We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Chaney Williams. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Chaney below.

Chaney, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

Writing my memoir has been my most fulfilling project. “Remembering: a homecoming into the body” is a hybrid memoir of nonfiction essays and poetry about the intersections of ancestral grief, generational trauma, biracial identity, place, and spiritual ecology. The memoir is a collection of essays about coming home into my body as someone who is queer, a descendant of both enslaved people and colonizers, a former Catholic, as survivor of multiple sexual assaults, and a Southerner. Through genealogical research and discovery of a history of my paternal side’s enslaved ancestor particularly, my namesake Chaney Chambers who was my sixth great grandmother, an enslaved woman born in 1826. The collection explores the reckoning process of discovering my maternal family both owned slaves and fought for the Union and Confederacy during the Civil War. “Remembering” explores how both grief and joy can coexist in my identity and the healing process of reclaiming of my identities dualities while shaped by place. The hybrid memoir was written at the Loretto Motherhouse, a retirement home for Catholic nuns in Nerinx, Kentucky where my maternal ancestors first came to Kentucky in the 1780’s as Catholic settlers. Writing over 70% of the memoir at the place where my maternal ancestors colonized the area over 200 years ago was an emotional journey which made the project even more meaningful when I discovered before my first artists residency at the Loretto Motherhouse that my roots were connected to the place where I was writing this work. It was such a synchronistic, magical experience also because of the incredible social justice work the Sisters of Loretto are involved in including an acknowledgment and public apology for the orders role in owning enslaved people in the early 1800’s in an incredible project funded by the National Endowment of the Arts and the South Arts organization which was inspiring. There was also the wonderful opportunity to have weekly conversations with the convent’s resident historian and archivist which really shaped my work.

Chaney, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am a full spectrum doula, writer, and ritualist. I have kept a journal since I was six years old and the first poem, I wrote in 5th grade was called “Antifreeze” which was about the loss of my aunt’s beloved dog and my dear friend, Sally who was poisoned in a hate crime. From the start my writing has been a haven where I can process all the experiences in my life whether they are moments of joy to my identity as a survivor of sexual trauma.

My creative practice is what I come back to and show up to repeatedly even when I am in the depths of grief and despair. Writing for me is how I analyze my experiences when I cannot even bear to speak the words aloud because the page is my sanctuary. Through writing I reclaim my voice when it has been silenced and how I come home to myself. By making I can care and tend for myself that leaves me rejuvenated. Creating is how I connect to my ancestors, the collective, and my future descendants. It is how I find belonging and community in this world.

I am also a holder of space through my doula work and as a former student midwife. I have been a full spectrum doula since Spring 2018 when I took my first doula training that focused specifically on pregnancy in the capacity of loss such as miscarriage and bereavement. For the last 5 years, while being a doula I educated pregnant folks with tools to make informed choices around their care. The space that exists when holding space for a birthing person is one that is sacred, and I am so grateful I have been able to witness them through such a powerful threshold.

As I make the shift from birth work to focusing on supporting and empowering people in a different capacity. Culturally there is a minimizing of honoring grief and thresholds and I want to create a container where people can be supported through these unique transitions. I help my clients hold space for themselves in a community and individual container through one-on-one consulting, by marking the wide variety of thresholds that humans go throughout their lives with ritual by providing facilitation, compassion, guidance, and radical softness for my clients as they go through unique transitions throughout life.

I am beginning to offer community and peer support to marginalized communities such as Queer, Trans, Disabled, and BIPOC people. These offerings are for people interested in the intersections of sexuality, ritual practices, creative practices, reproductive justice, and healing from trauma. Through a community-based container and 1 on 1 consulting, I want to empower clients and provide guidance with grace and dignity.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

As someone who is both a survivor of sexual trauma and intimate partner violence, I come back often to my ancestors who on my paternal side were enslaved when I am so immersed in grief from the trauma that it is hard to see a way out. My existence is an act of survival and resiliency because of them, especially my namesake Chaney Chambers. Through the generational trauma that exists in my ancestral line which has trickled down to myself, I have been able to find strength and pleasure to overcome my experiences. I have found a way for grief and joy to both coexist together. Even when I try something new and there is a sense of shame and failure, by “owning my story” as Brene Brown says and caring for myself with compassion, I can not only survive but thrive. I do this for myself, the collective, my ancestors, and especially the future descendants of my family line. I am proud of myself that I always have hope no matter how hard life can be that things will get better.

Have you ever had to pivot?

One of my big pivots was when my midwifery school unexpectedly shut down and I was in a car accident that changed my physical abilities to provide labor support. Both these events happened in a span of a few months of each other. The grief that existed from both of these occurrences was overwhelming. For years my calling had been to be a midwife but because of the accident it completely shifted the reality of that occurring because I now live with chronic pain. The accident and my school shutting down forced me to rest and prioritize myself in a way I never had because it was the only way to survive. Because of this, I had to focus on my physical body in a way I previously had not because the pain was consistently debilitating, and it shook my sense of self. This caused a huge shift in my identity as someone who has been a caretaker in different aspects for all of my life and brought me to the work I’m doing now because I identify with the need for compassion for having dignity and honoring the grief that comes in huge transitions that mainstream society doesn’t mark or see in a way as a big thing.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: theintersectionaldoula
• Substack: https://chaneywilliams.substack.com/