🔖📝 Read “You Make the Space, You Fight for the Space”
“…every draft after the first draft for me is a kind of process of stripping away the stuff that I had to write for myself & happening upon the stuff that I want to offer to other people.”
“I don’t have the sort of life where I can write every day and that’s fine.”
“…so much of writing is not writing but you have to inhabit that not writing space as a writer and not as a mother or a teacher or the 3,000 other things you are.”
I acknowledge that I live and work on unceded Lumbee, Skaruhreh/Tuscarora, Cheraw, Catawba, Saponi, Occaneechi, and Shakori land. I give respect and reverence to those who came before me. I thank Holisticism for the text of this land acknowledgement.
We must acknowledge that much of what we know of this country today, including its culture, economic growth, and development throughout history and across time, has been made possible by the labor of enslaved Africans and their ascendants who suffered the horror of the transatlantic trafficking of their people, chattel slavery, and Jim Crow. We are indebted to their labor and their sacrifice, and we must acknowledge the tremors of that violence throughout the generations and the resulting impact that can still be felt and witnessed today. I thank Dr. Terah ‘TJ’ Stewart for the text of this labor acknowledgement.