Welcome to Joy Ride, a monthly dose of joy, good things, and gratitude by writer Jennifer Chen. If you like it, please share this newsletter with someone who might like it too.
Your Pep Talk 🏃🏻♀️
It’s been a tough month with the election news. Then, this email arrived in my inbox from Once Upon a Time Bookstore, a local indie children’s bookseller, and the first line stuck with me:
“Books are hopes captured on paper.”
It reminded me that books have captured history, hopes, dreams, and tragedies, both past and present. Our words can heal or hurt. Recently, I wrote an email to a teen after she got into college. I was so proud to be a small part of her journey, so I wrote an email (excerpted below).
Being a creative person, you feel deeply. It’s an important quality, but can be so hard to be a creative, deeply feeling person in a sometimes unkind world.
Keep going. Keep making your art because we need your voice in the world. Please know that you are important and cared for and you are not alone!
I’m sharing it because I hope it helps remind you that we need your creative voice in the world. So please keep going. Keep doing what brings you joy, and let yourself feel all the feelings.
My Latest News 🎧
The audiobook for Artifacts of an Ex is on sale for $8 until Dec. 1!
In the Writer’s Yearbook 2025, I wrote a story on writing software. The issue is packed with comprehensive writing guides.
I started a new part-time remote gig as a content editor for the Breville+ app! I’m very excited to have a great job and work with an incredible boss. Plus, the products are stunning.
Check Out These... 📚
BOOKS: I’ve had an excellent reading streak lately so I’m sharing my faves.
It’s Elementary by Elise Bryant. I devoured this delightful mystery set at a public elementary school. I sold a friend on it by sharing the book’s tagline: “Murder was not on the PTA agenda.”
The In-Between Bookstore by Edward Underhill (out 1/14/25). Ed’s debut adult fiction book answers the question with heart and imagination: What would you do if you met your teenage self?
In Five Years by Rebecca Serle. As someone who plans every single moment, I loved this book about a woman who thinks she has her whole life figured out until she has an earth-shattering dream.
Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame by Olivia Ford. As a fan of the Great British Baking Show, I absolutely adored this cozy, heartwarming story from beginning to end.
ORGANIZATIONS: 🏳️⚧️
Calling all authors! Donate signed copies, swag, or your time. My friend Brian D. Kennedy is organizing an upcoming online book auction that will be raising funds for: Transgender Law Center, Trans Lifeline, and True Colors United.
Help kittens in the Best Friends Los Angeles nursery by shopping the shelter’s Amazon wish list for much-needed items like scales and warming pads.
Artist Miko Lee set up Trans Meals to ensure trans folks get a meal when they need it most. Your donation offers them support and reminds them they’re not alone.
Q&A with Author Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts
I’m thrilled to interview author Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts, who has published 25 books including several collaborations with numerous high-profile authors. Her latest book, Black Joy Playbook: 30 Days Of Intentionally Reclaiming Your Delight, is part journal and part meditation practice. I highly recommend signing up for her HeART Space newsletter too.
Black Joy Playbook is a guided journal full of daily suggestions and meditations for how to choose joy. Can you talk about what you hope readers will get through the process of your book?
Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts: One of the first things that come to mind is that I really want people to be able to locate joy for themselves. Specifically, locate joy in the body. There is absolute value in knowing what joy feels like so that you can call it up when you need it. This is the main reason why, out of the five sections in the playbook, “Joy in the Body” is the largest one. Too many of us—Black folks, in particular— are walking around in a disembodied state. We won’t give ourselves permission to feel joy because there is so much rage and grief taking up space in our bodies. We are also in our heads so much. It’s been a mode of survival for too long. So I thought it was important to offer a somatic framework for accessing joy. Ultimately though, I hope people will use the journal to create their own “book of plays” that they can return to again and again. It’s not a “30-day then I’m done” type of thing. This journal will hopefully be just the start of a continuous unearthing of joy in their lives.
What are daily moments of joy in your life?
Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts: It definitely varies from day today. Parenting a newly minted teenager is always good for a few laughs (in between the tears and the cringing). We dance, sing, crack jokes together all the time. I also love to garden and feel such an overwhelming joy when I have my hands in the dirt or I’m harvesting something I’ve grown. It’s the one space in my life I can fail and that be okay. I try to sit out there as often as possible.
My current daily joy is watching Christmas movies. The cheesier the better. It’s a whole thing! Hubby and the kid stay rolling their eyes at me. Lol Every year I try to beat my record from the previous year. Last year I watched 30 Christmas movies and it looks like I will top that this year.
I started the Joy Ride newsletter in 2020—at a time when I felt hopeless—to remember that there’s moments of beauty, even during hard times. Can you talk about writing your previous book, Black Joy: A Strategy for Resistance, Resilience, and Restoration, and how you connecting with your joy allowed for healing?
Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts: Writing the OG Black Joy book was probably the most liberating experience I’ve ever had as a writer. I allowed myself to release the white gaze (as Toni Morrison named it), the publishing gaze, the church gaze, and any other entity I felt could influence the way I told my story. I let myself play with form and frame my narrative exactly the way I wanted. That was a huge deal.
But honestly, I arrived to this conversation about Black Joy from grief. In 2018, I lost a family member to racial gun violence. In 2019, I was doing DEI work at the campus where I was teaching and experiencing hostility and pushback from those who refused to embrace that kind of culture change. And as a result of the grief and pain, my body broke down. I spent 6 months really unable to leave my bed except to go to a million doctors who couldn’t figure out what was wrong. During this time though, I got incredibly still. I was finally able to quiet the noise in my head and sit with what was missing. I remember going to therapy one day and my therapist asking me a question that changed the trajectory of my life and career: “Tracey, what does Joy feel like in your body?” And I wasn’t able to answer her. I could easily access rage and grief, but joy was so much harder. So I began this healing journey which included figuring out what joy was to me and specifically what joy meant for a Black woman in this country. Black joy is very distinct. It’s not just the cultural animations of our joy, i.e. the music, dancing, creativity, innovation. It’s more than that. It’s a deep, abiding, sustaining force that my ancestors knew how to access. Apparently, I had forgotten something and I set about reclaiming it. Along the way, I’ve uncovered so much about how to wield joy not just as a resistance to systems that want to dehumanize me, but as a way to heal myself and my people whether large-scale change happens in my lifetime or not.
I'm Grateful For... 🥰
My friends. The day after the election, Sophia and I chatted in my backyard. My pug Zoey, of course, had to join us. The in-person conversation just helped me feel grounded in an unstable time. Thank you to Sophia, Emily, Ed, Brendan, Melissa, Tre, Caitlin, Robin, Meghan, and countless others for reaching out, sharing support, and encouragement when my family and I needed it the most.
