magical and all these ideas of what I, what I thought I might wanna just start with. And she said, well, why don't you just, you know, why don't you just see what happens? You know, put pen to paper and see, see what that feels like.
And so I wrote a story that I'm really excited about the. It's getting published now in August of this year, and it's really a character that's based on my own childhood and is telling a story of change and migration across countries. And, and it's telling a story about really at the end of the day, you know, celebrating not only your own journey, but everybody else's journeys as well.
So I'm really excited about this new chapter for me.
LJR: Yeah. And it's so well ties to what we actually talked about in the last episode from beginning from your experience of being a child of the world basically, but then working with communities that were coming into Santa Barbara and kind of all the resilience it took for particularly the children to make a new home and to make friends and to kind of be an American at this time, or be in our American melting pot at this time. I think this is really well timed and so suited for you. It's not asurprise that your agent would say, try to write this was you. I know you said like something fictional, but were the fictional ideas also kind of down this road of some of your academic work and, you know, professional advocacy work?
MKK: Yeah, so I mean, my original, the, the first thing that I worked on with my friend was around mindfulness and, and teaching mindfulness to children and doing it through stories. So that's something that, you know, perhaps that'll be kind of next in, in the work that I do around children's books, because I, that's still definitely a passion.
So I did have that. And then I, and then I think some of the other things, I mean, I have, I have a billion ideas. I'm an idea person, so I'm always thinking of new things and then I just need the time to actually sit down and work them out. But, you know, writing teachers always tell you, write what you know, and I think that the other piece of it that's important to me is. Voices of authenticity are really important, especially in this day and age with artificial intelligence. You know, as we're moving into, into ai, you know, how much more important is authenticity in this world where we're having a hard time navigating like what's real and what's not. And, and having authentic voices and, and representing diversity feels even more crucial in this world that we're living in as well. So I think these are things that I can offer in a way that I in a unique way, I think, and I'm really excited for that piece because for me, growing up, I did not have a book with a character that had. Anything like my story, nothing really like, and certainly not on TV or in movies either. And I think a lot of people have had that experience and have talked about it, but I, I think it's still an area that can use a lot more work. And so if I can add my part to that, that is also meaningful to me as well.
LJR: Oh, for sure. Now you say that you're too busy to do it all yourself, and so went down that the bigger publishing house route, but you also don't really have time to work out all these million of ideas. So what is it that is in your bag of tricks? What are, what is filling your days and who are you contributing to? Because I know you're always contributing to different communities.
MKK: Oh gosh. Well, so I actually. Another really big shift was retiring from the university and becoming an emeritus professor at UCSB. So I'm happy and sad to say that we're old enough to reach the age of emeritus. And I'm hopeful for many of our classmates that they get to retire from something 'cause that's. That's pretty funny to say out loud at this point. I don't feel anywhere close to retirement, but it was, it was important to me to kind of celebrate the time that I've spent and be able to continue the parts of the academic work that I care for and are extremely meaningful to me. So I'm still very active in certain areas of science, psychological science, and being able to be part of American Psychological Association task force on immigration and health right now, which I'm working on some initiatives with a whole group of people incredible scholars from around the nation.
Also working as a consulting editor for a peer reviewed scientific journal and continuing to work with some graduate students who are getting their doctorates because it's so important to me to be helping the next generation. I think there's almost nothing more important than when we're taking care of our own children or somebody else's children because truly that's what's coming next and they're inheriting this planet and anything we can do to prepare them and support them is so important. So, and then I'm working with kids at a K through 12 private school with a bunch of 96 classmates, which is really amazing and fun and incredible.
LJR: We just recently actually heard from Ryan [Carey]. And he talked about his coming to the school where Jeneen is head of school, so
MKK: Yep.
LJR: It seems like all the 90 sixes are just like…
MKK: Come on down, 96s.
LJR: …where’s that San Juan Capistrano. Exactly.
MKK: We're expecting more of you, so come on down. We're ready. So that's…That's pretty amazing. And so…
LJR: And what's your role there, Maryam?
MKK: I am the director of counseling there, so I get to work with a team and work with kids and families and educators on all the things I love and care about. So with an incredible leadership team headed up by Jeneen, as you know, who also recruited Ryan Carey. And it's just been a really amazing community to join and, we actually, the three of us didn't know each other at Dartmouth, and yet it's that shared experience right, of those four years that we spent in Hanover.
LJR: That's so sweet.
MKK: So yeah, it's wonderful. So I'm really, you know, I'm, I'm also teaching a class through Stanford, continuing studies on mindfulness, which I've taught before, but that's also just kind of like a fun extra, extra element.
You know, so I feel like I'm in a really wonderful place of being able to do some of the things that are most meaningful to me. And, you know, continuing to evolve. Hopefully we all are. We all are.
LJR: Yeah. Exactly. All the while being a mother yourself. So you have that community, that little micro community at home too.
MKK: Yes, absolutely.
LJR: So lots to keep us busy at this point in life. (MKK: Yeah.) Even if we are retired.
MKK: I'd love to think I was the type of retired with my feet up, but, but I actually love being busy and I love. I'm, I'm just a very active. Busy person with a lot of energy and ideas and so I don't think I would sit still for very long anyway.
LJR: No, it doesn't sound like it. Well, when you go, you'll have A Suitcase Full. See what I did there? That's (MKK: I love it.) the name of the new book. And so pre-order now, but it will be coming out in August, 2026. And I'm sure a slew of other ideas and other great books will follow. So we will be sure to keep checking those out.
But I am positive that whatever you're doing is going to be full of delight and joy and really meaningful for the communities that intersect with whatever the work is. So thank you so much for all you do, and thank you for being a part of this little show. MKK:
Thank you so much, Leslie. I appreciate it.
LJR: That was Miriam Kia Keating, an author, psychologist, educator, and lifelong storyteller.
After serving on the active faculty at the University of California Santa Barbara for 18 years, she's now Professor Emerita there. Currently she serves as the director of counseling at St. Margaret's Episcopal School in San Juan Capistrano, California, and continues to serve as a consultant for Children's Media, a producer of children's media herself.
She's the author of the forthcoming. A suitcase full, a picture book inspired by her own journey across the world as a child. Find out more about the book and how to pre-order at miriamkia.com.
You know what is also great family friendly media? The Roads Taken catalog. You can find all 170-plus episodes at RoadsTakenShow.com. Please do help us spread the word so that more people can become inspired by the stories shared by my guests and me, Leslie Jennings Rowle on Roads Taken.