What is Your Creative Offer?
A Questionnaire to Oneself
“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself — a Black woman warrior poet doing my work — come to ask you, are you doing yours?”
— Audre Lorde, “Transformation of Language Into Silence and Action”1 (1977), pg. 41-42
People often ask me why worldbuilding? Why cling to that method like it’s the last sign post standing in a storm? That’s because, for me, it was. As a black woman warrior poet in her early 20’s juggling a series of restaurant jobs, a creative consulting practice, a string of retail jobs and eventually a full-time position as a software engineering instructor I would often ask myself, “how will I survive this”? How will I manage this severing of self in the name of survival? I thought about all the black woman warrior poet washerwomen, teachers, federal workers, human computers, academics who came before me. If they could do it, so could I. Wear the cape during the day and write my poems at night. So could I. So…to escape the loop of stacking part-time jobs while still maintaining the wholeness of my creative spirit, I decided the “natural” next step was to learn how to code. In 2018, I fell in love with the social practice of learning again and decided to teach. Then after becoming burned out from a demanding teaching job, I embarked on another job search; this time as a software engineer. As the days melted into months I began to experience physical neck and back pain spending hours studying data structures and algorithms whose lines of code mirrored musical notes that sounded like safety so I sang along. For most of my life, safety felt like the constantly unmet need. If “cracking the coding interview” housed the promise of safety on the other side I was ready to pull out all my tools of survival thus far: working through meals, exchanging sleep for more completed items on the day’s to-do list, willfully ignoring physical pain, exercising domination over the needs of my body and calling it discipline.
I tried to make the cut, I tried with everything in me. I promise you I tried but my body wouldn’t allow the severing. In 2021 my ancestors called me to Dawn, VA where they had worked the land for three centuries. I fell to my knees in surrender and Seeda was born.
Why worldbuilding? Because the only way I could invent the belief that safety was possible as a black woman warrior poet was to invent a black queer character in a parallel universe who was safe and cared for — a speculative ancestor in an abolitionist future leading the way, because, how else? How else could I cultivate the courage to trust the life I have now could ever be possible? The one where I get to wake up and write, then spend 3 hours walking inside the forest, only to come back to write some more. The one where I get to teach for 2.5 hours a week and record a podcast talking about how ecstatic the experience of collective study is. The one where I spend the afternoons bathing in black feminist research and evenings sharing a meal with someone I love. The one where I get to transform my silence into language and action by speaking out against zionism and for Palestinian liberation without compromising my income. The one where I am a black woman warrior poet and severing is no longer an option because it is fighting for and surrendering to my wholeness that brought me to this life. Who knew the safety I’d been searching for was in the surrender not the severing? I didn’t, but Seeda did.
Seeda School’s mission is to make the revolution irresistible through worldbuilding. But how? One method is to move toward collective liberation through collective divestment. This means we must abandon all beliefs that the only paths to safety are the roads paved with the concrete of colonization and white supremacist ways of working. We must emotionally, spiritually and intellectually divest from all value systems in misalignment with the truth of our love and desire. The value systems of fear and domination require severance and that is a path we can no longer accept. But what’s left when we step off the concrete of colonization? Relation. A wide open field of soft, green wildness so emergent that it seems terrifying at first until you scan the horizon and you spot us. Look, there, yes there. Come. We saved a plate and a spot on the picnic blanket for you.
Mariame Kaba reminds us “safety is a relation”2; it's not a thing that is granted or a thing that is “earned” through practicing domination over the needs of our body and spirit. Any sensations of safety achieved through these means are false and fleeting. I know and I’m sorry. It’s terrifying. It’s terrifying because we were never meant to survive but here we are choosing each other again and again. Black woman warrior poets, black queer warrior poets, black trans warrior poets, black disabled warrior poets and all our comrades, we made it to the wide open field. Thank god. Now what are our tools, frameworks and creative offers for helping each other navigate this wide open expanse?
Worldbuilding is my framework, the Seed A World Retreat is my offering and “The Creative Offer Questionnaire to Oneself” is the tool I want to share today. Use this link to download your very own copy of the questionnaire. Inspired by “The Audre Lorde Questionnaire to Oneself” created by Divya Victor, “The Creative Offer Questionnaire to Oneself” walks you through four key questions whose answers intersect in ways that allow you to discover your income generating and values aligned offer. The offering that allows you to refuse severance inside your interdisciplinary practice by practicing surrender, spiritual alignment and relation instead.
My journey of personal liberation through personal divestment is one that was cobbled together with the help of creative community, mentorship, a sequence of artists residencies, a series of artist grants and a safe house I retreated to in the enchanted ancestral forests of Dawn, VA to worldbuild. Perhaps it was a journey I had to walk before I could facilitate workshops on how we create our own tools, frameworks and offers for collective divestment. I stepped off the paved road and left a little foot trail for you to follow if you want to join us. The Seed A World Retreat is a 9-week incubator helping you return to the truth of your desires, craft your story, and release a creative offer that has the capacity to fund the entire ecosystem of your interdisciplinary practice. We are currently in the Fall 2023 session of the retreat and enrollment for the Winter 2024 session will open in mid-January. In the meantime, use “The Creative Offer Questionnaire to Oneself” to start reflecting on what you might bring to the picnic.
Whatever your contribution, I promise we need it. I created the questionnaire to help support you in beginning to translate your story of personal transformation into a values aligned offer that’ll help invite others to join us “off road” and into the wild beyond. Maybe your primary source of income is coming from an academic institution upholding white supremacy, a non-profit who isn’t practicing what it preaches, a full-time job that mandates your silence or influencer contracts with brands who refuse to make room for your anti-colonial political analysis. While there is no perfect scenario for generating income while inside of capitalism, we can begin the work of divestment right now, where we are, with what we have. What does that look like? One way is to begin the work of replacing your current, primary source of income with income from a creative offer aligned with your values, your deep desire and the world you’re dreaming of.
Why worldbuilding? Because another one is possible.
With desire,
Ayana
Audre Lorde’s “Transformation of Language Into Silence and Action” essay was delivered at the Modern Language Association’s “Lesbian and Literature Panel,” in Chicago, Illinois, December 28, 1977. Then first published in Sinister Wisdom 6 (1978) then The Cancer Journals (Spinsters, Ink, San Francisco, 1980).
So much gratitude to
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