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My writing space is wherever I can hear myself.
I wish I could tell you I have one of those gorgeous writer’s rooms with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a perfectly worn leather chair, and a window overlooking something appropriately literary. I don’t.
I have written everywhere.
In hotel rooms. In bed. At kitchen tables. In coffee shops. On airplanes. In the Notes app on my phone when something comes through so fast I know if I don’t catch it right then, it’s gone.
What matters to me isn’t so much the room. It’s whether I can get quiet enough to hear what is underneath the obvious thing.
That is where I write from.
I am interested in the story beneath the story. The thing underneath what happened. The image. The longing. The wound. The absurdity. The sentence that has been waiting thirty years for me to become the woman capable of writing it.
My writing space, then, is really an interior space.
It is the place where I stop trying to make experience behave and allow it to tell me what it means.
Sometimes there is coffee. Usually there is coffee. There are books nearby, papers everywhere, half-finished thoughts, and sentences I have written down because I don’t yet know what they are for.
I have learned not to rush them.
A poem may know something about me long before I do.
Outside my window is Southern California.
Sunlight. Trees. Cars passing. People going somewhere. The ordinary machinery of a life continuing whether I am ready for it or not.
I love that.
Because so much of my work comes from extraordinary circumstances—foster care, abandonment, longing, survival, love, grief, becoming—and yet outside the window, somebody is walking a dog.
Somebody is carrying groceries.
A bird has absolutely no interest in my childhood.
There is something profoundly reassuring about that.
The world keeps insisting upon itself.
And maybe that is what I am always writing toward: not simply what happened to us, but what remains. What emerges. Who we become when the terrible thing is no longer the only author in the room.
I spent a great deal of my life looking outside myself for coordinates—someone to tell me where home was, where love was, where I belonged.
Writing changed that.
Now I understand that sometimes the window works in both directions.
I look out at the world.
And then I turn inward and ask:
What do I see from here?
That question has become one of the great privileges of my life.
Because after everything, I am still here.
And I get to be the one looking.
Unladylike: A Mythopoetic Reclamation of Love is a lyrical collection of poetry and prose exploring love, survival, embodiment, and the journey of returning to the self. Blending literary poetry with personal reflection, Regina Louise examines relationships, identity, trauma, healing, and the process of reclaiming one's voice after loss and betrayal.
Through intimate poems and essays, Unladylike maps the emotional terrain between heartbreak and self-discovery, inviting readers into a deeply human exploration of resilience, self-love, and personal transformation. Her work speaks to readers interested in emotional healing, spiritual growth, women's voices, and the reclamation of dignity through storytelling and creative expression.
Rooted in mythopoetic inquiry and lived experience, this collection moves through memory, desire, grief, and repair, offering language for those navigating change, recovery, and the search for meaning. Unladylike is both an artistic work and an invitation-to witness oneself honestly and to return to what was always there.
Read an Excerpt
Say Her Name, Yours, and Mine
for Celie, for the girl on the 24 Divisadero, for all of us
Who taught her to bankrupt herself
back into her own disremembering—
to shrink inside the sound of her own name?
But I call her by her name. Celie.
Not by what Mister said.
Not by the nothing she thought she was.
I call her holy.
I recognize her as my own emulate,
mama,
sister,
auntie,
grandmother,
Jezebel,
and Sapphire,
The forgotten-about ones.
Because, like all of them (us),
she wrote letters to a God
she wasn’t sure existed.
Because she kept speaking,
even when no one answered.
Kept showing up,
and up,
and up—
Until that sacred day she stood and said,
“I may be poor, Black, I may even be ugly—
but dear God, I’m here,”
the day every woman who had been erased
stood up inside her.
The day I stood up.
My smallest exiled self—commanding like Moses—
until her spine / mine / all our spines
reached a Heaven of our own creating.
Miss Celie
touched her own face,
and I touched mine
on the 24 Divisadero bus heading away from Haight,
and we found ourselves beautiful.
About the Author:
Regina Louise is a poet, writer, teacher, speaker, executive coach, whose work explores the intersection of memory, belonging, identity, and emotional liberation. The author of three books—two of which have been adapted for film: Somebody’s Someone, Someone Has Led This Child to Believe and Permission Granted: Kick Ass Strategies to Bootstrap your Way to Unconditional Self-Love—she has spent more than three decades helping people transform adversity into authorship through story, self-inquiry, and radical compassion.
A senior teacher with the Hoffman Process, Regina is known for guiding profound conversations about restoring dignity, resilience, attachment, and the art of becoming fully oneself. Whether on stage, in classrooms, behind a microphone, or in intimate workshop settings, she invites audiences to reimagine the stories that have shaped their lives and discover the freedom that awaits beyond them.
Her forthcoming collection, Unladylike: A Mythopoetic Reclamation of Love (September 2026), marks her debut poetry collection. Blending poetry, lyrical prose, and aphoristic reflections, it is a fearless meditation on love, loss, self-possession, and the sacred work of returning home to oneself.
Regina Louise lives in California, where she continues to write, teach, and create work that honors the transformative power of language to restore dignity, deepen connection, and reclaim what has always belonged to us.
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