What’s the thing you’ve bookmarked, you know you need to read, and are excited to read?
This thread, asking people what their favourite short stories and poems are. I’m excited to get to the very end, Quote Tweets and all. Every week since January, I’ve read at least one short story from the thread.
What’s the thing you read when you want to remember how to write?
I have a document in my writing folder that I’ve titled “A’s flower garden” where I dump sentences and phrases I fall in love with when I’m reading. It’s my own version of a writing flower garden where I’ve stored all the soft, crazy, demanding, challenging texts that call out to something in me.
Whenever I feel stuck or need to remind myself how to return to writing, I visit my flower garden.
You’re at the newsstand and have decided you’re leaving with four magazines. What are you picking up? (from any era, be as oddly specific as possible).
Drum magazine, Ghana edition, November 1963.
Dust (accra) magazine, September 2011.
The first issue of Okyeame (1960) and the last issue (1972).
Tampered Press first issue, 2018.
Is there a thread you love that you come back to (or finds its way back to you)? (if so, why)?
This was in 2014 before threads were a thing, but Teju Cole’s ‘Hafiz’ — a short story that emerged from him asking his followers to Tweet one line each after his initial line, is a constant reminder for me of how we can creatively combine Twitter and literature or the arts.
This thread by Helena Greer where she uses the first season of Bridgerton as a case study in teaching consent. It’s a thread I’ve bookmarked that I return to occasionally — especially because of the work I am currently doing with @BlackGirlsGlow on sexual health education — because it reaffirms and reminds me of the influence film and art and pop culture has on our everyday life.
What’s the first book you remember reading and loving?
I was 5 or 6, and one of my mother’s students gifted me a box set of Peter Rabbit. I think that may have been my first self-awareness of falling in love. I was enthralled by the idea that rabbits had personalities, a life of their own, and a daily purpose. Love at first read!
Who’s the Twitter follow that hasn’t let you down, since the beginning?
