It started at a yoga retreat in November 2023.
Rachael Kesler Palm was sharing dinner with catering chef Allie Redshaw, who told the story of how she lost her hand after a kitchen accident in 2017.
Because Redshaw was pregnant with her second daughter at the time, she chose to undergo amputation surgery without anesthesia. Eight years later, Redshaw is a yoga instructor and competitive paraclimber, in addition to a chef, wife, and mother.
Redshaw says, “[Palm] and I started talking about how many cool, incredible people live in Charlottesville, and we cross paths on the daily, and we sort of know each other’s stories, but we don’t really know the depths of all the cool, badass things that everybody’s done.”
During after-dinner yoga, Palm folded into the final resting pose of shavasana and contemplated that conversation.
“And this thought came in my head,” Palm says. “I remember it so vividly. I was laying there, and I thought, ‘God, her story has to be told.’
“I got out of the pose when we were all done, and I said to the ladies around me, ‘I think I want to write a book about Allie, about her story, and about other badass women.’”
Palm first began learning yoga after losing her father two decades ago. Some of the most transformative moments of her life since then, including first meetings with her future wife and multiple women she later interviewed for her book, have taken place on a yoga mat.
“[Yoga] puts me in a state of mind to be open and receptive to these creative ideas,” Palm says.
Almost a year and a half after realizing she wanted to interview Redshaw, Palm is thrilled that Badass Women of Charlottesville, a book featuring stories about 24 women impacting the Charlottesville community, is on bookstore shelves and available for order online.
Photo: Sarah Cramer Shields.
Getting started
One of the first steps in putting the book together was finding somebody to photograph her interview subjects. Palm approached local photographer Sarah Cramer Shields before a 6am fitness class they were both in.
“I said, ‘Sarah, I’ve got an idea.’ She said, ‘Whatever it is, yes.’ And I knew she was the right partner to do this,’” Palm says.
Palm, meanwhile, shared a nomination form through which she asked members of the Charlottesville community to submit the names of women they’d like to see interviewed.
“When I was thinking about the women I wanted to write about, I wanted to prioritize women that were either Black, brown, or part of the LGBTQ community, because those were the women that I felt live a little bit more in the margins, and their stories aren’t the ones that are told,” she says.
The Prolyfyck Sole Systaz, seven non-traditional runners who learned to love the sport by joining the Black-led Prolyfyck Run Crew for regular runs through Charlottesville’s predominantly Black neighborhoods, fit the bill.
Palm went along for one of the runs and met Juanika Howard and Shelomith Gonzalez, two members of the Sole Systaz who were training for their first marathon.
“I just hadn’t seen a lot of runners that were our body shapes, our body sizes, or even within our age category,” Howard says. “So, it was like, ‘Can we do this?’ So that’s where the brain child [for the group] was birthed from.”
Howard and Gonzalez have since completed multiple 26.2-mile runs, and Gonzalez says she is excited to have their journey from non-runners to marathoners immortalized in Palm’s upcoming book.
“I like that for my kids, you know, they’ll have something that they can have and be like, ‘Oh yeah, my mom did that cool thing back in the day,’” Gonzalez says.
Palm also used the book to highlight the fitness journey of Nicole Hawker, owner of community gym Heart & Soul Fitness.
Hawker’s journey from stay-at-home foster mom to gym coach inspired her to open the nonprofit in 2022. After losing her mother, Hawker focused on her own health, which led to weight-loss surgery, falling in love with functional fitness, and leaving her longtime career in social work to open a gym accessible to women and other marginalized clients.
“Whether it was they felt marginalized because of their body shape, they felt marginalized because of their finances, they felt marginalized because of racial demographics—whatever their definition of marginalized, I wanted it to be a space where they felt they belonged,” Hawker says.
Palm has also continued her conversations with Redshaw, who told the author that searching for accessible physical activity after her accident led her to adaptive climbing.
“I wasn’t going to have the same abilities as before, but there were ways to move around and adapt to things, and I was going to get to a point where my arm was desensitized. There was a whole mental, emotional empowerment process with climbing that really, really saved me,” Redshaw says.
Redshaw has since competed with USA Paraclimbing, traveled across the world to climb, and learned adaptive poses in order to teach yoga. The surgeons who saved her life eight years ago tell her story to amputees around the United States as an example of resilience.
It can be difficult for Redshaw to revisit the accident that changed her life. Still, she believes sharing her story with people like Palm is worth it to inspire others.
“When you’re able to move those things to the surface, and you feel safe enough with the community around you to move through those things, to heal, to process, to un-attach, you are able to find freedom in yourself, in your heart, in your body, in your mind. I fully believe in that,” Redshaw says. “Whether we talk in person, or whether you read my story in Rachael’s book, I hope that that’s what people see.”
Share and share alike
Another person Palm interviewed for her book was birth doula and prenatal yoga teacher Kelly Cox.
Originally a therapist working with victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, Cox didn’t think she wanted to become a doula until she witnessed a child being born. She has now been present for 70 births.
Through her work, Cox has met a range of people—women unable to lactate, grandparents raising grandchildren, gay couples, and breast cancer survivors like herself—in need of breast milk. She was inspired by dating apps like Bumble to found Share the Drop, a nationwide web app matching breast milk donors with parents in need.
Because sharing milk is by necessity hyperlocal, whereby users match with volunteer donors in their own zip code, Cox sees Share the Drop as a community-building exercise. She considers Palm’s book another way to bring the people of Charlottesville together.
“I love what Rachael’s doing about telling stories about people in our community,” Cox says. “I’m just a huge believer in community. I’m not from here, I don’t have any family here, but my community is so big because I’ve just shared my life with everyone. So, I love that she is pushing out these stories about, ‘Hey, do you know what your neighbors are actually doing?’”
As Palm wrote on her Substack, Radically Honest, writing this book meant “that these stories—and these women—will live forever. There is a permanence now that perhaps didn’t exist before.”
Palm, a former journalist who now works full-time in marketing, scheduled hours of interviews and writing around her own consulting business. She ultimately decided to spend $10,000 of her own funds to self-publish and get her stories out into the community.
“When you’re writing, sometimes you just feel like you’re putting it out in the ether, and is anyone reading it? Is anyone resonating with it?” Palm says. “But it’s something that I do because I feel like I can’t not do it.”
While writing is often a solitary pursuit, Palm says she wasn’t really alone, thanks to “unconditional support” from her editor Jenny DeBell; from Shields, who in addition to serving as the book’s photographer also photographed Palm’s wedding last November; and, at home, from her mother, her daughter, and her wife.
“I felt like my whole village has just been incredibly vocal in their support and just backing me up and asking ‘what can I do,’” Palm says.
She also received encouragement from her interview subjects, some of whom are now close friends.
“It’s enriched my life incredibly. It’s been an opportunity for personal growth for me,” Palm says. “I learned so much about these women. I think these women have so much to teach us, and their stories just represent all the best things that women can do and have to offer. It’s felt really special to be trusted by these women and to get to know them more.”
She continues, “I think it was really cathartic for a number of them. A couple of them came back to me and said, ‘You know, that’s the first time I’ve ever really told this, start to finish.’ It’s a healing process for them. In a lot of ways, it was therapeutic for them. It was therapeutic for me.”
A portion of the net proceeds from sales of Badass Women of Charlottesville will be donated to The Woman’s Initiative, a Charlottesville-based organization providing women with access to mental health programs and counseling regardless of their financial status.
“I do want to give back to the community, like these women gave up their time,” Palm says.
Now that Badass Women of Charlottesville is on shelves, Palm is considering a sequel, which may feature some of the other women suggested through her nomination form.
“There are many other women, many other stories that have not been told,” Palm says. “I do foresee another edition of this, if not multiple other editions.”
