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is the author of The School for Good Mothers, which was a New York Times bestseller, a Read with Jenna/TODAY Show Book Club pick, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Carnegie Medal, and one of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2022. She lives in Chicago with her family.

This interview was originally published in 2023 in Raising Mothers.

What inspired you to tell this story?

I began writing The School for Good Mothers in February 2014. At that time, I was heading into my late thirties and constantly ruminating about whether or not my partner and I should have a child. The biological clock pressure was intense, as was my ambivalence. The other source of inspiration was a New Yorker article by the journalist Rachel Aviv, “Where Is Your Mother?,” which appeared in the magazine late 2013. That mother’s heartbreaking story made me start thinking about the injustices of the family court system and planted a kernel of rage in my mind.

What did you edit out of this book?

If you can believe it, the book I sold to my publisher was actually bleeker. Some scenes of death and violence were edited out. I also worked with my editor, Dawn Davis, to streamline the lessons. We cut about 35 pages in total.

How did you know you were done? What did you discover about yourself upon completion?

Most of my professional experience has been as an editor and I could tinker with individual sentences forever, so I consider something done when I have to turn in approval on final copy edits. I worked on these edits in 2020, so my memories of that time are a bit fuzzy, but I was surprised that it was hard to let go. I’d devoted my life to this book for so many years, so it was a strange transition to no longer spend all my time in Frida’s head.

What was your agenting process like?

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Our two-hour Zoom Workshop, StoryJustice: Social Justice Storytelling with takes place on January 31, 2026. Registration is open. Paid subscribers take 20% off.

(she/ her) is a writer, social worker, and seeker of collective liberation. She owns Liberation is Lit, a bookstore that sparks collective action for liberation among readers by promoting stories from intersectional experiences. She has self-published four books: Phases, Writing Our Truths: A Guide to Self-Publishing for BIPOC Writers, Love and Other Forms of Heartbreak, and Black Madonna. Through her books, she has made a commitment to radical vulnerability, curiosity, and connection.

I knew I always wanted to be a writer, but I was afraid to be seen for who I am. Sometimes I still feel that way. This world makes it so scary to be vulnerable.

When I started my first blog in college, I tried to make it completely anonymous. I wanted the freedom I thought anonymity would afford me; I could really be myself without judgment. After I wrote a particularly vulnerable piece about my best friend instead of talking to her directly, and she commented on it, apologizing, I knew that more people had eyes on me than I thought. It was both a scary and exhilarating feeling. My writing allowed me to express my truth and be seen for it.

When I published my first poetry collection, Phases, I seriously considered publishing under a pseudonym. This was my poetry, something I extracted from very dark times, but something had shifted in me. I was committed to expressing my truth in order to cast away the isolation I was feeling. My dad and I don’t have the best communication, but he read my poetry, and it opened a door to start repairing our relationship. This was something I had never anticipated from my work.

These two examples illustrate how sharing personal narratives–whether through a blog, poetry, or a book–changed my life. I don’t know where I would be without accessing this bravery.

I want my elected officials to look me in my eyes as I tell my story about how their decisions are affecting my life

Over the last few years, I have been going to my statehouse and other public political meetings to give public testimony. I want my elected officials (the ones I didn’t necessarily vote for) to look me in my eyes as I tell my story about how their decisions are affecting my life. I knew the work I was doing with my writing practice was directly connected to this work. There is a vulnerability to exposing your story to lawmakers in this way, but there is also power. You are confronting the beast that tells you that your Black or Brown or queer or trans or disabled or immigrant experience shouldn’t exist, or at least within the consciousness of what they dictate to be American.

In my exploration of how the power of personal narratives can be used to make change in our communities, I have been expressing that through my work with StoryJustice. I seek to empower people living in racialized, queer, trans, and/or disabled bodies to speak their truths through their stories. Whether you are building an archive because our histories are being erased and attacked, giving public testimony to elected officials, or just wanting to share your truth with the world, here are the five pillars of the framework you can explore when crafting your personal narrative through a StoryJustice lens.

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Understanding the Past

When we tell any story, we always start at the beginning. What are our roots? What were the things and people who shaped who we are? How did socialization shape those things and people, and how did those things affect the choices that we have?

Writing our personal narrative can help us explore our past. We are able to understand what forces and history have shaped our contexts. I am a big fan of exploring how our personal history fits within the context of history. What can we learn from our ancestors to guide us in the moment we are living in?

Imagination

Our story isn’t just about how the past has shaped us. One of the most exciting opportunities we have through sharing our personal narratives is the ability to envision a better future based on our lived experiences. If we want a better world, we have to imagine the things we want and need to build to get us there.

What care did you need after you experienced harm? Do you know how to name the care you need after experiencing harm? What kind of life do you want to live when you are free from oppressive systems? What would your life look like if you could live without fear of being all of who you are?

Building Relationships

The core of organizing is building relationships. White supremacist, patriarchal capitalism sold us the lie of rugged individualism, that we are self-sufficient beings who don’t need community to survive. Personal narratives are a powerful way to build relationships. Because when we share ourselves, we give other people the permission to be vulnerable with us in return.

As you can see from my stories above, I have experienced how sharing my personal narratives has improved several important relationships in my life. What courage could you gain from telling your story? What are the things you might have felt like you were the only person to experience? How can you build community around the things you may have been taught to feel shame for?

Radical Vulnerability

Everything I have been talking about centers around vulnerability. To me, vulnerability is radical in a world that teaches us to hide behind perfectionism and how we mask to present fully functional and sane humans. Our expansiveness is great, so why wouldn’t we want to share those parts? The world has taught us to feel shame if we cannot fit neatly into their boxes.

When we are first vulnerable, we give other people permission to be vulnerable themselves.

When we are first vulnerable, we give other people permission to be vulnerable themselves. I witnessed this within my work around the #MeToo movement, how survivors were able to build community and change narratives just because they embraced vulnerability. How could your story shift as you dare to be vulnerable? What care would you like to receive? What connections are you wanting to make with others?

Awareness to Action

A personal narrative can remain personal, but using it for action is how we work toward liberation. Through your story, you can galvanize people to action. Telling our story to bring awareness to issues is one thing, but using that story to show the world how we show compassion to one another, how we make space for the most marginalized, and how we look within ourselves to be the change we want to see, is another.

We live in a world where facts are no longer enough to move people into action, but stories do.

When I share my personal narratives to call people to action, I start by getting them to examine the ways in which their own lives have–or have not–been affected in the same ways. We can interrogate what parts people play actively or complicitly, not in a way that blames, but in ways that build empathy and encourage accountability. We live in a world where facts are no longer enough to move people into action, but stories do. This is a culmination of all the pillars before. We take context from the past, show what we want for the future, build relationships through vulnerability, and end up moving people to action.

If you are interested, we will be conducting a workshop on StoryJustice and how we can use our personal narratives to work toward liberation. Join us if you are curious. Your story matters.

Registration for StoryJustice: SOCIAL JUSTICE STORYTELLING is open. To learn more and sign up, click the link below:

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Our three-hour Zoom Workshop, Write to Thrive: Creative Joy with Words and Images hosted by takes place on November 22nd. Registration is open. Paid subscribers take 20% off.

“You should journal about that.”

We get this advice when our thoughts start whirling out of control, projecting into the future or obsessing about the past. And we know writing can be therapeutic—research has proven it—but the basic recording of events and feelings sometimes just doesn’t fit.

This is where structured writing practices step in, offering imaginative prompts that go beyond traditional diary-keeping. These exercises—developed at the Therapeutic Writing Institute—offer fresh, effective approaches to reflective writing. And they can have a meaningful impact, contributing to our well-being and informing ongoing writing projects.

An example: You’re facing a decision, one with two equally attractive options. They both have pros and cons, making it difficult to choose the right path. You might journal about the choices and how you’re feeling about them. But here’s a more interesting idea—write in the present tense as if you’ve already taken one of the paths. What are you doing? How does it feel? Then do the same for the other path, tuning in to the details and the emotions that come with it. Read over them and you’ll find that both pieces, imagined from future perspectives, give needed clarity around the decision.

This exercise is just one example of how specific reflective writing practices can help us develop the capacity to be self-therapeutic. The wisdom we need often comes from within, and prompts like these help us reveal it. When we add intuitive collage—created from our inner landscape and used as inspiration for further journaling—the results become even more powerful.

My upcoming workshop Write to Thrive: Finding Creative Joy With Words and Images is perfect for writers at all levels seeking new paths to self-discovery. Tuning in and taking our thoughts to the page is a direct entryway to clarity and enhanced creativity. Join me in community as we explore a variety of thoughtful, affirming practices that you can return to time and again on your own. Our time will include optional opportunities to share and reflect together. All aspects of your beautiful self are welcome.

Registration for WRITE TO THRIVE: CREATIVE JOY WITH WORDS & IMAGES is open. To learn more and sign up, click the link below:

, J.D., is a versatile writer, editor, creativity coach, and facilitator with a passion for nurturing the imaginative spirit and helping others discover their inner wisdom. The author of the gripping thriller, Have You Seen Him, she is a graduate of Stanford University and University of California, Davis School of Law. Kimberly is a Guided Autobiography, SoulCollage®, and Journal to the Self® facilitator, and she serves on the board of Amherst Writers & Artists. She is a teaching artist with several writing centers and has led workshops at numerous retreats and conferences, including Esalen Institute, Omega Institute, Arts & Healing Initiative, and the Expressive Therapies Summit. She has served on the staffs of Literary Mama, F(r)iction, and Carve magazines, and her writing has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. Kimberly trusts in the magic of miracles and synchronicity and believes that everyone is creative. She lives in Southern California with her husband and three children. Learn more and connect with Kimberly at https://www.kimberlylee.me/

Freedom Ways is an interview & essay series exploring the intersection of artistry and liberation, illuminating how art serves as both personal transformation and collective resistance. This Freedom Ways essay, in collaboration with , features DW McKinney.

DW McKinney is an award-winning writer and editor based in Las Vegas, Nevada. A 2024 TORCH Literary Arts Fellow, she is also the recipient of fellowships from PERIPLUS Collective, Writing By Writers, and The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. Her writing appears in Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, Ecotone, and TriQuarterly. She serves as the fellowship manager at Shenandoah.

—

Standing on the bathtub ledge in my grandmother’s bathroom, body statue-still as my toes gripped the cold porcelain, I craned my neck upward. Words floated through the high window above the tub to my perked ears. Grown folks’ conversation was happening on the backyard deck beneath the window, and as a girl of seven or eight, it wasn’t my place to listen.

My grandmother and her guest were sipping sun tea and enjoying the afternoon on my grandfather’s lounge chairs while they gossiped.

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“You know, he’s kinda funny,” my grandmother said. “Something’s wrong with his mind. Can’t talk to him the way that you want to.”

“And when you try to talk about it with them—” the guest said.

“—they don’t want to hear it,” my grandmother replied.

Their conversation faded in and out on the breeze, but I had heard enough to understand that the man they spoke about was different in a way that was embarrassing to him and his family, and to my grandmother and her guest as well.

That wouldn’t be the last time I stood on the bathtub eavesdropping on grown folks’ conversations about someone being “funny” or “not quite all there” or how “their mind ain’t right.” Shame and disgust pressed between the spoken words. There was frustration too, as the conversations scrutinized how a person was supposed to act or how they were supposed to be. Too often those supposed to’s were about other people’s minds.

Years later, I heard a different version of that afternoon conversation but with a similar intent. I don’t remember the exact context, except that I was talking to my big sister, and I was speaking about myself.

“Them is white girl problems, white people problems,” my sister said with her nose scrunched in distaste. “That typa shit don’t happen to us. We’re Black!” The unsaid part? That “typa shit” shouldn’t have been happening to me.

Them is white girl problems, white people problems. Not our problems.

“Them” was depression, anxiety, and stress. “Them” was any issue that couldn’t be solved with a tablespoon of castor oil from the upper kitchen cabinet, fervent prayer to God, or lying down somewhere. “Them” were the things that made grown folks gossip on backyard decks.

***

In Maya Angelou’s seminal 1969 autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she described how Mr. Freeman, her mother’s live-in boyfriend, repeatedly sexually assaulted her when she was eight years old. Angelou’s disclosure of the assaults led to Mr. Freeman’s arrest and trial. A judge sentenced him to one year and one day in prison but inexplicably released him from custody after the trial. Vigilantes beat Mr. Freeman to death that night.

Because of Mr. Freeman’s previous threats and the beliefs passed down in her family about how people were supposed to behave, Angelou’s understanding of the assaults became distorted. She believed that she had lied and her words led to his death. She wrote:

Them is white girl problems, white people problems. Not our problems. “Them” was depression, anxiety, and stress. “Them” was any issue that couldn’t be solved with a tablespoon of castor oil from the upper kitchen cabinet, fervent prayer to God, or lying down somewhere. “Them” were the things that made grown folks gossip on backyard decks.

[A] man was dead because I lied. Where was the balance in that?... Obviously I had forfeited my place in heaven forever, and I was as gutless as the doll I had ripped to pieces ages ago. Even Christ Himself turned His back on Satan. Would He turn His back on me? I could feel the evilness flowing through my body and waiting, pent up, to rush off my tongue if I tried to open my mouth. I clamped my teeth shut, I’d hold it in. If it escaped, wouldn’t it flood the world and all the innocent people?

Angelou vowed never to speak again. It didn’t help that her grandmother also demanded that their family never mention “the situation”—a pitiless euphemism for Angelou’s rape—or speak Freeman’s name again. Her grandmother’s shame-induced censure was a classic example of an enduring Black family narrative that we never talk about family business, that we only focus on the good things.

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“In the first weeks my family accepted my behavior as a post-rape, post-hospital affliction,” Angelou wrote. “They understood that I could talk to Bailey, but to no one else.” That grace was fleeting as her disability and psychological distress disconcerted them. Her family soon became offended by her mutism, which lasted nearly five years. They called her “impudent” and “sullen.” Angelou was sometimes punished and beaten for being “uppity.”

“There is nothing more appalling than a constantly morose child,” she wrote.

I first read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings when I was in high school. It was around the time my mother had threatened to enroll me in charm school after she confronted me about my demeanor during a drive home from track practice.

“Why do you look like that all the time,” she shouted, as she pounded her fists into the steering wheel. “Why are you always so sad? What do you have to be sad about?”

Whenever I appeared unhappy, my parents would say, just as my mother had in the car, “What do you have to be sad about? What do you have to worry about?” It was less a genuine question and more an insistence that I acquiesce to their perception of happiness. I had, according to them, everything. A roof over my head, food to eat in the kitchen, my own bedroom, and no bills to pay. I learned from other Black friends that these were common beliefs in many other Black households. What more could I—we, as Black children—want when we seemingly had everything? We were supposed to be happy. What I wanted was simple. I wanted peace. I wanted to be seen and heard. I wanted safety.

I first read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings when I was in high school. It was around the time my mother had threatened to enroll me in charm school after she confronted me about my demeanor during a drive home from track practice. “Why do you look like that all the time,” she shouted, as she pounded her fists into the steering wheel. “Why are you always so sad? What do you have to be sad about?”

Instead, I hid from haints and avoided looking at shadows because looking at them would evoke creatures that wanted to harm me. I used special magic to free myself from rooms and whisperings of bad tidings. I laced my breath with prayers to the Almighty to ensure my salvation. I lived in chaos and doom and death.

Angelou’s autobiography was a life raft on a turbulent sea. I was mentally struggling, and I couldn’t tell anyone because I was constrained by my own magical thinking and the rigid beliefs engrained in my family and community. Her words from a life nearly seventy years in the past, at the time, was where I found understanding and peace.

The act of not talking about the difficult and uncomfortable in our Black communities, the act of keeping family business to the family or erasing those events that cause shame, the act of not addressing what rattles our minds means that we have historically erased a catalogue of what makes us human. We have effectively created a superhuman lineage, deteriorating and unhealthy, that is impossible to live up to.

***

My mental health became more erratic in my 20s and 30s. Obscene and violent images blotted my thoughts. Sometimes I “forgot” how to breathe or how to walk, as if that information had suddenly become erased from my DNA while sitting at my computer or walking down the street. I often lost time to never-ending cycles of walking in and out of rooms, flicking light switches, unlocking and locking doors, and checking that everything that could be opened was closed and everything that could be turned on was shut off.

If no one in my family suffered like I did and these were not Black people problems, then the only explanations left were from misguided church folks who proclaimed that mental health issues stemmed from unrepentant sins, demonic influences, and generational curses. So, for a time, I believed my bloodline was cursed and that curse came from my late biological father, a career criminal, who passed away when I was six.

Digging into my father’s past to uncover this supposed curse only encouraged me to write about him and my family. I cobbled together memories and stories to begin understanding how we came together and broke apart, and how what presented as curses were really the collision of consequences and redacted histories.

***

Urgency propelled me to begin writing my memoir in 2015. I was pregnant with my first child and thought, I still have so much to do, as if I had suddenly stumbled into a nine-month deadline for all that I would ever be capable of doing. I had written before, but my words had always been for other people. This was the first time that they truly would be for me.

I had always wanted to write my memoir because of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The book left me with a profound sense of kinship. It was rife with possibilities and truths, and I recognized that I could write a book of my own possibilities and truths that, in turn, might resonate with someone else in need.

In those early book drafts, I wrote around the chaos that shaped my childhood and adolescence and how it was still affecting me. I didn’t have the language to completely define what I endured. I was also afraid of who would read my words (my family, my friends) and what they would discover (my mind was unstable). I was also afraid people would deem me unfit for motherhood, and I would lose my child before I had even had a chance to know what motherhood was.

Omission became my (a) form of truth telling in my writing. I continued to write around the fact that I refused to eat certain foods while I was pregnant because I believed they would poison my body and kill me and my unborn child. I didn’t write that I couldn’t handle knives because my mind told me that I would harm myself or others. Or that I couldn’t stop believing that every day would bring nuclear war. Every inhalation threaded contaminated air through my body that tainted the blood of the future life inside of me. I still lived in chaos and doom and death, only this time I had a child in my womb.

Angelou’s autobiography was a life raft on a turbulent sea. I was mentally struggling, and I couldn’t tell anyone because I was constrained by my own magical thinking and the rigid beliefs engrained in my family and community. Her words from a life nearly seventy years in the past, at the time, was where I found understanding and peace.

After I gave birth, I discovered that I had obsessive-compulsive disorder. The diagnosis only confirmed what I had suspected for a few years. This uncovering of the truth encouraged me to be more honest in my writing. I wanted to show that “white people problems” were really our problems, collectively.

I crafted essays about the anxiety and catastrophizing that came after every news report detailing police brutality against unarmed Black men and women. I wrote about how troublesome it was to talk about my mental health to friends who only delved into passive explorations of our lives through text messages. I wrote about the terrors that plagued my nightmares and how our political and social landscape negatively influenced my hope for the future. I wrote about how racism agitated my anxiety and seeded some of my intrusive thoughts.

Then, in my memoir, I finally crafted language describing my beginnings—“The compulsions, as automatic as breathing, began in childhood.”

When it came to crafting my future, I read Bassey Ikpi’s memoir-in-essays, I’m Telling the Truth But I’m Lying. In detailing her life living with anxiety and bipolar II disorder, Ikpi handed me a contemporary lens to view myself as a woman breaking free of silences that had hindered her self-understanding.

As Ikpi wrestled with her relationship with her mother, I saw the need to write more openly about how my obsessive-compulsive disorder shaped my own motherhood, especially since mothers too are hindered by responsibility and perfectionism discourses. Ikpi wrote, “My mother mistakes questions for attacks and accusations. She weaponizes her silences.” When I read those words, my daughter had already begun to ask me why I frequently washed my hands and about my behaviors around objects that I believed were dirty. I was reminded of Mrs. Bertha Flowers, the teacher who helped Maya Angelou gain the confidence to speak again. Mrs. Flowers told her, “Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.”

I could’ve reprimanded my daughter, told her not to talk about grown folks’ business or ignored her in the way that I had learned. Instead I chose to rewrite the narrative. I removed the sharp edge of silence. I removed the blade from how things were supposed to be.

***

Each sentence—spoken or written—restructured the boundaries around my mind, my life, and my personal truths.

The public and private responses to writing about my mental health have been wonderfully, and overwhelmingly positive. Instead of people calling me crazy or a bad mother, I’ve received messages from others who told me they had the same fears about speaking publicly about their mental health. Then came messages from other Black women who admitted that they had obsessive-compulsive disorder or felt in community with my words. We were no longer isolated by the falsehoods that once encircled us.

The act of not talking about the difficult and uncomfortable in our Black communities, the act of keeping family business to the family or erasing those events that cause shame, the act of not addressing what rattles our minds means that we have historically erased a catalogue of what makes us human. We have effectively created a superhuman lineage, deteriorating and unhealthy, that is impossible to live up to.

It’s also a strange gift to have a family elder tell me that they read my words and were finally able to understand a younger family member. They still fumbled over directly naming the disorder, but there was a seed of understanding, a building of respect. Some of my family members are still hesitant to admit that I have OCD. I am “particular” now, instead of “overly sensitive” and “having issues,” but they respect my journey. My truths are unfamiliar and difficult to acknowledge, but they don’t outright deny them.

The path to normalizing mental health issues in our community is still arduous, but so much progress is made by simple admission. I won’t stop talking or writing about my anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. I won’t stop showing the vibrant ways we can live and thrive with turbulent mental health. I won’t stop revealing the complexity of our truths.

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Our two-hour Zoom Workshop, Again and Again: Repetition in Poetry with Karen Zheng takes place on November 1st. Registration is open. Paid subscribers take 20% off.

Every morning, my life is sacred. I’ve built it that way intentionally. I wake up, go to the gym, work on administrative tasks, and then read. So much reading. I read a novel for 20-25 minutes, and then I read poetry for 15-20 minutes, and then I write. Not every morning do I write a poem with potential for revision, but I relish this routine. I bathe in the nourishment it gives me. And then, I meditate. How does routine become sacred? What does it mean to feed ourselves in our routines?

Of course, there are some routine parts of the day that just feel like a drag or a task or something that just needs to get done. I’ve never been good at flossing. I still do it every night, but I’m convinced I’m not doing it right. Locking the door is another repetitive motion I do without thinking at all. So goes putting in my password for any account (I never save passwords because I’m paranoid). Putting on the shoes, applying lipstick, turning on the stove, and waiting for the water to boil. All these daily motions, while not necessarily a drag, don’t feel intentional.

I read a dear friend, Adrián Pachuca’s, thesis earlier this year, and their poems and talking to them was the catalyst that really got me thinking about repetition in poetry. I have been enjoying revisiting old books lately, and also, re-reading novels immediately after I’ve finished them. It’s on the second read that the eye catches things the first eye didn’t, and that surprise is delightful. Notably, I’ve read Bryan Washington’s Memorial and Family Meal, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous twice in a row. I think I will forever remember this line from Ocean’s book, “The very impossibility of your reading this is all that makes my telling it possible.” Anyhow, like I said, it’s always on second read that the eye catches something new. So, in poetry, when a line or word or conviction is repeated, how is the resonance changing? What does it mean to have lines roll over in your head, over and over again?

I’m not really on the internet much, though I do have my vices, and I carve out specific times of the day for scrolling on social media (or my most recent obsession, whatever that may be). Sometimes, I find myself watching the same short-form content over and over again. What makes the experience of watching the same video different each time? Is the experience different? Sometimes the same content is filmed from a different angle. That gets me thinking about repetition with a difference. The content is the same, but the delivery has shifted. New lens, new perspectives.

How does routine translate into poetry? Does repetition equate to more meaning or does repetition wash away meaning? Is there a line that separates those effects? Again and again, we do these things, say these words. How can we turn repetition into ritual? This question is really what I’m interested in exploring in my upcoming workshop: Again and Again: Repetition in Poetry.

In terms of the craft of repetition, there are many poets I admire, but here, I’ll just mention Jennifer Chang, Vievee Francis, and Chen Chen. Jennifer Chang’s book, The Authentic Life, has a lot of longer poems, and to those who know me, I do not write long poems. I find them incredibly difficult, so I admire those who can keep the thread tight through so many pages. Chang is one of them, and while reading this collection, I noticed a different type of repetition I hadn’t encountered before, and I’m unsure if there’s a technical term for it, but I’ve been dubbing them “call-backs.” Call-backs are moments in a long poem in which something is “called-back” from earlier in the poem, if you will. Chang did a lot of that. It was almost nostalgic, or almost like something bugging you in the back of your mind, popping out every now and then.

Now, Vievee’s poem has been haunting me ever since I read it. “Say It, Say It Anyway You Can” repeats multiple different images throughout the poem, but each repetition occurs with a slight difference, a slight change. It’s wild to see the transformation that each image completes by the end of the poem. It’s almost like adding different seasonings to a pot. The motion might be the same, but the taste slowly transforms.

Chen Chen’s “Lunar New Year” is also a different flavor of repetition. Chen uses repetition of Chinese characters in a way that I’d like to explore in my own bilingual writing. Chen’s splitting of the characters in his repetition illustrates the definitional differences between the characters themselves that reveals my preoccupations of late, which is a definition poems project, in which I write definition poems for Chinese expressions/idioms/sayings.

The above is just a flavor of what the workshop might look like with me! I’d love to sit and explore and repeat in poems with anyone who’s interested in transforming routine into ritual.

Registration for AGAIN AND AGAIN: REPETITION IN POETRY is open. To learn more and sign up, click the link below:

Karen Zheng (she/they) is a queer, Chinese-American poet and writer. Her poetry has been featured in Bellingham Review, Harbor Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. They have received fellowships from the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, Roots. Wounds. Words, Chicago Storystudio, and Inprint MD Anderson Foundation. They have been a finalist for Harbor Review’s Washburn Chapbook Prize and have been nominated for the Best of the Net Awards and the Pushcart Prize. She is a lover of cats and all things related to food. Find out more about them at https://www.karenzheng.com.

Writing has been my personal liberatory practice as long as I can remember, thanks to my mother. I raged as a child. I’m told it was against everything. That’s certainly how the retrospective feels. And it seems justified. Born a brown female in the U.S. South to a father whose African genetics shown through dark enough to garner not just the spitting attention of overall clad neighbors, but the focal aggression of local KKK chapters.

I remember yellow walls or yellow light or a yellow house and a wood floor. My mother with construction paper, taking down my words. Telling me to express myself. She has always encouraged, articulated pride in my work, even when the writing exposes the deep pain of our family dysfunction; the ripping shame of an abusive immigrant father and the chaos of first-generation mixed-kids dealing with the classically American co-morbid hypersexualization and racial aggression at every turn. We were demonized. No wonder my father had his own rage. I was a demon, I thought. Half demon, anyway. Demon means the brown part, right?

That internalization of brownness as evil took time to shake loose. Lots of time, because it was rooted by the white supremacist culture that on one hand told me my darker skin meant I was closer to the earth/closer to the dirt/closer to the below-ground Hell versus light-sky Heaven. The same one that came knocking on our door every Sunday trying to scoop up us kids for Sunday School and Youth Group with the hopes that wresting us free from the hold of our half-Other home might make us fall into the baptismal pool that would wash away the devil. I was saved once under a big tent, but it wasn’t about Jesus. It was about hope. And it didn’t set ease to my unrest. No matter the community we landed in as we poverty-hopped around the Bible Belt, there was no sense of “home” or “safety” because being “half-and-half” meant being Not White, which was fundamentally, irrevocably wrong.

Writing, beginning with the rhymes my mother used to rhythmically ease my growing awareness of oppression, became my outlet. While the pieces I composed as a toddler are lost, I still have the work I toiled over from age six forward, recorded in my own careful, evolving print. I periodically look back on these relics and recognize them for what they were: the repeated effort to take control over some aspect of my life, readily apparent in the themes that cry out again and again. I have books of words twisted into spells I thought would banish the Otherness from the perception of my body by demonstrating my humanity. This was as ill-fated as my efforts to make my hair slick and shiny by brushing out my coarse curls every night 100 times, scalp to tip.

What I yearned for was freedom; to be seen and accepted for who I was as I was. My poetry, then fiction, then more conscious works of non-fiction show me grappling with gender, race and class. But my education was deplete of feminist theory. In fact, I never heard the name of any feminist role model other than Maya Angelou. There were no excerpts offered up in History, Social Studies or Language Arts. Angelou was just a note and a quote buried somewhere in a textbook. She existed. That was enough acknowledgment for a small town in Arkansas. Better to discuss the homemaking talents of Betsy Ross, to practice our own stitching and the placing of our hands over our hearts for the pledge to that grand flag she first assembled than to turn our attention to the Little Rock Nine and desegregation, what came before, and the very real life experiences of my family directly resulting from what is still coming after.

Thankfully, I had the opportunity to pursue higher education. I relocated from Southwest to Midwest, learned about Native and African peoples and cultures as an undergrad, then got pulled into grad school at Indiana University. My MFA was spent composing a fictive retelling of several true stories from my early life during as the Lebanese Civil War raged. The stories that fell outside of my thesis grappled with religious trauma, racism and sexual violence. There, I was finally exposed to writing by Black feminist literary writers starting with Lucille Clifton, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Cade Bambara. Toni Morrison, it might surprise you, was a challenge for me. I had a lot of unlearning to do. Internalized racism isn’t soft and doesn’t slide out like butter. It’s a wicked, barbed thing—the real devil. It would take me another decade of wrestling with my identity, especially as a Muslim American post-9/11, to truly comprehend the scope of the societal cancer riddling my bones. It wasn’t until I completely shucked that first life and moved into the life I’m living now that I learned about bell hooks, Angela Davis and Audre Lorde.

When I met my wife, I was newly out and in the process of dismantling my marriage to my ex-husband. There were many opportunities for us to opt out of our connection: she didn’t want to be the elder queer ushering me into the fold; my divorce might (and did) get messy; I had three children and she didn’t want kids; our chemistry was so intense it was obvious to both of us where dating was going so jumping ship early was really the only option; we were both in poverty and there wasn’t much hope of pulling each other out of it. I could go on. But we stayed together, and Marie took one look at my relationship with my “demon” brownness and showed me Janelle Monáe’s “Dirty Computer.” Then she handed me her copy of Women, Race and Class and talked me through it chapter by chapter.

My wife is French. White. Raised in a Muslim neighborhood in the south of France. When I met her, she was teaching literature courses through her PhD program that looked at pop culture through a liberatory framework. Our conversations on Davis and Monáe (and many other relevant and necessary feminist leaders) led to the gradual decolonization of my thinking about myself. It also led to a more conscious application of liberatory practices in my own teaching. I’m grateful for this service on her part—what we jokingly and seriously refer to in our home as reparations—and how it pays forward into my own work. I’ve taught Expressive Writing as a method for release and recovery to survivors of trauma for almost two decades. Understanding the necessity of origin and current application of liberation in personal praxis is a core tenet of this work, and my ongoing education has served to make me a more compassionate and capable educator. But there is always more learning to do, including how to continue raging.

Literary Liberation offers a space where community can come together and take part in that learning. Here, the Global Majority is served through opportunity and praxis. I’m excited to take part in the elevation of liberatory leadership as the new Director of Programs for Lit Lib. I look forward to the change we will continue to create together through practices that deeply examine intention and method, origin and accessibility. Who is our work for and why must it be ourselves in order for the rage to be released, freedom to be more than an idea for those of us who are the majority but are also on the margin?

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(she/her) is a journalist and natural hair advocate whose work centers on race, culture, and faith. She is the author of numerous books including "Loving Your Black Neighbor as Yourself: A Guide to Closing the Space Between Us," which received a 2025 NAACP Image Awards Nomination for Outstanding Literary Work - Instructional. Chanté is a former contributor to The Root, The Washington Post, and L.A. Weekly. She co-leads Spirit & Scribe, an online workshop that explores the intersection of writing craft and spiritual formation. Connect with her via Substack and on IG.

What sparked this story, and how did it evolve from initial concept to final manuscript?

I was in Kumasi, Ghana, nearly two decades ago when I heard a voice whisper, “Write a book about race and Christianity.” I didn’t know if I was imagining things so I responded back, “If this is you, God, then tell me through someone else.” One week later, while in the middle of a discussion about race and culture, one of my friends, Karla, looked me dead in the eye and said, “You should write a book about race and Christianity.” A few months later I enrolled in a memoir writing class at my local community college.

My initial book title was “Young, Christian, & Black.” It was my first writing class, outside of high school composition class, and I learned the fundamentals of writing there. I wrote about one fourth of the manuscript over the course of two semesters. The following summer, I attended V.O.N.A. Voices where I studied memoir writing with author Faith Adiele. At the end of my week at V.O.N.A., the voice spoke again and said, “Stop writing the book.” I didn't want to listen because I am not a quitter, and I didn't want to be the person who said I was writing a book, but never actually wrote the book. So I kept going until the voice emphatically said, “Stop writing the book.” So I stopped.

In my heart of hearts, I knew that I wasn't ready to go there–to face my racial trauma, So I stopped writing and stayed in therapy/spiritual direction. I took the manuscript from V.O.N.A., which had all the feedback from my classmates and my instructor, and I tucked it away in my bookshelf. As I tucked it away, I uttered a simple prayer, “God, please let me know when it's time to pick this back up again.” Almost a decade passed and we began to hear stories about young Black men and women being killed unjustly by police; and a few years into the Black Lives Matter movement, I knew that it was time to pick the book back up again. This time the story wasn't focused on me as an individual as much as us Black folks as a collective. And so the manuscript went from focusing on my personal stories to focusing on our collective stories.

The book ended up being titled Loving Your Black Neighbor as Yourself. I ended up incorporating stories from sociology, history books, newspapers, and the Bible. I fused them all together to create a guide that is essentially a spiritual handbook for loving Black people and the Black community. It is a spiritual formation book that centers on race, and it's designed to teach allies how to love Black folks from the inside out without paternalism and without white guilt and white pride.

What was the hardest part of writing this book? How did you get through it?

The hardest part was just writing about racism and the horrific things that have been done to Black people and continue to be done to Black people. So to interact with that every single day was just exhausting. It was grueling on top of the fact that writing a book is grueling emotionally, physically, and mentally. It was taxing when you add the racial component. I wasn't prepared for that because I'm a race and culture writer, so I'm like, Oh, I write about race all the time. But writing a whole book about it and having that added pressure of a book deal? Yeah, that was really, really hard.

So I tried to have a very balanced life as much as possible. I would start my days by eating a good breakfast and praying. I would write for a few hours, take a break. I would try to go to the gym when I could to exercise and get in the hot tub to relax. Some days I would just go to the gym solely to get in the hot tub. I would try to go out social dancing. I would try to talk to my friends. I just tried to keep a very balanced life because so much time and energy was going towards the book, and it was very exhausting. So I tried to replenish as much as I could.

What's something big you had to change or cut out of your book? Why did you make that choice?

My book is predicated on my belief that the Spirit of Love (God) knows better than anyone how to love and specifically how to love Black people. And so if you want to truly love Black people, you have to tap into that Spirit of Love. And so a sub thesis of the book is that you can only love your Black neighbor as much as you love God and that you can only love your Black neighbor as much as you love yourself. And so I really wanted to show the connection between love for God, love for neighbor, and love for self.

I wanted the first chapter to be the “Love for God” chapter and then the second chapter to be the “Love for Yourself” chapter. (Note: This was the “You’re probably a racist” chapter.) But when I was trying to nail down that first chapter, that “Love for God” chapter, I couldn’t get it. I tried every sort of analogy, and I was looking at different passages of scripture, but it just wasn't coming together. I kept trying, and then by the end, my editor said, “This isn't working. I think we need to cut it.” And I was like, “Yeah, but do we really want the first chapter to be, ‘You're racist.’ Is that how we really want to start the book?” And she said, “I've seen it done before. I think we can do it.” And so I let go of the “Love for God” chapter because it felt just too hard. I mean the entire Bible is trying to show people how to love God. So to think that I could try to do it in a chapter was naive. So I had to cut that.

What's the most surprising discovery you made about your story or yourself during the writing process?

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Enjoy the rest of your August everyone!

Behind the Book is an exploration into the other side of publishing; we speak with agents, editors, publicists, and other members of the publishing industry whose hard work contributes to the wonderful material we are able to read and recommend daily. It’s an open conversation on their individual careers, the state of the industry and its future potential.

Our first installment is with Cherise Fisher, literary agent at Wendy Sherman. Her career spans over 25 years, including her time as Editor-in-Chief of Plume (an imprint of Penguin Random House). She has ushered into print such recent notable books as ’ international bestseller Do Better (2021), Tia Williams’ novel Seven Days In June (2021), Maya-Camille Broussard’s Justice of the Pies (2022), ’s novel Black Candle Woman (2023) and a host of other spectacular authors.

What was your first job in publishing?

My first job in publishing was as the Assistant to the Editor of Chief of Delacorte/Dell. I started about two weeks after my graduation from college.

Can you walk us through your publishing career?

Well, that’s a long walk! After getting promoted to Associate Editor at Dell, I made a lateral move to the Touchstone Fireside imprint of Simon and Schuster. I spent the bulk of my acquisition career there, publishing many award winning and bestselling authors such as George Lopez, Nelson George, Victoria Christopher Murray, Bil Wright, and Tony Parsons. From S&S, I went to Penguin to serve as Editor in Chief of an imprint called Plume. I left that position in 2011, spent some time as a freelance editor, and started selling rights to book in 2015.

Why did you decide to become an agent?

Actually, becoming a literary agent was my first dream when entering into the publishing world. As I climbed the ladder in publishing, I lost that goal in the mix. When I left publishing after having two children back to back, the universe guided me back to my original intention. I was freelance editing after leaving Plume, and one of my clients, Sadeqa Johnson, asked me to represent her. I told her that I was an editor, not an agent, but that I would introduce her to an agent. I shared her work with Wendy Sherman, who loved it and immediately asked me to co-agent Sadeqa with her. And so the dream I had set aside came back in front of me.

What’s important for you to see in a query letter from a writer?

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I encourage anyone who can do more to search through the Writers Against the War on Gaza list of funds that are bringing food, water and supplies to people being intentionally and wickedly starved before our eyes. It is important to our own consciousness and our humanity to do whatever is within our ability and show up, consistently.

(She/her) is a Puerto Rican writer from the Bronx. Her novel Carmen and Grace was published by William Morrow Harper Collins in 2023. She received her MFA from the City College of New York, CUNY, and her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, CUNY in English. She is currently Associate Professor of English at Bronx Community College, CUNY. She is a proud IWWG, VONA, AROHO, and Hedgebrook alumna. Her work has appeared in several anthologies and journals including Centro, Caminos Reales, We’moon 2022, MomEgg Review, Callaloo, The Fairy Tale Review and others.

*This interview was originally published in 2023 in Raising Mothers.

What inspired you to tell this story?

There is a long story and short version answer. In short, coming up in the Bronx I was taught to feel a lot of ways about myself, my mother and women who did not perform motherhood, female sexuality, and Latina identity in very specific ways deemed respectable. I felt compelled to tell the story of mothers and daughters who appear to fail to be good and right, but who love, protect and fight for each other in every way imaginable. What if we found a Holy Mother like that? A divine image of ourselves as right just how we are. The long version is about a whole vision I had walking down the Grand Concourse when I was 23 years old and had my first son in a baby carrier on my chest. It came after seeing a group of girls who looked to be getting into a fight with a young man.

What did you edit out of this book?

Dreams and scenes of chaos. The dreams came out as a result of final rounds of editing, and the general feeling in publishing about the use of dreams. The scenes of chaos were scenes I needed to write for myself, but they did not feel at all needed for the book. The dreams were released against my will, more or less, but the chaos fell away with each edit in my own hands. Only the vital chaos remained. Nothing gratuitous remained which was important to me, especially as pertained to mothers and how they are perceived and what we project onto them as flaws and failings.

I go with the flow and always prioritize my actual life, but from time to time I pack a bag and leave home and say I must write and it can’t wait.

How did you know you were done? What did you discover about yourself upon completion?

These questions bring so much emotion.

First, I want to say that I thought I was finished many, many, many times. With each discovery that there was more to do, came feelings of weariness and fear. Can I finish? Will I ever finish? What the hell is finished anyway? But in the summer of 2020, when we were all locked inside, I was also grieving the loss of both of my parents. They died three months apart in early 2020. My mother’s death was at the height of Covid in NYC in April, I was still reeling from the loss of my father with whom I was very close. But the fact that my mother died alone, and in isolation, and we could not get her ashes till June really mirrored a lot of the ways she had been /felt isolated/abandoned in her life. It was a very difficult thing to accept, and it was after releasing her ashes, and accepting that I had to move forward, that I decided to simply spend the summer in the book and make a way out as a sort of pilgrimage to a different future for me, the memory of my parents and the book. I had to really get in and give it everything I had, and many things I had never had before. So I reached out to a wonderful writer/editor I knew and loved and asked her to keep me company on the journey. We arranged a contract and I basically asked her to be my book doula, as in I needed to make sure someone was watching out for me as I was entering and exiting this book at such an intense emotional moment for me.

After thirty years in my heart, including my ten summers of active writing to a finished manuscript that included five with my agent, the book was finished in five weeks in 2020 and I had a book deal by January 2021.

It was a long road and I learned many things about myself. The spiritual path the book took me on changed me fundamentally, and helped me to heal many aspects of my life and myself. On the personality level I learned two things I sort of knew, but were deeply affirmed: One, I am mad dog persistent, and two, I have the patience of a rock. I can really and truly wait a thing out, ride its waves, and follow its snaky, twisted, trail. Once I commit, I am very difficult to dissuade.

Writing is a practice and an exercise and I think people get too caught up in thinking about it as a performance. But usually the performance is many years away. So write!

Read Carmen and Grace

🤞🏾Don’t forget we’ll be in conversation with today at 10a ET for our Mama’s Writing x A Literary Life interview on Instagram!

Learn more & join us!

What was your agenting process like?

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Cinelle Barnes (she/her/hers) is a formerly undocumented memoirist, essayist, and educator from Manila, Philippines, and is the author of MONSOON MANSION: A MEMOIR (Little A, 2018, Booklist starred review) and MALAYA: ESSAYS ON FREEDOM (Little A, 2019), and the editor of the New York Times New & Noteworthy book, A MEASURE OF BELONGING: 21 WRITERS OF COLOR ON THE NEW AMERICAN SOUTH (Hub City Press, 2020). She is currently at work on an immigrant travel memoir.

Cinelle earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Converse College. Her writing has appeared or been featured in the New York Times, Longreads, Garden & Gun, Electric Literature, Buzzfeed Reader, Literary Hub, Hyphen, Coastal Living, and CNN Philippines, among others. Her essay, “Carefree White Girls, Careful Brown Girls”, is anthologized in A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home (Catapult, 2020). Cinelle was a contributing editor, instructor, and writer at Catapult, and a juror for the inaugural Pulitzer Prize in Memoir. Follow her on Instagram and learn more about her literary consulting and editing work at cinellebarnes.com.

*This interview was originally published in 2023 in Raising Mothers.

What inspired you to tell this story?

My debut memoir came about while I was in the throes of postpartum depression and needing a repository for all the memories that started to well up when my daughter was born. I was in individual and group therapy, and in both, writing was recommended as a healing practice. I first tried writing for and to myself, with no intention of making the work public, let alone profitable. I began by writing on index cards every time I sat down to nurse my baby…a word, a line, a paragraph at a time… and by the time she was walking, I had three shoeboxes full of these index cards--what would become the synopsis and annotated table of contents for Monsoon Mansion.

Read Monsoon Mansion

What did you edit out of this book?

After I signed with an agent, it took me another year or so to complete the manuscript. When the first round was done, my agent believed that there were several early chapters that belonged in a different book or as standalone essays… so I edited out ⅓ of it, mostly scenes about the interiority of my birth family and my parents’ marriage, and were less narrative or propulsive than they were atmospheric. They became openers or prompts for future essays, which would then be compiled into my second book, Malaya: Essays on Freedom.

How did you know you were done? What did you discover about yourself upon completion?

I kept my audience and my original intention in mind. When I felt like I had affirmed my child self, described the things she had to endure and overcome, and had written them in a way that honored her magic and humor and hope, it was done. There were still light copy edits and legal reads ahead, but the whole of it was set in place for these smaller edits when I felt like I had hit a balance between narrating the tragedies I endured in a long-abandoned mansion versus narrating the light and wonder that surrounded me and buoyed me through those times. I was set on NOT writing a “trauma memoir” but on recounting the tragedies that befell me and my family, but against a backdrop that was sparkling, delicious, and full of style. Memoir to me was both narrative and portraiture, and it wouldn’t have been either had I not included the truly divine and incantatory aspects of my Philippine upbringing and the surreal world that my parents built.

Read A Measure of Belonging

What was your agenting process like?

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Freedom Ways is an interview & essay series exploring the intersection of artistry and liberation, illuminating how art serves as both personal transformation and collective resistance. This Freedom Ways essay, in collaboration with , features Emma Akpan.

is a writer who lives in Washington, DC, and was born in Toledo, Ohio. She is working on a collection of short stories about women encountering gentrification and technological changes in Washington, DC. She writes about girlhood, the unsaid, fugue and paths of escape, and agency for the powerless. She also writes about religion and reproductive rights, and visual arts and culture.

When Emma is not writing, you can find her on a yoga mat, taking pictures, or making floral arrangements.

Emma has attended Tin House Workshop and Sackett Street workshops, and is a scholarship recipient for Blue House Residency. She is a 2025 Kimbilio Fellow. Her writing has appeared in New City Arts, Cultbytes, Reckon Magazine, Kord Backstage and Rewire News.

—

I cannot remember the origin of my writing practice. I do remember reading stories like the Bobbsey Twins and Beezus and Ramona, and then pulling out a notebook to make up a story about Sally who went to the store to buy apples. I remember listening to sermons in church, savoring the repetitive structure, and writing a speech about Martin Luther King for a seventh grade contest. I walked into public libraries, hand in hand with my mother and sister, piling stacks of books in our bags, studying my mother as she draped at least three upturned books on the arms of couches. A ritual.

I wanted to write because I found identity in books.

And when preparing to write this essay, I again turned to books.

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Edwidge Danticat writes in We’re Alone, “It is much easier to explain or elaborate on endings than beginning. Beginnings have more amorphous origins.” She goes on to explain that when she needs a beginning, she starts with her earliest childhood memories: a four-year-old in an airport, torn from her mother’s leg before her mother boards a flight to New York. She is left standing with her uncle, floor vibrating next to her while her brother thrashes, crying, and her mother hurries away so she isn’t tempted to engulf her children in an embrace and remain in Haiti.

I read this passage, searching and not finding that one moment defining the theme of my writing practice. Danticat writes frequently about immigration and loss of parentage, often from a child’s perspective. With this origin story, the reader sees clearly Danticat’s thread from spark to fully realized themes. However, my own childhood wasn’t a series of discrete formative moments propelling the “spark.”

I read The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner. The four Alden kids, orphaned and homeless, discover an old boxcar in the woods and make it a home. The eldest sister makes it comfortable with found fabrics, the brothers forage for food. It’s an adventure. My own childhood lacked adventure, characterized by confinement instead. I couldn’t walk in the living room in the middle of the night for a snack without my mother waking to ask me what I was doing. I dreamed of far-off lands, being abandoned in the woods, packing a bag and walking away. The children’s wealthy grandfather discovers them in the woods and rescues them, ushering them into his picturesque home with wide spaces fit for children’s play. They recreate the woodland adventures of the Boxcar–this time with the security of a room and warm meals and the charge of an adult. My two selves, writer and not writer, are distinct, but indistinguishable, because poor Black girls exist perpetually in our dreams.

My writing serves as a container for those dreams.

Reading helps to chart the possibilities of my dreams.

"My two selves, writer and not writer, are distinct, but indistinguishable, because poor Black girls exist perpetually in our dreams. My writing serves as a container for those dreams.”

The Stoning of Soraya M. is a 2009 film about a small Iranian village where a group of men stone a woman falsely accused of infidelity. Soraya M. is a thirty-five-year-old wife to the abusive Ali, who wants to divorce Soraya so he can marry fourteen-year-old Mehri. Soraya refuses the divorce, which would leave her and her children in poverty. Ali can only get rid of her if she is killed, so he falsely accuses her of adultery, punishable by stoning. Ali turns the village against Soraya with ease, a culture of misogyny and mistrust of women making everyone readily believe that she is sleeping with the man employing her. Ali turns Soraya’s two sons against her. A journalist’s car breaks down in the village, and Zahra, Soraya’s aunt, tells him of her stoning. The men of the village try to prevent the journalist from leaving with the tape Zahra has created, but Zahra slips him a copy while he is seated in his car, and he drives off, tape in hand, ready to release to the public.

The woman tells the men of the village, “What are you afraid of? Justice was served, wasn’t it? The God I love is great. Wasn’t our village going to be an example for the rest of the country? Now the whole world would know. Yes! The world will know what happened here!”

***

My life has been a series of isolated incidents that happened only to me, or so I thought.

In Nobody Knows my Name, James Baldwin writes an essay entitled “Notes for a Hypothetical Novel,” addressing a group at San Francisco State College in 1960, and conjures an theoretical novel he would write for the group. He says, “Let’s pretend that I want to write a novel concerning the people or some of the people with whom I grew up, and since we are only playing, let us pretend it’s a very long novel.”

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” - James Baldwin

I’ve started writing like this. I want to write a story about men who stand outside all day. I want to write a story about a poster in my sister’s bedroom. I want to write a story about dust, the dust that floats in the afternoon sun streaming from an open window. I want to write something concerning some of the people I notice.

These portraits, at times, swell into a full story. Other times they are vignettes.

When I was a second-year seminary student, we were assigned Go Tell it on the Mountain for a theology class, or maybe it was American Christianity. My older sister had died the year prior. I ignored my grief for a year. I hoped God would help me forget. God didn’t. Grief caught me in a hallway outside of class. I heaved. My sadness clutched my heart like a squeeze. I was falling. A fellow student, dreadlocked with warm, small hands led me into the bathroom so I could breathe before the class.

Afterwards, I felt stupid. Evolutionary science says that crying publicly is a sign that you need care, empathy or help. Still, I felt stupid.

I found a therapist soon after that incident. I didn’t want to be embarrassed anymore.

I told my therapist how ashamed I was over the incident. She asked why, adding, “There is nothing wrong with crying.” I said, “But I feel like a child.”

While reading Go Tell it on the Mountain, I came upon the character of Gabriel reflecting on a drunken night with a harlot, mired in lust:

And his tears began—such tears as he had not known were in him. ‘I wept,’ he said later, ‘like a little child.’ But no child had ever wept such tears as he wept that morning on his face before Heaven, under the mighty tree. They came from depths no child discovers, and shook him with an ague no child endures. And presently, in his agony, he was screaming, each cry seeming to tear his throat apart, and stop his breath, and force the hot tears down his face, so that they splashed his hands and wet the root of the tree: ‘Save me! Save me!’

I read this passage aloud, sitting across from my therapist. She nodded. Asked, “How does that make you feel?”

I felt as if the ground had opened for me, but instead of being swallowed whole, I landed softly into a cloud of people who’d also lost a loved one. I felt I was too young to join the underground, but grateful I found countless others whose grief dug into our souls. Now when I fall, I fall among company.

***

In writing, it is possible to be necessary. In How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee has an essay entitled, “100 Things About Writing a Novel.” He writes, “Everyone has a novel in them, people like to say. They smile when they say it, as if the novel is special precisely because everyone has at least one. Think of a conveyor belt of infant souls passing down from heaven, rows of tired angels pausing to slip a paperback into their innocent, wordless hearts.” I have a novel in me.

I felt as if the ground had opened for me, but instead of being swallowed whole, I landed softly into a cloud of people who'd also lost a loved one. I felt I was too young to join the underground, but grateful I found countless others whose grief dug into our souls.

What exactly does that mean? Yes, we all have stories. A novel is much more than a story we retell, or a string of events we can write down. It is a crack in our heart, and sometimes we must bleed to release it. It asks us to question our deepest, sometimes shameful desires, write down our harmful impulses, and put into words the people and places that exist amorphously in our nightmares.

So, it’s in you, sure. But the novel is not going to saunter into your room, sit down next to you, and tell you what to say. It may even bite or snarl at you, or disappear for years and reappear without warning.

I thought the beginning of my first novel walked into my room and sat down one day. My mother says about her growing up, “I had an idyllic childhood.” Idyllic? An idyllic childhood growing up poor in the Rust Belt in the 1950s? How? When she said this, I thought, I have to prove her wrong.

I’m going to write a novel. The novel will be about an all Black neighborhood torn down by the city to make way for a new expressway. In the novel, the Black people will be destitute. They will fear the “Big Bad” of eminent domain that will take their homes and neighborhoods for I-475. The neighborhood will have conversations in hushed tones. Some characters will protest, but most will begin packing. Mothers, sad because their daughters moved away. Mothers, sad because their daughters are pregnant and unmarried. Children waking up to no presents at Christmas. Mothers, sad because they’ve had to move quickly, and lost golden frames with their grandmother’s only photo surviving the journey north from Arkansas or Louisiana.

I’ve begun my research. I found a newspaper article about other children growing up in Toledo in the 1950s. I found a 2018 quote from Twyla Wheaton, who is about ten years older than my mother. Here she is, as quoted in the article:

“I am a native Toledoan. I was born here and I lived here all my life,” Ms. Wheaton, a retired Toledo Public Schools teacher, said. “I personally did not run into a lot of segregation or discrimination maybe because I lived in all-black neighborhoods. It’s the accomplishments of black people in Toledo that interest me very much.”

The novel about Black grief in a Rust Belt city got up and walked right out of the room. Sometimes I personify the novel as a woman. I glimpse her, well dressed, running into the grocery store, but she buys her canned tomatoes and frozen chicken wings and floats out, catching my eye, a smile that says, I see you.

Telling stories—whatever the point, the message, the politics, the lesson, the axiom or the action—shouts, 'I am human. I am here. I see you too.’

When thinking of my writing practice, and considering why I began writing, I realized I couldn’t answer the question without a little help. I pulled out most of the books I own about writing to weave this together.

James Baldwin once said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

I’m connected to humanity. Telling stories—whatever the point, the message, the politics, the lesson, the axiom or the action_—shouts, “I am human. I am here. I see you too.”

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