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When many people speak about Dr. King, they speak most comfortably about love. Love, in our collective memory, has been made gentle. Harmless. Easy to admire and easier to misinterpret. It has been framed as patience without urgency, kindness without confrontation, and unity without accountability. But the love Dr. King wrote about—preached about— lived by —was none of those things. In his sermons, King presents love not as sentiment, but as discipline. Not as a weakness, but

Day 1: Beyond the Soundbite Today, if Martin Luther King Jr.  were still with us, he would be turning 97 years old. That alone is a staggering thing to sit with—to imagine the length of a life, the wisdom accumulated, the conversations we never got to have. If you were raised in the South, like I was, you might remember how this time of year always came with ritual. The television movie King  aired annually, and without question, we gathered around the screen to watch it agai

In the previous Writer to Writer reflections, I wrote about becoming a writer through the act of writing, and about what happens when we finally commit to the truest sentence we know. This essay lives inside what comes next—the slow, unsettling work of writing ourselves. Ernest Hemingway is often quoted as saying, “Writing is easy; all you need to do is sit at the typewriter and bleed.” These days, many of us have traded in our typewriters for laptops, tablets, or note-takin

Writing is not ghostbusting until you sit down and write the most actual sentence you know. That sentence, if you let it, can turn into a memoir. So much has changed for me since I decided to write about myself that I sometimes wonder if I still want to write about myself. Do I still want to confront and engage with these ghosts? Do I still want to open doors I once worked hard to keep closed? The answer is yes. Yes, because words hold power and meaning. Yes, because I have b

As the calendar flips from February to March we begin setting our sights on the end of winter, the hope of Spring and Women's History...

It began with my friend Facebooking me, "Honey Word Smith, what are you doing that Tuesday?" To which I replied, "This right here!" I...

In the previous Writer to Writer reflection, I wrote about ghostbusting—about what happens when we commit to writing the truest sentence we know. This essay begins just before that sentence is written. What comes first, the writer or the writing? At first glance, this sounds like a philosophical question—the kind meant to be debated rather than answered. But most writers encounter it in a much more practical way: sitting in front of a blank screen, waiting to feel like a writ

I lit the match and threw it; it burned from November 2020 until now. Setting my life aflame happened in stages, and now as 2021 draws to...

Editor’s Note:  This post was originally written years ago, before H. WordSmith Reads had language for what it was becoming. I return to it now not to erase the earlier self who wrote it, but to speak more clearly from where I stand. If you are anything like me, when you hear that an author has passed away, your first instinct is to reach for everything they have ever written. To gather their words close, as if rereading them might keep something essential from slipping away.