Hi, I’m Josie.

A few years ago I published a book called The Gratitude Jar: A Simple Guide to Creating Miracles. I printed the smallest number of hardcover copies I could afford thinking, hoping, they might sell out sometime within my lifetime. My simple little story about keeping a gratitude jar with my then four-year-old son wasn’t what I considered to be a potential blockbuster.

But I knew the book could help people, so I crossed my fingers and let it go.

What happened next surprised me. It started slowly, then began building steam. People were buying stacks of the book and giving copies to everyone they knew. I started getting messages from readers all over the world about how the book had changed their life, or the life of someone they’d given it to. I sold out of the first edition and had to arrange a much larger printing for the second.

But what surprised me most was why people were buying it:

“My friend has Stage 4 cancer and is in the hospital. I think he needs to read this book…”

“She’s going through terrible postpartum depression, and I know your story can help her…”

“My son is in rehab for addiction, and I’m giving him this book to help him with his recovery…”

The book was giving people hope. It was humbling beyond belief.

I wrote it because practicing gratitude helped pull me out of postpartum depression and alcohol addiction. And I believed, with my whole heart, that I’d found the secret to healing everything.

Then life tested that.

My mom got Alzheimer’s. A few years later, she died.

That began what I call my grief on grief on grief season. Over the next few years, I lost my dad, aunts, uncles, and dear friends. There was one year in particular when it felt like I was at a hospital or a funeral every week.

People kept saying, “Josie, you should do the Gratitude Jar again.”

And honestly? The last thing I wanted to do was practice gratitude.

So I walked away from everything. I stopped writing. I stopped speaking. I even left school counseling, because I couldn’t sit with kids in their grief when I was drowning in my own.

What finally helped wasn’t gratitude, at least not at first. It was writing. Honest, messy, ugly writing at my kitchen table, every day, for months. And one ordinary morning, right in the middle of it, the gratitude came back.

Slowly, I found my way back to the work I love. I went to work at a grief center, sitting with hundreds of kids and families in their grief. Then I came back to school counseling. And then I came back to writing and speaking, and to using my voice to help people again.

At the grief center, I heard the same thing over and over. Families wishing they had just one more sentence from the person they lost. One more word. Something to hold onto.

That’s what my newest project, Legacy Letters, is for.

It’s a simple, guided way to write the words you most want the people you love to have. Whether you’re writing for the people you’ll someday leave behind, or in honor of someone you’ve already lost.

And this time, I didn’t want to write another book about my story. I wanted to help you write yours. In your own words. In your own voice. For the people you love.

It’s everything I learned at my kitchen table writing through my own grief, and everything I learned sitting with grieving families, woven into one gentle practice. Grief and gratitude, together.

Because everything I create comes back to the same thing. Simple tools anyone can use, right at their own kitchen table. Just a pen and some paper.

I believe anyone, no matter what they’re going through, can change. Can heal. Can find their way back.

I’m a testament to that.

Wherever you are right now, I’m so grateful you’re here.

With love and gratitude,