Here are VGB’s starting points for approaching your journaling journey in
a way that honours your ancestral instinct— and preserves your history…
For teastained women, it’s never “just” journaling…
"It's more that just journaling
for the depths to which we must
travel within to unlock, uncover
and unveil our truest Selves.
The thing is, it's work that goes beyond
the page and it reveals itself moment
by moment; reminding us that in this continual rebirthing of Self, in choosing
to journey on through the darkest parts
of ourselves, and acknowledge and love
those parts as whole, we gain strength to show up authentically as a testimony of who we already are and yet are still becoming.”
— Candice M., VGB Diarist
Obeying the Divine urgency to continue
in a counter-cultural legacy
Your journaling habit is the continuation of
an ancestral legacy to preserve testimony
and create the new testaments
that will quicken and inspire
the woman you will be—
and your generations.
What a marvel.
archival, immortal,
personal, spiritual,
historical
Western society has no intention of
awakening us into our glory, enabling
us into the healthy disposition of righteous rage and indictment, or preserving our history. We keep our journals to document ourselves, our times, and to preserve things revealed in the innermost parts of our
spirit and soul.
One day, these books
we are filling will be the history books
of all the women we’ve been while resisting, surviving, grieving, fulfilling and enduring seasons we had to name in past tense.
The onus is on us to honor our history, regality and memory by turning from the noise and creating written witness testimonies that are our journals.
here, we say “journey soulfully”…
Journaling starting points…
Read from the archives…
Look to Your Community…
VGB is replete with teastained women representing a variety of thought, experience, circumstance, lifestyle, and sojourn. Read their interviews for insights on the self-autobiography work we know as journaling.
Remember your mothers…
You’re fulfilling a historical legacy.
You aren’t without the precedent of hope with this practice: you aren’t the first teastained woman to feel the weight of Divine compulsion to write yourself into a blank book. Read “The Mothers” blog to learn about some of the teastained women who documented themselves. What a glorious birthright!
…. away from numbness and distraction…
…towards historicizing…
The heart and soul in a lovingly-authored, definitive zine introducing the foundations and fundamentals of what the West calls “journaling” for the teastained woman. The first booklet of its kind.
If you’re interested in a “handbook” that has the summation of our zeal with journal-keeping work, this zine was written for you.
Other Resources
Interested in learning more about diary literature? I wrote a chapter about Juanita Harrison for an academic anthology about diary literature! Click the image
to learn more!
The Exclusion of Black Women’s Diary Writing by Dr. Angela Hooks