Thank you for opting in to learn more about NarrativeSeeds – a new consultancy and dream space exploring methods and strategies for building healing-centered narrative change.
After a work chapter closed at the end of 2024, I decided to spend the beginning of 2025 seriously contemplating what would come next. I wondered if I had the energy to build something new. I tried to convince myself that I didn’t – I think we can all agree that 2025 has presented more than enough challenges without adding “start a new consultancy” to the list.
Yet, in my experience, when one feels the tug, it’s best to honor it. No matter what happens, the tug will be there waiting for you to return. And so, I’ve honored the tugging, the pulling, the seeding towards building something with a particular point of view about what it means to build narrative power.
During my first year of college, I spent hours at my campus bookstore immersing myself in the words of Black women writers. I nourished myself on the words of bell hooks, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan, and younger writers of the “hip-hop” generation like Joan Morgan, asha bandele, and Lisa Jones. The love letters these Black women wrote served as a healing balm for the oppressive notion that Black women do not live complex or nuanced lives deserving of unique and particular consideration. The cadre of Black women writers I was collecting inside my soul actively and fervently resisted any ideas I had internalized about what the world expected me to be, and gave me the affirmation to define myself – politically, culturally and spiritually. Through the tradition of Black women’s “self-defining,” as scholar Patricia Hill Collins articulates, I was developing narrative agency and establishing a foundation for my future political activity.
That was over twenty years ago. Back then, I delved into narrative practices like political education, storytelling and memory work – all while weaving together a radical longing for freedom and justice. While not knowing it at the time, I planted seeds for the work I’m doing now by simply trying to find my way into myself, with the words of Black women writers guiding me along.
I share this story as a way to demonstrate:
- The seeds of this work have been growing in me for some time, and
- Narrative change is a long arc.
That’s why NarrativeSeeds takes a long-view of what it means to build narrative power through healing narrative oppression and deepening narrative agency as a way to build capacity for political actualization. Ours is the slow work. The care work. The emergent work. The work that is rigorous and intentional, yet not always easily quantifiable and may take years or decades to bloom fully.
This is NarrativeSeeds: A dream. An intention. A point of view. And I’m open to working with partners in dreaming new strategies and experiments to seed the narrative future we all long for. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to work together. Or stick around for dispatches from the journey. I hope we have some fun and healing together.
In care and community,
Courtney M. McSwain