We were lucky to catch up with Vickey Finkley-Brown recently and have shared our conversation below.
Vickey, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
One of the biggest risks I’ve taken was not renewing my teaching license. I retired disabled in June of 2014 because of complications with lupus.
I intended to keep my license active, just in case. Once my health was somewhat stable and I could begin to think about my next steps, I could no longer see a classroom in my future. My license was set to renew in 2015. All I needed to do was take a class with the SC Department of Education and complete the paperwork. The closer the date came, the lighter my shoulders felt. When the date passed, I took my first real breath of freedom. I wasn’t sure what I would do but I knew it had not to do with teaching high school students.
It would be another year before I was healthy enough to consider my next steps. In 2016 I started a freelance writing and editing business and successfully edited a whopping six manuscript in those twelve months. Three self-help books, two children’s books, and one fiction novella. I had one client on retainer and worked with four or five small blogs writing and editing copy for them. In that year, I realized, I wanted to devote myself to my writing.
I took another risk, dissolved my fledgling, albeit lucrative, writing and editing services business and set out to complete a book I started writing in 2013.
Every risk I’ve ever taken has been worth it. I’m not looking for a balanced life, I seek to create harmony in all aspects of life. To be balanced is to be stagnate. I desire the freedom to move in my life as I please, while maintaining a frequency that resonates with and creates one harmonious tone.
Vickey, 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 have always been a storyteller and a collector of stories. Those two are not the same. One shares, and the other keeps. The dual nature of my two passions affords me unobstructed views of myself, which gives me the freedom to write without apology. The same duality gifts me with enough audacity to create, produce, and host a podcast where award-winning, bestselling Black women authors agree to sit on the proverbial couch to talk about the healing they find in writing and how that same writing is a battle ram to break down doors meant to keep them and those who would come after them out of white-centered spaces within the publishing industry. It is this duality that lays the foundation for my forthcoming writing consulting business, GRACE for Social Justice Writing Consulting Group.
If an aspiring writer went into the library and picked up twenty different writing craft books, they’re going to read the same information in different clothes, on different days of the month. That’s because writing is writing is writing. Plot structure isn’t going to change that much from one school of thought to the next. The narrative and character arcs are pretty fixed. Yet, writers, myself included attend conferences because we want the next new thing. That thing that’ll take our writing from here to oh, my gosh, have you read…
It is what I seek to create as a writer and it is what endeavor to help other writers create. My books are available on Amazon under my pen name, Ella Shawn. The Black Writer Therapy podcast can be listened to wherever people listen to their favorite podcasts. Season 2 airs June 06, 2024, meanwhile, starting in January, weekly shorts will air on Wednesdays under the name GRACEful Wisdom for BOLD Writers. I have published A Little Bit of GRACE Substack newsletter, where I write about writing, what’s going on with courses, and what I’m doing to further my professional writing, publishing, and consulting credentials… things like that.
My brand philosophy: There is one author, telling infinite stories. All of which occur simultaneously. There is one editor. Editing infinite manuscripts. Their job is to keep the characters believing that they’re the main characters in their story. All while, ensuring that it could never be so. There are infinite readers. Reading one story at a time. Their job is to accept the story as it is presented. Without judgment or condition.
If the writer, editor, and readers are all doing their jobs, then they create a harmonious state. This is what I bring to a writer’s journey.
I am an active member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, the South Carolina Writing Association, the Everyday Podcast Collective, the Women Who Podcast Collective, and the Black PodNews Community.
I’ve recently been accepted into the ANAPHORAArts Publishing Program with a partial Fellowship. This program is an important step to launching the GRACE for Social Justice Writing Consulting Group.
The rest of my socials, blog links, and crowdfunding information are available on my bio-site.
https://bio.site/EllaShawnWrites
Have you ever had to pivot?
I knew after I published the final book in the Broken Souls series, I would not self-publish another novel under a pen name or my real name, for that matter. I decided to find a pathway to become a traditionally published author. I made that promise to myself on the spring equinox. I didn’t know how it would look or what I’d do while writing and querying but I accepted it.
In August of 2022 during a virtual write-in session hosted by the Women’s Fiction Writers Association (WFWA), the moderator asked if I would be interested in presenting at their 10th-anniversary conference in September of 2023. This writing organization boasts an international registry of best-selling authors that people probably know. I joined the organization because I realized I needed a broader writing community that I could get to virtually. They are great! Anyway, I looked at all the faces in the Zoom boxes and wondered if they were as confused as me. They were, by the way.
Number one: People were allowed to submit proposals to present, nobody had been asked to do so. Number two: I was asked specifically to present writing diverse characters. Presenters were allowed to present on whatever they wanted as long as it dealt with writing craft, industry, or writer life and maintenance. Number three: I’d just started planning to launch the Black Writer Therapy podcast and had put some feelers on the group’s Facebook page. Black Writer Therapy is dedicated to uplifting, amplifying, and celebrating the stories, voices, and experiences of Black women writers with the audacity to challenge the status quo of a white-centered publishing industry and thrive. I said all that because that is probably why she tapped me to do the workshop.
I’d been working on creating a new writing model since before I published my first book in 2018. Being asked to present at the conference, was the perfect place to test it out on working writers. many of whom have MFAs.
Fast forward to September of 2023. I’d been working on this workshop for almost a year. The trouble I had was the topic. They wanted me to give a workshop to predominately white women writers on writing diverse characters in their predominately white-centered novels without being offensive or stereotypical. None of it sat well with me. In my former life as an educator, I was also a DEI training coach. One of the first things I told the faculty and staff at my former school was, “The onus does not fall on persons who are adversely affected by social injustices created by the white majority to educate and/or absolve the white majority.” I felt the same way about giving that workshop.
I’m in Chicago, IL in a beautiful five-star hotel preparing to tell a roomful of white writers–some of whom I call friends–that if they’re not capable of writing characters with different lived experiences from themselves, then they need to evaluate their desire to do so. An hour and a half later I was the “rock-star” teacher I’d always been. Accept this time, instead of high school students… the room was filled with my writing peers. Writer with agents. Writers with major-5 publishing contracts, movie and TV rights for their books in negotiation, multia-award winning, bestselling women writers.
“Do you offer online courses, workshops, or retreats?” “Do you offer coaching services?” “Oh, my god! You are amazing. I have never thought about writing like that and now I can’t think about it any other way.”
The G.R.A.C.E. for Social Justice Writing Consulting Group, a trademark of Southern Momentum Publishing House, LLC is currently in the developmental stage. What I and my fellow WFWA members love about the GRACE for Social Justice Writing Model is that it offers writers of privilege the opportunity to put their craft where their mouths are. Do you want to learn how to write diverse characters, or do you want to learn to write empowered characters who garner the empathy and respect of your privileged reader, who in turn is empowered to go into her community and make real change?
I’ve enlisted SCORE and have been matched with a business mentor. I am in the start-up phase, which means legal, funding, team building, identifying technology needs, marketing, website… etc. I would love to connect with other entrepreneurs in a similar line of business that’s based on course creation, workshops, and coaching. I’d rather not make this next pivotal move on my own.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
So many studies have been done to understand the effects of growing up with adverse childhood experiences or ACE. According to the Centers for Disease Control, ACEs are common, “About 64% of U.S. adults reported they had experienced at least one type of ACE before age 18, and nearly 1 in 6 (17.3%) reported they had experienced four or more types of ACEs.” (https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/fastfact.html) I fall in the 17.3% of U.S. adults. I’ve experienced six out of six of the listed adverse childhood experiences.
One of the many thorns left behind is the belief that I must figure everything out for myself. Unlearning a concept that has served to both protect me and warn others, of my place in my healing journey will be an ongoing process. As an ACE adult, it has taken me years to understand how growing up the way I did, continues to shape the way I move in the world. For me, it was never about my actions, which is why I didn’t think I’d been adversely affected by my upbringing. I thought myself to be quite resilient. Strong.
I am those things. And I am also unlearning lessons taught by adverse circumstances that were out of my control as a child. No child should be made to feel they must figure life out for themselves because the adults aren’t able to be what they need. I refused to be that person. I vowed that I would do whatever it took to give my children the exact opposite of what I had.
College Graduate… check. Start a respectable career… check. Marry high school sweetheart…. check. Buy a house…. check. Start a family…. check. Get and advanced degree…. check.
The first half of my adult life was a series of boxes to be checked off. Mental, physical, and emotional milstones to crest. When I turned seventeen, I luxurated in knowing I would not be a teenaged mom. When I purchased my first home, I beamed because it was something that to me farther away from the ACEs I tried to outrun. It wasn’t until I was diagnosed with systemic lupus erithrmatosis in February of 2013, that I had to stop running.
The years following that diagnosis, brought with them clarity, understanding, and most of all, acceptance. What is clear now, that wasn’t before, is my actions looked like the American dream come to life. However, what motivated those actions, were the same egregious, shameful results of surviving adverse childhood experiences that led Jay Gatsby to throw massive parties he didn’t know how to enjoy.
That’s the brutality of living in a country that creates social issues designed to adversely affect certain groups more than others and waits to punish the adversely affected group for not figuring out a way to do and be better. Or, punishing them because they did.
It is not on me to find creative ways to respond to social experiences designed to adversely affect my life and livelihood. It is my right and my privilege, to see the opportunity in every problem, and seek the assistance of others to help me figure out how to bring my solution to fruition. This is the mission of the GRACE for Social Justice Writing Consulting Group, the Black Writer Therapy podcast, and Ella Shawn Writes all of which fall under the umbrella of, Southern Momentum Publishing House, LLC.
I need help figuring out funding to attend a one-year intensive publishing program to which I’ve been accepted with a partial Fellowship. I need help figuring out how to fund my start-up publishing company to establish the other ventures as trademarks. I need help figuring our how to harmoniously onboard writing courses, workshops, and group progrmas and continue to write and query. I need help figuring out how to find a studio to record, sponsors to support, and a team to lighten the post-production load. I need help figuring out how to connected with like-minded people who will support and accept support without malicious intent.
I’m an unlearning the lessons learned while growing up with ACEx. The first step is acknowledging, without judgement or shame, that I am an adult survivor of adverse childhood experiences, and I’m learning to ask for help.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.ellashawn.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@authorellashawn
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/@authorellashawn
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vickey-finkley-brown-971987111/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@blackwritertherapy
- Other: https://ellashawn.substack.com https://bio.site/EllaShawnWrites