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Chasing Voices

My writing process is extremely intuitive. I have the tendency to be hypercritical of myself and my work, so lately what’s felt good and right for me is the process of automatic writing. All day I carry around a Moleskine notebook and record thoughts, sounds, names, titles, voices, and words that come to me in dreams. I let the ideas pour out without deeply considering rhythm or flow or logic. Once I have what feels like “enough” (an entire page, a paragraph), I begin cutting. I like to think of this approach to poetry as akin to woodworking—converting a log of driftwood into a work of art. I sand and smooth down the edges, rearranging language on a page until I have in front of me something that feels like a revelation. These pieces usually prove to be very personally powerful, as they often reveal information I have always tacitly understood but that now appears readily apparent on the page. This is a process I refined working with Maureen Seaton.

I believe a majority of my writing stems from the desire to lay people, ideas, and thought patterns to rest. I am deeply curious about how the black experience is repackaged in the US to be made palatable for mass consumption. Much of the time when I write, I am aiming for healing the collective, and myself, by honoring and acknowledging what is true. When I write I become a conduit, allowing myself the vulnerability of being open for emotion to flow through me. This is not always a pleasant process. It involves a level of honesty that at times can feel brutal. It involves holding space for my own emotions and the emotions of others while simultaneously allowing myself to traverse this space. This can be extremely difficult in a world that continues to affirm that psychic space is not something black people, much less black women, require.

I have been meditating on the idea of generational trauma and how writing can be used as a means to heal an ancestral lineage. My cousin recently did a DNA test with ancestry.com, and I’ve been using her account to locate my ancestors on the African American side of my family tree. I’ve been finding energy in the silences around all the child brides, the men drafted into wars that were not their own, the misspellings of first names on federal documents by people who were never presented with the tools to spell them correctly. Digging for language in these spaces is transfixing, and there is an overwhelming feeling of sadness and relief when I am able to create something that resolves some of the disruption of not knowing.

My favorite sounds and words in the world come from African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Experiencing a conversation in AAVE is like comforting notes of the opening lines of a familiar song drifting in through a window. As a black American who grew up speaking Standard English, the notion that I was robbed of something essential to my culture led me to begin chasing voices. Chasing the music of AAVE has led me deeper and deeper south, from the Southside of Richmond, Virginia, to Coconut Grove, Florida, to the Everglades, to New Orleans East. I will go anywhere for a good voice, and often I find the best, most unencumbered voices working with black children. Many black children in the South have the luxury of being raised in close proximity to their grandparents. This has the effect of making them sound older and wiser than their years. One of the phrases I’m working with right now is “liketalmbout” or “like talking about,” which comes from smashing the phrase “like [you are] talking about” together. It is used especially in Richmond, Virginia, and I am working on a piece inspired by the use of this phrase in a conversation among three young women, in which one of them emphatically states, “I like him, but I don’t like him liketalmbout.”