Three Ways I Live Through Words—and the Mystery I’m Still Chasing

What it means to be a writer, a teacher, a vessel—and why I can’t stop chasing the right words.

Big news—my poem SWEET REMEMBERINGS was just published in Wildscape Lit.
To celebrate—and to thank you for your support—I’m giving the first ten paid subscribers 30% off. Consider it a little love letter from me to you.

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In my mind, the breeze feels right. The way it ruffles the mango tree feels ancient. I still hear the laughter of my cousin and I echoing off its branches. I return to that Mango tree so many times in my dreams, in my thoughts.

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There is a way in which words live off the page. When you breathe them out, they gain density, weight in that moment.

There is an exquisite way in which they take up space and rearrange the atoms of the world you thought you knew.

My life is a swirling sphere centered on words. Words convict me. I chase them around, grasp at their smoky afterimage. I crave the right word with the right shade of meaning, the right connotative slant.

In my day job, I teach middle schoolers (and soon high schoolers) how to write words with fidelity, with deftness of feeling, with forethought and narrative heft.

In my business, Ayo Artistries, I embody the words other dazzling creatives have written. I shake loose the emotional truth of each word, phrase, and dialogue exchange. It’s consuming. I can’t get enough.

I write and rewrite words that come from some previously unknown, primordial raw part of my psyche. Those words may become a poem on mangoes and memories, like SWEET REMEMBERING (Wildscape Lit, Issue II, April 2025) or short stories like FALLING about legacy and redemption (Free Spirit Press, April 2025).

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In Between Hours ~ Poetry & Process

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The letters I find, that I click together like magnets, are no longer outlines of ideas, characters, possible past lives, but become tangible entities in the world.

I am beyond grateful that I get to do this. I get to write the truths that follow me around, shade my brain in vibrant splashes of color.

What I am seeking to learn is how to braid these three ways of channeling words together.

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That is the mystery that eludes me.

How do you layer your different interests so one can inform the other, strengthen the other?

Creatives who have somehow braided multiple passions together, layered them, comment below on how you did it.

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Those who came before me understood the power of words coming together to shift destiny, reframe disaster as opportunity, calamity as a calling to not only survive but thrive.

“We are masters of our unspoken words, and slaves to our unspoken words.”

Let’s move towards mastery, individually and together, in beautiful community spaces like this. Let’s move towards absorbing the elusive power of the unsaid.

Say the unsaid.

Write the unwritten.

Read it, re-read it.

Write it.

Rewrite it.

Let the process evolve you.

Let it build your core.

Let it cement your confidence.

The unsaid, the unwritten, the unexpressed, sources its power from secrecy, from darkness. It sources its power from convincing you that your shame, your pain, the bleeding self you see in your mind’s eye is singular, siloed—— irrelevant.

Drag the shadowed words into the light.

Be free.

In Solidarity,

Olu

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