Author: Kalisha Buckhanon for negression

Spirit of Writing Week 6: Edit and Revise…Now and Forever

This weekend, especially with a long holiday weekend coming up and the end of National Novel Writing Month, respect your accomplishments but commit yourself to EDITING in December. So, by the start of the new year, you will have a project (or two, or three) ready to go...End 2014 writing, not planning to write again in 2015. The Spirit of Writing: 12 Weeks of Practice.

Remembering Director Mike Nichols Through His Movies

It is a miracle and luck when any work of art, creative piece or cultural manufacture reaches out and touches those like it depicts. However, it is supernatural and magic when a work of art, creative piece or cultural manufacture so far beyond an aesthete's race, class, gender and experience arrives to inspire and introduce new lives to them. The handful of works I know from Mr. Nichols all do that for me.

Laboring a novel online…

Because of information, images, stories and archives on the Internet, I was able to massage those old memories from the comfort of my own home (as opposed to daylong stints in the library, which I still love to have). I am quite sure I was able to go deeper into some topics and subjects because of online archiving. Furthermore, I was able to publish parts of the work online in outside venues, to cement the idea the book was real and not just a whim of my imagination.

Are You a Joyce Vincent?

In this National Blog Posting Month, I decided to pick my favorite work so far on my blog Negression. My eulogy of a total stranger, Joyce Vincent, remains the most personal piece of writing I have ever done publicly for the sheer emotional response I had to her story's resonance in my life at the point when I wrote it. I think this chilling black female version of a "Sex in the City" tale will always stick out to me and beg attention. It is something I wish I had never had to write, because that means it would have never happened. But since I did have to write it, it was a privilege to learn about myself and my life and what I need to do for myself and for others through the pain of another who was unable to.