From Criticism to Worldbuilding

Notes From Building the Mississippi Lwa Nocturne

Falling Away

I stepped away from publishing for a while. Not from writing, but from the need to explain myself in public. It wasn’t a conscious motion—trapped in a loop of bids for survival, I simply fell away from it all. It had become clear to me that social media, Twitter/X specifically, was a dangerous place for a négresse to build a sustainable future as an artisan¹.

Somewhere along the way, explanation stopped being enough, and worldbuilding began.

Criticism explains a world. Fiction allows you to stress-test one. My route has been crooked, spiraling, meandering. I have often been punished for straying from the straight path. Moreover, I have punished myself. “If people don’t understand you,” I have said, “It’s because you didn’t explain yourself well enough.”

---

---

Opacity

Criticism began to feel like explanation under surveillance. Being looked at is different from truly being seen. I started to think maybe it was impossible to express myself adequately through criticism. Cultish frameworks encourage us to classify, to categorize, to label, to align—even as we purport to wanna break down those standards, we just can’t seem to escape them.

“Authenticity” in a climate such as this consists of identity politicking and semi-strategic overexposure. It is blinding to be viewed and constrained by a lens which looks but does not see me. Seeking understanding through vulnerability is folly —damnnear fatal— among a country whose citizens subsist on surveillance and opportunistic exposure.

I realized that the pursuit of transparency was a faulty approach. This realization led to me looking for other options. The answer had to be more than just invisibility (as Erasure or Silence) versus visibility (as Transparency). I tried turning the map upside down, studying names, linguistics, and paradigms. Maps have always offered me a sense of comfort.

Let’s turn this into a world, I decided.

---

The Turn

Waves of despair always lead me to studying. I can’t help myself. I craved invisibility. I wanted to hole up in my library surrounded by books. I wanted to fabricate myths about where the term “America” came from. I wanted to make new knots.

I started stripping when I was eighteen. I came of age during the 2007-2009 Recession, and I desperately needed the money. You audition for clubs by dancing one, maybe two songs. You get naked. I was an itinerant stripper back then— I traveled throughout the Midwest and danced at different clubs. Everyone always assumes that getting naked is the hardest part. But the hardest part is closing the sale. You aren’t selling yourself. You’re selling a carefully crafted opaque version of yourself. You need to know how to read people, when to push and when to pull. Or you could end up leaving the club with nothing after you tip out.

In a specific kind of way, being a stripper indirectly prepared me for influencer culture. I studied the people and the world around me, and I adapted my approach. But eventually just observing and critiquing wasn’t enough. I had started out wanting to be a creator of worlds but my need (to survive) kept getting in the way. I felt trapped.

I wanted my freedom but I wasn’t sure what freedom meant anymore.

I started writing a memoir because I wanted to tell my story. For me, writing was a way to secure a future for my children, a document of my struggle for survival. As a lower income black mother, my memories are not just personal history; they are a testimony against a system that seeks to devalue me, functioning much like a 19th-century slave narrative. Writing my memory began to feel like asking permission to exist. Every memory I commit to paper is an appeal to a white gaze, forced to translate my lived experience into a language of justification. I asked myself: Is it validation I seek, or creation?

I decided I’d had enough. Wandering freely is easier to do in a form which does not expect too much of me. This means that instead of begging to be seen (understood) or trying to persuade people to hear me, or even writing in protest, the nouvelle motion is strategic revelation and acceptance of complexity. Pulling back from social media and the gaze of others, I began by building a fictional world. I mapped out its themes, its history, and its power structures. Eventually, I named the project The Mississippi Lwa Nocturne.

---

Worldbuilding

The Mississippi Lwa Nocturne began as maps, dialects, and questions about power. Fiction can do something criticism cannot: It can hold contradiction. It can embody tension instead of debating it. It allows different visions of power to coexist inside the same landscape. The project grew slowly, piece by piece — a mythology, a set of political structures, a language system, a geography.

At some point I realized this project was answering many of the questions I used to write about directly. For a long time, writing as a poor black mother and “survival sex worker” felt like a trap—a modern-day slave narrative where I had to recount my trauma in order to prove my humanity. It was, as Toni Morrison called it, a ‘rememory’ I couldn’t escape, a haunting that kept me stuck in the past.

I shifted to fiction because I needed to move from ‘disremembering’ (trying to forget) to ‘rememory’ (assembling pieces of the past to create a new, imagined future). Fiction gives me the authority to finally heal the memories I was previously only allowed to witness. This work is not just remembering; it is re-assembling. I am taking the fragments of my life and those of my mothers and, through fiction, I am giving them a new, chosen shape.

---

Field Notes Ahead

I’m no longer interested in begging to be understood. I’m interested in building something that stands on its own. What I build will be beyond trends, beyond identity.

I spent years explaining myself to the world.

Now I’m building one instead.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing pieces from that world — its language, its contradictions, its ghosts — along with notes from the work of building it.

If you’ve been here before, welcome back.

If you’re new, you’re arriving at the beginning.

This space will move between fiction, field notes, and reflections on power — the same questions, just approached from a different angle now.

Some weeks I’ll share pieces from the world I’m building. Other weeks will be observations about craft, language, or the strange work of turning lived experience into story.

If you’re interested in how worlds — and people — get shaped, you’re in the right place.

---

(I also work as a developmental editor for literary fiction and narrative nonfiction — link in bio.)

1. The term artisan is used deliberately here, as both an illustrator and writer— though my writing has tended to take precedence for reasons related to survival. See: https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/artisan.