Descent into the Speculative Realm
And why I've always struggled with moving in silence, sorry Weezy.
I never mastered the art of moving in silence. I’ve always been a big fan of a verbalized inner-monologues, often employing friends and mentors as a sounding board for me to hear myself come to my own conclusions. I often narrate my life to my close friends’ list, and those who love me enough to listen get nearly play-by-play updates when I’m at a juncture in life. I like for those who know me to know where I am and what journeys I’m on. I know that many people find social media to have the opposite effect, but having grown up on the internet I’ve arrived at a point of thoughtful curation across platforms and a better understanding of the type of “content” I like to share. The creation of social media stories has actually worked in my favor, allowing my friends scattered around the globe to keep up with me and engage with my life happenings as they come via replies. The reunions are still just as sweet, as there’s nothing like time spent in the company with loved ones and a good catching up. But I really enjoy sharing my creative ideas and pursuits, emotional journeys, and life adventures with the friends who have access. It’s not 2012 and I am not a brand, thus I feel no desire to grow my following beyond those who know me personally or are at least within a degree of community or practice with me. My friends often tell me that they do indeed feel this connection with me through our social media engagement, and their engagement with my stories throughout the week keeps our connections alive through the distance of life.
Alongside my social media, this newsletter is a place where I can share my creative journeys as they unfold. As a budding writer and cultural worker, I’m overflowing with ideas and aspirations for work I so clearly see in my head and can’t wait to bring into reality. I aspire to find radical online community and build towards world-bending collaborations. I also struggle with lots of anxiety, and my creativity and motivation wax and wane. I’m embarking on another journey of learning the cycles of my body and how to best be a conduit to my creative desires, but that’s a post for another day. Right now, I’m deep into crafting a creative practice that works for me and is also flexible to my needs. Grace is the word I’m looking for here.
I’m learning (again) the power and importance of intention. I’ve recently done a lot of reading about writing, and over and over I’ve found writers I admire lament the importance of speaking truth to the work you seek to put into the world, whether to yourself or to trusted others. The personal notes and essays of Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and so many other foremothers teach me that setting the intention to create - declaring your audacity to disrupt and transform and reveal - is the first step in the process of writing and creating great work. I can’t continue to minimize my desires in a twisted effort to lower my expectations (and risk of dissapoint) and still expect the work to get done and done well. In nearly every part of my life, I’m being hit with a hard truth: my paralyzing fear of what might happen if I bet on myself and bet on love stops me from seeking fulfillment. In order to make my deepest desires real, I have to be willing to believe in them with all of me. I cannot be split between wanting low expectations and low risk of pain while also expecting grand outcomes and transformative connections. While this lesson is showing up throughout my life, it’s been particularly potent in my creative practice.
I frame this as a repeat lesson because I spent two years of my life proving to myself what I can do when I fully believe in myself. For those who don’t already know (thought most people in my life had to listen to me complain about it at some point), I wrote an undergraduate honors thesis that when printed and bound amounted to a whole ass book in my opinion - over 110 pages! Through the mind-scrambling process of writing and researching it over the course of 2 years, I always reminded myself that I was doing this for me. Writing a thesis wasn’t a major or graduation requirement, and it took dedication (and typically, grad school aspirations) to be fool enough to write one. While I was in a graduate school pipeline program at the time, my motivation was still personal and simple - I wanted to show myself that I could commit to and complete a long intellectual project. At no point in my life thus far had I produced something of that magnitude or that required the persistence and dedication of the thesis process. In pouring my blood, sweat, and many tears into this creative scholarly project, I proved to myself once and for all that those deep, lustful desires of writing and creating were worth making real - and most of all, that I was fully capable of doing so.
After taking nearly a year to recover from thesis writing and from finishing formal schooling, I crept back into writing only to discover fiction calling my name. Throughout college I used academic and research-heavy writing to assuage my writing desire without having to be as creatively vulnerable as poetry and fiction require. Only in the past year-ish have I mustered up the courage to explore ficiton and truly unlock my wildest creative desires.
All this to say, I’m really excited about my next big creative project: descending into the realm of the speculative, the futuristic and the fantastical. Speculative fiction, frequently and debatedly considered a sub-genre of science fiction, encompasses a vast variety of stories that can be horrifying, thrilling, reflective, imaginative, futuristic, and just about anything else. The main agreeable comanility is the “speculative” aspect of it - using science, technology, or pure imagination to craft eerily parallel worlds that are just slightly off kilter. Anything from slight uncanny valley vibes to a vivid guesstimate of Earth 300 years from now counts as speculative fiction, and the author’s intentions can vary widely.
Speculative writing for me is an exercise in imagining possiblities beyond the constraints imposed on us by the great villains of modernity - racial capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy. In a world that teaches us to keep quiet with our heads down, to accept the mechanisms of the world around us and our position as cogs within grand machines, daring to invite readers to imagine a life of abundance and agency is a daring pursuit.
This next journey includes reading and writing lots of speculative fiction. Some genre-defying works I’ve loved (or at least found really effective) so far include:
Pet and Bitter by Akwaeke Emezi. (Is it really my newsletter if I don’t mention one of these?)
Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur
Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa
How to Dispatch a Human: Stories and Suggestions by S. Andrea Allen (in progress)
There is a growing body of work highlighting how science fiction, speculative fiction, and Black and Indigenous -futurisms function as fertile soil for imagining and making real new worlds. By experimenting with surreal possibilities within eerily familiar settings, speculative writing can act as a tool for individuals communities to experiment with different possibilities for collective survival.
As an educator and cultural worker, I also use speculative writing as an exervise in thinking dialectically. In many of my story drafts to date, I first lay bare the landscape and clearly identify the core components that make up this parallel world. Who are the actors and where do their alliances lie? Who are the villains, negative forces, or opposition? What is the struggle, or main action that the characters are exploring? This is a riveting progress where I get to create new systems, inter- and intra-species relationships, and blur the lines of what we’re told is possible in our current society.
Then, like most great writers would tell you, the story becomes less of my own creation and more of me desparately chasing after threads and capturing as best I can what unfolds before me. Releasing control is the challenge of a lifetime, and writing takes you right up to the brink and dares you to let go.
Finally, when I come out on the other side and see what was there all along, what the conclusion of this parallel world’s progression must have always been, I face the fruits of my experimentation. One of many infinite possibilities of what could happen if we just love each other differently and dared to build a world that worked in favor of the majority. Or, when I’m feeling twisted, I find myself in one of the just as probable possiblities: seeing how deep our destruction of each other and our planet may go if we don’t change course soon. Change is inevitable, but the direction that the pendulum of possibility swings is still left to the hands of the people. What will we create? Still forever probing this elusive question, I begin again carrying what I learned this time around. I’m a better comrade and teacher thanks to regularly exercising and stretching my imagination, and I seek to constantly grow in my ability to help others do the same.
In fear of sounding like a broken record, I can’t stress enough that imagination is a muscle and one of the core tools of revolutionary change. It is just as important to take time to collectively imagine what we will build as it is to know what it is we’re tearing down and why. There are endless creative exercises to strengthen our imagination engines, and I implore everyone to carve out time in this capitalist hellscape to explore your wildest creative desires. This, too, is the work of revolution.