We are made of star stuff and stories.

I am alive because I have thousands of other people’s stories inside me.

Whenever I feel like my courage is thinning, I go back to reading stories of resilience. I have a wider mind because I've paid attention to stories.

That's why I share stories—to help others find their way home.

At one point in my life, I told my stories, awkwardly, repeating an old one, anxiously. Or, hedging my bets to make myself feel safe.

Now, I know the story that comes from my gut and insists on being told. That’s always the one that moves people most deeply.

I guide my kids by sharing stories, not by telling them what to do.

My brain is a story-making machine. You too?

For more than 40 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 in common, on the surface. But they each evoke the oldest human story.

They all share this intention—to 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.

When a story grabs me by the collar and won’t let go, I feel less alone. I carry on walking, my load a little lighter. I’m willing to bet that's true for you too.

I’m nearly 60 and done with plotted-out programs and polished funnels.

If I could, I would drop all social media and wander around with a Polaroid camera and a thick, mostly blank notebook and a blue Pilot pen. I might be doing that soon.

I am now returning home to what I first loved to do—I'm writing my stories.

And I want to hear your stories too.

I write small, vivid stories about learning to be present, in the messy moment, imperfect and alive.

STories connect us.

Let's connect.

Here's the story.

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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.

I also know that everything becomes funny, given enough time.

Here’s what you’ll receive when you subscribe to my newsletter.

Here's the story.
On one 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 there too, no matter what is happening.

These stories are free for everyone to read.

The Story of Learning 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 show up for paid subscribers on the next Wednesday.

If anything you read in my writing space moves you or makes you think a little bit sideways, then consider becoming a paid subscriber, to support me in doing this storytelling work.

Here are my stories.

Let's shape
your story.

Let’s Shape Your Story

You write the draft. I read it deeply. We make it sing.

You have a first draft of your project — memoir, important speech, series of essays, fiction — and you are proud. And exhausted.

You want a fresh reader with a depth of experience, someone who can read the first draft and see the piece of storytelling the writing could become.

That is what I do.

Editing stories is one of my deepest joys. Developmental editing is the work I do best.

What is your story’s structure? Who are the characters? Do they feel real and compelling? Does the pacing work? Is there dramatic tension that builds? Does the voice feel authentic? Is it consistent, all the way through to the ending?

I will read your draft all the way through, taking notes along the way. I will look for the specific holes and inconsistencies, then offer you kind and specific ideas for how to make the story sing.

I work best with writers in midlife and beyond. Women, especially. Writers working in memoir, essay, fiction, and speech. Writers who care more about voice and emotional truth than commercial polish. Writers who are not looking for someone to make them sound like everyone else, but for someone to help them sound more like themselves.

If that is you, write to me. Tell me about your project — what it is, where you are with it, what kind of help you are looking for. I will write back with the next steps and the options that fit what you need.

Let’s make it sing.

Write to me →

Let's find your words.

LET'S FIND YOUR WORDS.

You talk. I write. You approve.

You love what you do.

You just cannot find the right words to describe your story in writing.

You light up when you talk about your work. When someone asks you about it, you give them your passion. They're fascinated. In person, people understand how you can help them. And they hire you. Or buy from you.

But when you sit down to write the copy for the homepage of your website? Or draft a newsletter about an upcoming event? Or spend an hour trying to write the perfect Instagram caption?

The words feel stiff.

You write. You delete. You scribble ideas, then scrunch up the paper in defeat. After all that work, you read what you wrote and realize that none of it sounds like you, even a bit.

When you talk about your work in a relaxed conversation — to a friend, to a curious stranger, to me — the rhythm of how you actually sound comes out. The specific words you reach for. The stories you tell to explain what you mean. The phrases that make your face change when you say them.

That is the writing your business needs. Your voice, on your most-at-ease day, on the page.

Here is how we work. You tell me what you need. A homepage. A full website. A newsletter sequence. A book.

Then, we will have a relaxed conversation about it. You tell me about your work — the way you would tell a friend over coffee. I record your voice. I listen for what comes alive when you talk.

Then, I write. You read what I wrote. We work back and forth until the words sound like you.

That is the entire process.

You might be the right person for this work if writing is not your creative act, but creating is what you do every day. You might make pottery, or paintings, or workshops, or cakes, or songs, or any of the thousand things humans make.

The making is your practice. Writing about the making is what stops you.

You worry for hours over one paragraph, then close the document, disheartened.

Your business depends on people understanding both what you offer and who you are, which means it depends on writing that sounds like you, not like the generic prose that an AI chatbot spits out.

I can help you. This is what I love to do.

If this sounds like work you would welcome, then
Write to me →

Hello there. Here's a bit of my story so far.

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.

“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

I feel experiences in life before I understand them. I write my stories to find the precise right words to understand my stories, 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.

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.

My husband Danny and I stopped creating cookbooks, but we still 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 learn to say yes to life, even though that’s hard hard hard work sometimes.

Learning to say yes to whatever arises is why I wrote my book, ENOUGH: Notes from a Woman Who Has Finally Found It.

We’re raising 2 wildly joyful, neurodivergent, and 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 for who they are.

After being convinced for decades that I could ever make it through a moment of silence, I’ve been practicing meditation every day for 26 years now. .

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. 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 that I don’t earn 6 figures 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.”

“Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.”
~ Madeleine L’Engle

SHauna James Ahern

Shauna James Ahern