Writing With the World

Why does it feel like we're all writing more?

Katherine Johnson works with an adding machine and a celestrial training device—a sort of globe-within-a-globe to help calculate space navigation—at NASA's Langley Research Center in 1962.

It was always there.

A life partner I never gave a name. Once it’s named it can be owned and I knew it would all end if they took them away. No this was mine. It was always there. There, when I started a magazine in college writing manifestos that were really chanting songs. There, when I started a clothing line and wrote poems in the descriptions on the website instead of the garment’s dimensions, composition, and care. There, when Seeda School started as Seeda Press. There, when I scribbled my way out of depression and anxiety again and again and again and again and…

I developed a practice of witnessing the world and painting its landscapes with pen inside the intimacies of stacks and stacks of journals. It took a decade for me to call myself a writer, to name it. To release it. To release myself and surrender to the world. Surrender to the river.

I call it the river, Saidiya Hartman calls it the chorus, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo calls it the web. This headless, collective anti-body, with practices as strong as spider silk leaving behind threads you can’t see but can feel. — Ayana Zaire Cotton, We Web As Rehearsal (2022)

It took me so long to give this life partner a name because for so long I thought it was all I had. “Star shine, moon glow / You're all that I can call my own.”¹ I now know my writing practice was never mine, it too belonged to the world because it too was made up of the world. The river of data we swim in everyday. The water that finds it’s way in our nose, mouth, ears, burning our eyes and reverting our hair. 

Figure 4: Dorothy Vaughan’s NASA Retirement ID card. Displayed in Scripture and Science: Our Universe, Ourselves, Our Place, through January 15, 2024. Courtesy of Ann Vaughan Hammond, Daughter of Dorothy J. Vaughan.

Last week while in conversation with Omayeli Arenyeka, I asked why does it feel like we’re all writing more? We talked about the personal and collective grief of the last three years and how writing is a tool for composting it. Even my Instagram feed is more pictures of words than pictures of people², a river or bulletin board stream of flyers, mutual aid asks, community resource slides and Substack snippets. Transposing our worry into words, we are writing more even if it’s just to invite you to the workshop, where we will write some more.

What’s equally interesting is some of us are writing in collaboration with our computers, with code, with data — making the river the co-author. And I’m not talking about the writers using AI and large language models, that’s something else. I’m talking about what Kameelah Janan Rasheed does, what Neta Bomani does, what Lillian-Yvonne Bertram did with Travesty Generator, what I did with Daily Seed and Cykofa. I asked Yeli what’s going on here, is it about this deep desire in each of us to consent not to be a single being³, relinquish authorship, and join the rest of the world in its wildness? Is it about being a part of this cultural moment where the kids who grew up on the computers, the kids who now make their living on the computers, nostalgically are craving a more intimate relationship with the machine again — longing for the days when it was a portal to a social playspace, online recess as afterschool, when the web was for worldbuilding and modest marronage? Yeli shared the article, “The Online Publications Bridging Poetry and Code” by Meg Miller and a “Game Design for Poets” course by Felix Lecocq. I thought about the School of Poetic Computation’s classes on Narrative Constellations: Exploring Choice, Time, and Location-based Storytelling and the two I’ve taken Reading, writing & compiling and Teaching and Learning as Primitive Hypertext. I also thought about a link Kameelah shared with me, Making a Poetic Web(site) by Chia Amisola. Writing shapes the fabric of reality and we are desperate to shape something new, computer cousins welcomed too. There are plenty more links pointing to examples of thinking about writing alongside code and from what I can tell most of these folks don’t have MFAs in creative writing. What are we doing, why can’t we stop and how is it so fucking beautiful?

It was always there. I enrolled in a poetry course my sophomore year of college and withdrew right after the class. I remember sitting in that cold circle, the only black woman, thinking to myself these people are going to destroy me. I’ve always been more viscous and ruthlessly adamant about protecting loved ones, even if I didn’t afford the same adamance to myself. You see, my writing practice was a friend, a life partner and was too sacred for the eventual violence of that circle. So I kept it in the folds of my skin as I bounced around the art school, the business school, women's studies, philosophy, theater, and computer science departments — eventually graduating with a major I invented. My writing practice successfully protected. I have been practicing like this for over a decade. Gathering a constellation of courses, books, PDFs, transcripts, love letters, syllabi, and conversations with friends and using it as seed data to write alongside.

Over the summer I’ll continue gathering seed data, collaborating with computer kin, and thinking about why we’re all turning to writing at the same time. Meditating on what affordances, shelter, breath, code allows inside this practice. In September, I plan to invite you into a creative coding for writers offering and that’s when live virtual programming inside of Seeda School will resume. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts on creative writing alongside code or would like to collaborate around this topic — please get in touch. I would love to hear from you and continue thinking through this together. Consenting not to be a single being, the carrier bag theory of fiction explodes when non-humans are also the authors.

1. “Woman Work” was written by the poet Maya Angelou and first published in her 1978 collection And Still I Rise.

2. Yeli mentioned how sometimes when we do post selfies it’s in an attempt to trick the algorithm, again dancing with the computer.

3. “The symposium highlights how these thinkers’ contributions continue to act as generative frameworks for imagining new ways of being in the world, particularly within our current context of a global pandemic, planetary environmental precarity and transnational migration. In particular, it asks how their ideas could enable new worldings, new decolonial and reparative modes of understanding global art histories, artistic practices and public cultures more generally. Addressing the contested spaces of universities, museums, and cultural institutions, this symposium thinks with and through Glissant, Hall, and Wynter to radically transform our ways of relating to the world around us.”  —  consent not to be a single being: Worlding Through the Caribbean, I’m thinking about this past symposium by Tate Britain, see PDF of full programme here.