Start Here ~ Fierce Love: The WOMN Project
A grassroots healing movement growing from the stories of Minnesota women in resistance
Fierce Love
Fierce Love is a community space where we process the joys and the griefs, the beauties and the horrors, the passions and the rages of being human. . . all through the lens of love that is un-ending, ever-growing, and all-nourishing.
This community started as a safe space for sensitive souls, the over-feelers, and the meaning-seekers, to be weird and awkward and accepted and loved. We are the ones who need to leave parties early, but also hold vigil for strangers after everyone else has gone home.
During the winter of 2025/2026, when Operation Metro Surge arrived in Minnesota, something deep and permanent shifted for us at the bone-marrow level. We sensitive souls were called forward to serve. Our finely-tuned nervous systems are precisely the instrument the world needs right now.
And the WOMN of Minnesota are showing us the way.
I have interviewed eleven of the women of the resistance here in Minnesota and am working my way through writing their stories to publish here and in a fully compiled book.
This publication is the home for that unfolding. I’m posting excerpts from the WOMN interviews, pieces of the book as it takes shape, and the living conversation growing around it. This space is also for the deeper currents moving underneath these stories: grief, courage, service, tenderness, rage, community, and the ways we are being changed at the core.
I didn’t go looking for this project.
After Renee Good died, I lost myself. For weeks, everything felt frivolous and pointless in light of the horrors happening on the streets of my home state. Then, Alex Pretti died, and I picked up my pen to write about the helpers and the good things growing out of this tragedy.
Writing helped, but I needed more to feel whole again. Because writing is a lonely venture, and healing happens in community. I needed to be in a room where the grief had voices other than my own.
So I put out a quiet little call on Substack Notes, offering to create a space for sensitive soul Minnesota women to gather. And in true Minnesota fashion, they showed up. We sat in circle and poured our hearts on the ottoman between us in my living room.
And I kept thinking, I need to write these stories.
Over the past several weeks, I met with them one by one. I turned on a recorder and asked them four questions:
What encounters with ICE and the surge have you had?
How are you showing up to serve?
Who were you before all this happened?
How did this change you at your core?
What I found is that no WOMN is ordinary.
Every WOMN is extraordinary.
WOMN
These stories are written with anonymous first name pseudonyms because every women is phenomenal (thank you Maya Angelou). She is you. She is your mother. She is your neighbor and your third grade teacher and the stranger you locked eyes with at a protest.
These stories are the pure, unfiltered, human truth of what these women experienced, survived, and became.
A woman who was physically assaulted by an ICE agent in a Target parking lot and found the only tool she had left was her voice — and it was enough.
A green card holder from Europe who puts on a reflective to make sure immigrant children get to school safely, and organizes bridge brigades on the front lines.
A woman whose fiancé was deported to Mexico, and now knows what tear-gas feels like.
A protest frog — and the things she witnessed from inside her costume at protests at the Whipple Federal Building. The best of humanity and the worst of it.
A woman whose MAGA family rejected her trans child, and who found her way to something bigger than herself through resistance action.
A VA nurse who lives between Renee’s and Alex’s two memorial sites and sees herself in both of the people they honor.
A Jewish mother who has no more fucks to give and calls her resistance her sacred obligation to repair the world.
A woman who works with a team to bring home detainees released from detention centers in Texas back home to Minnesota.
An ER social worker who watched the injuries come through her hospital doors and heard the explanations that didn’t match them.
A mutual aid master who raised over $75,000 and paid more than fifty rents for families in need out of her tiny South Minneapolis home.
An elder care nursing aide who started showing up at the Whipple Federal Building to yell at ICE because the grief had nowhere else to go, and it turned out that was exactly the group therapy she needed.
Every Tuesday, I’ll share a new piece of this work here on Fierce Love. Sometimes that will be an excerpt from one woman’s story. Sometimes it will be a reflection on what I am learning as I listen. Sometimes it will be an update on where the book is headed, what is growing around it, and how this community will help carry it into the world.
A grassroots mutual aid healing project
This is not just a book.
It is a healing movement.
My vision is for Fierce Love to grow into a community space where we share our truths about what we have lived. I hope our comments section becomes part witness-space, part story-circle, part gathering-ground. I want people to read these excerpts and feel their own memories rise up, and to spill those stories here too as a way of holding, bearing witness, honoring, and recognizing each other in love.
Fierce Love is more than a publication. It is more than words on a screen. We have community gatherings, on Zoom and in person. We hold grief rituals, and healing circles, and storytelling campfires. This is a place where story becomes medicine because it is spoken out loud and received by others with care.
And when WOMN, the book, is ready to come into the world, I want it to move the way this whole project has moved so far: through community, through grassroots mutual aid, through women and neighbors and readers carrying it forward because they believe in what it is making possible.
I want to take this work on the road to independent bookstores and community spaces for gatherings that feel human and alive. I envision something more communal than book signings. I imagine open mic storytelling that serves as healing grief circles. I can read an excerpt to open the room, and then we gather as shared witnesses, tending to our grief and growing our love through connection.
This isn’t my book or my project. It’s ours. This is a shared endeavor, a living act of community. Fierce Love is a movement of loving neighbors telling the truth, bearing witness, and creating spaces where healing and organizing can happen side by side.
The women of Minnesota showed us what that looks like during the surge.
I want this project to carry that same spirit.
I want us to make something together that helps people feel held, and helps them find each other, and helps them imagine what becomes possible when story is sacred and community is medicine.
Why
Because these women and their stories deserve to be witnessed.
Because grief and pain this huge need somewhere to go.
Because what happened in Minnesota changed us at the core, and I do not want that truth flattened into headlines, or lost to time, or swallowed by the churn of the next terrible thing.
Because Operation Metro Surge split us open, and what came out was rage, courage, tenderness, humor, devotion, resourcefulness, and the bright light of Fierce Love.
And that is worth keeping, and growing, and passing from hand to hand.
This is where I begin.
The first excerpt posts next Tuesday. It’s a hard one, and it is worth every word.
If you see yourself in these pages, pass it to the soul next to you.
I love you fiercely,
TeriLeigh 💜
Fierce Love is a community space, and your voice belongs here as much as any story I publish. Tell me in the comments — what does WOMN stir in you before you’ve even read a word of it? I’m listening. We all are.
I love this, and I love how you said, "Because writing is a lonely venture, and healing happens in community." That is so true.
The Universe called. So glad it was you who answered. Teri, I got chills reading this. I too connected with this line “writing is a lonely venture, and healing happens in community.” Sending fierce love, friend.