Memoire

Darius Stewart on his search for self and writing his memoir “Be Not Afraid of My Body”

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Darius Stewart, author of “Be Not Afraid of My Body.”Danielle Buckingham Sign up to get positive Black news stories, words of affirmation and weekly curated playlists delivered to your inbox twice a week: Enter your email to subscribe to Black Joy. Self-discovery is a series of life-altering experiences and in the end you’re often able to give a name to what you’ve been through. In his memoir “ Be Not Afraid of My Body ” author and poet, Darius Stewart, takes us through his journey as a Black gay man trying to find his place in the world. Through lyrical prose that floats between insightful streams of consciousness and beautifully vivid imagery, this book tells a story of love, grief and survival. Black Joy chatted with Stewart about how his memoir came together on the page, what he learned about himself while writing and the readers he hopes this book will reach. I read an interview you did where you talked about the importance of saving those bits and pieces of things you write to essentially create a larger project. Can you share your journey of finding the thread that connected the individual pieces that came together to shape this book? “Be Not Afraid of My Body” was easier to find those threads because I already knew what I was basically gonna be writing about. I knew it was gonna be about my health. I knew it was gonna be about my addiction. And it was gonna be about my family dynamics, coming out and all of that. And those were some of the larger pieces or essays in the memoir. But there were some connective tissue pieces that I had to think about like how to bridge one piece to the next in a way that let the reader kind of mellow out a bit because some of the material can be overwhelming. I should back up and say, when I went into this project, I knew that I didn’t just want to reveal a bunch of things. I was really searching for myself in a way. Who […]

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