This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Regina Louise will be awarding a $25 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner. Click on a tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.
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.
Topic: How was it that you came to be a writer?
The Morning the Universe Shifted
Life has a way of turning on a single, invisible pivot. For the first chapter of my working life, I was a business owner, navigating the daily rhythms of running my hair salon. I had never written anything creatively before, no journals tucked under a mattress, no ambitious drafts stashed in a drawer. My world was defined by the tangible: scissors, hair, appointments, and the quiet, heavy survival of enduring thirty foster homes with no family and no anchor for the entirety of my youth, young adulthood or any other time in my life.
The shift began with a nightmare. I awakened from a chilling dream that warned me to be acutely aware of strangers. I brushed it off, not realizing it was a premonition. I started my day and went into my salon, only to find that every single client had canceled.
Feeling a sudden, urgent need to find something that reflected my reality, possibly a book representative of surviving thirty foster homes and total isolation, I decided to head to the Barnes & Noble on Union Square in San Francisco. But as I set out, an inner voice intervened. Go home. Just go home. My son was in boarding school and scheduled to return; I could go home and prepare the house for his arrival.
Yielding to that sudden intuition, I changed direction and caught the BART train just as the doors were closing. I scooted on and found a seat. When the train reached 16th and Mission, my usual routine would have had me stepping off to grab Mexican food at my favorite taqueria. Instead, I stayed on. When we arrived at 24th and Mission, normally I would have pushed forward with assertive urgency, but this time I didn't. I waited, holding back to let mothers carrying babies and toddlers exit first.
As I finally stepped off the platform, a man walked past me. I instantly recognized him as someone whom I had not seen in thirty years.
Instinct took over. I went after him and called out, "Hey, hey you." He kept walking. I said it again, louder: "Hey, hey you."
He turned around, his eyes looking past me. I walked right up to him. "I'm sorry," I said.
"Yes, how can I help you?" he asked.
I just stared.
He frowned. "You speak to me as if I should know you."
"I know you," I replied. "You don't know me."
"Well, why would I?"
I looked right at him and said, "Because you're my father, Tom.
From the Edge of Despair to the Tip of a Pencil
The encounter left me entirely unmoored. The weight of thirty years of estrangement, colliding with a lifetime of foster care and abandonment, closed n on me as I walked home. When I walked through my front door, the emotional shock was so intense that I thought I was going to self-harm.
Instead of yielding to the terror, my hand reached for a pencil.
I didn't have a blank journal or a pristine notebook. All I had near me was a copy of The Bay Guardian. Following a voice within I began writing along the perimeters of the newspaper. The pressure was so raw and uncontainable that my pencil kept puncturing right through the newsprint.
It was in that chaotic, desperate moment that I wrote the very first words of what would become a much larger project:
Careful not to disturb the raggedy screen door that barely kept the man-eating mosquitoes from tearing our asses up. I leaned my body into the frame and stared up at the sky. I could tell by the way the clouds moved that God was gonna start crying’ soon…
That single sentence broke the dam. The writer inside me wasn't born out of a desire for craft or a romantic notion of storytelling; she was born out of survival. Writing became the only vessel strong enough to hold the wreckage of my past, transforming a disorienting, shattering day into the foundation of my voice. I didn't choose to become a writer, writing chose me.
What unexpected moment or turning point completely shifted the trajectory of your own life?
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.
Website: http://www.therealreginalouise.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therealreginalouise
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/regina.louise.5/
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/p/books/unladylike-a-mythopoetic-reclamation-of-love-regina-louise/b4379cc65cf1293b
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001IQXN7M
