Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Vincent James. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Vincent , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

On 2/1/21, I launched “Coffee, Pizza, and Wine” on Instagram and gradually expanded outward to other social media platforms. I named my imprint “Coffee, Pizza, and Wine” after my three favorite things– I am a coffee aficionado, a foodie who loves pizza, and a lover of fine wine. The concept of “Coffee, Pizza, and Wine” is that I aim for the reader to experience that cozy reassurance that one would experience with their first sip of coffee in the morning, their first bite of their favorite pizza on a Friday night while they are looking forward to the weekend, or their first sip of wine on a Saturday evening get-together with their closest friends. The idea for “Coffee, Pizza, and Wine” emerged only the year before during the pandemic. At the time, I was working from home as a full-time therapist and I started doing online mindfulness sessions for my co-workers during our breaks. At first, I used mindfulness scripts I found online, but I eventually started writing my own. The sessions were a huge hit within my team and it gave me a level of confidence with my writing that I hadn’t experienced since I was a Creative Writing major in undergrad. I had always considered myself a writer since I was 15, but I had set aside my dream to work as a writer because I also felt called to help others as a social worker by the time I started grad school. But after the successful mindfulness sessions at work, I found myself returning to writing poetry and even restarted a novel that I had been trying complete for several years. As word spread about my mindfulness sessions, I was asked by other departments at work to provide mindfulness sessions at their team meetings. I eventually had one co-worker interview me on her wellness podcast on two occasions that year where I shared a mindfulness session I wrote and did a reading of one of my poems. I then had another co-worker incorporate another one of my poems into her wedding. The wedding poem ended up being a funny story because the wedding planner forgot to add a word on the sign that was made for my poem. But despite this grammatical error, my poem was still featured in the wedding. I realized from all of these experiences that I could combine my dream to be a writer with my drive to help others and reach a wider audience. By this point, I had wanted to reach more people beyond individual therapy sessions and mindfulness groups, but it took the encouragement of several co-workers for me to share my writing with the world. In other words, it took a village. I will always be grateful to them.

Vincent , 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?

My goal with sharing my writing through “Coffee, Pizza, and Wine” is to provide as much encouragement, reassurance and positivity to as many people as I can. I understand from my work as a therapist that I can’t change lives, but I can always encourage and support people in their desire to change their own lives. If the impact I have on bringing positivity and reassurance to someone’s day will only last for the duration that they would consume a cup of coffee, a slice of pizza, or a glass of wine, I consider my work a success. I learned early on that life is hard and it can be scary. I believe that even just a short positive moment that someone may have after reading my work on an otherwise long, dreary day can make all the difference in the world.

My love for writing and my desire to help others was inspired by the teachers, social workers, and books that all helped me through a troubled childhood. I first started writing as a way of coping with depression and anxiety when I was 15. It was a therapeutic process that I started on my own, but by the time I was 16, I was in an alternative high school that had both teachers and social workers who were encouraging me with my writing. This encouragement led me to expand my writing beyond just writing for myself. I had struggled throughout most of high school and didn’t have the grades or confidence to go to a university, so I tried to take one community college class at a time to see if I could make it in college. I managed to make it through one online class before trying an in-person class the next semester that I considered to be “my last chance.” After struggling through a few classes, I approached the professor after class and shared with her that I had been through special education in high school and wasn’t sure I was going to make in college. That professor ended up being the greatest mentor I ever had. With her encouragement and support, I expanded the amount of courses I was taking and eventually ended up with my associate’s, bachelor’s and master’s degrees. The experiences of other people helping me through childhood and early adulthood when I contemplated giving up on an almost daily basis inspired me to become a social worker, therapist, teacher, and writer at different points during my career. I wanted to encourage others the way they encouraged me and I wanted them to know that they weren’t alone in having the struggles that many of us go through. My writing includes many quotes, poems, dialogue, narratives and meditations that I wish I had available to me when I needed them as a kid and a young adult (and still benefit from now as an adult). The greatest reward I receive from my writing is when someone tells me “I really needed this.”

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I had to unlearn my concept of “culture competence” and embrace culture humility, but I take that a step further and also say I had to unlearn being “a people person” and learn to be a person who loves people. What I mean by that is that for several years I thought I knew people, thought I always knew what was best for them, and thought I didn’t have to always have an in-depth understanding of their culture, background, life experiences and pain to be present for them and to show empathy and kindness to them. What I discovered is that empathy and kindness without a full understanding of what someone wants you to have in terms of where they are coming from is about as authentic to them as a fake laugh or small talk about the weather. I had an experience where I was working with a poor African-American man with PTSD who engaged me in an inadvertent mindfulness exercise where he had me imagine a normal day in his life in which he experiences people misunderstanding or misinterpreting him, encounters racism, and navigates on-going challenges with accessing social services and health care. This was an extraordinarily uncomfortable and positively life-changing event that forever impacted how I approach people, how I write about them, and how I even take care of myself. I realized that simply doing what I think is right based on my values wasn’t enough, that I needed to learn and explore other people’s values in depth (whether I agreed with them or not) in order to understand what they think is right for them in order to make positive changes in their lives. I believe this process of unlearning and relearning requires a macro level of humility that some people believe they have already attained by having an individual level of humility. Obtaining a macro level of humility to me is as challenging and rewarding as learning a new foreign language. I believe that an individual level of humility is no longer enough in today’s society and I express that as much as I can through my work.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

When I was in college I wrote a short story for a creative writing class from a female perspective because I wanted to experience writing more from a different point-of-view. The story was about a teenage girl who is bullied in high school and suffers from body image issues. In the story, the girl discovers that when she looks in the mirror with very dim lighting, she finds herself beautiful. Because she never thought of herself as beautiful before, this is a life-changing discovery for her because she never thought she could see herself as a beautiful person. This new insight leads her to fantasize about being accepted by a boy she has a crush on at school. After I presented my story in class, a woman in my class who I had never interacted with before approached me and expressed appreciation for the story. She told me “that girl is me.” That memory always stayed with me even though that was the only interaction we ever had. It inspired me to convert the short story into trying to write my first novel. Over the next 18 years, I struggled on and off with trying to write it as I found it much more difficult to write from another perspective than I had ever imagined and I wanted to do it right. I ended up changing the secondary characters and the storyline several times while maintaining the original concept of the short story. That short story ended up becoming my first novel, “Beautiful Joy.”

Here is a passage from it that was inspired by my classmate who approached me:

“…there aren’t many people like you. There aren’t that many people committed to do the right thing who have a heart like yours. So many people don’t really live the right way and deep down they only do right for themselves even at the expense of other people. But you are unique. You are a treasure. People like you are so vulnerable to those other people who mistreat others. You have to value yourself and you have to love yourself because a lot of people won’t know how to value you. They’ll actually see you as a threat, because you are like a mirror to them. You are mirror that makes them look at themselves and see in themselves who they should be but haven’t been. You make them realize they can be better people when they don’t want to be or think they aren’t able to be. You are so special, and unfortunately a lot of people like you don’t always make it in our world because of how cruel it really is. A lot of people like you disappear and hide away to get away from the world, when really you have so much to offer to it, and when really, it needs more like you.”

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