People ask me whether I bring something different to the work when the audience is Black. I understand the question despite the audacity of it. I’m a Black editor who has spent the last several months focused almost entirely on Black writers, and I don’t pretend my cultural fluency disappears when a new project lands on my desk. But the honest answer isn’t “I try harder for my people.” That’s not provable, and it isn’t true. The truth is narrower, and more useful: the same attention and meticulousness gets applied every time. Only the terrain shifts, project to project, and that shift is what decides what needs catching.

Here’s what that looked like in practice.

What grammar can’t catch

In the Black health magazine, a piece on spirituality and cancer outcomes included this line:

“Researchers have also questioned whether this kind of personal faith can play a role in the cancer journey.”

Nothing wrong with it on its face. Subject, verb, clean syntax, any copyeditor would sail through it. I flagged it anyway. “Questioned whether” imports a note of institutional doubt into a sentence about a practice its own readers already trust and use. I suggested “explored whether” instead, and explained why: skepticism reads differently to an audience with documented, well-earned reasons to distrust how the medical establishment frames their health practices. Grammatically, the sentence worked either way. Editorially, only one version was correct.

A few weeks earlier, in the lifestyle magazine, a feature on athletes and performers navigating the end of the spotlight used theatrical language as its spine, calling the early days of a new career a “second act.” One line slipped and called it a “tour” instead. Also grammatically clean. And also wrong, for a completely different reason: it broke a structure the writer had built intentionally, sentence by sentence, across four pages. I flagged that one too.

Neither catch would show up on a style-guide scan. One required knowing something about the history sitting underneath a sentence about faith and medicine. The other required holding an entire piece’s architecture in my head while reading a single line inside it. Different knowledge, same instinct: read past what the sentence says to what it’s built to do.

Precision that has nothing to do with race

Some of the sharpest catches in both projects had nothing to do with identity at all, which is worth speaking about, because it’s easy to assume a Black editor’s value only shows up in Black-coded content.

In the health piece, a line about cancer cell mutation read

“uncontrollable growth of abnormal cells.”

I changed it to “uncontrolled.” It wasn’t a stylistic preference. Medically, the two words aren’t interchangeable. “Uncontrollable” says this can never be controlled. “Uncontrolled” describes where things stand right now, which is what treatment exists to change. For a reader learning about their own diagnosis, that’s the difference between despair and information.

In the lifestyle magazine’s speculative-design feature, a line read:

“The tone is wry and even optimistic.”

I changed the “and” to a comma. “The tone is wry, even optimistic.” That was the entire edit. But the comma creates a beat the sentence needed, a small pause before the surprise of “optimistic” lands. The “and” was flattening a sentence that wanted to move.

Neither edit needed me to be Black. Both needed me to be paying full attention. I’d like that to be unremarkable, and in a fair industry it would be. It isn’t yet, so I’m naming it.

The one place I won’t force a parallel

Here’s where I could reach for a tidy symmetry, and I’m not going to, because it would be dishonest.

In the health magazine, an early passage about spirituality described how:

“Slaves turned to it to maintain hope during Slavery.”

I changed it to “Enslaved people turned to spirituality to maintain hope during slavery,” and I made that correction without querying or explaining my reasoning. “Slaves” reduces people to the condition forced on them. “Enslaved people” names what was done to them instead of what they supposedly were. This isn’t a house style call. It’s the correct language, and the kind of correction that mainstream health outlets, staffed mostly by white editorial teams, still miss or ignore more often than not.

A little later in the same issue, “White” appeared next to an already-established capital-B “Black,” and I flagged it instead of deciding myself it should be lowercase. Same underlying instinct as the “Slaves” correction, expressed as a question instead of a fix, because the capitalization choice belonged to the editor of a Black-led publication, not to me.

The lifestyle magazine has no equivalent moment. Its readers don’t carry the specific weight that makes “enslaved people” a non-negotiable correction, because that history isn’t what the room is built around. I’m not going to manufacture a parallel example to prove I “did the same thing” in both places, because I didn’t. The terrain determined what needed catching.

Knowing when to leave it alone

The health magazine had a section in my editorial notes labeled “notable strengths”: sentences that were already doing what they needed to do, and where the correct edit was no edit at all. Restraint is a muscle most people don’t associate with line and copyediting, but it’s the tell that separates real editorial judgment from busywork. An editor who intervenes more on one audience’s writing “for its own good” is, by my definition, restraining less there too. Eventually that would show… as flattening.

In the lifestyle magazine, a food history piece described the postwar habit of making meat “stretch across several meals,” a correction I made to a line that had originally read “portion meat out.” Sharper verb, same meaning, small fix. On the same page, I left other sentences as the writer had them because they were already precise, and improving them further would have meant erasing what made them work.

Same rigor, different terrain

I don’t think equal treatment means identical edits. I think it means an attention that doesn’t downshift depending on who’s going to read the sentence, and doesn’t upshift into performance when the subject matter is heavy enough to seem like it deserves extra credit for trying. The Black health magazine needed me to know something about medical mistrust and the history sitting inside a single word. The lifestyle magazine needed me to track a writer’s architecture across an entire feature and hear where a comma changes what a sentence does. Different knowledge, same standard, applied without exception.

If you’re holding a finished manuscript and want one bounded read instead, the Opening Chapters Critique or a Full Manuscript Assessment are still there for that. But if you’re in the middle of building something and want an editor paying this kind of attention the whole way through, that’s what The Arc is for.

Inquire about The Arc

Summer doesn’t ask permission before it changes how you write. The schedule loosens. The light stays out longer than your attention does. Some of you will use the extra hours. Most of you will watch them disappear into everything except the page, then wonder where July went.

This July has a particular flavor to it. Mercury has been retrograde since June 29, moving back through Cancer, and it doesn’t lift until July 23. If your drafts have felt foggier than usual, less like you forgot how to write and more like the words keep arriving sideways, that’s not something to ignore and push through. Retrograde seasons don’t create your stall. They make it loud enough to finally notice.

I’ve been studying evolutionary astrology, deep enough now to have an advanced certification in it. And the one thing that has stayed with me through all of my coursework is that a planet never changes what it’s asking for. Mercury always wants the same thing: a clear channel for your mind to move through. What changes is the sign it’s moving through, and what that sign does under pressure. People talk about Mercury retrograde like it’s the apocalypse. Retrograde just slows the whole system down long enough to show you where the channel was already narrow. It’s incredibly prescriptive if you’re open-minded enough to view it that way.

Camp starts July 13, while Mercury is still moving backward. By the time I teach my session on July 31, the retrograde will have lifted for exactly one week. Good timing, for once.

I’ll be at Novel Summer Camp this year as a camp counselor, teaching a session called Write Like Your Element. It’ll be both diagnostic and interactive. You’ll find your element through your sun sign, then we’ll go through what each element does when a draft stalls, sign by sign. Air doesn’t stall the same way for every Air sign. Fire doesn’t either. The strategy each sign reaches for under pressure is specific, and so is the way back in.

Your sun sign is your identity, and in the realm of writing, it’s always asking the same question: what does it look like for you to be fully yourself on the page? Your element is the family of answers you’re working with. Your specific sign is the particular strategy you reach for. When the draft goes quiet, it’s because the strategy hit something it wasn’t built to handle. It needs a different move, not more force, and definitely not more guilt.

I won’t walk through all four elements here. That’s what the session is for. I’ll say this much though: the unlock is never “try harder.” It’s smaller and stranger than that, and it changes by element. You’ll leave with a writing exercise built specifically for where your draft stalled, and something concrete to do after the session.

If you’ve got a manuscript that’s gone quiet, or you’re starting something new and want a real framework for understanding how you work instead of borrowing someone else’s, come find me on the campgrounds. I’ll be the one with a red name badge, talking about the sky like it’s a craft book.

Novel Summer Camp runs July 13 through August 7. It’s a free, 4-week writing retreat, no packing required.

When you sign up, you also get access to the full NovCamp experience, including:

• Educational webinars from camp counselors (like me!) — craft, genre technique, and professional development

• Daily writing sprints to build momentum every day

• Cabin groups — small, matched cohorts for accountability and friendship

• Campfire story circles — weekly showcases to share and celebrate your work

• S’mores social hours — casual, pressure-free community hangouts

Sign up for Novel summer Camp

About the author

High Priestess Lakeisha is the founder of The Story Temple, a spiritual writing sanctuary for Black writers healing their relationship with their voice. She is a developmental editor with close to 10 years of experience across fiction and nonfiction, an initiated priestess, a certified evolutionary astrologer, and a shadow work facilitator. Her editorial roots are in fantasy and speculative fiction, the genre space where she first saw the patterns she would later have language for.

Lakeisha’s work holds craft and spirit as one practice. The Elemental Writing Energetics framework reads the manuscript. The Elemental Shadow Wounds framework reads the architect behind the words (the writer). The Story Temple exists on a single premise: writing is a spiritual practice, and a free sentence is a prayer being answered.

Morrison knocked the gaze off the shoulder. Baldwin showed what the eyes could do once it was gone. Àṣẹ 𓂀✧⟡

Mercury stationed retrograde yesterday, and if you’ve been paying attention to your writing practice over the last couple of weeks, you already felt it before you could name what was happening. The pull backward. The half-finished draft from March surfacing in your mind at 2am. The conversation you thought you were done with showing up in your morning journaling like it never left. The signal is still there. But the frequency has shifted. Everything’s coming through water now.

This is what Mercury retrograde can feel like for writers. The mind stops reaching forward and starts circling back. The things you thought you understood about your work get fuzzy at the edges. You reread a draft and can’t tell if it’s good or if you’ve just been too close to it. Miscommunication is everywhere because the signal has changed.

Subscribe now

Yesterday, Mercury began its second retrograde of the year in Cancer. It will move backward through the sign of home, family, and emotional memory until July 23. Most of what you’ll read about this transit tells you what to avoid. Back up your files. Don’t sign contracts. Wait to send the pitch. These are practical things to be mindful of. But pop astrology has a way of flattening a transit into a warning label.

I’m an evolutionary astrologer. I go deeper than that. I’m not interested in what Mercury retrograde tells you to avoid. I’m interested in what it makes accessible that wasn’t accessible before.

And I’ll be honest with you. This essay fought me. I sat down to write it three times, and each time I knew what I wanted to say and each time it came out sideways. Which is exactly on par with the energy. Knowing what a transit is doing doesn’t make you exempt from it. I’m part of the same collective sky you’re sitting under right now. It’s affecting me too. So don’t take what I’m offering here as someone writing from above the cosmic weather, but as someone who’s in it with you, trying to find the words the same way you are.

The retrograde didn’t arrive alone. It came in under a full moon in Capricorn, and I found the timing pointed in the way the sky sometimes is when it decides not to be subtle. Capricorn is the sign of what really exists, not what you planned to build. A Capricorn full moon puts the receipts on the table for you and everybody else to see. On January 18, we had the new moon in Capricorn, which was a planting point. Some of you set intentions then, consciously or not. You said you’d finish the draft. That you’d submit or pitch an agent. That this would be the year the manuscript stopped living in your head and started living on paper. Six months later, the accounting is now here: what grew? What didn’t move? What moved in a direction you didn’t expect?

Then there’s Jupiter, who just entered Leo, the sign of creative identity and self-expression, which means your sense of who you are on the page is expanding right now. Your ambition is louder than it’s been in months. And pressing against the full moon are Saturn and Neptune, both sitting in Aries. Saturn says slow down, be realistic, do the work before you celebrate. Neptune blurs the edge between what’s real and what you wish were real.

Both active at the same time means the thing you see clearly might also feel confusing. You might look at your writing goals and not be able to tell whether you’re behind because you weren’t disciplined enough or because the goals were never quite honest in the first place. The clarity and the blur are both information. And since Mercury turned inward the same night the moon was full, whatever the full moon showed you, you’re going to sit with it for three weeks. Don’t try to fix anything yet. Let the retrograde do its slower work underneath.

Cancer is the sign of home. The feeling, not the physical structure. The place in your chest where you keep the things that matter too much to say out loud. The memory that lives in your hands, your jaw, the base of your throat. Cancer is where the body stores what the mind wasn’t ready to process when it happened.

When Mercury moves through Cancer in direct motion, you can write about these things from a comfortable distance. You can craft an essay about your mother or your childhood kitchen or the silence at the dinner table, and keep your hands steady while you do it. The analytical mind stays in charge. You choose what to reveal. You edit from a position of control.

The story you’ve been circling for months without finding a way in might not need a better angle. It might need you to stop thinking about it and start feeling where it lives in your body. Mercury retrograde in Cancer doesn’t take your words away. It reroutes them. The signal that was running through your head drops into your chest, your belly, and your breath. The draft that wouldn’t come when you sat down with an outline might come when you sit down with nothing and let your hands write what your body already knows.

Some things are stored below language. The only way to write them is to go below language to find them. Mercury retrograde in Cancer opens that door. The question is whether you’re willing to walk through it without knowing what you’ll find on the other side.

For the next three weeks, your mind is being pointed somewhere your craft hasn’t gone yet. This might feel like regression. It isn’t.

Return to the drafts you stopped in the middle of because something felt off and you couldn’t name what it was. Mercury retrograde in Cancer gives you different ears for your own work. The thing that felt off might become legible now. Pull out the essay without an ending, or the chapter you wrote fast and never sat with, or the manuscript you put in a drawer because you told yourself it wasn’t ready. Read them slowly. Out loud if you can stand it. Listen for the sentence that makes your stomach tighten.

Slow down on sending work out. The signal is scrambled right now, and what you send will land differently than you intend. The pitch that sounds clear to you tonight might read sideways to an editor next week. If you can wait until Mercury stations direct, wait.

Between now and then, try this. Not every day. But more days than not.

Sit down with something unfinished, a piece you’ve been avoiding, or one that keeps surfacing at odd hours. Don’t look at your outline. Don’t reread your notes. Open the draft and ask it one question: what are you really about?

The answer that comes during a Mercury retrograde in Cancer will arrive lower than usual. Less in the head, and more in the gut. It might not sound like a plan, and instead sound like a feeling. Write it down anyway. Write from that place for as long as it lasts. No structure or editing while you draft. Let it be ugly. Let it be too personal if that’s where it goes. Give it permission to contradict the version of the story you’ve been telling yourself for months.

When the session is done, save it and close it. Don’t revise or reread. Let it sit until Mercury is moving forward again. What you wrote will read differently than it reads today, and that difference is significant. The writing that surfaces on the other side of this retrograde will have deep roots.

During these three weeks, write like somebody who isn’t in a hurry to be understood. Write toward the thing your body has been holding. Let the scrambled signal teach you something your clear signal couldn’t.

Join the Temple

About the author

High Priestess Lakeisha is the founder of The Story Temple, a spiritual writing sanctuary for Black writers healing their relationship with their voice. She is a developmental editor with close to 10 years of experience across fiction and nonfiction, an initiated priestess, a certified evolutionary astrologer, and a shadow work facilitator. Her editorial roots are in fantasy and speculative fiction, the genre space where she first saw the patterns she would later have language for.

Lakeisha’s work holds craft and spirit as one practice. The Elemental Writing Energetics framework reads the manuscript. The Elemental Shadow Wounds framework reads the architect behind the words (the writer). The Story Temple exists on a single premise: writing is a spiritual practice, and a free sentence is a prayer being answered.

Morrison knocked the gaze off the shoulder. Baldwin showed what the eyes could do once it was gone.

I was sitting at the dining table in the early morning. The rest of the house was still asleep. I’d just finished my morning ritual of tea and tarot before settling in to write. Client work would take over soon enough. A page was open in my notebook. The words were forming. And somewhere between my chest and my fingers, I felt the tug. The one that says: soften this. Make it palatable. Translate so everybody understands.

I wrote the words my ancestors gave me anyway. Then I sat with my hands in my lap, staring at them for a long time.

That’s where this essay starts. With the weight of a page that is waiting for you to tell the truth on it.

There were laws in this country against Black people reading. Specific, enforceable, punishable laws.

In South Carolina, the 1740 Negro Act made it illegal to teach an enslaved person to write. In Virginia, the penalty for a second offense of assembling to learn could be twenty lashes. In North Carolina, teaching a free Black person to read carried a fine and jail time. I have never once believed these were abstract policies. They were responses to a real fear: that a literate Black person was a dangerous Black person.

And they were right. Literacy is dangerous when it belongs to someone the system was built to silence.

Your nervous system doesn’t know these laws were repealed. The body keeps the record that the legislature tried (and still tries) to erase. When you sit down to write and feel that clench in your throat, that pause before the honest sentence, or that instinct to explain yourself to a reader who was never going to understand anyway, you’re not being dramatic or overly sensitive. You’re responding to an inheritance that lives below language.

The silence moved through families the way most inheritances do: without announcement.

Black families learned to speak sideways. To tell the story in the car but not at the table. To keep certain things oral on purpose, because the written record had been used against us before. The stories that mattered most were the ones that never made it to paper because it was safer that way.

Think about your own family. The things they told you, the things they kept quiet about, and the things you figured out later by piecing together what nobody said directly.

That silence is a strategy that outlived the conditions that created it. And for writers who come from those families, the act of writing isn’t neutral. The page itself has a history. And by filling it, you are breaking a pattern that kept people you loved alive.

Juneteenth named the end of a specific delay.

The Emancipation Proclamation was signed on January 1, 1863. The news did not reach Galveston, Texas, until June 19, 1865. Two years and five months. People were living in bondage that had legally ended, and no one told them.

Sit with that for a minute. The cruelty of withheld knowledge. The freedom that already existed but was kept from the people it belonged to.

This is the writer’s inheritance too. The permission to write as yourself, in your own syntax, with your own grammar and your own references and your own rhythm, has existed for a long time. The news just didn’t always reach us. It got intercepted by writing workshops that taught us to write for a universal reader who was always white. By MFA programs that called our dialect “inconsistent voice” or ghetto. By the editorial process that smoothed us into something readable for people who were never going to read us anyway.

You were already free. You just didn’t know.

Writing from freedom is different from performing freedom on the page.

Performing freedom looks like writing something bold, then undercutting it with an explanation. Adding a footnote that translates your reference for the reader who doesn’t share it. Cleaning up the syntax that follows your actual thought because someone once told you it wasn’t grammatically correct.

Writing from freedom is quieter than that. It’s the AAVE left intact because that’s how the thought arrived. The dialect that doesn’t apologize. The sentence that follows the shape of your mind instead of the shape of the workshop handout. The story that doesn’t translate, and the decision to tell it anyway.

This is a practice. It requires you to catch yourself mid-translation and choose the original. It requires repetition because the conditioning runs deep. You will reach for the smooth version out of habit. The version that reads easily to someone who is not your reader. And then you will put it down and pick up the one that is yours.

Every time you do that, you are doing Juneteenth work.

Call it a posture.

Juneteenth is available every time you sit down to write. Every time you choose the word that is yours over the word that will scan more easily to someone outside your lineage.

Write something that doesn’t explain itself. Let that be the practice.

Years before The Story Temple, before Shadow & the Pen or Write From the Wound, before any of this had a name, I was simply a developmental editor. My client list was a mix of fantasy writers, sci-fi writers, and a handful of literary folks who wandered in from somewhere else. My job was strictly craft. Pacing, structure, character development, voice at the sentence level. I was good at it. I still am (very good at it).

But there was something I kept seeing in the work, and for years I didn’t have words for it.

The writing was often clean. Sometimes it was good enough that I’d sit back in my chair. But underneath some of it sat a quality I couldn’t quite place. Something held back. Something smaller than the story around it.

Here are a few things I was seeing on the page. A protagonist who took up less room than the story needed them to. A fictional world that felt borrowed, like somebody else’s house with somebody else’s furniture, and the writer was a guest instead of the one who built it. I was seeing magic systems that played it safe. And stakes that never quite climbed as high as the premise promised.

The questions these writers brought me were craft questions. Why does this scene feel flat? Why doesn’t this character feel real to me? Is the magic system working, or does it just look like it should? I answered as an editor. We talked about interiority, about specificity, about raising the stakes on the page. Sometimes that helped. Sometimes it didn’t, and I couldn’t always explain why.

That essay was about the industry. This one stays closer to home: what happens before the industry ever sees the manuscript.

I’ve been in the publishing business for almost 10 years now, and have learned quite a bit from sitting across from those writers with their borrowed worlds and their careful dragons. The tax doesn’t start at the acquisitions table. It starts on page one. A writer who has spent their whole life absorbing the message that their work will read as too much, too Black, not relatable, and not what readers want, learns to shrink the dragon themselves, long before anyone else gets the chance to. Before they’ve written a single line, the white gaze is already in the room. And it’s wearing their own face.

There’s one session I keep coming back to. One of my first clients, a Black writer, working in fantasy romance, three drafts deep into a manuscript she couldn’t get past a certain point in. We’d been over the craft notes twice. The structure had good bones. The prose was clean. And still, every time she reached this one chapter, she stalled.

On a hunch, I asked if she’d be open to trying something different during one of our sessions. We pulled cards.

I read tarot intuitively, so as the cards came up, I started asking questions. About the novel, and about the season of life she was in. What was shifting underneath her. Because all of that comes through on the page, whether a writer knows it or not.

We talked for maybe ten minutes. Then she stopped answering and started writing. Feverish, head down, pen moving fast across the page. She filled two pages in her notebook before coming up for air. I watched something happen in her eyes that I still don’t have a clean word for. The closest I can get is alchemy.

She finished that chapter. Eventually she finished the draft.

Years later, I watched it happen again while teaching a workshop for a friend of mine who is a writing coach. A few days after the workshop, word got back to me that one of the attendees had been stuck on the same project for three years. By the end of the session, she wasn’t stuck anymore. Same thing, in front of strangers this time. Something underneath the craft problem, surfacing the moment someone made room for it.

I didn’t have language for any of it back then. I only knew that something had moved, something that craft feedback alone hadn’t been able to reach. Looking back, I understand now what I didn’t understand then. The inner work and the craft work weren’t two different practices. I’d been doing both the whole time without realizing it. I just didn’t have a name for either one yet.

Let me say plainly what the work I do is for.

It’s for the writer who wants to write the dragon, the joy, the space heist, the ordinary Tuesday where nothing happens except a family eating dinner together, and for it to be enough. It’s for writing anything at all without the nervous system treating the blank page like a courtroom.

The white gaze followed those writers into their invented worlds because it doesn’t live in the genre. It lives in the body. Jesmyn Ward has talked about getting frozen three chapters into Let Us Descend. Ward is a writer at the height of her powers, with every award and every credential. And yet she still met a wall she couldn’t write past. The work I do now dissolves the wound that credentials can’t heal.

Once the gaze loosens its grip, the subject matter can stay exactly the same. What opens up is everything underneath it: the dragon gets its size back, the world stops feeling borrowed and starts feeling like yours.

If you’ve ever opened a blank document to start something that was supposed to be entirely yours… your world, your rules, your magic… and felt the colors get pulled down before you wrote a single word, I want you to name what that is.

It’s the gaze. It’s old, and it’s been riding shotgun longer than you’ve been writing. It showed up before the story did.

Shadow & the Pen is where we look at that directly. Your manuscript and your wound, both in the room at once. Booking are available. To claim your spot, click here.

Subscribe now

About the author

High Priestess Lakeisha is the founder of The Story Temple, a spiritual writing sanctuary for Black writers healing their relationship with their voice. She is a developmental editor with close to 10 years of experience across fiction and nonfiction, an initiated priestess, a certified evolutionary astrologer, and a shadow work facilitator. Her editorial roots are in fantasy and speculative fiction, the genre space where she first saw the patterns she would later have language for.

Lakeisha’s work holds craft and spirit as one practice. The Elemental Writing Energetics framework reads the manuscript. The Elemental Shadow Wounds framework reads the architect behind the words (the writer). The Story Temple exists on a single premise: writing is a spiritual practice, and a free sentence is a prayer being answered.

Morrison knocked the gaze off the shoulder. Baldwin showed what the eyes could do once it was gone.

In 2026, there are over 144 Black-authored books tracked across every major genre: historical fantasy, sci-fi, romance, horror, Southern gothic, literary fiction, biography, cozy mystery. Black writers are writing pirates, space races, hip-hop dramas, neurodivergent family stories, and multigenerational epics. They’ve been doing this for decades. They’ve never stopped.

And yet.

Every few months, a review, a panel, or some publisher announcement uses the phrase “expanding the range of Black storytelling” as though the range were new. As though it had been waiting for permission. As though the surprise were genuine.

It isn’t.

The industry’s surprise isn’t a discovery. It’s a posture. And postures serve a purpose.

The evidence of range isn’t subtle. Percival Everett’s James won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. N.K. Jemisin won three consecutive Best Novel Hugos for the Broken Earth trilogy, a feat no one before or since has matched. Nnedi Okorafor published Death of the Author in 2025. Stacey Abrams is on her third thriller. Nicola Yoon is writing dystopian horror. The inaugural Atlanta Black Romance Book Festival in 2025 showcased every romance subgenre: paranormal, fantasy, queer, sports, historical, erotica, and inspirational, all in one room.

Eugen Bacon’s anthology Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction won both the 2025 Ignyte Award for Creative Nonfiction and the 2025 Locus Award. Africanfuturism,1 the literary movement Nnedi Okorafor defined formally in 2019, keeps producing major award winners. It’s not emerging. It’s been arrived.

The breadth isn’t new. The tracking of it is what’s new. And only barely.

The industry acts surprised because it’s structured to be surprised.

According to the Lee & Low Diversity Baseline Survey 2023, released in February 2024,2 72.5% of the U.S. publishing workforce identifies as white. Among executives, it’s 76.7%. Black employees represent 5.3% of the total workforce, a number that has held essentially flat across all three Lee & Low surveys.3 When the people controlling acquisitions, marketing budgets, and front-table placement overwhelmingly share one cultural vantage point, the range of Black storytelling becomes invisible. And the people with the power to invest in it are not, by and large, the people reading it.

Regina Brooks named the acquisitions filter directly: “If you know there’s an audience for a book and you know the book is going to sell — but it’s not something you would pick up and read — would you acquire that book?”4

#PublishingPaidMe is the clearest receipt for what that structure costs. Roxane Gay received $12,500 for An Untamed State and $15,000 for Bad Feminist. N.K. Jemisin received $25,000 per book for the Broken Earth trilogy, the same trilogy that won three consecutive Hugos.5 Jesmyn Ward had to fight, after winning the National Book Award, to get $100,000 for her next novel.6 Kiese Laymon paid ten times what his publisher had originally paid him to buy back the rights to two of his books.7

Lydia Kiesling received $200,000 for her debut novel. Lacy Johnson received $215,000 for her essay collection.8 These are the baseline for how the industry prices work it has already decided matters.

N.K. Jemisin named the mechanism: “Advances indicate what the publishing industry thinks readers will like in the future. In a racist industry trying to sell books to a racist public within a racist society? Implicit bias alone will make negotiations harder.” She called it “Lots of little biases at many points forming a big racist Voltron.”

Then came 2020. After George Floyd’s death, every major publisher issued statements. Black editors were hired into visible roles: Lisa Lucas as publisher of Pantheon and Schocken at Penguin Random House, Tracy Sherrod at Little, Brown, Dana Canedy as publisher of the Simon & Schuster flagship. DEI commitments were announced. Numbers were promised.

By May 2024, Lucas and Sherrod had both been dismissed or laid off.9 Canedy had departed in 2022. Researchers Dan Sinykin and Richard Jean So found that between 2019 and 2023, novels by Black authors rose from 4% to 9% of Big Four output, then named exactly what the industry does next: “Publishers announce the acquisitions with fanfare. But publishers then fail to provide adequate investment in marketing, publicity, and sales; the titles underperform and, set up to fail, provide publishers with an excuse to disinvest.”

Print unit sales of books by Black authors fell 14% in 2025 compared to 2024.10 Black writers are writing more. The industry is supporting it less.

The surprise isn’t neutral. It does something specific.

It positions Black writers as newcomers to genres they’ve occupied for decades. Samuel R. Delany debuted in science fiction in 1962. Octavia Butler published her first novel in 1976 and became the first sci-fi writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995. Charles R. Saunders coined “Sword and Soul,” an African-rooted heroic fantasy subgenre, in 1981.11 Jemisin has spoken about being told as a child that “Black women don’t write science fiction,” and about The Killing Moon being rejected for being “too Black.”12 Sixty-plus years of documented range. The industry still reaches for “surprising.”

The surprise reframes the industry’s failure to invest as a discovery to celebrate. It allows gatekeepers to take credit for recognizing what was never lost. It keeps the bar of proof permanently higher: a Black writer can’t simply write a great fantasy novel. They must write the one that finally “proves” Black writers can do this. As L.L. McKinney put it: “when our books flop or fail, it’s seen as a reflection on all Black storytelling instead of just that one book.”13 Then the clock resets.

Toni Morrison said it plainly: “If you can only be tall because someone is on their knees, then you have a serious problem.”14 The industry’s surprise requires Black writers to remain perpetually emerging, never arrived, and always having to demonstrate range anew.

Black writers were always in every genre. The industry is being forced, slowly and selectively, to look at what was already in front of it.

The surprise is the tax. Black writers have been paying it for sixty years: re-proving range that was already documented, fighting for investment that was always deserved, and entering genres they never left.

The range was never missing. Only the recognition.

If you’ve been writing in the genre you love and something still feels like it’s being decided for you, that’s what we look at next.

You’re awake before the alarm because something woke you. A line, a fragment, a sentence that almost had you. Or maybe because of a wild-ass dream you can’t make sense of (this is a regular occurrence for me). You reach for your phone in the dark and type it into the Notes app before it dissolved. You read it back twice. You don’t know if it’s good. You just know it’s true.

You invoke Goddess Caffeina by making coffee — or in my case, a strong British brew. On your counter: a dog-eared copy of The Body Keeps the Score, a tarot deck wrapped in a scarf your aunt gave you, a bottle of Florida Water you forgot to move. On the bookshelf behind you: your grandfather’s photograph in a frame you haven’t dusted, a white candle burned down to its last inch, a sprig of something dried that you put there in November.

You open your laptop. You have an hour before the day starts claiming you.

You open a Word document titled MANUSCRIPT_v14_FINAL_forreal.docx. You read the last paragraph you wrote eleven days ago.

Your chest tightens. You close the document. You’ve been swallowing this paragraph for two weeks.

You open a browser instead. You end up reading three Substack essays, saving a fourth and closing the tab. The desktop experience is always better than the app.

You think:

I should be writing. I can’t write like this. I just need a system. People swear by morning pages. Maybe I should try that again.

Maybe you should. Or maybe — and I want to say this carefully, cuz I know I’m about to agitate some demons — the problem was never the system.

— ✦ —

— ✦ —

What The Artist’s Way Got Right (And What It Missed Entirely)

Before I go any further, lemme say this plainly: Julia Cameron wasn’t wrong. Morning pages work. Three pages of longhand, stream-of-consciousness, written first thing, as a practice of clearing the mental clutter and creating a channel for creative work — it is sound. It has helped millions of writers. It helped some writers I know and respect.

I tried it twice. The first time I made it six weeks. The second time, three.

Discipline wasn’t the problem. Saturn is my chart ruler. I have discipline for days. And I have disciplined myself to do far harder things. I stopped because every morning I sat down to do them, I felt like I was confessing into a void. Like I was emptying myself out before I’d been filled. Like someone had handed me a broom and told me to sweep before they’d shown me what the room was supposed to look like.

The Artist’s Way is a spiritual book rooted in a specific tradition: Christian recovery. The artist as a child of God, returning to a source. The morning pages as a kind of daily confession: empty the noise, make space, let the divine in. Cameron is clear about this. The framework makes sense inside the worldview it comes from.

However, that framework wasn’t built to address:

A nervous system that has been trained — across generations, not just a lifetime — to understand that being fully heard is dangerous.

Morning pages ask you to pour yourself out onto the page. For a writer whose block is rooted in a real, embodied, ancestrally transmitted belief that their full voice is not safe in this world, pouring out before you are held doesn’t clear anything. It confirms the fear. You open up, nothing catches you, so you close back down. Tighter than before.

Cameron wrote a book for a particular wound. It’s not the same wound we carry.

The Artist’s Way didn’t dismantle the surveillance. It simply gave it a schedule.

This is not a critique of Cameron. This is a diagnosis of what happens when a Black writer who isn’t blocked by creativity but by a very rational protection mechanism, picks up a framework built for somebody else’s healing and wonders why it doesn’t work for them.

They already knew how to empty themselves out. They’d been doing it for years. In the writing workshop. In the pitch meeting. In the critique group. On the page, writing characters who are legible to the centered white reader. They didn’t need more practice clearing. They needed to learn what it felt like to be filled first.

That is a different practice entirely. That is ceremony.

— ✦ —

The Difference Between Routine and Ceremony

A routine is what you do to manage yourself.

Ceremony is what you do to remember who you are.

This isn’t a small distinction. It is, I believe, the whole thing.

When I say routine, I mean: the thing you do because it helps you function. Coffee before you open email. Walking at lunch so you don’t feel like a body that has been sitting at a desk for eight hours. Morning pages so you clear the noise before you write. These things work. They are not nothing. But they are management. You are trying to get yourself under control, or get yourself into a usable state, or clear the decks so the real thing can happen. The relationship is instrumental. You are a problem your routine is solving.

Ceremony is relational. You are in relationship with something when you do it. That something might be your ancestors. It might be your own sacred self. It might be the tradition you come from, or the lineage you are consciously choosing, or simply the understanding that the work you are about to do is not simply labor, it’s an act that has a receiver. Someone is waiting for what you will write. You are not alone at the desk.

Here is what changes when you understand your morning practice as ceremony rather than routine: you stop being the person trying to get yourself to write, and you become the person being prepared to transmit.

There is a difference in the body. You feel it as soon as you name it.

In routine, the nervous system says: let’s get this going. In ceremony, the nervous system says: I am being held. I have been held before. The holding has a lineage. I can let something move through me that is larger than the noise in my head this morning.

You cannot write freely from a body that doesn’t believe it is safe. Ceremony is how you tell your body: we are safe. We are held. The ancestors are here. You can say the true thing now.

The blank page isn’t the problem. The body sitting in front of it isn’t the problem either. The problem is that nobody taught you that before you touch the page, you get to be gathered. You get to be held by something that knows your name — your real name, not the one you use at work. And that gathering, that holding, is what ceremony does.

Morning pages skip the gathering. They go straight to the output.

For some writers, that’s fine. For the writer who has been performing their way through creative spaces for years, who code-switches even on the page, who writes and then reads their own sentences with a stranger’s eye — going straight to output means going straight to surveillance. They produce words, yes. But they’re not theirs. Not fully. The little white man is already on their shoulder by the time they reach for the pen.

Ceremony puts him in his place before they open the document. This is the whole point.

— ✦ —

What Ceremony Does to the Nervous System (This Is Not Metaphor)

Your nervous system responds to signals. It’s physiology.

Your nervous system responds to signals. It’s constantly reading your environment. Not the environment you’re consciously aware of, but the environmental data your body is taking in below the threshold of thought. Temperature. Sound. Light. The quality of your own breathing. Whether your shoulders are at your ears or resting somewhere they can breathe. Whether you are, at the cellular level, in a state of threat or a state of safety.

Creativity requires safety — not comfort. You can write in difficult conditions, but the nervous system has to believe, on some level, that the act of expression is not going to get you hurt. For writers who carry the ancestral inheritance of “speaking out loud is dangerous,” that safety doesn’t come automatically. Toni Morrison described herself as “paralyzed, unable to write” after the 2004 election. The body knew something the craft couldn’t fix. Safety has to be created. Deliberately. Repeatedly. In a way the body can recognize.

This is what ritual does. Ritual is not meaningful because of its content, though content matters. Ritual is meaningful because it is repeated. The body learns: when I do this sequence of actions, what follows is safe. What follows is spacious. What follows is held. When I light this candle and speak these words and sit in this posture, I am not alone at the desk.

The nervous system, over time, stops bracing when you sit down to write. No, the white gaze on your shoulder hasn’t disappeared. The world hasn’t gotten less hostile either. It stops because the body has learned that the ceremony contains the hostility. That inside the ceremony, something else is possible.

This is why I always light a candle before I sit down to write.

This is why I pour water and make strong black coffee for my grandmother and other deities on Saturdays.

This is why I pull a card before I begin.

These things aren’t decorative. They are the mechanism by which I tell my body: we are not performing today. We are transmitting. Those are different physiological states. One contracts. One opens.

What I’ve just named is the diagnosis. I want to go further… into the actual practice.

Because understanding what ceremony does is one thing. Knowing how to build one that belongs to you… rooted in your tradition, your lineage, what your body already knows how to recognize as safe… is something else. That requires getting into the particulars.

What does my morning look like, element by element? How does my Elemental Writing Energetics framework map onto a morning ceremony, and why does that matter for what happens on the page? And how do you build a practice that is genuinely yours — not mine, not Julia Cameron’s, not your MFA advisor’s — but a ceremony drawn from your own spiritual inheritance?

That’s what continues for Temple members below.

If you tried The Artist’s Way and couldn’t figure out why it left you cold, what continues below is the answer. The practice of building a morning that’s yours, and yours alone. Upgrade your subscription, and join other Temple members.

Read more

The way you carry something you’ve been holding for a long time. Three years of work. Three years of drafts, of revision, of knowing something was wrong and not being able to articulate it well enough to fix it. She had received editorial feedback in the past. Genuine feedback. Careful feedback. The kind that points out the structural problem in act two and the place where the main character’s interiority goes flat in the final third. She revised, yet the flatness was still there.

She said: I know what’s wrong on the page. I just can’t seem to change it.

This, or some version of it, is the sentence I’ve learned to listen for because it almost always means the problem isn’t on the page at all.

— ✦ —

There’s a distinction I’ve come to think is essential, and nobody really talks about it:

A craft problem lives in the manuscript. It can be seen, diagnosed and revised. Developmental editing and manuscript assessments are built to do this. They find the structural fracture, the pacing failure, the place where emotional logic breaks down. These are precise diagnostic tools and I believe in them completely. How could I not? I’m a developmental editor.

A voice wound lives in the writer. It shows up in the manuscript. You can see it at the sentence level, in the hedged interiority, in the flattened desire, in the scene that softens right before it gets true. But you can’t fix it from the manuscript side. You can revise the symptom, sure. But the wound stays.

Most writing programs treat every problem like a craft problem. They give you better notes, more sophisticated feedback, finer-grained tools. And if the problem is structural, that works. But if the problem is a voice wound, if what’s holding the manuscript hostage is a Silence wound or a Worthiness wound or a Performance wound sitting underneath the pages, an editorial letter isn’t gonna move it. You will revise into the same flatness every time. Why? Because you’re working on the wrong layer.

The Shadow & the Pen is a session that works on the right layer.

— ✦ —

We didn’t talk about act two of her magical realism novel.

We pulled cards instead. I asked her what she was most afraid her manuscript was saying about her. Not about the main character, about her as a writer. She went quiet for a moment. Then she said something that she may have written in her journal, but hadn’t said out loud to anyone before: that she was afraid the book was too much. Too specific. Too spiritual. That no one outside of her community would understand it, and that she’d been writing with that fear for so long she’d stopped noticing it.

The card that came out was the Hermit. Meditative. Solitary. Interior. Holding the light inward, not outward.

I said: what if the book isn’t too much? What if you’ve been writing it for people who were never meant to receive it?

She started crying. Not the kind that means something broke. The kind that means something finally got named.

We didn’t return to the manuscript after that. Instead, we talked about who she was writing for, and why the imagined white reader had moved into her creative process like a tenant she’d never invited and never quite figured out how to evict. We talked about the spiritual elements she’d been softening like the rituals and the ancestral presence in the story because she was afraid of being called ’too niche,’ which is a phrase that means: too Black, too specific, too unapologetically yours.

By the end of the session she’d made one concrete decision: she was going to write the next chapter for her grandmother. Not for the market. Not for an agent. But for the woman who appears three times in the book and who she’s been keeping at arm’s length because she didn’t know if it was a good idea to put her grandmother fully on the page.

— ✦ —

Tarot is a diagnostic tool. I want to be clear about this because I know some of you came through secular literary culture and the word ‘tarot’ still activates the part of your brain that wants to qualify, to footnote, to make sure the people in the room know you’re also serious and rigorous and not just being woo.

The cards work.

Here’s the mechanism, without mysticism: a tarot card is a mirror that doesn’t lie. It surfaces what you already know but haven’t let yourself say directly. The image, the symbolism, the question it opens… these create a container for the unconscious to speak in a register that linear thinking can’t often reach. It isn’t supernatural. It’s a different kind of diagnostic. Numerology works the same way in terms of pattern recognition. The numbers in your name, your birth date, the timing of when you started this book. They act as a map. These tools aren’t looking at the pages of your manuscript. They’re looking at you.

And for a writer whose block isn’t in the craft but in the wound, that matters a great deal. Because you can’t revise your way out of a wound. But you can name it. And once it’s named, it loses the power that unnamed things have: the power to run your writing sessions from the inside without you ever seeing them clearly enough to push back.

— ✦ —

Uranus moved into Gemini for the first time since 1942. Gemini is the sign of language, of voice, of the multiplicity of what we allow ourselves to say and how we allow ourselves to say it. Uranus is disruption, sudden revelation, the dismantling of structures that have outlived their use.

I’m not going to make grand predictions. But I will say this: we are in a moment that is asking Black writers specifically — writers who have been writing under surveillance, in the censored register, for the centered white reader — what happens when the old structures stop holding? What happens when the old guard falls? What voice comes through when the architecture of approval starts to crack?

That isn’t an abstract question. Or even a hypothetical one. It’s a writing question. It’s a manuscript question. And it’s the question sitting underneath every session I hold.

— ✦ —

The Shadow & the Pen is a 90-minute session for the writer who knows something is wrong but can’t get to it from the manuscript side.

We work with your manuscript and with you. We pull cards and look at your personal numerology. We name the wound that’s been running your writing sessions. We find the layer underneath the craft problem: the voice problem, the permission problem, the white reader on your shoulder who moved in and never left.

If you’ve been revising into the same problem. If you know what’s wrong and can’t change it. If you’ve gotten good notes and the block is still there, this session is for you.

I’m a developmental editor. I know how to read and assess a manuscript. But I’ve learned that the most important reading in the session is rarely the pages.

— ✦ —

Bookings are open

With love and fire,

High Priestess Lakeisha

𓂀✧⟡

Subscribe now

She opens the document on her laptop.

Not for the first time this week. The third time. Maybe the fourth. She knows where she left off. It’s the scene she’s been circling for two months. The one that keeps coming out wrong, calibrated down, the feeling right but the words doing something she didn’t intend.

She reads the last paragraph she wrote. Her chest tightens. She closes the laptop.

And opens Substack on her phone instead.

Most writing advice will tell you that this writer simply isn’t disciplined. That real writers write every day. That resistance is just fear. That if you wanted it badly enough you’d figure out how to make time.

I’m going to tell you something different.

The block ain’t about discipline. It was never about discipline. The block is located in three places: your nervous system, your ancestors and the imagined white reader sitting on your shoulder while you try to write. And there ain’t a single word count goal, accountability partner or morning pages practice that can reach any of them.

This is not a character flaw. It is a wound. Three wounds, to be exact, and they’ve been operating in your writing sessions without a name for long enough.

The first wound is the Silence Wound.

Our ancestors were punished for literacy. Punished, whipped, killed and legislated against for the act of reading and writing and speaking in languages that belonged to them. That is in your nervous system. Not only as history we know about, but as inheritance our bodies carry.

So when you sit down to write something — a scene with full rage in it, a character whose spiritual life isn’t explained for white comfort, the thing you’ve been circling for three years — your body reads it as danger. The chest tightening isn’t procrastination. It’s protection. Your nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do across generations: keep you quiet so you stay safe.

The problem is, you’re not living in your great-great-grandmother’s reality. But your nervous system doesn’t know that yet.

The second wound is the Worthiness Wound.

You’ve been writing for an imagined white reader for so long you don’t even notice the moment you start. The hedge that shows up in the third sentence. The cultural reference you explain. You know… the one your people don’t need explaining. The scene that softens right before it gets real. The character whose interiority is calibrated down, made legible and made safe.

You’re not blocked on the writing. You’re blocked on the permission. The belief — installed by publishing culture, by MFA workshops, by a hundred small corrections — that your voice needs approval before it can matter. That your specificity is a liability. That you owe the imagined white reader access to everything.

You don’t owe them shit. But the wound doesn’t know that.

The third wound is the Performance Wound.

Somewhere you absorbed the belief that producing constantly is proof you deserve to call yourself a writer. That real writers write every day. That your inability to maintain a consistent rhythm — while working a full-time job, while running a household, while carrying your nervous system through a world that was not built for your flourishing, while doing the labor of being a Black woman alive in this particular historical moment — is evidence of inadequacy.

It isn’t.

You can’t productivity-hack your way through systemic oppression. You can’t grind your way to a regulated nervous system. The Performance Wound makes your very real constraints feel like personal failures. It keeps you grinding, judging and never resting, which is not a writing problem. It’s a survival pattern wearing writing’s clothes.

I didn’t name these wounds from theory.

I named them from watching them operate in the manuscripts of my clients.

Before I had a framework for any of this, I was a developmental editor working with fantasy and sci-fi writers. Black writers who had chosen speculative fiction specifically — I understood this later — because they thought it was a way out. A genre where they could finally write without performing their Blackness on every page. Magic systems, invented worlds, characters who simply existed without having to justify their existence to white readers.

The white gaze followed them in. I watched it happen in the manuscripts before I had language for it. Characters who came out flat, guarded, emotionally small. These writers had mind-bending imaginations and mad skills. But their nervous systems were still performing safety even in a world they made up entirely.

A tarot pull on a hunch named what two years of craft notes hadn’t.

That was the beginning of The Story Temple.

Here’s what I know is possible on the other side of this work (cuz I’ve seen it and experienced it myself):

A writing session that doesn’t start with chest tightening. A scene where the rage is real and stays real all the way to the end. A character whose spiritual life is fully inhabited, not performed for the back of the room. A rhythm built for your actual body, your actual energy and your actual life, instead of some ideal writer’s body that doesn’t have your history or current responsibilities.

The book gets written. The block gets named. The voice gets returned.

It has nothing to do with finding the right productivity system. And everything to do with you no longer trying to fix something that was never broken.

Your writer’s block ain’t a discipline problem.

It’s information your body has been holding. About your ancestors. About the white gaze. About what it has cost people who look like us to be fully heard.

Naming it is the first step.

The work of unlearning is what comes next.

𓂀✧⟡

If these words named something you’ve been carrying: Write From the Wound is the framework for going deeper. It’s a 7-day shadow work journey designed and built specifically for this type of excavation. The ancestral work, the white gaze, the nervous system and the page. On sale this week only for $27 (then, it goes back to $47). Join here.

Subscribe now

Write From the Wound just moved into that room.

It’s now live on Podia. A proper course home where all seven days live together in one place, along with the Welcome Guide, the Tarot and Oracle Basics reference, and the Resource Library. Everything you need to do this work the way it was always meant to be held, at your own pace and available whenever you need to return to it.

I want to ensure you (inner)stand what this course really does.

One of the writers who went through the original version wrote to me after Day 1:

“I have a flowing connection with writing my truth, but when it comes to publishing online, that white gaze thing takes me down. Doesn’t matter that I’m a contributor to a dozen anthologies and have a memoir out.”

She has the credentials. She has the publications. A very real body of work. And the wound was still there, still doing its job, every single time she went to press publish.

By the end of that first day, she pulled the High Priestess, her first time in all her years of pulling cards, and wrote:

“I’ve found HOME. Where I belong. Safe, no turning back, cannot unknown what I’ve always known, have kept sacred and private inside me, hidden for 73 years.”

That’s what seven days can begin to move.

Let me be very clear: this is not a productivity course. There are no word count goals to meet, no writing sprints to keep up with, no advice telling you to block time on your calendar.

Write From the Wound is seven days of shadow work for Black writers. Each day contains tarot guidance, excavation prompts and somatic practices that move the resistance out of your head and into your body where it can finally shift.

The block you’ve been living with is not a discipline problem. It’s not a laziness problem. It’s not an issue of needing better writing skills either. It is a protection pattern. A pattern that was learned and/or inherited, and it’s quietly running underneath every draft you’ve started and stopped.

This course helps you identify and name it. And then begin writing from the other side of it.

If you were one of the first people to go through this journey when it existed in email form, check your email. I sent you something personal.

For everyone else: the door is open.

Begin Write From the Wound — $47

With love and fire,

High Priestess Lakeisha

Writing is spiritual practice. Reclaiming your voice is an act of sovereignty.

𓂀✧⟡

I mean that thing was pristine. Clean prose, consistent point of view, well-paced scenes that moved the reader along. It was the kind of writing that would get high marks in any creative writing class. The kind of manuscript an agent would call “polished.”

I read it twice. And both times, I set it down feeling nothing.

I wasn’t confused. I wasn’t frustrated. I wasn’t even bored, exactly. Just… empty. Like I’d walked through a beautifully decorated home and everything was covered in plastic. Like sofas used to be back in the day depending on whose house it was.

When I wrote the editorial letter, I struggled with how to say what I needed to say. Because the writing wasn’t bad. There wasn’t anything to circle in red, per se. There wasn’t a craft failure to diagnose and offer solutions and/or suggestions for. The structure was solid. The sentences sang. Every element was present and accounted for.

But the writer wasn’t in it.

Subscribe now

I’ve been an editor for years now, and the pattern I see most often isn’t bad writing. What I see is hollow writing. Writing that performs competence while the writer stands at a distance from their own pages.

Sidebar: Writers don’t hire editors because they write poorly. They hire editors because they write carefully. Too carefully. They want someone to call them back into the work they’ve been circling.

Hollow writing looks different than you might think.

It’s not the first draft that reads like a mess. That’s usually a writer who’s still inside the work, still discovering what they’re saying. The mess is honest and true. The mess has heat.

The hollow manuscript is the opposite. It’s the fifth or sixth draft. Or even the tenth draft in some cases. It’s been critiqued and beta-read and revised until every rough edge is gone. And somewhere in that process, somewhere between the raw truth and the final version, the writer left the room.

They can’t tell you when it happened. Half the time, they don’t even know it happened. They just know that the manuscript they sent me took months to finish and they can’t feel it anymore. They tell themselves that it’s just part of the process of revision. That distance is professionalism. That the absence of feeling means the work is finally ready.

Beloved writer, it’s not ready. It’s abandoned.

Not the way you abandon a project in a drawer. never to see the light of day. This is worse. This is a writer who kept showing up to the page consistently, kept doing the work, kept hitting their word counts and deadlines, and still lost the thread of why they were writing the book in the first place.

Stay with me cuz I’m not talking about writer’s block.

Writer’s block is when you can’t get to the page. When you can’t get the words to flow. That’s its own wound and it has its own medicine. But the writer who lost the way? They’re at the page every day or every week. They’re producing. They might even be publishing online. From the outside, they looks like they’re doing everything right.

The hollowness isn’t visible to anyone but them.

And sometimes… not even to them. Sometimes the only evidence is a low hum of dissatisfaction they can’t articulate. A feeling after they hit publish or type “the end” that should be relief but instead feels like indifference. The quiet knowledge that they used to feel something when they wrote. An aliveness, a heat, a sense that the words were pulling them somewhere they hadn’t been. And that feeling is gone now, but they can’t tell you when it left.

Some will call it burnout. Others will call it a creative rut. Some will buy a new planner or try a different writing schedule or sign up for another course on craft.

None of it will work cuz the problem isn’t any of those things.

The problem is that somewhere along the way, through all that revision and critique, they stopped writing toward something that mattered and started writing toward something that performed.

Here’s what I mean.

There’s a version of writing that moves. And there’s a version of writing that performs movement.

They look almost identical on the page. The sentences are strong in both. The structure holds in both. You could put them side by side and a casual reader might not know the difference.

But the writer knows. And as an editor who views writing differently, I know.

Writing that moves comes from a place inside the work. The writer is there, in the room, in the wound, in the body of the sentence. They’re writing toward a question they don’t fully have the answer to yet, and that not-knowing is what gives the prose its heat. The reader feels it. They probably can’t name it, but they feel it. Something in the writing is alive. Words carry energy, and it calls to them.

Writing that performs comes from a place behind the work. The writer has already decided what they’re saying. They’re managing the reader’s experience instead of sharing their own. The sentences are grammatically excellent but emotionally flat. The conclusions are arrived at before the essay or novel or whatever they’re writing begins. There’s no discovery happening because the writer already knows where they’re going, and that certainty is what makes the whole thing feel dead on the page.

I’ve done this myself. Written entire pieces that were well-constructed and completely hollow. Published them, even. Got the likes and the shares and the comments that said “this is so good,” and knew in my body that I hadn’t said the thing I sat down to say.

That’s the performance wound doing its work. It’s not visible in the craft execution. It’s visible in the why.

The writer who sent me that manuscript wasn’t a beginner or an emerging writer as some of y’all would say. She’d been writing seriously for over a decade. Had the credentials, had the writing practice, had the discipline that most writing teachers would hold up as the gold standard.

And she was miserable because the writing had stopped meaning something.

When I asked her, very gently in the way you ask something you’re not sure the other person is ready to hear, when she’d last written something that scared her, she went quiet. Not thinking-quiet like she was trying to remember an actual date in journal or something like that. The kind of quiet that means the question hit her somewhere she wasn’t expecting.

She said she couldn’t remember.

And then she said something that broke my heart a little:

I think I’ve been writing for an audience I don’t even want anymore.

And just like that, she identified the wound.

This isn’t a problem that any productivity system or writing course or editorial feedback can solve. The question underneath every sentence she’d written for years wasn’t “is this good enough?” It was “who am I writing this for, and when did I stop writing it for me?”

As I’m writing this, I’m thinking about the full moon we had on April 1. Libra energy: the sign of balance, of reciprocity, of relationships. And it makes me think about how the relationship between a writer and their audience is one of the least examined relationships in a creative life.

We talk about finding your audience. Growing your audience. Serving your audience. Writing for your audience.

But we never ask: is this relationship costing you something?

Is the version of yourself that shows up on the page the version that’s true? Or is it the version that gets the most traction? Are you writing toward the readers who need your real voice? Or toward the ones who reward you for performing a voice that’s easier for them to consume?

Because there’s a difference. And the writer who lost the way can feel it even if they can’t name it.

The hollowness isn’t about the audience being wrong. It’s about the writer abandoning themselves to keep the audience comfortable.

So what does the road back look like?

There’s no four-step action plan.

What I will say is this: every writer I’ve worked with who found their way back did one specific thing. They stopped asking “is this good?” and started asking “is this true?”

I don’t mean true in the factual sense. I’m talking about true in the body sense. True in the way that makes your stomach tighten when you write it because you know it costs something to say it plainly. True in the way that makes you want to revise it into something softer and more palatable before anyone sees it and has something to say about it.

The road back is toward the writing that scares you.

It’s the paragraph you delete before anyone reads it. The sentence you hedge with “it felt like” or “in some ways” because saying it directly feels like too much. The piece you’ve been circling for months that you keep telling yourself isn’t ready yet, when what you mean is you’re not ready to be that visible.

That’s where your writing is. The real writing. The writing that moves.

It’s been waiting for you to stop performing and come back to the room.

Lemme ask you something directly:

When did writing stop feeling like yours?

When did it stop belonging to you? The real you. The one who writes because something inside them wants and needs to be said, not because something outside them needs to be produced?

Can you even remember?

And if you can, if there’s a moment, a season, a manuscript, a rejection, a revision that took the heat out of your voice, what would it look like to go back to the page before that happened?

That question might sit with you for a while. Let it.

with love from the waters,

High Priestess Lakeisha

This essay was written as a door. If you felt something shift while reading, if the hollowness I described felt familiar in a way that caught you off guard… Write From the Wound is where that recognition becomes practice. It’s a self-paced course that helps you name what’s underneath your writing patterns and write from the other side of it.

Join Write From the Wound

I’m High Priestess Lakeisha, developmental editor, writing guide and the person who’s gonna ask you questions about your writing that nobody has thought to ask you yet.

I built this place cuz I got tired of watching Black writers being handed the wrong tools.

Productivity systems. Craft rules designed by and for people who’ve never had to translate themselves for a room. Writing feedback that treated our silence as a stylistic choice instead of what it really is: a survival response. A learned protection. The direct result of an industry that has spent decades telling us, with its acquisition decisions and its advances and its editorial rooms, how much space it thinks our full truth deserves.

You already know this. You’ve felt it on the page. The moment you pull back. The moment you reach for a word that’s safer than the one that’s true. The moment your story flattens because some part of you is writing for an audience that hasn’t earned your full voice yet.

That flattening has a name. And it can be healed.

That’s what we do here.

Start here.

If you’re new to the Temple, these five pieces will tell you who I am, what I believe and what kind of work we do together.

Stop Calling Yourself an “Aspiring” Writer - The word “aspiring” isn’t humility. It’s self-sabotage dressed up as modesty, and for Black and Brown writers specifically, it’s doing the gatekeepers’ work for them. This is where the reclamation starts: with the name you give yourself.

Why Black Writers Need Shadow Work - Your writer’s block isn’t a discipline problem. Your resistance isn’t laziness. It’s information your body is holding: ancestral silence, white gaze conditioning, nervous system survival. This piece names what craft advice never will, and makes the case for why excavation is needed.

What White Publishing Took From Us - Your language. Your authority. Your right to complexity. Your right to opacity. White publishing didn’t just gatekeep, it trained us to police ourselves before anyone else could. This essay names the theft precisely, so we can start taking it back.

The Elemental Writer’s Compass - Air. Fire. Water. Earth. These aren’t mere metaphors. They’re a diagnostic system for understanding what your writing needs at any stage of the process. If you’ve ever been lost in a draft and had no idea why, this is your map.

What Type of Editing Do You Actually Need? - Most writers are paying for the wrong kind of editing at the wrong time. This is the insider knowledge the industry assumes you already have, and withholds when you don’t. Read this before you hire anyone. Read it twice if you’re preparing to query or submit.

You were called here for a reason.

It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t the algorithm either. Something in you recognized something here. Maybe the frameworks, maybe the wound-naming, maybe just the fact that somebody finally said the quiet part out loud without flinching.

That recognition is trustworthy. Follow it.

The industry has made its position clear. It told us in the advances it didn’t give, the editors it quietly let go, the surge of 2020 it built and then dismantled when it became inconvenient. It told us in every writing workshop that treated our cultural knowledge as local color and our ancestral grief as backstory.

We’re not waiting for them to change their minds. Cuz they won’t.

We’re building something that doesn’t need their permission to be holy. Asé

With love from the waters,

High Priestess Lakeisha

𓂀✧⟡

Once you settle the question of showing versus telling — once you accept that technique isn’t the issue — you’re left with a harder question.

If it’s not about the technique, what exactly is at stake when a writer stays outside the room? This episode is about diagnosis. These notes are about the cost.

Managed writing is writing that protects itself.

It explains before it lets you feel. It summarizes the hard moment instead of inhabiting it. It hedges at the exact sentence where it should commit. All of this looks like caution. It looks like craft consideration. It looks, sometimes, like humility — the writer not wanting to presume too much, not wanting to overstay their welcome on the page.

But what it really is, is a tax. A quiet, consistent withdrawal from the account.

The reader feels it even when they can’t name it. They finishes the piece and think it was fine. Well-written, even. But nothing moved. They didn’t carry anything away. They weren’t changed. And they won’t come back. No, the writing wasn’t bad. There was just nothing in it that needed them. The writer managed it so carefully that the reader’s particpation became optional.

That’s what managed writing costs. Not readers, necessarily. Connection.

The writer pays a tax too, though it’s less visible.

Every time a writer steps back from the experience — summarizes the hard moment, explains what the image meant before letting it land, hedges the sentence that should be a declaration — they’re making a trade. Safety for heat. Distance for control. They get to avoid the exposure of full commitment. The vulnerability of saying the true thing plainly and letting the reader do what they want with it.

What they lose is the reason they started writing in the first place.

Most writers I work with didn’t come to the page because they wanted to execute technique well. They came because something needed to be said. Because a story was pressing against the inside of them. Because they had something to witness, something to name, something to give. Writing from behind the experience is what happens when that original impulse gets educated out of them — when they learn enough craft to become self-conscious about the very instincts that brought them to the page.

This is what the performance wound does in the Fire element. It doesn’t kill the writing. It just makes sure the writer is never fully in it. Present enough to produce. Absent enough to stay safe.

The shift isn’t a craft fix. You can’t revise your way back into the room.

The shift is a trust decision. Trusting that the experience itself — your specific detail, your bodily truth, your conclusion arrived at in real time — is what the reader really came for. Not the explanation. Not the proof that you know what it means. The reader has no reason to doubt you.

That trust doesn’t come from better technique. It comes from understanding what’s underneath the distance. Which wound taught you that your presence needed managing. Which voice told you the experience wasn’t enough.

That’s the work this episode was pointing toward.

If you want to understand which wound is keeping you outside the room, The 3 Wounds Blocking Your Writing is the best place to start. It’s free.

If you’re ready to go deeper into the wound itself — to write from the other side of it — Write From the Wound is a seven-day shadow work course built for exactly this.

And if you want to keep doing this work with a community of writers who are in the room with you, the inner room of The Story Temple is open.

with love from the waters,

High Priestess Lakeisha

Spirit said we doing this, so I sat down and got to work. Four months, four elements. A curriculum that didn’t exist anywhere in any form before I made it. I wasn’t adapting someone else’s framework or putting a spiritual spin on known craft theory. I was receiving something new and trying to transcribe it faithfully — in real time, without a map, without knowing where it was going until it arrived.

And it was good work. People learned from it. Something true came through.

But I’ve been sitting with it lately, now that I’m on the other side of it, and I can feel something I couldn’t feel while I was in it. I was writing from outside the experience. Reporting what I saw from the trench instead of writing from inside it. I was faithful to what Spirit gave me, but I was standing at a slight distance from the material, holding it up to show you rather than pulling you inside it with me.

I know this because I wrote something two weeks ago that felt completely different.

It was the opening to my most recent essay. About Women’s History Month and what it actually means — or doesn’t mean — for Black women. I didn’t plan it. It arrived. And by the time I finished it, I was standing at my desk with the thing sitting low in my belly, knowing I’d said something I’d been meaning to say for a long time without having the right container for it.

Writing the curriculum felt heavy. Important, true and necessary, but heavy. Like carrying something large across a long distance.

Writing that opening felt like saying the quiet part out loud. No weight. Just heat.

That’s the difference between reporting a scene and inhabiting one.

And that’s what Fire is.

Not plot. Not pacing. Not the number of things that happen on a given page. Fire is whether the writer is in the room with you while it’s happening. It’s the thing that makes you forget you’re reading. The stakes don’t have to be high, but because presence does. A quiet essay about grief can have more Fire than a thriller if the writer is fully inside it. A single paragraph can burn hotter than a hundred pages if the writer committed to the sentence she actually heard instead of the safer version that followed.

When Fire is weak, the writing feels like a list of events. This happened. Then this happened. You’re reading a report from someone who was there. You’re watching from outside the glass.

When Fire is strong, you’re not reading anymore. You’re walking through it.

Here’s what I want to be vulnerable and name directly, because it matters for this practice:

The performance wound was inside my Fire work.

When I was writing the elemental curriculum, I worried — not always consciously, but it was there — that people wouldn’t understand it. That they wouldn’t take it seriously. That I was making a claim about a framework that existed nowhere else and had no institution behind it, no canon to cite, no authority to borrow. So somewhere in that writing, I managed the heat. I held it at a careful distance. I reported what Spirit gave me with precision and faithfulness, but I didn’t fully trust that the experience itself was enough to carry the reader. I kept explaining. Kept contextualizing. Kept standing just outside the room making sure you could see in.

The performance wound doesn’t just block your writing. It shapes the temperature of it.

It teaches you to manage the heat instead of let it move.

The Fire practice this month is simple. One question. One revision move.

Find a place in your current draft where you’re standing outside the room describing what you see.

You’ll know it because it’ll feel like reporting. Like you’re being accurate and faithful to the experience without being inside it. The sentences will be correct. They just won’t have heat.

That’s the place.

If you want to know what it feels like to write from inside the room instead of outside it — the full practice and a writing prompt are waiting for you on the other side.

Read more

She had paid $2,600 for what her editor called “comprehensive editing” on her 75k-word manuscript. Eight weeks later, she got her book back with corrected grammar and a few consistency fixes. Basic copyediting. Not the structural work she had paid for. Not the work her manuscript actually needed.

Her beta readers were still saying the same things they said before she spent the money. I got lost halfway through. The ending felt rushed. I didn’t understand why the main character made that choice.

“I don’t get it,” she told me. “The editor said they fixed everything. But agents are still saying no, it needs more work.”

The structural problems that were preventing an agent from picking it up? Still there. She’d been charged developmental editing prices for surface-level work. And she had no way of knowing the difference because nobody had ever explained it to her.

When I wrote about this in an essay1, I received comments from white editors who said it was her fault. That she should have known what kind of editing she needed before she hired anyone. That she should have done her research.

What they didn’t say — what they never say — is that white writers make the same mistake. I know this from experience because I’ve had white writers as clients too. Writers of every background overpay for the wrong edit, misread what their manuscript needs and/or put trust in the wrong person. The difference is that when it happens to a white writer, it’s an unfortunate experience. When it happens to a Black writer, it’s evidence of something they should have known.

The publishing industry operates on insider knowledge that Black writers are not systematically given access to. We are expected to navigate a system built on assumptions about what we already understand, and then blamed when we make expensive mistakes inside that system.

Something took root in me after working with her.

Not immediately. Not loudly either. I wasn’t enraged or anything like that.

It was more like a question I couldn’t stop asking: What would it look like to build something specifically for us? A container where Black and Brown writers weren’t navigating a system designed to exclude them? Where the knowledge wasn’t gatekept? Where the work could just be the work?

I didn’t have the answer back then. This was during the height of covid and the lockdown. I had lost my corporate job because of the crisis, and started my business to feed my family. The Story Temple was the furthest thing from my mind. But the question stayed. It put down roots before I had language for what it was asking.

I teach three wounds here in The Story Temple. The Silence Wound. The Worthiness Wound. The Performance Wound.

The worthiness wound is the one that’s most active for me right now.

I want to be precise about what I mean when I say that. I don’t mean I struggle to believe my work has value in the abstract. I know it does and you can’t convince me otherwise. I mean the wound shows up in my body before my mind catches up. In the moment before I send the invoice. In the hesitation before I say what I actually charge. In the part of me that has historically worked twice as hard for half the acknowledgment and called that normal.

In my writing. In my business. In my relationships. In every room where I had to decide whether I was going to take up space or make myself smaller so someone else could be comfortable.

Society does not fear Black women because we are dangerous. It fears us because we are powerful, and fear is how power gets managed when it can’t be controlled. The conditioning that tells Black women we are less than, that we have to prove our worth to be accepted, that our presence requires justification — that conditioning is not accidental. It is structural. It is intentional. It is by design.

The worthiness wound is what happens when that conditioning gets inside. When you start to believe, even partially, even in the quiet before-sleep hours, that maybe they’re right. That maybe you are too much. That maybe you should wait until you’re more ready, more qualified, more certain, more [insert whatever this is for you].

This is why shadow work is important. I know my worth is priceless. I know it in a way now that I didn’t know it when I started this business. But healing is not a destination you arrive at and stay. New things come up. Old patterns surface in new situations. You heal, then life gives you something that tests whether you truly healed it or just learned to talk about it differently.

Here is what I have learned: you can build something real while still healing the wound it grew out of.

You do not have to be fully healed to begin. You do not have to have resolved every question about your own worth before you create a container that is about worth. Sometimes the building — the creating — is part of the healing. Sometimes Spirit gives you the assignment before you feel ready, because the readiness comes from doing the thing, not from waiting until you feel like you deserve to or are qualified enough now.

I pulled cards this morning. Mind. Body. Spirit.

Eggshell pots. Spring hike. Germination.

The Germination card says: Trust in and fully embrace the emerging path to who you truly are.

This week, an essay I wrote got one like. And that one like was me cuz I always like my own stuff. A restack of a single sentence from someone else’s article got about fifty likes and is still making the rounds. The notes I’ve been writing carefully, with intention… some of them are going out into what feels like silence.

And then someone replied to an email I sent yesterday:

It costs a lot. And I wonder what would happen if we just let all of US out onto the page. What else would shift around us?

It helped remind me what germination really is.

It’s not the moment the plant breaks through the soil. That’s visible growth. That’s what everyone celebrates and screenshots and calls progress.

Germination is what happens before that. Underground. In the dark. When the seed is doing everything it needs to do to become something, and there is no visible evidence that any of it is working.

The roots are growing. You just can’t see them yet.

I think about my client who paid $2,600 for the wrong edit. I think about what it took for her to reach out to a stranger, to explain what happened, to trust that someone in this industry might be different. That wasn’t her being naive. That was a root. She was still reaching toward something even after being burned.

I think about every moment the worthiness wound told me to stop. To wait. To be more ready. To prove something first. And how I kept going anyway because Spirit kept giving me the assignment and I kept saying yes even when I wasn’t sure. Even though I knew I hadn’t healed the wound.

Some will say this is confidence. I call it faith. And those are two different things.

Confidence says: I know this will work.

Faith says: I don’t know if this will work, and I’m doing it anyway because it’s what I’m being called to do.

The Story Temple is meant to exist. As a beacon. I know that the way I know things before I can explain them. The roots are growing. Even when the numbers are quiet. Even when the algorithm is doing what it does. Even when I am writing into what feels like a void and the void doesn’t write back.

The spring equinox is tomorrow. I’m going to keep watering these roots.

with love from the waters,

High Priestess Lakeisha

We have been included in this month the same way we have been included in just about all institutions: partially, belatedly and on terms we did not set. So when March arrives and the tributes begin, Black women writers are somewhere in the acknowledgment — but rarely at the origin.

Rarely treated as the question the whole month should be asking and pondering on. This essay begins with the work of a client of mine — a Black woman writer who reminded me what it looks like to refuse every condition this month was built on… and to write free anyway.

Back in January, I read a manuscript that really left an impression on me.

It was a high stakes murder mystery — set at an HBCU, steeped in Black Greek life and full of the kind of cultural specificity that doesn’t happen by accident. The kind that only comes when a writer trusts herself enough to put it there. But what touched me so deeply was the grief. One of the characters had been carrying something for twenty years. Not explaining it, not performing it for those around her, just holding it in the way that grief lives in a body. In the panic that comes without warning. In the dream that keeps returning. In the way recognition moves through muscle before it ever reaches the mind.

My client knew that grief. She had put it on the page with a precision that only comes from having carried something a long time.

And then, she kept going. Scene after scene, chapter after chapter. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t flatten out. Didn’t reach for the safe version of the story. She stayed in it all the way to the end.

I finished the manuscript assessment, wrote the editorial letter, sent it back to her and sat with something I don’t always get to feel as an editor.

A Black woman writer who didn’t leave herself out of her own work.

I want you to hold that image for a second. Because we don’t often talk about what it actually looks like when a Black woman writer stays on the page — fully, without apology, without translation.

It looks like an HBCU setting that isn’t explained for an outsider. The Black Greek life dynamics (cuz yes, there’s a difference), the sorority and fraternity history, the specific texture of that world. She trusted that it could just be there. She didn’t slow down to make sure everyone could follow. She wrote it like it was the only world the story knew, because it was.

It looks like grief that doesn’t get summarized. The character didn’t sit down and think about her trauma in organized paragraphs. Her body remembered before her mind did. That’s how it actually works. That’s also how a writer who isn’t performing safety or palatability writes it — as a lived thing happening in real time on the page as opposed to a mere concept.

It looks like relationships that don’t resolve cleanly. The women who failed their sorority sister twenty years ago showed up at the end. They weren’t redeemed or forgiven on a schedule. In fact, they weren’t redeemed or forgiven at all. They were just present. Everything was still complicated. They were still accountable. That complexity stayed intact because the writer didn’t reach for the easier ending.

In my editorial letter, I wrote:

Zahra had been sitting with that grief for 20 years; now it’s their turn to sit with their part in it.

This is what writing true looks like. And I want to name it specifically because the alternative — writing quiet — is so common, so normalized, that most writers can’t feel the distance between the two anymore.

There’s a particular feeling that comes over a draft when a writer has started writing for someone who isn’t her.

The prose tightens in certain places. Dialect gets smoothed out. The sentences that should have heat come out lukewarm instead. Not careless, but managed. The interiority that was so specific in the first chapter starts to reach for something more general by chapter three. More universal, which is a word that has done tremendous damage to Black writers and deserves its own essay entirely.

The writer still shows up. The story is still there. But you can feel the place where she made herself smaller.

Most of the time, the writer doesn’t know she did it. She may have felt something while she was writing. A constriction. A sense of herself getting a little quieter than she meant to be. Maybe it happened at the first sentence — the moment before she committed to the dialect, the cadence, the cultural specificity that was so alive in her head. Maybe it happened during revision, when she read it back and heard herself sounding “too much” and didn’t have language for what too much really meant or whose voice was saying it.

But she’d been taught — by workshops, by craft books, by every writing program that talks about universal appeal without ever asking whose universality we mean — to push through that feeling. To treat it like self-doubt. Like weakness. Like the enemy of a finished draft.

So she pushed through.

And what came out the other side was a draft that was technically and grammatically sound, but spiritually smaller than the writer who made it.

That’s the performance wound doing exactly what it was designed to do. It doesn’t announce itself. It just teaches you to call constriction discipline, and then it waits.

Zora Neale Hurston knew this feeling.

She also refused it.

Their Eyes Were Watching God was written in seven weeks in 1936, in a Haiti boarding house, and it is one of the most fully inhabited novels in literature despite the poor reception it initially received. Zora didn’t translate Black Southern vernacular for a white readership. She didn’t make her characters’ interiority more palatable or their speech more legible to people outside the culture. She wrote Black people’s interior lives the way Black people live them during that time — with specificity, with humor, with spiritual complexity, with the full register of a language that doesn’t need to apologize for itself.

The literary establishment of her time called it folklore. Called it dialect fiction. And questioned whether it was serious literature. Richard Wright, another Black writer, said it had no theme, no message, no protest.

She was reviewed dismissively, underpaid and largely forgotten by the literary mainstream while she was still alive. She died in 1960, in poverty, in a welfare home in Florida. Her grave went unmarked for over a decade. Alice Walker found it in 1973 and put a headstone there herself.

Think about what it took to maintain that level of refusal across an entire writing career while watching what it cost her. Zora knew the performance that was being asked of her. She had been educated, decorated and celebrated in certain rooms — and she still chose the fullness of the work over the safety of palatability.

I want you to sit with that timeline. The decades between Zora’s refusal and the manuscript I read back in January. Decades of Black women writers navigating the same wound, the same standardized reader, the same institutional pressure to manage their voice for rooms that were never built for them.

The performance wound is not a personal failing. It is a survival strategy with a very long institutional memory behind it.

Here is what I want you to understand about the wound.

It doesn’t require you to be a bad writer. It doesn’t require someone who doesn’t love her culture or her language or her people. It doesn’t even require a conscious choice.

All writers want their work to be read. That’s not a compromise. That’s not being a sellout. That’s the whole point of making something — you want it to meet somebody. But somewhere in the machinery of traditional writing education, wanting to be read got collapsed into writing for the people who decide what gets read. And for Black women writers, that has almost always meant writing for a readership that was never us, inside institutions that were never built for us, toward a standard of universality that was never universal.

The writer whose manuscript I read and assessed didn’t fall into that collapse. She wrote true — all the way through, all the way to the end — and it made everything land harder. The grief hit because she didn’t soften it. The relationships had complexity because she didn’t resolve them cleanly. The setting had specificity because she trusted it enough to leave it specific.

What does that feel like from the inside? I think it feels like staying in the room when everything in your training is telling you to step back. Like committing to the sentence you first heard in your head instead of the safer version that followed. Like trusting that the reader who needs your work will find it — and writing for them, not for the white reader publishing taught you to keep in mind.

My client wrote for the story. Not for the white reader we as Black writers are trained to center. And that is an act of resistance that most writing workshops will never name as such — but it is. Every time a Black woman writer chooses her own language over the managed version, stays in the body of a character instead of summarizing the feeling, leaves the cultural specificity intact instead of translating it — she is doing something Zora did all throughout her writing career that still hasn’t become unremarkable.

It should be unremarkable by now.

It isn’t.

So I’ll ask you directly: when you sit down to write, who are you writing for?

Not who you say you’re writing for. Who you’re actually writing for when you smooth that sentence out. When you take the dialect back out. When you read the paragraph back and decide it’s too much — too specific, too loud, too Black, too you.

Who told you that was too much?

And are you still letting them sit in the room while you write?

If the performance wound is what’s been running your first drafts, this is where you begin.

Write From the Wound is seven days of going underneath what’s been making you write small, so you can find out what you actually sound like on the page.

Write From the Wound → $47. Seven days. Your voice was never the problem.

with love from the waters,

High Priestess Lakeisha

For a lot of Black and Brown people — particularly women — the opposite was true. We were taught that the body is to be beaten into submission. The thing you override. The thing you push past on the way to wherever you’re going.

We were told: Don’t cry. Stop being so sensitive. You’re too emotional. Toughen up.

Strength looked like not feeling. Or more accurately — it looked like feeling and not showing it. Feeling and not responding to it. Feeling and continuing anyway, like the feeling wasn’t even there.

And there is real wisdom in that. Our people survived things by learning to adapt and to keep moving. That is ancestral power, and I won’t downplay it.

But some survival strategies have a shelf life. What kept our ancestors moving through unbearable circumstances can become — in our bodies, in our lives — a reflex that overrides information we actually need.

And it follows us directly to the writing desk.

The Silence Wound Lives in the Body, Not the Mind

In Sunday’s essay, The Two Drafts, I wrote about the silence wound — the reflex that deletes the sentence before you know you’re going to delete it. That softens the claim. That translates your voice into something more acceptable before anyone asks.

What I didn’t have space to say in the essay is this: that reflex isn’t a thought. You can’t argue yourself out of it. It’s a physiological response — your nervous system assessing a threat and responding accordingly. That’s just how the nervous system works.

And if you were taught that your body’s signals are obstacles to override, you will never catch this wound while it’s operating. Because catching it requires noticing it. And noticing requires you to be in relationship with your own body in the first place.

That’s not a small thing to ask. For a lot of us, our families, our communities, our culture conditioned us not to do that.

What I’m really asking when I say pay attention to what happens in your body when you write — is a reclamation assignment. Not a writing exercise.

The Time Spirit Got My Ass Together — One of Many

A few months ago I felt called to pull cards for the collective. Write up the reading. Share it on Substack.

I pulled the cards. I wrote it exactly the way Spirit gave it to me — raw, direct, no softening. Let it sit. Then went back to edit.

And started editing it down to the ground.

I was debating back and forth with Spirit like — I cannot say it like that. Somebody’s going to get offended. I was doing the thing in real time. Taking the potency out of something that was given to me in that specific form for a reason — because it needed to land a certain way — and sanding it down because my body was afraid of the response.

Spirit, very lovingly, got my ass together.

The message: yes, delivery matters. We should always use care in our communication. But sometimes something needs to be said in a specific way so it can land the way it needs to land. Put everything back exactly the way it was.

So I did. Quick proofread for spelling and grammar — because I’m an editor, that’s non-negotiable — and then I published it before my fear could talk me out of it again.

Then came the hard part. Sitting with it being out there. Edge-snatching and raw and on the internet for whoever needed it.

Here’s what that story illustrates: I know this work. I teach this work. I built a career helping writers find their truest voice on the page. And I still had to be corrected in real time.

That’s how deep the conditioning goes. It doesn’t care what you know. It cares how safe your body feels.

What Listening Looks Like

The work starts with noticing. Before you can change anything, you have to be willing to feel it — not analyze it, not fix it right away. Just feel it.

What does your body do when you open the document? When you start writing the sentence you know is going to make somebody clutch their pearls? Where does the tightness live? What do your hands do?

These are the beginning of a somatic writing practice. Learning to be in your body while you write — instead of writing from somewhere above it or outside of it entirely.

And I want to say this directly to the Black and Brown writers here: listening to your body is not self-indulgence. It is not weakness. It is not the opposite of discipline.

It is the reclaiming of information that was systematically taken from us. The right to feel what we feel. To let the body speak. To treat its signals as data instead of obstacles.

Our ancestors survived by overriding their bodies. They had to.

We get to survive differently. We get to write from them.

You Are Not Broken

You’re not undisciplined. You’re not someone who just needs better writing habits or a tighter morning routine.

You’re a writer whose body learned things that made sense at the time. And who now gets to learn something different.

That’s the work. It’s slower than any productivity system. And it’s worth every single minute.

If you’re ready to do this work in a structured container, Write From the Wound is a 7-day shadow work journey built for exactly this — not to push through the resistance, but to understand what it’s been protecting.

Join Write From the Wound → Click here

Enjoyed this episode? Share it with a writer who needs it. And subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming next.

Subscribe now

Share

There are two versions of the piece you’re working on right now. Piece… meaning book, essay, poem, article, etc.

The first one came through fast. Maybe late at night. Maybe right after prayer, or a walk, or a conversation that created a lightbulb moment for you. You didn’t plan it. You just started writing and something moved through you that felt true in a way your usual writing doesn’t. Raw. Specific. Very honest. You read it back and thought: This da one. I wrote the hell outta this.

Then you sat with it for a day. Maybe two.

And then you opened the document and started editing.

Not tightening sentences. Not clarifying the purpose. Softening. You took out the sentence that called a spade a spade and replaced it with something that gestured toward it. You cut the paragraph where you said exactly what you meant because it felt “too much.” You read it back, nodded at how professional it sounded now and closed your laptop.

And somewhere in your body — your chest, your throat, the place between your shoulder blades — something went quiet that had been trying to speak.

That quiet sensation? That’s the silence wound.

Subscribe now

It Doesn’t Announce Itself

This is what makes the silence wound different from the other wounds we carry as writers.

The worthiness wound announces itself. You can hear it — who do you think you are to write this, nobody wants to read this, you’re not a real writer. It’s loud. It’s annoying. It’s exhausting. But at least you can identify it as a voice that’s lying to you.

And if you can’t recognize it as a lie yet… if that voice still sounds like the truth… that’s not a character flaw on your part. That’s how deep the wound goes. We’ll get to that.

The performance wound has a voice too. It’s the one micromanaging your word count, policing your consistency, telling you that real writers don’t take breaks and you’re already behind. Relentless, but still a voice you can argue with.

The silence wound doesn’t talk. It acts.

It’s already deleted the sentence before you knew you were going to delete it. It’s already added the disclaimer, softened the claim, translated the Ebonics into something more “neutral,” explained the cultural reference that your people don’t need explained — all before your conscious mind weighed in with an opinion. By the time you read the revised draft and think this feels kinda flat, the wound has already done its work.

It’s not a thought. It’s a reflex. And reflexes live in the body, not the mind.

What Your Body Learned

Your body learned that speaking your full truth has consequences.

Maybe it was a specific moment. The memoir you wrote that made your family go silent and give you side-eye at dinner. The op-ed you submitted to a newspaper that got called “too angry.” The time you said the true thing out loud and watched the room shift. Your nervous system catalogued that. And filed it under: this is what happens when you say too much.

Or maybe it wasn’t a singular moment. Maybe it was a slow accumulation, a thousand small corrections from writing teachers or facilitators who wanted your voice to sound more neutral, more formal, more like the “standard” that doesn’t account for how you think. A thousand tiny signals that the way you naturally speak and move and see the world needed to be dialed down and translated before it was acceptable.

Your body learned. And now it protects you the only way it knows how.

It makes the real version disappear before anyone can reject it.

The Two-Draft Life

I know this life from both sides.

As a developmental editor, I can see the silence wound in a manuscript from the first page. I know what it looks like when a writer has taken themselves out of their own work. The hedged claim where there should be a declaration. The paragraph that circles the true thing without ever landing on it. The sentence that was clearly written by someone who was feeling braver than the one who approved it for submission or publication. I’ve sat across from writers and said: the most potent sentence in this whole piece is the one you buried in the middle of page four. Why did you put it there? And I already knew the answer before they said anything

Then I switch hats after hours and do the exact same thing to my own writing.

Because I also know the other side. I write things that come through fast and true — channeled from Spirit, raw and way more direct than my polished voice usually goes. And then I go back. And the professionally trained editor in me takes over. Except she’s not editing anymore. She’s managing. I start sanding the piece down for the reader I don’t want to offend, taking the edge off every place that might cut, until nothing’s left that could reach the reader I’m actually writing for. I soften the statements that landed too hard. I hedge the claims that felt too authoritative or assertive. I translate the version of me that showed up first into something that feels safer to release into the world.

Some of that is craft, yes. Real revision is needed. You’re supposed to shape the raw material.

But there’s a specific kind of editing that isn’t craft. It’s fear wearing craft’s clothes. And the difference between the two lives in your body, not your brain. When you’re doing real revision, your body stays loose. Curious. A little excited. When the silence wound is running things, your chest gets tight. You’re not making the piece better — you’re flattening it. You’re taking yourself out of it.

What remains is technically cleaner. But it has no pulse.

The irony isn’t lost on me. I built a career helping writers find the truest version of their work. And yet I still get caught up in this tug of war at times — in my own body, in my own writing — to let my truest version stay on the page.

That’s how deep this wound goes. It doesn’t care how much knowledge about writing and/or editing you have. Or how long you’ve been on your writing journey. It cares how safe your body feels when doing these things. And nothing else.

What It’s Costing the Work

Here’s what the silence wound takes when it does its editing on your behalf:

It takes specificity. The most alive writing is always specific. It’s the named street, the exact phrase Big Mama used, the specific quality of light in the room when the event happened. The silence wound edits toward generalizations because general feels safer. General doesn’t name names. General can’t really be used against you. But general also doesn’t hit anybody in the chest.

It takes authority. The sentence that got deleted — the one where you said what you said without hedging it — that sentence knew what it was doing. The sentence that replaced it is still working up the nerve. Your reader can feel the difference. They don’t always know what they’re feeling to put it into words, but they know something shifted.

It takes the reader. This is the one that doesn’t get talked about enough. When you perform safety on the page, your reader — your real reader, the one you’re writing for — loses you. It’s not that they don’t understand the polished version. They understand it just fine. Trust me. But they came to your writing because they felt recognized in it. And when you edit yourself out, they stop feeling recognized. They keep reading, sure. But they’re reading alone now. Your presence is gone.

The silence wound doesn’t just cost you. It costs them too.

The Practice

You don’t bulldoze the wound. You don’t just “be brave” and publish the raw version unedited. That’s not writing from liberation. That’s swapping one extreme for another. And from an editor’s perspective, publishing raw, unedited content — whether it be a book, an op-ed, a Substack essay, etc. — is not the flex you think it is. It’s dumb. You can argue wit ya mama about it.

What you do is learn to feel the difference in your body between real revision and fear-based editing.

Real revision: your chest is open. You’re making intentional choices. You’re in the work. You’re in flow.

Fear-based editing: something in you goes tight. You’re not shaping the piece — you’re managing it. You’re getting smaller and the work is getting smaller with you.

When you feel that tightness, stop. Don’t push through it. Ask your body what it’s protecting you from. Ask: whose disapproval am I editing for right now? Who is the imagined reader I’m sanding this down for?

And then — not every time, but sometimes — you put the sentence back.

The First Draft Is Evidence

Here’s what I want you to sit with:

The fact that the first version came through the way it did — raw, specific, more honest than you usually let yourself be — that didn’t happen by chance. That’s your true voice when it’s not being managed.

It exists. You wrote it. Even if you buried it in a folder nobody will ever open. Even if you deleted it the same night you wrote it. It came through once, which means it can come through again.

The silence wound is not your true voice. It’s what learned to stand in front of your voice.

And underneath all that careful editing, all those softened sentences, all those deleted paragraphs… your real voice is still in there. Still trying to get out and be heard. Still writing the first draft in the middle of the night when your guard is down.

The work is to keep the door open long enough for it to come through.

As much as I adore a good metaphor, I’m not speaking metaphorically here. This type of work requires daily practice. It’s asking your body what it’s protecting before you hit delete. It’s putting the sentence back, even when your hands and your brain don’t want to. It’s learning — slowly, with evidence — that the truest version of your writing is the one worth fighting to keep on the page.

This is what Write From the Wound was created for.

Seven days of going underneath the silence wound — and a few others — to understand what it’s been holding, and to start writing from the place it’s been protecting.

It’s not about being fearless on the page. It’s about learning, slowly and with evidence, that your truest voice is worth fighting to keep there.

If the silence wound is what’s sitting between you and the piece you most need to write — this is where you begin.

Write From the Wound → $47. Seven days. Your first draft deserves to survive the second one.

You may or may not know this about me — but in addition to running The Story Temple and working with private clients, I do contract work on the side. Virtual assistance, editing, that kind of thing. It pays the bills while I build what I’m actually here to build. My goal — the one that’s been sitting on my chest — is to quit that contract work and run The Story Temple full time. To serve the Black writing community and do spiritual shit with my friends. That’s my dream.

So when I decided to do a business run I was calling “Return to Lineage,” I meant it. Content every day. Show up and teach. Build momentum. I had a whole system going — essays, notes, podcast episodes, threads. I was executing my ass off. And every morning I woke up tired before I even sat down at my desk, I told myself that was just part of it.

That’s what building something looks like, right? That’s what doing the work means.

Except somewhere around day sixteen or seventeen, I looked up and realized I hadn’t raised my prices. I had an offer out there — real, good, transformative work with testimonials — priced like an apology. Like I was asking permission to be taken seriously instead of just being serious.

And that’s when I caught it.

I wasn’t building a business. I was proving I deserved one.

The worthiness wound is sneaky. It don’t always show up looking like low self-esteem or shrinking in a corner. Sometimes it shows up looking like hustle. Like discipline. Like a woman who is clearly working very, very hard.

It tells you that reciprocity is something you earn. That you gotta log enough hours, produce enough content, show enough consistency before you get to ask for what you’re worth. It tells you that ease is laziness. That if it ain’t hard, you probably ain’t doing it right.

I had been running a 30-day content sprint — a content machine — and underpricing my offers at the same time. I knew my work had value. But some part of me was still waiting to have proven it enough.

The worthiness wound don’t always look like low self-esteem. Sometimes it looks like a woman working herself to the bone and still not asking for what she deserves.

I looked at my birth chart recently and saw something I’d been living but hadn’t said out loud. Sun and Venus both in Capricorn, both tucked away in the 12th House. The 12th House is the house of self-undoing. Capricorn is the sign that equates worth with sacrifice and labor. And Lilith — Black Moon Lilith, the part of you that got exiled for refusing to shrink — she’s in Capricorn too. In the 12th. Buried.

I’m not telling you this to get deep in astrology. I’m telling you because sometimes you need to see it written in the stars to finally believe it’s real.

The wound was always there. I just kept calling it a work ethic.

Tuesday, March 3, there’s a lunar eclipse in Virgo, my moon sign.

A lunar eclipse is completion energy. It’s the universe turning on every light in a room you’ve been navigating in the dark. Whatever has been operating below the surface — whatever you’ve been doing without fully seeing it — an eclipse will make it visible. And then ask you to let it go. That’s what eclipses do.

For me, I’m releasing the belief that things have to be hard to count for something. I’m releasing the content machine version of myself that was running on fumes and calling it momentum. I’m releasing the underpricing, the over-explaining, the doing-too-much-for-too-little that I dressed up as dedication.

I am not a content machine. I am a writer, a guide, a priestess of this work. And I deserve reciprocity. Not someday. Now.

That’s what this eclipse is asking me to put down.

So I want to ask you something before the eclipse gets here.

What have you been calling dedication that might actually be punishment?

What story have you been writing — or not writing — because some part of you is still in the process of earning the right to tell it?

Where is the worthiness wound showing up in your writing life, looking like something else entirely?

You don’t have to answer out loud. But sit with it. Let the eclipse do what it came to do.

Something is completing. Something is ready to be put down.

Let it go.

BEFORE YOU GO…

The Story Temple is the container for writers who are done doing this alone.

If this essay named something you’ve been living, paid membership is where we go deeper. Every month: essays, office hours, resources, community and me — in the room with you. That’s what reciprocity looks like from my end.

The door is open. Come on in.

He loved America. He said so plainly. And because he loved her, he insisted on the right to criticize her perpetually. That’s not a contradiction. That’s integrity.

In this episode, we move from silence to something more difficult: refusal.

The Worthiness Wound doesn’t silence you. It negotiates you. It convinces you to pre-soften your truth before anyone asks you to. It teaches you to cook your sentences for someone else’s stomach. To translate yourself. To balance what doesn’t need balancing. To sand down what was meant to cut clean.

And then you call that craft.

That ain’t craft.

Craft asks: Is this precise? Is this clear? Is this doing what I intended it to do?

The Worthiness Wound asks: Will they still like me afterward?

Those are not the same question.

Baldwin wrote with precision, not palatability. He did not dull his sentences to widen his welcome. He sharpened them. He understood what too many writers are still learning:

Clarity is not the same thing as comfort.

Comfort protects the white gaze.
Clarity protects the truth.

There is a difference between precision and palatability. Precision is artistic discipline. Palatability is political conditioning. One strengthens your authority. The other quietly erodes it.

When you write as if you must earn your place, your sentences apologize. When you write as if your place is already secured, your sentences stand.

Authority in writing isn’tvolume. It’s posture.

This episode asks you to notice where you are negotiating your truth before anyone has demanded it. Where you are shrinking preemptively. Where you are confusing “I didn’t relate” with “This failed.”

Not every room deserves dilution. Not every reader is your audience. Specificity is not exclusion. It’s power.

Baldwin didn’t dilute himself to widen his welcome.
He widened the conversation by refusing to dilute.

If this conversation struck a nerve, my free guide The 3 Wounds Blocking Your Writing will help you name the patterns shaping your craft decisions — silence, worthiness and performance — so you can choose alignment over obedience.

Your truth doesn’t need to audition.

With love from the waters,

High Priestess Lakeisha