The Things that Shape Us as Storytellers with Vanessa Li
Tomatokind Founder & Editor
In April of 2023, I started Tomatokind because I wanted to deeply understand and connect with my local community. Writing was my happy place, as was striking up conversations with strangers on the street.
I had moved back to my home state of California in mid-2021 after a decade of living, schooling, and working in the Pacific Northwest, the East Coast, the Midwest, and abroad. During this homecoming, I sought to make sense of the people and places of the San Francisco Bay Area. While I did not necessarily feel like an outsider, I did not feel at home either. Aside from my nuclear family who had remained, nearly everything else felt novel - the changing climate, the skyline, the hills and beaches, the way people crossed paths on the street (headphones as permanent cranial appendages), the downtowns and uptowns, the list went on…
So, everyday, I experimented with new routes and routines, tried new restaurants (looking for my “go-to’s”), sipped tea at different cafes, and toured nearly every dog park within a 15-mile radius (with my all-too-willing teenage Great Pyrenees). I wandered into 2nd- and 3rd tier metro areas adjacent to “The City”, infiltrated countless water-cooler talks with retirees and remote workers, discovered new views atop hiking summits, and strolled into brand new establishments that had opened during the COVID-19 pandemic (and paid homage to those that were closing after generations in business).
I could not stop wandering and jotting down inspiring tidbits.
I craved to know the stories that were embedded in the place I had only known as a child.
Evolving Into A Celebration of Community
At the beginning, Tomatokind was a vehicle for my personal curiosities and musings. I shared poems inspired by the places I visited and fictional short stories adapted from characters I encountered on my travels.
Organically, the magazine began spinning its own web of connections that linked stories and experiences of faraway people and communities with each other. Through dialogues and paragraphs, I started to document the curiosities of others: people’s dreams, hopes, passion projects, and many twisty-turny tales of both disappointment and newfound wills to create.
In June of 2023, I turned the focus of the publication exclusively onto small-business owners. Throughout my wanderings, independent makers and creative solopreneurs emerged as the visionary agents of neighborhoods: crafters of beautiful worlds and stitchers of our collective social fabric.
I started to go on coffee dates with my small-business neighbors, developing friendships that were rooted in a symbiotic desire to share stories and to be seen.
I was curious to know:
What were the internal and external changes in their lives that led them to create something of their own?
What were the philosophies they lived by?
What were their greatest joys and challenges of sustaining (and making a living) out of their passions?
What were the emotional milestones that defined their journey?
And, what were their visions for the future?
For nearly all of our featured guests to-date, the moments we have sat them down and asked about their businesses are the only times they have had the opportunity to take a pause and reflect on (and share) their journey.
We hear the phrases “I’ve never taken the time to think about how I got here” or “This is the first time I’ve told anyone the story of how I started my business” all the time.
A Collection of Headlines in Our Personal Journey as Storytellers
For the entire year-and-a-half that the magazine has existed, we have centered our pieces on the characters and narratives that exist beyond our own creative headquarters.
But, as authors and creators of this publication, we understand that our personal experiences and identities influence what stories we choose to tell and also the way we tell them. So, as the start of 2025 beckons, we take a brief pause to look inwards and reflect on some stories of our own.
Here are a few moments in our lives that have affected us in big ways, and that define us as humans and storytellers:
“When life truly became precious”: As a child, we experienced losing one of the most important people in our lives. It was the type of impending loss where every crevice of your body sweats uncontrollably, your legs operate on autopilot (floating up flights of stairs as if you are a ghost), and your brain is outside the body. That day, our loved one was admitted to the hospital for a risky procedure. Two hours later, we heard their name announced over the intercom calling their relatives to the Intensive Care Unit. Every bone in our body became jello, and our concept of time and understanding of death changed forever. By coincidence, someone with the same name was also admitted to the same facility for the identical procedure at approximately the same time that day. It turns out that it was the other person who was in critical condition. We would soon learn that our person would complete their risky procedure with no hiccups (and that our experience of loss would be brief). And, that the universe had played a terrible joke on us (and an even more terrible one on the other family in the waiting room).
“When our confidence was shattered”: One day in secondary school, we were working on a group assignment when one of our fellow classmates turned to us and called us “the ugliest girl they had ever seen.” To this day, those 20 seconds are seared into our brains - the temperature of the classroom, the feeling of our lift lid desk trapping us in a jail of shame, the short blond hair and chiseled jawline of the male student whose words stung like a hornet’s, and the unmistakable raisin-smallness that our organs shrank to the size of. Just like sixth grade, life would not always be easy.
“When we reached for the torch”: During one of our spring breaks home from college, we joined our family - as we always did - for Qing Ming Festival (Tomb Sweeping Day). This is a tradition in Chinese culture where families gather to pay respects to ancestors, clean their gravestones, adorn their tomb with flowers, and feed their spirits with food and wine. As our family approached each of our ancestor’s burial sites, we secretly penciled down the coordinates of each tombstone (including the section, row, column, and contextual details like its proximity to the highway or to the grave keeper’s shed). Even while we had followed behind our elders - year after year, like a procession - to each of these locations, we were not confident in finding our ancestors’ tombstones if left to our own devices. So, as we aggressively memorized each spot and transferred that information swiftly to the Notes App on our phones, it dawned on us that - one day - we would be the ones leading the procession.
“When we tried to hack the mind body connection:” A few years ago, we ran the Seattle Marathon, thinking it was just to check off a #fitnessgoal. However, it was not until our last breaths and muscle aches in the final 20 minutes did we realize that the race boiled down to our need to control something in our life. That summer was the most emotionally wrought few months of our life (and that remains true to this day). So, we needed something to anchor onto - something physical, challenging - impossible even (given that we only gave ourselves 3 months to train), and distracting. And, it worked! When we crossed that finish line, our friends were waiting for us (none of them were unhinged enough to accompany our wild insecurities cloaked in ambition) - cheering us on with the biggest smiles. We certainly were not winning at life, but we were a finisher that day, and was treated to our favorite sushi spot by chosen family. The accomplishment gave us the strength to continue battling life’s other gremlins.
There are countless other stories we could tell, but we will stop there for now. These moments are what make us human; they make us more than just letters on the by-line or engineers of a brand. In the future, we might share more on these headlines - and, invite you - our readers - to share some of your personal stories with our community as well.
Tomatokind in 2025
The new year…is here!
Last April through July, we published our first short story, interview feature, and launched our website. By Feburary 2024, we had published 10 full-length features on small-business owners across the San Francisco Bay Area - from winemakers to musicians, jewelers, vintage sellers, documentary filmmakers, boutique gym founders, food sellers, and textile artists. In March through August, we launched our series “Heirloom” to highlight specifically the works of artists and visual creatives, and began sharing fieldnotes of community livelihood.
In October, we met our illustrator Jacqueline Sarah Brown for the first time, began working on a new look for the magazine, and announced the making of our first Small-Business Adventure & Gift Guide. By the end of the month, we had published our 20th feature.
In November, we finalized our new logo (which has been getting so much love), a visual translation of our core values: community, play, adventure, creativity, rootedness, and wonder.
Here are a few words from our illustrator: “We started off with getting to the core of what Tomatokind stood for. At the core is the sense of community, and to not only celebrate that, but to shine a spotlight and bring those stories to a wider audience. So, I began with sketches of abstract shapes that could allude to this. As we continued on, we also wanted to combine the idea of a person and a community together. So, in the current logo, the hands and arms are outstretched in an open, curious way, and the shape is suggestive of none other than…a tomato!”
In December, we debuted our Little Album of Small-Business Adventures, featuring 39 reader-nominated businesses from the shores of California and the streets of Toronto, to the hills of London, UK and isles of Lagos, Nigeria.
So, as Tomatokind looks towards the blank pages of 2025, we are excited for:
A book we are co-authoring, which will center the creativity and self-care of small-business owners;
Opportunities to practice novel mediums of storytelling;
The community we are nurturing, as we ignite more in-person experiences;
Our geographic reach, expanding into communities across the world; and
Crafting our existence in the physical space (as we discover slowness and intentionality in an increasingly digital world)
Thanks for sticking around and we can’t wait to explore more stories together in the new year!
As always, happy community gathering!