Somewhere on Sunday: Jacquie Verbal
A Conversation on Community Building, Cooking, and Coming Home
Welcome to Somewhere on Sunday, a conversation series where I get to know people from all walks of life, through the lens of how they spend their Sunday. I decided to focus on Sunday because it’s a day where people can, typically, choose their own adventure and prepare for the week ahead. The way a person spends their last day of the weekend, and first day of the week, says so much about how they live and what they value.
My guest for this week’s Somewhere on Sunday is
, who I proudly describe as “the first friend I made off the internet;” she is an author, writer, community builder, wife, and mother. Verbal is a fellow Substack writer for her personal publication, Chronicles of Change, and she is also the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of - an online publication, magazine, and publishing house for Black writers. In this week’s conversation we discuss coming home, starting Blackstack, and the importance of cooking on a Sunday.
Amanda Greenidge (AG): What does Sunday mean to you? What's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear that word?
Jacquie Verbal (JV): Sunday is my rest and reset day.
AG: Okay, and what does rest and reset mean for you?
JV: I rest and reset within my house, within my body. I usually am in a space where I'm preparing for the week ahead, and I'm doing that by cleaning my space, cooking, [and] nurturing. Nurturing myself, nurturing my home. Those are my non-negotiables. I'm not doing anything on Sunday, that's like a day for me. So that's what the rest and reset kind of means to me.
AG: What were your Sundays like growing up?
JV: Growing up, Sundays were dedicated to family [and] I had to go to church. I had to have Sunday dinner with everybody over at our house because my mom was the cook in the family. Sundays was never for me. Sundays was always a day that I had to pour into the family and play host. So growing up, I didn't always love Sundays. The weekends weren't my favorite, Saturdays was cleaning days, and Sundays was church and family day.
AG: You were like, “I'm working on the weekend basically, I'm tired.”
JV: I actually got my workers’ permit at 15/16, whatever age you're able to, and I started working at McDonald's.
AG: Oh my God, so you worked at McDonald's on Sunday rather than do the family hosting?
JV: Yeah.
AG: This is so interesting. So to you, what made working, like actually going in and clocking into a job, something that you were looking forward to more than like, “I'm going to do this big hosting day?”
JV: Because at that point I was learning independence, and how different I was from my family - they were just kind of like annoying to me at that point. Going to work gave me this sense of freedom, and now that I think about it, it's kind of what developed this whole idea of Sundays being for me. On Sundays I usually only cook meals that I want, I don't really take suggestions from my family of what they want for dinner - that's during the week. On Sundays, I cook what I want to cook and it's usually something from scratch because that's the process that I like to go through. I think me working was me kind of, within myself, claiming Sundays for [me].
AG: Take me [through] your current Sunday routine; from the time you get up, to the time you go to bed, what are you doing?
JV: Sundays I sleep in just a little bit and I get myself prepared to go on my normal walk to the coffee shop. I'll walk on this trail from my house to the coffee shop, and it's [on the] waterfront. Sometimes I will take my book, whatever book that I'm reading, [but] I try not to take manuscripts or any[thing] work related. It's kind of hard because I edit and I do books for work, so I try to take a book that's just strictly for me to read and enjoy. I will sit at the coffee shop for a few minutes, or at the water, and read a chapter of the book.
I'll come home, and usually when I get home at that point, I'm super motivated, so I go ahead and prep dinner. Go through that process. If I'm making a dessert, then usually I'll wait ‘til later in the day to make it, but I will go ahead and start the prep process for it. Then around this time, usually my family is starting to wake up, so I will make breakfast for us to have because I'm already in the kitchen. And then that's when my cleaning starts, so whatever cleaning that I didn't do throughout the week, I usually try to get that done.
Once I get the house feeling the way that I want it to feel, that real sense of home, then at that point everyone's kind of in the living room anyway. Sometimes my wife, she works on Sundays actually, so it's usually my daughter [who] is up and in the living room at that point because my wife would have left for work by now. Once she gets home from work, then that's when we all are kind of chilling in the living room together and doing whatever. So it may be coloring, it may be building the Lego set, it may be doing a puzzle. It may be them playing video games, and me just kind of like writing or doing my own thing. From there, it's usually dinner time. Once we do that, then everybody starts their night time routines. On Sundays, I'm usually in bed by like, 9:30, 10:00.
AG: I want to get into Blackstack because Sunday is really a touch point for [your publication]. You have the Sunday Service Announcements, then you have the Sunday Dinner articles, so I wanted to ask you why you chose this specific day for the Blackstack community?
JV: Well, for me, it was very intentional, so whenever I first started Blackstack, Sunday Service Announcements was the first one whenever we launched. I launched on Juneteenth, which was in the middle of the week, and there was so many writers that was interested in the idea of Sunday Service Announcements. There were actually people willing to get it done for that first Sunday, and that first Sunday is actually the [day] that I moved permanently to Oakland. I essentially moved home on that day, and that Sunday just kind of became the staple for Blackstack.
During that time, the thought process and the energy that I was already putting out through my personal publication, Chronicles of Change, was [like] a cookout, Black block party feel anyway. I just kind of took that energy and played on it, and played into the Southern church.
For me, when you think about American Black culture, that's the first thing that people are going to automatically be able to connect with. Everybody has a grandma from the South, or has been to church in the South. So running over late, food being in the basement or, you know, certain things within Black church, it was very easy to pull in a lot of Black readers and writers at the same time. So that was really the intention behind it because I knew that that day is so culturally specific to us, that immediately the community would grow.
Sundays just has always felt like such a sacred day for the Black household, that if I wanted to create a safe place, then what better day than a day that we associate with that? That was a really good one, because I don't think anyone ever noticed that everything was so specific to Sunday, so maybe I need to get back to that basic. I'm glad you asked me that.
AG: I love it. Yeah, I was going through [Blackstack] and I was like,“the Sunday synergy is here.” Okay, so let's talk about First Sundays. So you did First Sundays for Blackstack, traditionally that was a space for Writer’s Circle. Now I see you renamed it the “Writing With Intent Salons.” I wanted to talk about this community writing event and why you started it for Black writers? And then maybe we could talk about the days because I know you're shifting that around a little bit too.
JV: It's been titled Writer’s Circle, and I always hosted it on the first Sunday, again, playing off of Southern church. It was always something going on on First Sunday, and it was always kind of like us congregating together. If the root of everything is stemmed in Southern church, then it was easier to play into a First Sunday meeting. It worked, everybody was on board, and it was great. It was Writer’s Circle for so long because I just wanted to create a space where we could make time for our craft. A lot of writers struggle with making the time, so if you know that you're going to spend two hours with a group of people, that you enjoy writing and being in community with, and it's only once a month on the First Sunday of the month, then it's a lot easier for you to carve out that dedicated writing time. At minimum, you're getting one piece out that month, and it was just a way for us to stay consistent.
December, that was the last Writer’s Circle, for me, that it was ever the same because that following Tuesday is the morning that my father passed away. Everything around the first of the month now is just heavy grief for me. As this year has come, I've gotten to a place where I've accepted that the first of the month I have to take off from social media. I can't work or do anything, I just need to be off, so that hindered first of the month meetings. And then, there's so many communities popping up on Substack now, so when I saw that there was another Black community meeting and calling it “Writer’s Circle,” that's when I decided that maybe it's just time for change.
So that's where I'm currently at. I still want to do it because I do think that a lot more people were given that dedicated writing time to their craft, and I've even noticed that I struggle getting a piece out every week now because I'm not hosting it in the way that I used to. It made me realize that, “wow, if it's affected my writing, you know, people that were joining every single month, I wonder how it's affecting them?” I wanted to make sure that I brought it back, but I'm also being very realistic with myself and noticing the changes. The community is changing, the app is changing, Substack’s not what it used to be. So instead of taking everybody off of the app to me, I want to see, and this is just me testing it out, I want to see how it would be for everybody to just be within the app.
AG: I've been a part of Writer's Circle, I definitely think it's a special community experience, so I'm excited to see your future iterations of it. You write your own publication, you’ve written your own book, but you're also very community driven like you said, and you create these spaces for communities. So why is community important to you as a writer, and why have you felt called to create that community for other writers as well?
JV: That's a really good question. I came to Substack seeking community, and I came to Substack from Instagram. I had a community that I had built on Instagram, but we all know Instagram's energy is a little weird, so it's a lot different. I found myself pouring my heart out in my captions through a photo dump on Instagram, and that's kind of what I got popular for. I just needed an outlet, I knew that there was more that I needed to write, but I was like, “how are people getting these emotions out? Like, how are people doing this?”
Someone on Instagram shifted into a publication on Substack, but she wasn't very consistent with it, but she kind of brought me to the app. When I got on there, I was like, “wait, I want to try the browser,” and when I tried the browser, I realized that it really wasn't a lot of us [Black people]. When I did come across us, what we were writing about and what we were talking about, it was like, “wait, why don't more people see this?” We need our own little hub so we can filter our own work. My first thought was, if we could get an algorithm going for Black writers, then we could create a Blackstack like #BlackTikTok. Girl, that's how it literally started.
I tried to bring hashtags to Substack, and I tried to do it through #Blackstack, and people commented and were like, “where do I sign up?” And so I was like, “oh, wait, this is something people actually want,” and then I also realized hashtags don't work on Substack [laughs]. So I ran to see if the publication name was available, and I was shocked that there wasn't a space that was only for Black writers; at that time it was only
and that's a BIPOC community. I was like, well, “what would it look like if there's only Black writers?” Like nobody else, and we could just talk about real, raw, authentic topics. This is maybe a few months after had [brought] The Cookout Library [to Substack], so it was already there it just needed to be done.I started it, I put it out, and then literally that first week, I think the publication had over 200 subscribers. The following week, I opened up paid subscribers, and then there was like five paid subscribers within the second or third week. So within that first month, it was very clear that this was something that needed to be done, and so that's when I decided that, “okay, well, I'm all in.” I was on a journey where I was like, “spirit, whatever you got for me, I'm willing to do it, I just want to go home.” And if you remember, the day Blackstack started was the same day that I moved to Oakland, so I just felt like it was an answered prayer.
To answer your question as to why I go so hard for the community - I just truly feel like this was something that I was divinely put in this position to be able to do.
AG: I'm just thinking about it, you were called home, so you moved to Oakland on Sunday, you opened up Sunday Service Announcements, and now you're spearheading this community that's also now a nonprofit and a publishing house. I just think it's such a beautiful connection. I do want to ask my final question, which is what's one thing that you would recommend people to do every Sunday?
JV: Oh wow. Cook. I would recommend for everybody to cook a Sunday dinner, even if it's just once a month or, you know, once a month you go all out and make maybe cookies from scratch or something to start small. I think that everybody should definitely cook on a Sunday because when you're in the kitchen, cooking for me, is very similar to writing. You have this thought, right? You have this sense, so you might have a taste for something, or you might have seen something that you wanted, and you go through the steps of preparing every single ingredient separately to make one final plate. Then you get to plate it and enjoy it, and then the cleanup process. Afterwards you just feel so accomplished, like, “wow, yes, that was amazing.”
I know it's probably shocking like, “wow, she didn't say writing,” writing sometimes isn't so refreshing at the end. Cooking, every single time, there's not been one time that it hasn't been refreshing [laughs]. I would say every single Sunday, regardless of what it is, even if it's something small, if it's something just for you…that's something that I wish that I would have done more of just for me, before I had a family of my own, is just cooking Sunday dinner. You'll just have this love [and] appreciation for it, and it's a way of really nurturing yourself. It's an act of self love in a completely different way, so that would be my one thing.
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I feel like someone important!!! I loved this conversation it’s sparked so much in my personal life and now revisiting it brings back that same Sunday spark. Thank you for thinking of me and sharing my story on your platform!
Thanks for sharing more about the brilliant goddess, Jacquie!