Friends of My Mind
Navigating tenderness, queer dispatches from the Black Film Archives, my daughters' stepmom, and more
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Last week, I felt more tender than I have in years. Growing pains, I realized. Deepening my relationships—romantic, platonic, familial—has come with a fine-tuning of sorts that invites this tenderness and vulnerability, as well as an awareness of my deep need to be understood. Not approved of, but understood. Or rather, to not be misunderstood, a distinction that matters greatly to me.
This idea, this need, isn’t comfortable, nor is it new. Back in the early 2000s, a friend of mine wrote a play for our church’s Valentine’s Day celebration, a series of vignettes, scenes from different seasons in marriage. My then-husband and I were among the couples acting in this play. I don’t remember my lines, his lines, nor any of the particulars of the scene we were in, a dialogue. I do remember our characters grappling with seeing, knowing, and understanding one another. And I remember how our scene ended––with the chorus from Sade’s “By Your Side” playing before the transition to the next couple and their scene. I remember thinking that love was important to every type of relationship—and I’d been loved my whole life, thankfully—but I had rarely felt known, seen or understood, even in my marriage.
I’m happy to be in a romantic relationship now with someone who loves and sees me. But that was not the case in my first marriage, 25 years ago. And to be fair, I didn’t see him either. Part of the disconnect in that marriage, not surprising, was stuff from our respective childhoods. I had grown up with a deep-rooted, debilitating fear of being misunderstood, misperceived, and judged. Unfortunately, dynamics within my relationship with my mother only exacerbated these fears.
During this past tender week, I realized that while that deep-rooted fear of being misunderstood is no longer as debilitating as it once was, it still lingers. Unrelated, I also learned this week that a second person in my family is on the autism spectrum; autism has a strong genetic basis. This is significant to me because some people on the autism spectrum experience what has been described as a “phobia of being misunderstood.” I’ve added this finding to the list of observations I’ve made about myself over the last few years that have prompted me to consider getting assessed for autism. I now plan to get the assessment before the year is out.
I’m fine being in a state of tenderness. But what I can’t abide is when tenderness becomes woundedness. And that’s how I felt last week. Wounded, for reasons too complicated to get into here. But two sister-friends came to my rescue, and I was reminded of a quote from Morrison’s Beloved that summed up their care. Though the character, Sixo, is speaking here of a romantic lover, his words remind me of my friends’ tenderness towards me:
She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
Friends of your mind know you, see you, get you, understand you well enough to hand you back your pieces in the right order, reminding you who you are.
Happy Pub Day, Lonnae!
Speaking of sister-friends…
Congratulations to Lonnae O’Neal on the publication of her second book, Bibb Country: Unearthing My Family Secrets of Land, Legacy and Lettuce! My blurb: “Lonnae O’Neal’s deeply intimate Bibb Country is a revelation, a reckoning, and an elegy that should be taught in every high school and college history class in this country. She unearths six generations of her family’s history against the backdrop of our nation’s shameful legacy of enslavement, sexual violence, and injustice, and its present-day incarnations. With righteous rage and a voice that ignites the page, O’Neal is a wonder and a truth-teller.”
Also, check out Lonnae’s excellent but slept-on first book, I'm Every Woman: Remixed Stories of Marriage, Motherhood, and Work (2006).
Resist
*dons Electric Lit board member cap* Six months into the year, the Trump administration is pressuring nonprofits to sanitize their missions and trying to eliminate the NEA, likely putting an end to EL’s federal support for the foreseeable future. But Electric Literature will not back down. Our mission is to make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive, and we will continue publishing writers and stories this administration wants to silence. To do that, we need your help.
Electric Literature needs to raise $25,000 by the end of this month to protect our literary future. Artists are resilient truth tellers. Their voices demand to be amplified, and their stories demand a place in this world. Of being a writer in times of urgent distress, Toni Morrison wrote, “We write. We speak. We do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
Electric Literature’s platform has a real impact. We maintain an annual readership of over 3 million and publish over 500 writers each year, launching the careers of up-and-coming authors. Everything we publish is free to read. Our work is forward facing, powerful, and healing, and therefore dangerous. Support Electric Literature. Help us continue to do our part.
Courtesy of J Wortham: If you’re in NYC, you can participate in a two-part series of Court Watch NYC trainings, which covers: a brief history of mass incarceration and abolition, the NYC court system, why court watching is important, and how you can get involved.
Pre-order time!
“In The Seven Daughters of Dupree, mothers are mysteries for daughters to unfold, ancestral spirits entangle grieving hearts among the living, and––as always with Black folks––our hair, our land, and our blood embody whole worlds beneath the surface. Nikesha Elise Williams conjures the worlds of the Dupree women with powerful, lyrical prose, and a deep, deep knowing about Black women’s resilience and intimacies, from Africa to Alabama. This gripping intergenerational saga is haunting, heartbreaking, and utterly unforgettable.” - me'
But Where’s Home? by Toni Ann Johnson
On Morrison by Namwali Serpell
The Book of Alice by Diamond Forde
Clothes to Make You Smile: Patrick Kelly Designs His Dreams by Dr. Eric Darnell Pritchard/illustrated by Shannon Wright
Black Women on the Perils and Promises of Friendship with White Women edited by Patrice Gopo
Martha’s Daughter: A Novella and Stories by David Haynes, founder of Kimbilio
Under the Neon Lights by Arriel Vinson
HotShot: A Life on Fire by River Selby
Resting Bitch Face by Taylor Byas
Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival by Maria Pinto
Writing
Daughters magazine and Minutes Before Six are publications dedicated to featuring the work of incarcerated writers, including a mentee of mine who is on the inside. We met during a visit to a prison I made in 2022 as a literary ambassador for Freedom Reads, founded by Reginald Dwayne Betts. (Check out Reginald’s latest collection of poems, Doggerel.)
The Business of Writing
Spoiler Alert: It’s comps!
“‘Gosh, why don’t Black books sell?’ And I’m like, ‘No, you don’t know how to sell Black books.’” - Thee Kennedy Ryan, straight no chaser in Elle
“The first time I tried to sell a book with an agent, I had already written 2 books. I wasn’t new to writing, but no editors we met with were interested in the proposal I’d written. I was a little bruised but I squared my shoulders…” - Imani Perry
“Most writers don't pay attention to what makes a book ‘of quality.’” - Maurice Carlos Ruffin
A list of what makes a book appeal to agents and publishers by developmental book editor Alyssa Matesic
“10 Novels Agents Have Seen a Billion Times, and How to Make Yours Stand Out” (Electric Literature)’
“Every year, I meet a new group of graduate students…and I tell them the best thing they can do for their art is to separate their relationship to it from the concerns of publication, reception, reputation—all the places where the ego creeps in to do its dubious work.” - Melissa Febos
Writers on Writing
I fell down the rabbit hole of Andre Long Chu’s New York magazine archives, and you can too.
More wisdom from my friend Maurice Carlos Ruffin:
News & Views from Friends & Faves
My loves, Mahogany L. Browne and Yona Harvey, at The Met! And check out, “Playing Big with Mahogany L. Browne” on the Uplifters Podcast!
Candice Marie Benbow has a new, must-read Substack newsletter:
People magazine included That's How They Get You: An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor edited by the Pittsburgh homie Damon Young among its picks for the best nonfiction books of the summer. The collection, which includes a new story by me, also made The Grio’s summer reading list.
Pride All Year Long
Both/And: Essays by Trans and Gender-Nonconforming Writers of Color by Denne Michele Norris, Electric Literature
“We are here and to be here means to know what’s done is never final as long as we maintain our hearts.” - Maya Cade in “5 Black Pride Films to Urgently Watch from the Black Film Archive”
Black Film Archive is “a living register of Black films. In its current iteration, it showcases Black films made from 1898 to 1999 currently streaming.”
Be Gay Do Crime: Sixteen Stories of Queer Chaos edited by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley
Wondering
“However, to the Black woman in me, the same Black woman who watched white women by majority support the largest figure of patriarchal tyranny of our time, Donald Trump TWICE. The same black woman who herself has continuously felt abandoned and betrayed by white women who almost always chose the favor of men before a sisterhood that crossed racial lines, Sabrina Carpenter’s album cover if anything looks like a white woman’s accurate self portrait.” - Aliyyaa Maya
Miss World Somalia, Zainab Jama, shares her experience with female genital mutilation (FGM)
Genius Ava DuVernay on Elon Musk:
“I love being interviewed by women, I love the experience and 90 percent of the media I consume is made by women. But my trust has been broken for the last time.” - Jameela Jamil
Wandering
Ursa LIVE!
I have the pleasure of co-hosting two podcasts, each with a dear friend––Dawnie Walton (Ursa Short Fiction) and Kiese Laymon (Reckon True Stories). And we’re all coming together for a special live event at The Center for Fiction on July 9! We’ll be joined by special guests, authors Carrie R. Moore and Lawrence Burney, for an evening full of reading, laughs, and bookish fun. Tickets are available here. Can’t make it to Brooklyn? Choose the livestream option on the registration page.
Submit
To me:
I’m excited to once again be judging the Sante Fe Writers Project Literary Award. Deadline to submit is September 15.
This is my first time judging Cream City Review’s Summer Fiction Prize: Deadline: August 1
To others:
The Black List’s 2025 Unpublished Novel Award for Fiction: Deadline June 27
Keep reading (or become a paid subscriber to do so) to find out the last writer I had dinner with, why we don’t need Obama right now, and more…
Writing, Wandering, Wondering is a reader-supported publication. To receive full access to all posts, consider becoming a paid subscriber. All proceeds go to Roots Wounds Words, Bronx Defenders, Freedom Reads, and National Bail Out.