writing as world bending.

I will write to bend the reality of the current world into one of liberation and dignity for all beings and to contribute to the groundwork being laid for the world to come.

I am two months into my creative writing MFA at the New School in New York City.

The timeline has been wild. I applied in June and when I was accepted in July, I wasn’t sure how it was all going to work but I told myself that if that path cleared for me to go then I would. And it did. The money came. The housing came. So I picked up and moved across the country in August.

I cried when my partner dropped me off at the airport. I cried when I landed. And occasionally cry when trying to figure out how to navigate the subway with groceries. And even though I felt upside down on the first day of class, and even today, I know I’m in the right place.

I know this because in times of personal, social, and political overwhelm, writing has remained my steady and trustworthy companion. It’s how I know to document, communicate, process, and imagine. It’s instructive.

So, I shouldn’t be surprised then that I feel called and honestly, tugged into being in devotion with my writing right now. My words have created the world that I now inhabit. It’s how I’ve escaped worlds that no longer could contain me or were unsafe. Writing taught me to worldbend.

I learned to write by writing scholarship applications in high school. I’m not sure when or how I learned about them, but as soon as I understood them as a way out of life as I knew it, scholarship became a life raft. As an “at-risk” teenage darling, scholarships became a way to access the inaccessible, a way to keep up in the conversations and experiences of my peers. I measured the gap between my dreams and the resources I needed and I wrote to fill it.

An afterschool program, meeting Mae Jemison, a spring break trip counting desert tortoises, an internship at the Bronx Zoo. I wrote myself away from the world I was in and toward the one I wanted to live in. Scholarship applications taught me to tell a story, make an argument, and showed me what I could bring to life through writing.

Being in school gives me time to return to what teenage Grace discovered. In a creative nonfiction writing program, I have time to return to this practice with complete devotion. I know practice makes possibility. The muscle memory and repetition that practice demands diminishes the gap between my internal world and the exterior one. I know that what I write becomes what I practice and expect in the world. When I write of unflinching dignity, liberation, and love for myself, I become unshakeable in my commitment in seeking it for my loved ones, my community, and those who I don’t know and never will.

Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, June Jordan, Octavia Butler, James Baldwin, Patricia Hill Collins, Toni Cade Bambera, Cohambee River Collective, and countless other Black luminaries have used their words to tell the truth, imagine, and offer new paradigms for me and others to exist in with dignity and possibility.

In this moment, to devote oneself to writing, or any other form of expression for liberation and freedom, is to place yourself in direct opposition to the authoritarian regime in this country and beyond. Authoritarianism thrives when it succeeds in stealing our ability to imagine current and future realities where we can exist and flourish. Attempt to suppress and control the expression of arts & expression is a strategy to silence the truth telling of what we see and how we are resisting. It’s the reason why so many journalists in Gaza have been targeted, killed, and disappeared for documenting the truth.

In Peril by Toni Morrison says:

We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writing is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources. The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow. The history of persecuted writers is as long as the history of literature itself. And the efforts to censor, starve, regulate, and annihilate us are clear signs that something important has taken place. Cultural and political forces can sweep clean all but the ​“safe,” all but state-approved art.

And so I will write. To bend the reality of the current world into one of liberation and dignity for all beings and to contribute to the groundwork being laid for the world to come.