The Way Out Is In

1,000 Words Today, A Story Tomorrow, A New World Now

Seeda Syllabus (2020) Designed as a “worksheet”, the syllabus is a fill-in-the-blank unlearning device inspired by the instructional work of Audre Lorde. The syllabus helps participants organize and share what they currently need to ask and read, with the intention of making unlearning and engaging our radical imagination a public, forever social activity. Seeda Syllabus was created during the E:17, Transformer residency on zines and generously risograph printed through mutual aid by Ipsy Bipsy Studio in Washington, D.C.

Dear Worldbuilder,

Lately I have been getting up before the sun. This time not to obsess over my to-do list or throw myself beyond the distance that is even required of me. No, lately I’ve been getting up to write 1,000 words. To write a novel, a memoir, a self help book, a collection of essays, a collection of poems, a collection of prayers, a whatchamacallit, a way out.

Why 1,000 words? Because I don’t know how else to do this. I’ve never made it this far into the woods before. I try not to obsess over the first sentence, tweaking it until it cuts like a knife you’re eager to welcome. What about the characters? Who are they, what do they want, what do they need and how, how, how do I protect them? And don’t get me started on the book’s spine, the outline, the chapter structure, the high beams that I need in order to see where I’m going on a road that doesn’t exist yet.

Time and time again these lists of micro-obsessions stop us from starting. Frustrated I question myself, “what’s the problem”? You know how to do this, storytelling is how you got here, the stories are the water you are swimming in. The wake and the weather. You know stories. In an essay I wrote during a creative biotechnology residency titled, “The Stories We Tell: Blackness As Biotechnology, Collective Imagination, and Study” I quoted Muriel Rukeyser saying “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms” and remember how true that feels inside an election season scaffolded by fiction. So what is this fierce resistance to examining the narrative molecules of my own story, my own universe, my own fictions?

Time and time again the fear of uncertainty stops us from starting. The vulnerability of an open plain, a blank page, traversing a road that doesn’t exist yet but must¹, generates a familiar panic. A panic we’ve learned. How do we allow ourselves to desire freedom more than we crave safety?

I don’t know, but I’m determined to live the questions inside the practice².

Today the practice looks like 1,000 words. Today it looks like protecting a 2 hour valley of time to allow those words to fall to my feet like the grace of an autumn leaf. Like a rope let down from the sky. Like a whatchamacallit. A way out.

Seeda School News

🍁 I wrote the paragraphs above while on a walk through the autumn forest last week and days later I was reminded that the way out has always been disguised as the way in³.

🎙️ The podcast For the Worldbuilders will be back with a new season starting November 28th. Season 2 is all about interdependence. With “Interdependence” as our focus we will explore how every story rooted in independence is a lie, why we crave safety over freedom and how the fear of uncertainty keeps us strangers to eachother and ourselves. I can’t wait to explore and live the questions with you in season 2!

🌳 In the meantime, I’ll see you in tomorrow’s workshop titled “Queer Your Education: Create Your Syllabus for Unlearning”. This workshop is open to current Seeda School Treehouse members and together we will explore how we might reclaim research too queer for capitalism, create our own syllabi⁴ for interdependent study and learn how to navigate unpaved roads through trusting the wayfinding technology of our intuition and curiosity. Sign up for the waitlist to learn when Seeda School enrollment reopens.

1. “The grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn’t happened yet but must. It is an attachment to a belief in what should be true, which impels us to realize that aspiration. It’s the power to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not, but must be. It’s a politics of prefiguration that involves living the future now.” — Tina Campt, “Quiet Soundings: The Grammar of Black Futurity.” Listening to Images, p. 17.

2. “I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (public library)

3. Just today, I realized the title of this newsletter, “The Way Out Is The Way In” is also the title of a book, calligraphy work and podcast inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh.

4. In this month’s workshop we will also explore a variety of case studies featuring ways to weave collective study into your art practice. One of the case studies will feature the Seeda Syllabus, the first iteration of Seeda School, which can be found here.