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082. Professionalism Requires Our Lies, Poetry Requires Our Truth
Manage episode 496501597 series 3590063
My intention behind this episode is to invite you to seed a public creative practice through, what we call in Seeda School, “weekly dispatches” for time accountability or “creative dispatches” for time freedom. Whatever your desired relationship with time — committing to a cadence of newsletters, podcasts or videos, as dispatches becomes a public ritual of staying close to yourself. A sacred ceremony of bi-directional witnessing.
Inside this sacred witnessing ceremony we don’t need your “professionalism” we need your poetry. We don’t need your cynicism, we need your care. We don’t need your cool, we need your conviction. At times it can feel easier to write for cover letters, grant applications, school applications or memos on the job because professional development rarely requires our honesty. Some career-conscious spaces even encourage our lies, asking us to leave our politics at the door as if that’s even possible. It can feel harder to write for ourselves and seed a public practice through creative writing, because our poetry demands our truth. Our poetry demands that we acknowledge our pleasure and politics as the only starting points we need to create work worthy of our breath. Inside this episode I share spells for doing exactly that.
Resources
- Register for the free Worldbuilding Workshop to learn more about Seeda School’s 1:1 Coaching: https://www.seedaschool.com/coaching
- Subscribe to the Seeda School Substack: https://seedaschool.substack.com/
- Follow Ayana on Instagram: @ayzaco
- Follow Ayana on Threads: @ayzaco
- Follow Seeda School on Instagram: @seedaschool
Citations
- “Suicidal Ideation On The Subway: Taking Me To A World Beyond The Cul-De-Sac” by Ayana Zaire Cotton
- James Baldwin to Maya Angelou, “If I love you and I duck it, I die” inside “Conversation with a Native Son”
- “I write best when I stop trying to be brilliant and start trying to be honest.“ — Yrsa Daley-Ward
- Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “We didn’t come here to be right, we came here to love” in Stars and Stars with Isa
- Ocean Vuong in an interview with Sarah Ferguson for 7.30 ABC
- Cover Art: Black and White Photograph of Maya Angelou Writing
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