EDITOR’S NOTE.

Welcome to the first Issue of WriteNow. It’s a command for me and a reminder to keep it fresh, stay current and log what I’m looking at in the world. Should everything go as planned, we’ll see you next week.

I came to this platform thinking I could just crank out a bunch of essays easily. After completing a book-length project, I thought it’d be easy to just sit down and do it, but my mind hasn’t been working in that way. I am also having a very hard time procuring the stationary that I’ve committed myself to over the last decade. (At edit before posting, i’ve ordered the last ream of A4 looseleaf that they had available) It’s a very important part of my process. Notwithstanding, the pressure to craft something ground-breaking and path-finding weekly is a little much to ask of myself, and that’s often all I want to produce in long form. I’ll deal with my perfectionism another day. All the other, much more important writers are just making newsletters, so here go mines.

I should have been done a newsletter though.

My trepidation in all of it was something to do with gatekeeping I guess. If everyone knows what I’m looking at and leaning into, won’t they steal all my ideas? I will not say I had some groundbreaking revelation against a scarcity mentality to change that. Or that I’ve learned to be against gatekeeping altogether. I am not. There is a way, though, I can be generous with what I’m seeing, fearless about how I feel about it, and cultivate conversations with people about what’s going on in the world of cultural production. That’s what I need right now. Somewhere to argue about my opinions.

BIG STORY

I AM AFRAID, Actually.

This would be longer if Episode 2 of Lanterns, HBO’s latest DC series hadn’t just been posted. I’m no comics expert, so my opinions don’t matter, but I’m having some big feelings about this show already. Sunday Night “prestige” television is a traditon for me, so I’m just happy to have something to look at again. But my hangups with heroes persist.

Ep. 1 Spoilers ahead…

I’ll share my feelings in the form of questions.

1. How do we think about the willingness to be or make a hero that will drive us to harm ourselves and others, children especially? Even with expert skill, what is at stake when a father takes shot at his son’s head to ensure he is fit for training?

2. What do we know about this portrayal of John Stewart, a disciplined vegan trained from childhood, who wouldn’t have the discipline to avoid a carplay hookup outside a bar in a small town? Will this lack of discipline show up in other spaces? Is it his flaw?

3. Is there an added racial tension between Hal and John that neither of them recognize as problematic for the sake of honor? How do we see that played out in institutional cultures today?

BARS

Many of you got here from a Jay-Z quote that had a little traction on here. I be tight about hip-hop all the time because it’s my soapbox and how my journey starts in formal literary criticism.

I wasn’t alone in my outrage or analysis here, and the good folks over at Code Switch on NPR picked up the conversation with some special guests, Christiana Mbakwe Medina (subscribe below!) and Joel Anderson of the Ringer.

Check it out and let me know how you’re feeling about throwing up the dynasty sign these days… (never around the Deltas, though!)

Pop Syllabus

Deconstructing the zeitgeist. Answering the big cultural questions

By Christiana Mbakwe Medina

Medina was already on my timeline when she reminded us that she’d called Meghan, Dutchess of Sussex’s return to London. While she’s the self-styled “innit black” and I’m just an ol’ dusty American, my frustration is simple and straight-foward: Meghan’s frustration with the Royal Family is not just a simple family fued. It was a reckoning with racism and prevailing logics in dominant culture. I don’t need Meghan to be the perfect victim or expert in race relations to support the family going no contact from the Crown. The Pop Syllabus episode gets into the racial mess late in the episode, but it felt like an afterthought when it’s truly the main thing in the whole mess. I want everybody on not just their best behavior, but doing the work to undo their understanding of everything for the safety and stability of Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet. Wishful thinking sure, but that’s what I’m on.

BOOKS

I deleted Tik-Tok last week in order to get some more reading done, and I did finish two books and have started another without it. My worry is, how I’m finna know what to read without book-tok? It’s a conundrum, for sure. 1

I got into Hanif Abduraqib’s A Little Devil in America. Seeing his work and career flourish in poetry, prose, and criticism over the years has been dope. I’ve been seated, and reading since at least 2015 when I was introduced to his poetry. My new interest in sports (see prior substack) will have me on There’s Always This Year next.

From the essay on Don Cornelius and The History of Soul Train, this quote sat with me all week.

Also, he just did an episode on my favorite podcast Critics at Large from The New Yorker Magazine. He riffs on Camp Lo’s cult classic, Uptown Saturday Night with critic and writer Vinson Cunningham. Listen here!

I wrapped up Jesmyn Ward’s On Witness and Respair this week as well. With a jagged red underline, My word processor refuses to acknowledge the last word in the title. Obscure, now obsolete — Respair means “fresh hope after despair”. Ward’s ability to hold on to and revive a word plucked from our usage and it’s sentiment ultimately snatched from our lives is a reflection of her own life and journey. Ward’s work challenges us to engage in fresh hope in the moments when the headlines hit us at our doorstep.

#SealeyChallenge wraps up with the month of August - most of my poetry volumes are in a garage and I promise to do better next year.  I revisted Jericho Brown’s Pulitzer Prize Winning The Tradition. Read the titular poem below, from Poetry Foundation. 

The Tradition
BY JERICHO BROWN

Aster. Nasturtium. Delphinium. We thought
Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt, learning
Names in heat, in elements classical
Philosophers said could change us. Star Gazer. 
Foxglove. Summer seemed to bloom against the will
Of the sun, which news reports claimed flamed hotter
On this planet than when our dead fathers
Wiped sweat from their necks. Cosmos. Baby’s Breath. 
Men like me and my brothers filmed what we
Planted for proof we existed before
Too late, sped the video to see blossoms
Brought in seconds, colors you expect in poems
Where the world ends, everything cut down.
John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.

Copyright Credit: Jericho Brown, "The Tradition" from The Tradition.  Copyright © 2019 by Jericho Brown.  Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Source: The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org, 2019)

BITES

A bunch of us binge watched Food Network growing up and count it as an education. Although there were some Auntie-intensives where I mastered my soul food chops, Alton Brown and Ina Garten taught your boy some tips and tricks that always have me doing the absolute most in the middle of the week. I’d identify more with Carrie Bradshaw and have sweaters in my oven if I wasn’t Martha Stewart, running around the kitchen and complaining about stupid knives.

This week it gave St. Louis Style Ribs, a scoop of potato salad (not pictured) and a handmade Shortbread Cake with fresh whipped cream and strawberries (the worst I’ve ever seen, don’t get tight at the store on those) I’m not in the recipe-writing field, but there is a widget here if I should decide to try my hand.

I jumped on a trend, too! There’s been a bunch of thoughful critiques of this trend in particular, and I probably agree with most of the takes against it, but I don’t see it as the end of creativity for us to engage a format. I just think we see too much of everything and the same day we see it the first time, we’ve seen it 5,000 times.

BIBLE

We’ll wrap each issue with a scripture to reflect on or a blessing to bounce with. It may tie in to what we’ve disscussed in the culture or just what’s been on my mind throughout the week.

I’ve got a laundry-list of reasons why I shouldn’t be into sports. It’d even be expected and probably assumed for me to be against the enterprise altogether. Whenever I’ve been given a chance to rattle my reasons off, I relish at the opportunity to let everyone who will listen know. I can keep going however long I need to in order to stave off a dreadful discussion of stars and stats.

-

As a gay boy, sports can bring up all the times you were left out and picked last for the team. It might even remind you of when you made the team, but the only shot you made was at the wrong goal after the half. I skipped the rest of the season and fell in love with brunch. I was always in the group discussing what happened on the reality competition shows, the two about models and boy-bands— for which both creators have had their due recokoning now. The buzz at our lunch table was about our favorites being forced to walk to Junior’s for slices of cheesecake or a make-over gone too far, but never a buzzer-beater game. Then was a much simpler, even black-and-white time.

As an scholar-writer in art and academic spaces, we’re not watching the game at the opening dinner or sponsors’ luncheon. You find yourself invested in more pressing ideas: the end of the world, apathy, art being derivate, the latest controversial opening or surpise hire. “How about those insert team of choice here” wouldn’t get you dismissed from the table exactly, but the discussion would move from scores to the pride and glory of a city, meaning-making in the commons, and the capital of it all.

When you’re anti-capitalist, the billion dollar engine that can write millionaire players checks without ever affecting their actual wealth isn’t what you choose to be entertained by.

But when your hometown makes it to the playoffs in the NBA, you tune in for a few games. You hint at your list of objections every time you call something wrong in the game. If you celebrate a shot too early, you make sure everyone knows “I hate sports anyway.”

My hometown’s team eventually lost. But simultaneously, my chosen city was in the running too, and there was something different about this year. They just kept going. They’d just keep winning. Eventually, they made it to The Finals. Knicks in Five.

That was the moment everything changed.

The sport I actually did like would be having a huge, like world-wide sort of tournament just a few weeks later. The basketball league I could sorta justify, where the Women run things, was also in full swing.

It became the Summer of Sport.

As the volatile world of politics unfolded, so did the world of Sports. Never unscathed from geo-political implications, this year those connections manifested plainly. We learned Trump shouldn’t be invited to games altogether. All parties involved will regret it and he’ll lie about how he was received as if we didn’t all hear the collective boos from the audience. Despite his appearance in the Big Apple, after the city pulled off the championship, it was even more a delight that the victory was made just after electing a progressive candidate in the midst of the a red shift throughout the country. Argentina’s sordid national history informed the racial makeup of their team of course, and support for your favorite footballer held a ton of implicatons.

How do you support a team thats “owned” by the bad guy’s buddies?

Can you root for a team and not root for the nation it represents?

Can you be into sports and not be into the global apparatus of racial captitalism that fuels it?

There’s an easy yes to all those questions there to justify that shared desire to just enjoy the game with our boys. Some would say it’s silly to even ask. In that camp, too, are people that ignore anything beyond the scores, or so they think, their biases already set deep and not up for questioning. If only I could bathe in that blissfull ignorance. God knows I’ll go to any bar with happy people hollering. There’s no energy quite like it.

But I worry about hero worship. When we can’t see where people are wrong because of their super-human skill sets and disciplne in one area.

I worry about fandom. Where people obsess and identify with the figure they’ve been sold and devote more commitment to the icon than to themselves.

I worry about the limiting idealized masculinity and macho that sports seems to enforce on the impressionable.

I worry about how much of that masculinity is tied to gambling, because of course you can wager your earnings on a game, because tomrrow you’ll just earn more to do it again. That’s what real men do.

I, though have not ignored my contradicting interests just for the sake of pleasure. I will never betray my heart, which at it’s core seeks out justice by almost any means neccesary. I’ll never watch any game for the love of the game, but I will be showing up more now to be a part of the conversation, not as a compromise, but as a concious viewer of a tradition that connects the world, and that can’t nobody tell me I don’t get.

It’s monday night, and WWE RAW is on Netflix. I’ll talk with y’all later.

In February of 2025, I walked away from the boutique agency that serviced churches, bereaved families, and non-profit organizations for over 15 years. We “sunset” that business, to use business parlance, although I was unsure of what exactly I’d spend my time or earn my spending doing otherwise. I was in high school designing album covers and merch for choirs, late to take Junior Prom pictures making sure files were uploaded to CDBaby in time for physical production. In those days, a custom MySpace page from me was all the rage in the region. I’d cornered the market as a graphic designer throughout the Black Northwest. That work carried me through so many seasons of life, and was a personal space for creative expression and freedom. I was able to have flexibility to show up for my calling and communities, and most importantly dignify the life of so many folks in my area. While my colleagues in ministry were the first folks I needed a break from, it was heartbreaking to tell families who’d lost their loved ones that I wouldn’t be available to prepare the memorial journals for their homegoings. So that I would not be trapped by my own compassion, and in order to keep my commitment to moving on, I cancelled my subscription to Adobe altogether, to this date. They’d let me use the software until the end of the month, but I removed it from the dock and didn’t look back. It has since been uninstalled.  

 “You have that skill, why not use it?” was the retort from my family when they got the news. They were another portion of my problem, even if my own lack of boundaries caused it. Work often also became dinner table chatter, and the professional distance of 24 hours to get back to a phone-call or email was unheard of. Chains of command got all sorts of kinks in them. Projects that only needed two heads became the task of councils of twelve, time was wasted, and payments were remitted with commentary that undermined the craft. Demoralizing is a big word for Elmo, and one that I’d like to pretend I’m too strong to ever need to use. It’s even harder to cough up when you’re looking for them to return next month, or desperate for that retainer payment to be remitted. You choke it down and remind yourself that it’s for the work of the ministry. If you can take it, you can make it. What else would you do with your time, anyway? It’s what you’ve done your whole life. It is hard for people to understand leaving something that’s been established to explore and build elsewhere, but it’s always been my thing. Running off, getting lost, figuring the way back on my own or by begging. I’d need to take that practice I’d taken up in real time in my professional life. While I’d gotten used to just stacking things up, this time, I’d need to leave something altogether and make room for something new. 

The Bishops assumed I’d give up my sabbatical in time to prepare for Convention season come June. Clients checked in to see if I’d changed my mind when Christmas came, but I held my hope and in the background, an even older skill was sharpening. My long-beloved pen. 

_

That was one of the perks of having me on retainer, too. I was also going to work to make sure the copy *popped* That the language landed well, that things looked good overall, and in my small sphere of influence, a certain legitimacy came from having me on the job. There was a certain dignity my involvement gave to an occasion. I was proud of that. However, there was no space or time for me to explore the full scope of my gifts in that work, or for my clients to meet the invoice that would come along had I decided to. While I’ve always tried to balance both, making space to write-think, draw, design and sometimes even blend my practices, one gift needed center stage for a spell, to sit with grief as well as growth and to move from the transactional to the transformational. 

_

As important as its function might be in the moment, I have always felt most challenged by the lifespan of ephemera. In the sticky digits of children, a keepsake may shift into a paper plane. In the sloppy grasp of men, a souvenir may get rolled up like a paper towel roll or become a paper towel itself. In the pits of passenger seats, a beautifully typeset program on costly cardstock with complex ink arrangements is trampled underfoot. Spending weeks on art with such a short life-span could no longer serve my artistic needs at the moment. Even when the premium of registration is attached and the cost and quality of the work was defined, so much of our cultural embrace of keeping a physical personal archive has been dismissed as “Mama is a hoarder, and that house is full of junk”. “Are you keeping  that?” in an irritated tone while tidying up a shared space. Archives discarded as excess, with too much trust placed in clouds and links that come undone on websites that could sunset at any time. Histories trusted to servers that will scrape them to sell us back to ourselves. Toni Morrison talked about doing work that you respect, and it is a tenet of my life. It also became important for me to know that the work I was making was going to be respected as well. 

As the emails slowed down, and the requests stopped coming,  I dug into my own ephemera, still romantic for what I was refusing, and reflected on the pieces that meant the most to me. Designer boxes converted into flat files, folders filled with high-school essays and decade old-checks. The back flaps of books with invitations and receipts long forgotten. I dug deep into an idea that carried me to old funeral programs, legal decisions, and some of my favorite jams. When I came up for air - I’d written a book that won’t be easily left on a seat after church or folded up or forgotten about in a coat pocket. Even as a manuscript she is boastful and refuses to be ignored. Prayerfully, the work I’ve done will live. In libraries, in memory, and locations I will never grace, and in years I won’t get to see. I took that work through the arduous journey of what writerly folks call the “query trenches” - and came out unscathed, not to boast, but to celebrate finding alignment with an agent who believes in my gifts, and has committed to fighting for this work to come into the world. 

In February of 2026, I can officially announce that I am an agented author, represented by Candice Marie Benbow at Gardner Literary. I’m almost too excited to type anything else, but that can’t last too long, as the deadlines are upon us already. So let me get back to work, I’ve got a book to sell!

the chatty mailman, who always sparks up a convo based on my yankee cap of the day shifted a conversation about weather to baseball to inevitably, minneapolis. he described the video in it's gruesome detail.

i couldn't stop to say how i don't rehearse violence and that i wouldn't be watching the video as a practice of resistance, not because it was inappropriate or that my theories don't work in real time, but because i was struck by the felt need so many of us share to make intimate connection in this frenzy of violence we have made quotidian.

i make connection easily. it's one of my gifts. i can weave the disparate to present a tapestry succinct and stately, all within the two-minute windows the program demands. i can easily get the house, but not every moment calls for a shout.

Before the patently brilliant, distinctively classical anthems we sing on special days and know Richard Smallwood for, there is a treasure of lesser known often harpisi-backed pop tracks people don't know or discuss often. these tracks yearn. one says "we can't go on this way! we've got to find a better way" on another, they "see a vision - some day we'll all be free", and while perhaps that Vision is at the back of all his more liturgical music, the hope of harmony, that we get it all together one day, in the middle of it all - while living through it, as the sage Dr. H. Beecher Hicks, Jr. said in a recording at his funeral "His music never denied Babylon"

Those of us who take up his work and life cannot either. We are troubled on every side. Our grief is compounding daily. While sitting with one loss, we get news of another.

By not rushing to the shout or skipping ahead to the victory, his music allows us to sit with the depth of our grief, and sing anyhow. Not every song is a song of joy. The savior we sing of was a man of sorrows and himself acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:3)

The mailman did not leave with a testimony about meeting a pastor who worked a miracle or even shifted his perspective. I didn't get a gold star for offering resistance strategies or teach him how the messaging is meant to immure him to violence, to make state sanctioned murder normal. I got no glory. He did get an ear though. A moment of connection. I don't know who he's working for or who will hear him at home. I don't know his friend circle or family life, but talking, face to face made space. We held the energy together. I did not witness to him. We witnessed each other.

There is a pressure we can relieve ourselves of when we aren't always seeking to own the moment. When we show up simply - or simply show up and deny dazzling in order to make the connection.

-

A week later, my sister’s text served as my alarm: “D’Angelo is dead.” I have a personal friend with the same name and same spelling, but knew that news wouldn’t have come from her and wouldn’t have come as a text message from anyone. It was the musician we grew up on. The musician whose song narrated the most intense scene in my absolute favorite movie. As Lance grows red with fury reading the betrayal that would mark the climax of both Harper’s unreleased novel as well as the film, D’Angelo croons a tercet of curses: “Shit…Damn..Mutha*&(#1%” The pitch-perfect expression to paint the picture. Engaging the song in its’ fullness, one could imagine it was written for the movie, but it was already a classic by the time of the film’s 1999 release. “My best-friend and my wife…” The audience knew what time it was from the beat alone.

In the fourteen years between Voodoo and Black Messiah, we never let the Brown Sugar dry out. We never interrupted our grand pursuits in queue for a slice of “Devil’s Pie”, and we could never stop asking that question: How does it feel? His body of work soundtracked love and its betrayals, earning its’ place in our cultural memory with song. His corporal body provided many of us an awakening cemented in our personal memories with “Untitled”. This project though, divine in both timing and scope would take up another tenor: How might our freedom sound? On the cover, his signature cornrows and chiseled abdomen absented this time for a snapshot of the epoch - a black and white photo of protesters, some with fists up and others with hands lifted. Because the latter gesture revisits a scene I do not wish to repeat, might these lifted hands have a double meaning? Was it possible that we could seek out liberation and also have pleasure?

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I’ve been to my share of weddings in my life. The friends from Bible College who did things way too early, the horse-drawn carriage soirees at the Four Seasons, the unforgettable destination weddings that set a tone for the rest of your life. I’m always the ideal guest who does too much perfectly, knowing just how to charm parents into relaxation and coax my peers into a frenzy. A wedding, a gala, a luncheon - always my kind of carrying on. At this big age though, as the weddings get closer to home, there are all the other events that lead up to them that you are also required to show up for. The Bridal Tea, The Wedding Brunch, The Engagement Party. This past weekend, just after setting up the champagne service to celebrate the betrothed, I got the crowd’s attention for a set of toasts at the perfect time - as a cherished love song played in the background. I again absent the song’s title so that the couple can share it themselves if they so choose. “Did you plan this?” “Did you know this song was coming on?”. It had truly been no goodness of my own, even though I may have wanted to take the credit. While the playlist was set for a lover’s groove, the moment was purely organic. I don’t know if the couple already have their song, but I’d love to say I witnessed it if they choose that one for their love story. Of course we’d heard 100 songs that night already, but the difference between this and all the other ones was simple:

We were all quiet enough to hear it.

The last time I loved, it seemed like songs were everywhere. Songs clung to the wall. They would drape from the columns of Victorian homes in the streets we’d trek, echo in and out of dive bars, shuffle down hallways and run red lights during the lunch rush. We were striving, up and coming just like our romance. The heavens declared our love, or at least - the algorithm agreed with us. They teach you in the movies that love has a soundtrack. That the perfect song will find you in the perfect moment with the perfect person, and the kiss will seal the deal. The particular song that followed us, though, wasn’t as much an affirmation as it was a warning. I only realize that now. I just need some confirmation on how you feel, for real. Because the song was about romance, or at least its rupture, I didn’t listen closely to what the song was really saying. I was only interested in having a song to legitimize the experience that so many discounted for so many reasons. Even if we didn’t have nothing, we had us a song.

-

After the couple wrapped their speeches, I found a cozy corner with the better half of one of my favorite couples, two best-friends since grade school, now in marital bliss. I told her the story of my songs, misunderstood and mistook and asked, still hopeful, if her and the homie had a tune, too. She warned me it’d be something I’d never expect. Gucci Mane’s classic “I Think I Love Her”, a comedic back and forth romp that followed them from a bar in college until they chose it for the entrance at their wedding reception.

The art and the soundtracks of our time are myriad. They may refuse the shape of the protest song or race music as we know it. They may no longer choose the language we deem appropriate for uprising. They may be as fun as the couple they describe, or they may be ambivalent. Some songs be delayed, burnt out by the world from which they emerge. Perhaps our songs are already celebrating ten year anniversaries, just old enough for us to appreciate what they were saying all along. For those making songs and those finding them, be open to what they say and how they flow. We don’t get to pick our songs. Our songs pick us, and I hope we can hear them.

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That first decade, when the magazines had to find new ways to make revenue, we worked to get behind those paywalls, both to read and be read. Those big-named ones we grew up on with glossy bylines and strong mastheads. Our making it there would serve as testament to our writing prowess and be symbols of our success. We pitched and plotted our way into their storied archives. In this decade, though, (can you believe it’s almost been ten years since Summer ‘16?) we’ve been told to build our own paywalls - create your own platform, make that newsletter, connect with your readership in *meaningful* ways. Add Value. Weekly. If you do that good enough, the larger outlets will reward you, eventually. Who knew that a man of letters would have to get it out the mud, too?

I haven’t heard from some of my favorite writers in years. They know they make work worthy of publishing and celebration. They do not know if making that work is worthy of their time if it cannot be adequately supported. Even with the support and celebration that the big names promise, though, many of us want everyone to have access to the work we produce. My friends in academia have displayed this practice best, emailing files of their articles otherwise only accessible in journals and databases to folks outside of the ivy tower, making sure the word is spread. The paywall was what we were all fighting against in the first place.

Making our own cost-prohibitive structures was not the plan, but it is what we’ve been left with. Through the years, I’ve struggled with how to build a subscription page and ask folks for money while also holding on to those idea/ls. How does everyone get to see everything if there are special incentives for those with more resources? Why is there early access for the big spenders? I questioned how I’d be able to reconcile that structure with my politics. The answer came as it typically would for a preacher, not when you want it, but right on time - and from an all too familiar place: A parable of Jesus.

Matthew 20.1-16 read it at your leisure.

In the parable, workers that agreed to work a full day for a flat rate got upset when workers that only worked a half day, a few hours, or just one hour - received the same rate of pay as them. This was clearly unfair, right? One should only get what they have earned, we’ve been taught. However, the vineyard owner (yay, wine!) didn’t see it this way. People who did less work were able to leave with the same benefit as those who worked all day.

Now, how was that an answer to build this substack? What’s the lesson? I want to invert the parable to practice its principle: People who pay, who give more than others can, like those who worked all day - will get the same content as those who can’t afford to give, those folks who only worked one hour.

I’ll need your emails for future news - I am writing these days more than ever. If you’ve ever followed me before, you know I’m always thinking and writing and sharing - so an extra 1,000 words from the surplus of my thoughts shouldn’t be too much of a challenge.

This isn’t about paying for the amount of work, to play in the text again - as much as it is about supporting the life of the artist and their journey. Because of this, the subscriptions are higher than Netflix! There are even big, big options for the very generous. So commit as you can, or not at all. Everyone gets the same thing.

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