May 6, 2025

🌸 Chasing Beauty

Dear friends,

I recently returned from Durham, North Carolina to visit my dear friend, K, and usher her into her new home. The days spent there were full, easy, and had the quality of an otherworldly portal. This trip undid and then remade me in so many ways. 

This week, I wrote about my travels on the blog, specifically the ways beauty and home showed up as creative forces throughout the trip.

Read it here:

Chasing Beauty in Durham — SOJOURNER AHEBEE

a travel diary on beauty, home, and survival in Durham, North Carolina.

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✨ A New Chapter

I have some exciting news to share: I’m writing a novel and I’d love for you to come along for the journey! 

Last year, Scholastic published my debut children’s book. It’s a story about my maternal grandmother’s childhood in rural North Carolina and the process of discovering her father’s functional illiteracy one night during a family story time. The picture book – told in the form of a free-verse poem – follows the tale of a young, Black southern girl and her farmer father as she teaches him how to read and he, in turn, shares the painful yet resilient history of the land they own and the storytellers they come from. 

The book's release date is forthcoming, but in the meantime, I’ve started embarking on my next literary project: a young adult fantasy novel set in a fictional West African coastal city!

The story follows Ahou [AH-woo], a grief-stricken teenager who is on a quest to find her father after his mysterious disappearance in the ocean one day. When an offering to the water opens up a potent portal that takes Ahou to the bottom of the sea, time blurs and she discovers secrets about old ships, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and her family’s long-forgotten magic. As Ahou navigates this underwater world, she begins to realize that finding her father may mean uncovering a truth far more powerful than she ever imagined.

After years of holding space for other people’s stories— from classrooms to newsrooms and nonprofits – I’m finally carving out time to write a long-form story of my own. This story has been tugging at me for the past year, and I want to give it the time, care, and spaciousness it deserves.

To do that, I’m excited to let you know that starting next month, June 2025, this newsletter will evolve into a tiered offering through Buttondown – the platform that currently hosts this newsletter. There will be three to four monthly tiers to choose from – ranging from $0 to $20 respectively— each tier offering a bit more content as well as behind-the-scenes looks at my creative process. 

Why this shift, you ask? By subscribing to the newsletter for a small monthly fee, you're helping me take time off from full-time freelance work, pay for essentials, and write with intention. 

Each month and depending on your tier you’ll receive an intimate, handmade dispatch from my creative life, including:

• one monthly essay/blog on a creative process or happening

• audio reflections

• generative writing prompts for your own work and life

• media recs

• recipes

• glimpses into my novel and the writing process

• answers to your own creative process questions

• and potentially live classes!

This commitment is for the folks who want to witness a book being made, and support the human who is making it.

In return, I’ll send you something thoughtful and heart-made each month, just like the last three newsletters you’ve already received. Think of it like a living, breathing artist’s journal— made with love.

But … I am committed to keeping a free version of this newsletter accessible. There will always be a free version that includes my signature monthly essay/blog. <3  

I’ll be sending a sign-up link for the tiered options and more info very soon. If you have suggestions for things you’d like to see offered in future newsletters, please send me an email to let me know! Until then, thank you for reading, for witnessing my work, and for walking beside me on this path. Enjoy the rest of the newsletter!

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💡i just had an epiphany (creative breakthroughs)

• tea kettle magic: Several minutes after I landed on K’s doorstep in Durham for my visit, her new tea kettle arrived packaged on her doorstep. The rest is history. The whistle of the tea kettle became a welcome sound during mornings (and cozy evenings) at K’s home. I loved hearing it from another room and running to fetch the hot water for my daily rose chai. It turned tea-making into an extravagant event. Whistling tea kettles are far superior. That is the breakthrough. Is there a small object you’ve been wanting to add to your home to bring you joy?

• one baby at a time: As you may have noticed, it’s been a while since my last newsletter. I am also in the process of launching an original poetry podcast and learning how to write a novel. Though I’ve talked about the importance of having multiple projects (ideally in different forms) to work on and how important that is to creating momentum for me, I’ve realized through this recent stint that I can’t be working on many NEW or very early development projects all at once. Birthing something is already a labor of its own, and then trying to birth three or four things all at once throws me into disarray. I need the groundedness of something that’s been around for longer and already has an established flow as I embark on something new. For now, that means I’m going to experiment with a once-a-month cadence for the newsletter to make room for some of these other things on my plate. Is there something you’ve started recently that you need to reassess? What kind of shift might you need to continue working towards your goal?

• enlivening the senses: After some recent trips to visit friends in Durham and Medford, MA, as well as a long weekend spent hosting a D.C. friend in my home city, I’ve come to realize that travel (both locally and domestically) opens up my senses and exposes me to either the care of others or the opportunity to care for my friends when they come to stay with me. That special concoction of new sensory experiences(beauty!)and care makes me more excited for and amenable to creation. I’ve had major writing, business, and relationship breakthroughs on these trips, which makes me think that creating opportunities for new sensory experiences through food, music, crafts, and movement are integral to my creative process, particularly when I’m feeling stuck or in a stagnant place. When’s the last time you felt like your environment really inspired you? What was special about your environment then and how might you recreate it for yourself now?

  

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🌧️ what’s pouring in (sojourner’s inspo)

• chasing herons: I watched Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron in K’s living room one night during my Durham trip. A 2023 Japanese anime film, the story follows a boy who is grieving the recent death of his mother. In an ancestral home in the Japanese countryside, the boy encounters a talking heron bird who claims his mother is still alive and entices the boy with this promise. A deeply spiritual movie about processing loss, talking to your ancestors, and having the courage to face all of your ghosts – both the ones that haunt you and the ones that look over you. The animation was 10/10 - lush, whimsical, and sometimes terrifying. I think this movie possesses some kind of crazy energy. After watching the movie, K and I kept seeing images of herons on fine china in antique stores, on the bathroom wallpaper of a local restaurant, and even when I touched down in Philly after my trip had ended I saw a poster with a heron near the Delaware River Trail lol. The herons follow you even after the movie ends, viewers beware. 

• where we gather: I’ve been thinking a lot about how my grandmother would always set an extra plate at her dining room table for a deceased ancestor to honor their memory. There would always be a seat at our table for that ancestor. In addition, I was really inspired by K's dining room table practice when I visited her in North Carolina and all the care she put into making sure the table was beautiful when we ate. During that visit, we watched this mini episode from the Magnolia Network’s Capturing Home series, an interior design show where Amy Neunsinger and Kate Martindale take inspiration from homeowners' personal stories to create custom, one-of-a-kind spaces for their families to gather. Here’s their how-to guide on setting a table.

• sojourning: One of my parting gifts from North Carolina was a copy of K’s Southern Culture Magazine … the  Sojourning issue to be specific. A potent collection of photo essays, interviews, poems, visual art, fiction, and original scholarship on the history and culture of the American South. On evenings when I didn’t have a lot of energy to read many pages of a novel, I loved committing to one entry in the magazine and looked forward to the magic of discovering what entry would come next. I read essays on African American migration patterns, stories about southern migrants returning to the south, the history of Black-owned rooming homes for itinerant, Black domestic workers in Chicago’s suburbs, and much much more. I really appreciated the willingness to make what would otherwise be a very inaccessible academic journal vibrant, non-jargony, and multi-genre. If you want to read more scholarship but have had issues feeling like academic writing is for you, I’d really recommend checking out Southern Cultures!

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🥘 let her cook

I’ve been thinking about what it means to visit a new home, and the ways that home can open you up to flavors and scents beyond the ones that are familiar to you. When I first arrived in Durham, there was a curry K had brewing in her pressure cooker – a simmering collection of split pigeon pea lentils, tomato, shallot, turmeric — among other spices. As she opened the door to greet me, the smell of the curry enveloped me all at once. I was home now, in the care and kitchen of a bosom friend.

Now the tanginess of this lentil soup – which hails from K’s home city in India – is a sour I reach for. Almost a month later, my mouth is still salivating for it. The smell of the fragrant spices being heated in the ghee. The sharp and sweet whistle of the pressure cooker letting us know one mission has been accomplished. I yearn for the sour warmth of a home dish my friend made to both make her new place home and to welcome me back to an ancestral home of sorts — North Carolina.

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🫴🏿 from me to you ( offerings, workshops, & more)

In mid-March I taught an ancestral stories poetry workshop at Making Worlds Bookstore in West Philadelphia. And then I taught another version of the same workshop last Friday at Drexel University’s Writers Room. Both workshops were deeply multigenerational, collaborative, and left me in awe of all that is possible when we make intentional attempts to get to know those who came before us.

I loved getting to curate the workshop space before folks arrived. I brought pictures of my maternal grandparents and great-grandmother with me and set up the workshop tables like altars: There were flowers, tarot cards for participants to interact with, seashells, and little slips of paper by each photograph with deep truths/fun facts about each of my ancestors.

Some workshop highlights:

• Naming all the ways we define what an ancestor is

• Listening to Black elders (many of whom were were southern migrants themselves) tell stories about the American south, Black archival traditions, land, memory, and home

• Seeing our ancestors reflected in the poems we read

• Generating new ways to recover our family histories

• Meditating and writing an ode to a single ancestor we wanted to know better

• Starting to answer the questions: How do I keep my own archives and what can the archive of my life look like?

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🗂️ into the archives

Morning routines and creative self-regard

Morning Routines & Creative Self-Regard — SOJOURNER AHEBEE

How morning routines help us build trust within ourselves to move towards our wildest creative dreams.

The source of creative confidence and the magic of beginning

The Source of Creative Self-Confidence — SOJOURNER AHEBEE

a guide for nurturing the confidence within you to get started on any creative project or dream.

tarot creative diary no. 0 - what is ancestral tarot?

How To Use Tarot To Talk To Your Ancestors — SOJOURNER AHEBEE

Our ancestors have messages for us. I harness these messages through the power of tarot and you can too. Read my weekly ancestral tarot diaries about the big life themes pushing us towards our wildest desires.

❤️‍🔥 Until soon, dear friends!

from the footsteps of my desires to yours,

🦉sojourner