We are made of star stuff and stories.
I believe stories help humans survive, transform, and find their way home. I gather people around that belief.
For thirty years I’ve been studying why certain stories move us so deeply. Epics like The Lord of the Rings. The mindful beauty of a Mary Oliver poem. Something ridiculous and loving like Schitt’s Creek. They don’t have anything obvious in common — except they do. They all share the same deep structure. And they all show us, obliquely, how to endure the slow difficult process of becoming someone kinder, less afraid, and more awake.
You don’t have to be a mother to be wrecked by Hamnet. You may think you don’t like hip hop — but have you listened to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and actually studied its story? Please tell me you’ve read Persepolis.
When a story grabs us by the collar and won’t let go, something real is happening. We feel less alone. We carry on, our load a little lighter.
I’m Shauna James Ahern. Storyteller. Teacher. James Beard award-winning author. Nearly 60 and done with plotted-out programs and polished funnels. I’m back to what I’ve always loved: gathering people around stories.
Stories connect human beings. Let’s connect.
With warmth and joy,
Shauna
Here is my NEXT story experience.
Saturday, June 2oth
11 AM, Pacific
ONLINE
Allow Yourself to Write Your Story
ENOUGH: Notes from a Woman Who Has Finally Found It is my memoir about letting go of the stories we’ve told ourselves for decades — about our bodies, our families, our worth — and mindfully finding enough in the present moment.
As one reviewer wrote:
“Think essays that are wicked truth-tellers, bare, unflinching, a reckoning with a family legacy of trauma, a life-long quest for radical self-love, an insider look at a marriage through thick and thin.”
This book might speak to you too.
Allow Yourself is a two-hour writing workshop, every third Saturday of the month, based on the stories I wrote for ENOUGH.
You don’t need to be a writer. You need to be willing to show up and write.
Here’s what happens: I’ll read you a short passage from ENOUGH. We’ll have a conversation about it — not about me, but about what it stirs in you. Then I’ll teach you how to write one of your own stories, with radical specificity and unblinking kindness. We’ll read and listen. You don’t have to share. Listening is plenty.
You might enjoy feeling not so alone in the midst of a universal problem.
And then we’ll do it again.
After the workshop, I’ll email you a writing prompt to keep you putting your pen to the page. It’s the practice of writing, over time, that changes our minds.
Come back the next month, if you want.
$40 a month. Every third Saturday of the month. Two hours. Your words.
What readers said about ENOUGH
“She breaks open the myth that women who want are to be feared, and allows us to take up the space we were born to occupy.”
— Lena Dunham
“One of the best accounts of human growth I’ve ever read.”
— Ashley C. Ford
“Raw and vulnerable…a testament to the healing power of a purpose-filled life.”
— Lisa Congdon
“Enough feels like a long exhalation.”
— Molly Wizenberg
Would you like to drop all the sharp points and acrid memories that have made you feel not good enough?
I believe that writing your real stories is the path to let you stop clutching.
Allow
Yourself
to wrIte
your story.
Here's the story.
I’m Shauna James Ahern, storyteller and writer.
I write small, vivid stories about learning to be present, in the messy moment, imperfect and alive.
Here’s what you’ll receive when you subscribe to my newsletter.
Here's the story.
Every other Wednesday, I’ll send you a story about learning to be here, fully, without flinching or striving. My stories always start from a place of noticing, something that strikes me as true about being alive in this specific moment. And then I write it down to place you in that moment.
These stories are free for everyone to read.
The Story of Learning How to Feed Myself is my ongoing writing project, driven by discovery. I’m doing an in-depth revision of the blaring story I have always told myself — that my body has never been good enough to rest. The noise about food in my head, implanted there by 1970s and 1980s diet culture, has made me suck in my stomach for nearly 50 years.
Now, I’m breaking down the story, one essay at a time, then letting it go.
This is my follow-up to my memoir in essays: ENOUGH: Notes from a Woman Who Has Finally Found It. This time I am writing the book as a newsletter, one essay at a time.
These letters arrive in your inbox on the other Sunday.
Only paid subscribers will receive these Sunday posts.
You can read these 4 letters in The Story of Learning to Feed Myself for free, to get a glimpse of my stories.
If anything you read here moves you or makes you think a little bit sideways, then consider becoming a paid subscriber, to read my work and support it.
“Try to realize it’s all within yourself
No one else can make you change
And to see you’re really only very small
And life flows on within you and without you.”
— Within You Without You, written by George Harrison for The Beatles
When I was 7, my father loaned me his first-edition copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. I played it on my Fisher-Price record player until I wore it out. I didn’t understand a word of “Within You Without You.” But I knew it. I felt it.
I feel experiences in life before I understand them. I write my stories to find the precise right words to understand my experiences, then let them go.
I’ve been writing all my life and a professional writer for twenty years. A high school teacher before that. I’m still teaching but not grading anymore. Back in the early 2000s, I was a food blogger for 13 years, when that was a strange and beautiful thing to be. I wrote a food memoir and 3 cookbooks with my husband. (One of those cookbooks won a James Beard award.) Our cookbooks contained multitudes of stories, as well as recipes. A well-written recipe is a story too.
My husband Danny and I adore each other. We keep turning toward each other, even though that’s fucking hard work. He’s no longer a chef. He’s a preschool teacher now. I don’t write about food anymore, because I was always more passionate about writing stories that showed how I have learned to say yes to life, even though that’s hard hard hard sometimes.
Learning to say yes to whatever arises is why I wrote my book, ENOUGH: Notes from a Woman Who Has Finally Found It.
After I suffered a transient ischemic attack (mini-stroke) in 2015, I felt shaken and afraid. My doctor reassured me that my tangible test results showed that my heart and brain were healthy. So what happened? Probably a chunk of cholesterol broke off and blocked the blood to my brain for a bit. And then, he opened my heart with this insight. “We know now that emotional stress on the body can cause physical damage. Stress can kill us. So what are the forces that have been causing you to not feel good enough?”
As I slowly regained my strength and mental clarity after that TIA, I repeated that question to myself so many times that it became a mantra, the path I walked for months. And then I wrote the answers to that question in the form of deeply personal essays, which became ENOUGH.
After turning in the final manuscript for that book, I received a cPTSD diagnosis. At 56 I was diagnosed with ADHD. Those twin forces have been requiring me to rewrite all the stories I told myself about who I am, again.
I know how to let go of the old stories stuffed in my body now.
We’re raising 2 wildly neurodivergent, complex kids. We laugh with them every day. I’ve never been more exhausted. I have never learned so much as I have from loving my children, fiercely.
After wondering if I could ever make it through a moment of silence, I’ve been sitting meditation every day for 26 years.
I think in patterns. I love Joseph Campbell and Pema Chödrön and Stephen Colbert and Emily Dickinson and the Artemis astronauts. I believe the first law of thermodynamics applies to love. I believe stories are how humans survive, transform, and find their way home.
I’m nearly 60 now. I live in an island community, where I’m surrounded by trees, water, and the sound of Swainson’s thrushes in summer. Increasingly, I’m also surrounded by the reality that everything is built for the wealthy now. So many of us are struggling. But I feel no shame anymore.
I’m done with trying to do anything only because it will bring me more money. I can only focus on what I know and love:
I gather kind people around good stories.
“When you’ve seen beyond yourself
then you may find, peace of mind is waiting there”
I would love to walk this path with you.
Hello there.
I'm Shauna.
"The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are."
— Maya Angelou