Dear Black Writers,

By Darrell Spearman

Dear Black writers,

The strings of your voice are vines that stretch through your esophagus, visible through your hands, forearms, and through your knuckles to your fingertips. Your blood is the ocean’s swash as it breathes songs of unlimited truth, no matter who’s ear is leaned against the moon’s dance with water. It tells the truth without regard. Your pen’s ink is your blood. Your hand’s motion is the tide of this ocean. And as you breathe, your rib cages hum the tunes of your ocean’s breath.

When the skin and shapes of your fingers make them say: You look like you’ve been here before, you just inhale that sentiment and let it join the water’s dance in your ribs. The repression in your chest, the tension in your throat are all of the things we need you to write down, for the world is your canvas. Hear the quickened rustle of trees above your head when mid-day falls into early evening, and the earth dithers in suspending its leaves as you write. Know that you’ve conjured the earth’s dance through the direct line from your hand to your heart. This band stretches the more you write. To your heart’s wisdom, the market is a shitty myth.

Marsha P., Hemphill, Morrison, Baldwin, and Angelou had hearts filled with wisdom and vines that boldened in time, through their arms and hands like veins. They coughed up flower petals baked by milk, greens, and the soil inside of their bodies. They coughed out daisy disks when their vines matured and their voices were ready to disband from spoon fed language, and reshape the world. In whatever crevices our stories find themselves dancing in, in whatever dark corner, however shelved, closeted, or muffled, they are valuable and will never be outdated.

Black writer, the timelessness of your origin spreads through your hips, your hands, your head, your feet, and swashes in your deep brown eyes like the Hudson River at night. Many times, you’ve been lied to. You are infinite and your good desires were manifested through your bloodline. So when you find yourself clinging to your mattress in despair—daylight stretching across your skin through your bedroom window, or struggling to reach you against the shutter, blinds, or closed curtains—contemplating your worth, gaslit by the absence of resources that would help you know the value of your anger, resentments, value of your joy, your creativity, try to let yourself write it down. If only you’ll let yourself write it all down.

When the current of the world’s noise rests on your shoulders and your soul feels crushed, try to write your way to your remembrance of the value of you. When you find yourself and your relatives in survival mode, unable to tend to each other’s feelings, unable to hold each other, unable to treat each other’s feelings and thoughts like precious objects, try to write yourself a lantern or an orbit. Let it be your heart’s language that casts its light into your situation, no matter how hollow you feel, or how worried, how fearful, no matter what age; our hearts deserve to soar. Your story is real.

When the imposter syndrome grows in your mind, or in your chest, like a clumsy parasite latching onto your divine gift, try to let yourself write its dissolve and know that it is only present

because you are a force of nature when you’re writing. Life tried to bury us, but we are the root and the seed.

Sometimes, I find myself walking the streets of New York, or Philadelphia, thinking of all of the things I do not say and withholding feels as if I’m contracting, collapsing into myself. But when the opposite happens, and I finally trust my gift again, I re-member that the contraction period is a gathering; and that butterflies shut their wings, pressing them against each other when scoping out their sights, preparing to fly off again.

yours,

Darrell