Writing with Juliet Iwelunmor

“You have an interesting take on things. You ought to write a book.” These words were once spoke to the late great Toni Cade Bambara, author of one of my favorite books including the one simply entitled “Black Woman.” She once shared how she had been writing stories long before she could spell. She never thought of herself as a writer, only a community person who writes. I can relate.

I have been reflecting lately on why anyone would decide to go through this solitary process called writing. It is neither kind nor mean, neither open or closed. Just a journey that requires one thing and one thing only, a commitment.

Many have started to write and some even wrote but the world still never saw their books because they lacked that final push to fully commit to seeing it in the world. I have written on my blog for close to 4 years now. The idea of turning my thoughts to a book has come up more the once. Yet I honestly lack the will power to commit. Something about the unfettered ability to simply put words down without any restriction, without any care inspires me still that I feel like a book would rob my words of its innocence. I feel like I’m in the business of applauding all of who we are, the ordinary people, women like me, who have been waiting in the wings for when their words have a space of their own. Of course in a book fully celebrated by many would be ideal but what if we celebrate our words our way everyday and not for fame or fortune, just simply for the community, those we call our own, those that need to seem themselves in words, with words too that are like a mirror to their soul, words that lift and uplift, words that work and heal. I’m in a space where all I want to keep are words. The life of a book is serious. I get that it can be used to create or distribute knowledge in ways that make everyone entitled to the experience of merging your own mind with another. Toni Morrison noted that securing this peace, this peace with the dancing mind, as is typically done in books, is our work.

But what if the times have changed. What if in writing here as I do, as notes to keep, every day, you surrender with an open mind, equally with my own, as you read and as I write.

The past few years I did so as grants. That phase is slowly slowing down. This next phase is for me. My words as a necessary resource for those interested in dancing with my mind, those dreaming, those interested in telling things as it is for the sake of holding ourselves and our stories to the same limelight as anything else that ever existed. What if our words were everywhere. Pyramids made with our words. A radical use of words for those prepared to restore their souls. I’m in the space where words are restoring my soul, reimagining my world too, as I write once more, but this time, beyond myself.