We recently connected with Catie Greene and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Catie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Looking back, do you think you started your business at the right time? Do you wish you had started sooner or later?

I really feel that the timing of this business is so grounded in the timing of my life at that point that I could not have done it any sooner even if I had wanted to. I learned necessary skills and had the experiences needed to culminate in this point in life where my work and passions truly integrated.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Catie Greene and Healing Stories, Animal Party Kiki Books, LLC is a culmination of all of my professional work and personal life culminating together into one beautiful project.

The spark was just supposed to be a birthday gift for my nephew when he was 2 years old. We had been creating a story together over FaceTime for months. I put the story into a rhyming narrative, found an illustrator, and navigated my way through the self-publication process motivated by giving him a special gift I knew he would enjoy. I should have known it was not going to end there!

I am a licensed professional counselor educator by training, which means I have spent my career providing mental health therapy and teaching counselors in training. I have spent the last four years of my career on a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion team for a company helping to make mental health care more accessible, adjunct instructing, and working with individuals in private practice. Through this work, I have engaged in a lot of academic writing and research, but before I developed my academic writing voice I had been writing short stories, prose, and poems since I could put a pen to paper.

While creating the gift for my nephew, my worlds began to meld. I infused the story with the same reflective questions I would ask my nephew as we created it together such as “what do you think the little boy may be feeling?” and “what do you think he could do to help feel calm?” As a therapist, I know that stories are healing in and of themselves yet sometimes adults don’t quite have the tools to deepen dialogue about difficult topics with their little ones. I spent hours upon hours getting lost in the process of creating the story. Once “Everyone’s Included at the Animal Party: The Little Boy Learns about Feelings, Inclusion, and Coping” was finished, not only was it something my nephew was so proud of, it was a tool that deepened the work I do as a therapist.

I have been trained by my mentor, Dr. Gillian Berry, from an Afrocentric lens over the past 8 years. Gillian has reiterated to me over and over that healing happens everywhere, not just in 1:1 therapy offices. So after self-publishing my first book, I began to take the story on the road. However, I found it really difficult to simply sell the book – I wanted to create an environment at my vendor table that children would want to relax and do activities at. Where I could have organic conversations with families about the themes of the book that I find so important.

From there, I continued to build out the Everyone’s Included at the Animal Party series with “The Little Girl Learns about Patience & Imagination” and “The Little Bear Learns to be Body Aware.” Both of these stories were inspired by conversations with my nephew and shared similar goals with the first book but covered different topics and areas of diversity such as representing a queer family as normative, dealing with difficult transitions, and consent & boundaries.

I fell in love with the process of bringing a story to fruition and the environments that I got to spend my weekends at – engaging with other local authors, vendors, and creatives. Before long, my mentor approached me with a children’s story idea of her own. We discussed me publishing her work so that she could focus on what she enjoyed – the creative process. For the same reason, I obtained publishing rights to my colleague, Matt Worhach’s book, Carmen & Stella. And it has grown from there.

Healing Stories, Animal Party Kiki Books, LLC is more than an indie publishing company. Because all of the authors are healers themselves, we bring a level of interaction that is really an extension of our work as therapists. For this reason, we have begun to curate local events that bridge the gaps between local therapists, authors, diverse forms of healers, and makers. The goal is to create environments that amplify the healing energy already in the room. Just like the Everyone’s Included at the Animal Party series is meant to amplify the healing energy already existent in the spaces that children will read the story with adults in their lives.

Healing Stories’ vision is to foster opportunities for healing and restoration in every day life through storytelling, literacy, creativity, synergy, and inclusion. Our mission is to publish stories that inspire: Empathy, Inclusion, Community Healing, Restoration, and Intergenerational Dialogue.

We do this through three strategies:

Healing Stories
We publish stories that teach socioemotional skills in relatable ways in the context of diversity, equity, and inclusion. With a focus on intergenerational learning, our authors publish stories that are aimed at children and have tools and messages for the adults who read with them. Whether providing reflective prompts for adults to use to deepen meaningful dialogue, a “Hey Adults, Pause Here!” message at the beginning of a book, or a story that unapologetically flips the script of traditional norms or expectations of what a family is or what a healer looks like or how we express our love, Animal Party Kiki Books creates Healing Stories for learning across the life cycle.

Creative Events
In addition to publishing Healing Stories, Animal Party Kiki Books curates and attends local events providing activities, story times, and interactive workshops on the themes of our books. We also sell merchandise and crafts that promote our mission, such as make your own Calming Jars. We attend local pop up shops, school events, conferences, art events, libraries, and more. In September 2024 we hosted our first Healing Stories Wellness event bringing together local artists, authors, healers, and makers. In November of 2024 we held our first Queer Indie Author Event co-organized by ThirdEye Editing. This event included a panel discussion with local queer indie authors and a market of over 30 local queer artists, makers, therapists, and healers.

Supporting Local Literacy
We also support Reading Partners, DC, a volunteer-based non-profit that ensures literacy is a human right. Reading Partners connects children who are currently reading below grade level to get individualized tutoring from volunteers. We host a Book Drive for them at our events and have a line of merchandise that 100% of proceeds get donated to them.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

In 2022 I was working full time as a professor. That spring, I accepted the school’s Excellence in Teaching Award. While I was extremely proud and grateful, I felt a deep sense of dissonance as I stood on that stage. I had been neglecting friendships, relationships, and community over the past two years of my full-time academic appointment. I was in a knee brace after getting ACL surgery from a soccer injury – the recovery was extremely difficult at the peak of the semester. I was behind on grading and actually still had a batch of grades to submit as I accepted that award!

I needed to make a change that would put relationships, rest, community, and connection more at the center of my life. Despite my fears of making things work financially outside of the academic institution setting and moving to full-time independent contractor work as a consultant and therapist, I knew I needed to make the leap.

I never would have had the energy to pursue Healing Stories, Animal Party Kiki Books one year later if I did not create the time and space in my life to have creative time, to be in my community, and to reconnect with myself. I am absolutely confident I am a more excellent teacher today than I was the day I received that award.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

There are so many resources out there but it is hard to find your way around! Connecting with my local business development center was so helpful to get some tips entirely free for beginning my business. I highly recommend others doing so. I also come from a field (therapy) where it is common to pay others a small consultation fee when you need to ask them a question that is related to their area of clinical expertise. I have taken that adage into my business now and try to offer to pay or exchange something for others’ time to teach and mentor me.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.animalpartykikibooks.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/animalpartykiki

Image Credits

Lakin Jones
Prince George’s County Memorial Library System