Listen & subscribe now: WHAT’S YOUR STORY? SEASON ONE: WOMEN, POLITICS, POWER.
Nine years ago, I walked into a room that changed everything I thought I knew about myself. It was a breezy summer day on Maui, and a group of writers were gathered for bestselling author and activist Rebecca Walker’s Art of Memoir master class in a space full of light and air and curiosity. It was almost, but not quite, a year after my mother had died.
The week before, I’d left the work I once thought was my most fervent vocation—teaching yoga and serving as a so-called spiritual activist and guide. In the wake of heartbreak and loss, I realized that many of the beliefs I clung to didn’t hold true in real life. I was deeply uncomfortable. I wanted to get back to the one thing I knew as a constant love: Writing.
From the time I was a child, I’d run home after school to write stories and poems, create worlds within the world I inhabited as an often lonely kid. I didn’t walk into Rebecca’s class thinking I would write a book, but two years later, under her guidance, I finished a memoir. Pieces of it are in the book I published last year, and, more importantly, my study with Rebecca never stopped.
Rebecca’s mentorship and the force of her work as a writer (of seven books) and activist (co-founder of the Third Wave Fund, mother of third-wave feminism, revolutionary teacher of all things race, gender, and identity) changed me, changed my mind, expanded the walls of the universe in which I lived.
In 2011, Rebecca and I created What’s Your Story?: a method that uses writing prompts to help people excavate, understand, and rewrite the story of their lives. We taught an in-person class and sent weekly newsletters—and we always knew the time would come for What’s Your Story? to be a book. That book—an interactive, guided journal—is coming in 2020, from Sounds True.
And today, we launch the What’s Your Story? podcast. Cue all the celebratory trumpets.
In our first season, WOMEN, POLITICS, POWER, Rebecca and I sit down with some of the most courageous, brilliant, and revolutionary women running for office this November. From Afghan war veterans to the candidate poised to be the first Native American woman in congress, from the 19 Black women running for open judgeships in Harris County Texas to single mothers fighting for land and water rights in Hawai’i—we are here to listen to, learn from, and amplify their stories.
I have poured my heart, mind, and every ounce of bodily energy I possess into this endeavor, and I am thrilled to share it with you today.
Listen, subscribe, and share!
Welcome to What’s Your Story?.
