Welcome to The Story Temple

Pull up a chair, beloved. There’s food on the stove.

We don’t rush here.

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.

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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.

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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✧⟡

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