September 2025
Happy Autumn, my good people!
I hope all is well in your world. You’ll notice a few differences in this newsletter. First, it is on a Tuesday! And, the newsletter will be – for the foreseeable future – a once per month endeavor. You can look forward to hearing from me on the 16th of each month.
During the summer, I had the opportunity to be in residency at Vermont Studio Center. My residency was 19 days. During that time, I moved in a short geographical triangle: where I slept, where I ate/socialized, and where I worked. It was an incredibly useful space of uninterrupted work and experimentation.
The hardest aspect of residency life was re-entry. While restorative, residency times are not vacations. So, when I returned to an obscenely cluttered inbox, I was assured that I needed to both declutter my own inboxes and refuse to clutter others’ (as much as is within my power).
That’s not the only reason I have changed formats. I am interested in asking more questions. Shout to Zora Neale Hurston who said there are years that ask questions and others that answer. I think 2025 has been a year of questions for me.
This September has been the first time in my life when I have not looked forward to re-entering school. I tend to love the bustle of the fall and the excitement of new classes and new students and new material or old material in new ways. This year, I was struck with a general malaise about the whole endeavor. Some of this feeling comes from institution-, field-, discipline-, and industry-specific politics. Some of it comes from reckoning with my relationship to my work.
The last thing I heard Cheryl Wall say was in Fall 2019 at the Black Women Writers At Work conference in North Carolina. She announced her retirement, but also said her work wasn’t complete. We were meant to look forward to more writing and thinking from the late scholar. Though it was not to be (she made her transition in 2020), her words set me on a path to thinking about what is my work?
I ask that question with quite a few emphases.
WHAT is my work? (I think this is about content and form)
What IS my work? (I think this is about publication or distribution or, loosely, product)
What is MY work? (I think this is about voice, what makes this uniquely mine)
What is my WORK? (I think this is about labor outside the crush of capitalism)
I don’t have answers, but I think the questions have lead me to some fascinating conclusions about how I want to be in the world. In considering content and form, it never occurred to me that I would leave scholarship behind or limit my creative endeavors to poetry. But, it does strike me that I am, at heart, a writer and a storyteller. For what it is worth, I keep receiving this answer (or parts of it) in my body. I feel a sharp shock of ‘no’ run through my body like a current when anyone suggests I am “now a poet” or “mostly a scholar.”
Thinking through product, I realize I am a writer who likes but is agnostic to the page. To be clear, this impulse speaks to the fact that I love a good yarn. My “Black Lives Matter” class is now learning about BLM through The Wiz Live! and Straight Outta Oz, both variations of The Wizard of Oz. When we dug into the lyrics for “You Can’t Win,” we discussed how the sound, the lyric, the movement, the micro-expressions, and intertextuality were working to create meaning. (Elijah Kelley is great in the role, BTW). Storytelling is complicated. Why limit it to the page?
The voice question unsettles me because my voice changes. I once took a class on Edward Said’s writing. We read the books including Orientalism and On Late Style. Said’s intellectual and political commitments didn’t waver, but his voice shifted over time. I also think about someone who has had a long career in fiction. Danzy Senna’s voice in Caucasia is vastly different from that in Colored Television. It strikes me that I am consistently learning new aspects of what is uniquely me or what can be.
I find myself thinking about labor all the time. What would I do if I didn’t have to work? Would I still be a writer? YES! What kind of labor can I have that isn’t crushed by capitalism, forcing me to grind my body or devalue my humanity? Not sure.
As you can tell, these are ongoing questions. They speak to what projects I take on and why. Where I go and why. What I ask for and why. They tell me my ‘why.’
In an moment when you can just make out the tune Nero played while flames lick the air, I think ‘why’ is one of our most powerful questions.