One early morning in 2018, just before the sun began to rise and the day was still caught between the steely blackness of night and the uncertain emergence of dawn, Eloghosa Osunde realized something that would change her life. At the time, the multidisciplinary Nigerian artist, known best for her fiction and creative nonfiction writing, had returned to work on a manuscript she hadn’t looked at for quite some time. The reason for the hiatus? “I was scared,” Osunde wrote to me in the live Google Document where she preferred we speak.
“I had caught myself 50,000 words into a whole other book I didn’t truly care about, and I was tired of so many things. [But] not writing was making me restless and darkly depressed.” Before going to sleep that early morning, she asked herself a crucial question in her journal: “Do I have enough courage to make the kind of work I’m pulled to?”
