March 7, 2026 | Chicago
I’m in Chicago for the culmination of Luvvie Ajayi Jones extraordinary six-month Mastermind on Book Marketing. I have not experienced quite this feeling of joyful anticipation since the snowy day I defended my PhD dissertation at Princeton.
I felt both excited and scared when I was prepping for the Story2 Techstars Demo Day in the fall of 2014, but I felt like an alien in Techstars, like I would never really be one of them (that is a story for another day). The other women on their way to Chicago today for these presentations about our books have become my trusted allies. They have seen me scared and helped me be courageous. I imagine them reading and sharing my book, Story Medicine.
Luvvie created the conditions for us to succeed, individually and as a group. This is what repair looks like and feels like to me. How does that happen?
- Luvvie teaches from her own experience becoming a best-selling author. If you are a writer and want to become a published author, Luvvie’s Book Academy teaches the tools and process for that shift.
- Luvvie creates ground rules for the community so people are generous and kind with themselves and one another.
- Luvvie expects us to do the work. Anything worth doing requires going deep into yourself and sticking with your vision and making it palpable to others.
- Luvvie makes herself continuously vulnerable in the process of teaching all she has learned through publishing four best-selling books. She shared part of her next book with the Mastermind, taking a pivot inward to reveal more of her own story. I loved watching that liberatory turn towards stories that are deep and painful, told with humor and joy.
- Luvvie designed this Mastermind for people who have books on the road to publication, so we can learn not only from her but from one another and from the process of publication at this inflection point in our lives and careers. On the way to the airport, my driver asked about the other women in this cohort. I felt a bit tingly as I described each of them and why they wrote the books they are publishing.
- Luvvie focuses on WHY first. I usually resist the question WHY because it’s interpretation, not story, but I’ve come to see how important it is to stay focused on my audience and their needs, not my own. Why should a reader care about my book enough to buy it and share it with other people?
- Luvvie treats each of our books as a force in the world. Each of us is writing not just for ourselves, but to build a community of actors and change agents. This sense of our collective power is the most important thing I’m taking away from this experience.
- We are all scared, and we are all pushing through fear. Luvvie has described this in her own journey. That might be her greatest gift of all – to each of us and everyone our books inspire – to know that the pounding in your heart, the twists in your gut, and the lump in your throat are because your writing is important. The world’s on fire, and books provide a way of listening to another person’s voice and spirit and discovering threads of connection to what is real for them – and all of us living beings together.
- And, the most miraculous part of this group is how we have come to work together in ways that are bigger and bolder than any of us could create alone. For me, it was as if I went in with one sense of myself, mostly hidden, and now I imagine a larger set of possibilities, informed by the other participants’ vision and work.
This safe space for eight women authors – diverse in so many ways – to be our most vulnerable and courageous selves, is happening in the context of the United States and Israel bombing Iran and Lebanon, with no end in sight. What does it mean for a small group of women authors to focus on expanding the power of our words at such a time?
I believe deeply that our shared future will be birthed not only by resisting these authoritarian regimes and protecting the people and earth they seek to destroy (we all must resist and protect continuously), but also by creating these small, shared spaces where the group does the work of carrying us, collectively in real time, to that shared future.
Luvvie’s community became a space of repair for me. When I arrived in Luvvie’s first class, I wasn’t sure I had the stamina to finish and publish this book I’d been working on for more than a decade. The first time I took the hot seat, I tentatively asked Luvvie if I had enough of my proposal written to try to find an agent and publisher. She looked back and forth between my LinkedIn profile and me and said, “You probably know people who can introduce you to agents. You just need to start asking people to make those introductions.”
Luvvie was right: just a couple weeks later, friends of friends introduced me to their agent. But I still didn’t know how to put my own stories into a book about storytelling that begins with the authority and healing power of stories from each person’s unique lived experience.
Here’s how the shift happened: Shae asked me about my name and pronouns … and after what felt like a very long silence collapsed in a pool of shame, I sat up, took a breath, and told the story of leaning into my Hebrew name — Chaya, or living being — and pronouns that reflect the many parts of my multiple being after Israel began their devastating attacks on the people, buildings, and cultural institutions of Gaza. Now I lead with that story, awkward and unfinished as it is,
Repair is not like flipping a switch. Creating a space where diverse people can thrive, individually and together, happens through daily acts of resistance and kindness (the word kind is built on kin, family) and
Healing begins in community. If we want to topple either-or regimes, we need to tend to them when they show up in our own self-protecting nervous systems. From that place of gently tending our own fears and celebrating our own and others’ wins, we can begin to build communities of compassion and care that extend beyond our usual boundaries to ensure everyone is safe.
Repair is messy, challenging, and evanescent. Storytelling is a set of muscles we can develop, individually and collectively, to build circles of continuous repair in our everyday lives. That’s why I’m pushing Story Medicine out into the world now: to create, again and again, the place we need to go together in the present.
Thank you Luvvie, Macy Robison, Aleshia Curry, Sarah Hanson, Khadijah Sharif-Drinkard, Dr. Erica Jordan-Thomas, Shae Primus, Ronnie Dickerson Stewart, Jovian Zayne, and Erica Freeman for all you’ve taught me about repair and especially how community makes repair possible.
Weekly writing prompt
Where in your life can you take a circle you are already a part of – maybe that’s a parents group, reading group, or prayer circle – and make it safer and more connected than it already is? How is it safe now? Where does it privilege one identity over others? What can you do to make that group of peers with a shared interest safer for everyone by taking in wider and more diverse points of view?