Nathalie Pierre, an assistant history professor at Howard University and alumna, said you can’t go from braids to a silk press without going through steps such as unbraiding, detangling and deep conditioning. To her, this same revision process applies to writing.
On Sept. 25, Bryan M. Jenkins, a cultural scholar and Howard alumnus, moderated a panel called “Writing in Community: Lessons Learned from a Black Writers Collective,” which talked about the writing process from start to finish. This event was part of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (MSRC)’s International Black Writers Festival.
The festival, hosted by the MSRC, lasted from Sept. 23 to Sept. 25 and featured students, writers and professors, among others, as panelists.
Pierre advised attendees on how to write with a busy schedule.
“I am going to actually share some advice that Dr. Talton, the director of [MSRC], gave me when I was writing my dissertation, which was [to] ‘eat the frog first,’” Pierre said. “I googled it, and this idea of eating the frog first [means] you do the thing that is hardest or grossest first.”
Halia Benn, a freshman interdisciplinary humanities major from Altadena, California, said the panel was very inspiring because it talked about the writing process and inspired them as an aspiring writer and student volunteer at the program.
“[These] are people that I wish to collaborate with in the future or at least reference their work, or have my work be a reference to their works,” Benn said. “I realize that writing is something that’s ageless in that way.”
Pierre advised students interested in writing to “figure out how to make it as habitual as hygiene” and “figure out the schedule” depending on how their lives are structured.
Jacob Echevarria, a freshman history major from Belmont, North Carolina, attended the panel to better understand how he could become a better writer. He enjoyed hearing from a panelist
who he said “limited herself in editing” and “organized herself in time or spaces to edit her work.”
Echevarria said Pierre’s explanation of going from braids to a silk press stuck with him in relation to the revision process.
This year’s festival focused mostly on writing, literature and activism compared to last year’s theme, “Why We Gather,” which concentrated on why Black people gather in Black spaces when there are others in predominantly white spaces.
However, Benjamin Talton, history professor, author of three books and director of the MSRC, explained that there was no theme for this year’s festival.
“This year, we really just wanted to emphasize keeping it international and making sure that we have a diversity of Black voices,” Talton said.
Although he said putting the event together was an exhausting process, Talton expressed his enjoyment in seeing the look on students’ faces when they listened to the people on stage.
In addition to Howard students, he said talking to international writers is “special” and “rewarding.”
“The spirit of the Writers Festival [is] coming together as one. We have our different agendas, different initiatives, different backgrounds, but we come together, and just for this brief period, we’re locked in,” Talton said.
According to the MSRC’s website, the MSRC is the “largest” and “most comprehensive” collection of books, documents and ephemera on the global Black experience.
The four-day festival was live-streamed and is available on MSRC’s YouTube channel.
Copy edited by Jalyn Lovelady
