A Half A Century Later

“The only person holding me back was me.” - R. Raminyah Ingram

Peace and Blessings. Welcome once more to Shifting Ground Chronicles.

Before the story became a trilogy. Before the characters began to breathe on their own. Before the nations and tribes found their names. There was only a reader and her longing.

Books have always been my home. I found myself in their pages long before I found my purpose as a writer. My childhood shelves were filled with mythology, stories where gods and mortals shared the same sky. I loved the power in those tales, the way divine lessons hid inside the chaos of human life. As I grew older, my imagination demanded more. I searched for worlds that felt limitless, and science fiction answered that call.

When I reached Tennessee State University, a single class altered everything. My African American Literature professor gave an assignment to map an author’s life and works. I searched for someone who looked like me within the realm of science fiction, and the search led me to Samuel R. Delany. His work was revolutionary, yet it felt like a door only half open. After grading my project, my professor met me in the hallway of the Women’s Building and placed three books in my hands: Kindred, Parable of the Sower, and Wild Seed. The author was Octavia E. Butler.

That day changed me.

Her stories were a revelation. Through her eyes, I saw America, Africa, and the legacy of slavery reborn through spirit, science, and myth. I carried her words with me across the Atlantic, through Gambia and Senegal. I began to understand storytelling as a sacred act an altar where memory and imagination meet. Queen Mother Butler showed me that our histories were not static. They breathe, they evolve, they demand to be rewritten.

Years later, I found myself living in the Bronx with my aunt and uncle. Her bookshelves overflowed with vampire and werewolf tales, and I read them all. I loved the thrill, the danger, the mystery. Those stories lit fires of possibility, even when they lacked the depth my spirit craved.

Time passed, and I turned to online wolf lore hoping to find that spark again. What I found instead were recycled plots and shallow arcs. Every story began with a silenced heroine waiting to be saved, every ending hidden behind a paywall. I searched for something that spoke to ancestry and survival, something that revealed strength instead of sorrow. I could not find it. So, I decided to create it.

The Shifting Ground began as a simple promise to myself to write the story I wanted to read. A tale that honored history while imagining new worlds. A story where our people stand in power, where the unseen becomes seen, where love and law, blood and spirit, converge in balance.

That promise grew into a world. The Africas became the cradle of civilization, untouched by colonization yet scarred by the memory of the Triangle Trade. Across the water, the Americas rose. East of the Mississippi held twenty six states, rooted in commerce, government, and order. West of the river lay the Wastelands, a vast and untamed expanse. The name “Wastelands” was given by those who failed to cross. Yet those who endured found home there. They built villages where the stars still guided travelers. They created laws shaped by lineage and ceremony. They lived close to the soil, and the soil remembered them.

Their world thrives outside the noise of cities. Intelligence and innovation bloom from tradition, not technology. Freedom has its price, but it also has its wisdom. The Wastelands stand as proof that even in chaos, life creates order. Even in exile, the spirit endures.

The Shifting Ground Chronicles emerged from that truth. It is my way of bridging myth and memory. It speaks to identity, transformation, and the sacred power of storytelling. Each post on this blog will draw you deeper into the world through the eyes of its Guardians, its seers, its exiles, and its healers.

Here you will meet vampires bound by ancestral covenants, wombyn carrying the wisdom of the Mother’s Womb, and wolves who remember the language of the land. You will see history reframed through the lens of spirit and survival.

This is where imagination and remembrance meet.

Tua-u, thank you for walking this ground with me. May every word remind you that we have always been more than what the world recorded.

Peace and Blessings.
Let’s Graduate.