I opened a tea shop!

And more notes from a very full summer

Hello! It’s been a while since I’ve been very present here. I could say I’ve been “busy” but that’s not much of an excuse - who isn’t busy, after all? I prefer to say my days have been very full; the sort of full that makes it easy to let weeks go by without checking in. I look forward to getting back to my regular publishing cadence soon, but for now, here are a couple of updates that will hopefully explain my absence:

1) I turned in my book manuscript.

I spent much of the winter working on my first draft, with an intense (and sometimes panicked) push in May and June to deliver by July 8. My editor turned her first round of edits around in record time, delivering them back to me just five days later, on Friday afternoon. For the next two-ish weeks I’ll be revising; primarily addressing the book’s structure, the part I find most challenging in any piece of writing but particularly with a full-length book project.

The question of where this section should go vs. that one and how to group everything together thematically in a way that makes sense and flows well, to determine which sections could benefit from more depth vs. which sections don’t fit at all and need to go…it’s some of the hardest work in the whole process, in my opinion, and I’m feeling a bit intimidated by it all.

To help me along, I’ll be hearkening back to one of the organizational exercises from

Beth Kempton

’s Book Proposal Masterclass. I figure the same process that helped me write a compelling proposal will now help me make sense of the resulting book-length project. Copious numbers of Post-Its will be employed.

The Last Parenting Book You’ll Ever Read will publish next summer (or spring, if we can push through the revision process quickly enough!) and I can’t wait to share it with you!

2) I opened a tea shop.

Because when you’re under deadline for a book why not also open a brick-and-mortar retail establishment, right?

Bevy Tea is a shop inside The Mill, a public market in Manistique, MI owned by myself and my husband Eric plus my sister and her husband Eric. About the name: a “bevy” is a group of birds, and I just loved the play on words: a bevy = a gathering, as well as a beverage.

Paper Mill Books, an independent bookseller, opened inside The Mill last summer, and earlier this summer we (mostly my husband) had done enough work in the building that we were able to expand and roughly double the amount of available retail space - creating an opportunity for me to open my own shop, which I’ve been eager to do.

In addition to fine teas, Bevy Tea sells tea ware and tea-related gifts, and I also started Pulp + Fiber, a microshop under the Bevy Tea umbrella, selling stationery and craft supplies.

Almost all of the displays are made from pieces we antiqued, thrifted, repurposed, or found in the attic or basement of our over-125-year-old shop building. Setting up the store, sourcing products and suppliers, and learning the retail ropes after being in a completely different line of work for most of my life has been so fun - but also a big challenge.

You can hear more about Bevy Tea in my latest episode of The Tea’s Made podcast (which is on hiatus until late August.)

Multiple people have reached out to ask me whether I’ll be offering online sales at Bevy Tea. The answer is that—for right now, anyway—Bevy Tea is an in-real-life-only experience. I don’t have the capacity to fulfill orders year-round, and since I’m not on-site most of the time, just keeping up with inventory is a big learning curve!

I have been playing with the idea of offering curated gift boxes offering some of my favorite products a couple of times a year. I’ve also thought about expanding the “Bevy” branding beyond tea into a publication and community. Both of those ideas are rattling around in the back of my head, and if I move forward, subscribers will be the first to know.

But currently, Bevy Tea’s internet presence is pretty sparse: an Instagram account with a couple posts and a static page on The Mill’s site. And right now, I’m satisfied staying right there. For decades, the majority of my work has happened on the computer and through the Internet, which has been very good to me - but I sort of love that there’s a piece of my working life that is purely in-real-life and physical, at least for the moment. It feels like an opportunity to develop an experience without the added pressure of having to share a constant digital narrative around that experience.

downtown Manistique, Michigan

Eric and I just got back from being in Manistique for about ten days, and we both had the opportunity to work in the market a lot. It was so rewarding to interact with customers in person, to make recommendations face-to-face, and to hear and see the excitement and appreciation when people walked in and saw all the work we’d put in. We had long, heartfelt conversations with a huge variety of people from all different walks of life, backgrounds—and, I’m sure, voting records.

Our world needs more of that right now, doesn’t it?

Well, I’ve loved updating you all on what’s been happening around here, but now it’s time for me to get back to the hard part of writing: revisions. For the next couple of weeks I’ll be doing a lot of shuffling around, fleshing out—and more painfully, deleting. I’m looking forward to making this book the best it can be, and very much looking forward to returning to my cozy schedule of sharing my life with you here.

A note about what’s to come: paid subscriptions will be turned back on August 1, and we’ll be diving back into the So-Slow Book Club plus adding some exciting new opportunities (Zoom chats and creativity circles, anyone?)

Can’t wait to share more as the Bevy story unfolds! More soon, friends.