Processing: Glynn Pogue and Nneka Julia on creating and sharing their work
Plus an opportunity to share your own.
Writing practice🖊️
Get work done and meet us in Bed-Stuy on April 30 for our monthly writing meeting. $10 donation! BIPOC TO THE FRONT, PLEASE. Limited Space.
On a weirdly warm evening in February, I was standing in a packed room in Bed-Stuy to watch Craft and Release’s Release #2. Six storytellers shared a story about friendship, from Club Penguin situationships to the girlhood sweetness of having a bff. In between stories, audience members came up to ask each other questions: How has social media affected your friendships? What’s one thing you wish you could say to a friend.
I was tapped in, listening to every story like my own best friend was filling me in on a long phone call. The audience chimed in at all the right places. It reminded me that the Internet, and its seeming foreverness, can’t replace the feeling of being together like this. No funny IG comment hits as hard as a perfectly timed “mhmm” from the person sitting next to you. Live events are so special because even if you did the same thing tomorrow, it would never be the same as this moment today.
Glynn Pogue and Nneka Julia founded Craft and Release to help makers create and share their work in community. We interviewed them about their creative practices as both artists and facilitators.
Learn how you can share something you’re working on below.
WC: What's the first step of your writing process? When you get an idea, what do you do next to make it a real, written thing?
Glynn: My notes app goes crazy. Typically my pieces come to me in fragments and lines, often uncontrollably - a friend will say something and I’ll like the turn of phrase, or I’ll witness something really gorgeous, or have an experience I can’t stop thinking about, and a small line of description will come to me and I’ll jot it down in my notes to hold onto it.
From there more and more lines will come to me at random. It’s like once I jot down one line I’m “living in” the piece and I see everything through that lens. I start to envision the structure and how it should unfold. When I feel like I’ve gathered enough, I dump all my notes into a document and start to organize them. And then the real work begins as I start filling in the blanks.
Other times - and these are the best, and most rare times - an idea will strike me and I’ll run to the page and a whole piece just pours out of me. It’s like being possessed.
Nneka: When I get an idea I give myself time to free-write and dump everything on the page. No judgment of punctuation, or spelling, or sequence. From there, I start parsing out the bits that serve the story and spend days editing, revising, and reworking the piece.
Writing is such a solitary act and it often doesn’t feel “real” until the work is actually shared, whether that be in a publication, on a stage, or even just over email with one of your trusted readers. — Glynn Pogue
WC: Both of you start your bios with where you come from. What role do the places you call home have in your work?
Glynn: So much of my work is about identity and understanding the world and my place in it. I always have to start with Brooklyn because it’s where I began, and I carry a lot of pride in that. I’m interested in how where we’re from impacts who we become, what cultural nuances and behaviors we hold onto and which ones we reject.
My work also often dissects class and race, themes that have been so prevalent in my life growing up in a rapidly gentrifying, historically Black neighborhood like Bed-Stuy. Being from Brooklyn has also deeply impacted my voice and perspective. I think you can hear Brooklyn in my writing; it’s in the slang, color, rhythm and flavor in my word choice.
Nneka: I have multiple lenses through which I see the world and multiple places I call home. Growing up as the daughter of immigrants from two different cultures has broadened my appetite for both internal and external exploration and adventure. Though where I’m based changes, being a third-culture kid colors a lot of the narrative work that I do.
WC: How does the community building/facilitating work you do fuel your own creativity?
Glynn: Being in community with folks who are passionate about their art and creation is my greatest motivator. I think back to the storytellers who came to the salon-style writer’s circle my friends and I started in college and to the writers I met in my MFA program; they were people whose work I admired and respected. They were my first readers, always willing to give me feedback and vice versa. Conversations with them always inspired new work. They gave me a real sense of accountability and were the ones to say, “Nah, this is actually really good. You should keep at it.”
Writing is such a solitary act and it often doesn’t feel “real” until the work is actually shared, whether that be in a publication, on a stage, or even just over email with one of your trusted readers.
Being in community with other writers makes my work feel “real.” When launching Craft & Release, Nneka and I both reflected on how essential these sorts of environments are for artists and we wanted to create an offering for others but also for ourselves.
Nneka: We get to commune with such a diverse range of artists. We’ve worked with writers that are experimenting with pottery, and metal workers that want to branch into filmmaking. The community that Craft & Release is building has greatly inspired me to diversify and deepen my creative practices. The more areas one can pull from, the richer the word.
WC: How do you make a living as an artist? Do you use your day job to sustain your artistic endeavors? Or something else?
Glynn: I have TOO many hustles, but beautifully, they all intersect around storytelling and that makes me feel like I’m in alignment. In addition to freelance writing, I’m the Associate Director of Development at Audible. I’m responsible for creating original scripted fiction podcasts for our platform.I spend a lot of time vetting script submissions and looking for shows that can “hit the zeitgeist.”
There are a lot of unsexy administrative and project management bits in between, but on my best days, I spend my time thinking about what makes a great story and getting to be creative and that absolutely fuels my own practice.
On top of that, I’m a co-host on the Black Girls Texting podcast, co-founder of Craft & Release, and I teach creative writing workshops for a variety of organizations and institutions.
Nneka: I’m very fortunate to be a full-time artist. Along with being the co-founder of Craft & Release, I work as a writer, filmmaker, and host. I’ve collaborated with brands ranging from The Four Seasons to Fenty Beauty to help create compelling stories around products and experiences.
WC: Tell us about your next release 👀
Glynn and Nneka: Our next live Release 003 storytelling theme is LOVE. It’s going to be a juicy one, ya’ll! We’re currently accepting submissions for storytellers, so if you’d like to grace the stage for our in-person reading in Brooklyn on May 23rd, or for our digital reading on May 30th, share your story with us here.
We’d love to see the writers club community show up for Craft and Release.
Pull up to the live release.
Perform your story.
See you next time,
Writers Club 🧡