Showing My Ass In 2026

Or Learning How To Play Around

For most of my writing life I told myself the convenient lie that I had to create the best possible thing I could before sharing it with the world. For years I toiled away in private with tampered expectations of readership, hoping that if by some cosmic coincidence I wrote the perfect sentence or manifested the perfect story, then I’d finally muster up the courage to share my work with the world. But the endless pursuit of perfection is little more than a placation for one’s deep-seated insecurities. Because if you never share your work, never showed your ass, as Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah puts it, then you can never be critiqued. Never grow.

I had no intention of changing my ways, but then something interesting happened to me over the summer. I was accepted into a workshop on Sex and Bodies taught by Deesha Philyaw and for a week I biked over to a small classroom to share my ill-conceived, generative exercises with some incredibly, INCREDIBLY talented writers.

And if you don’t know vulnerability, you…