In Company of Literary Greats

The writers I admire most show up at different volumes in everything I write. When I read, I’m not just reading for story or for entertainment. I’m also reading to expand my definitions of words that once felt abstract to me, like home, belonging, love. I’m reading to understand how these words can be lived by me and by using what I already have.

Home. Belonging. Love. 

That desire to understand home, belonging, and love has never been limited to the page. It’s connected to everything I do and how I choose to show up in the world. My world opened when I began to study three specific writers: Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Maya Angelou. 

I came to these writers late. I didn’t grow up in a house full of books. No one around me encouraged reading or world-building. So when I walked into my first writing class at thirty and heard my peers speak easily about the writers who shaped them I remember thinking, Why haven’t I read them? I felt behind. Already in deficit.

But what I return to now, with gratitude, is my curiosity.

I remember going to the local library with my then nine-year-old (he’s twenty-three now) and checking out stacks of their books. As I read, I could feel something happening inside me. My mind opening. Questions forming. Recognition building.

I was coming home.

When I was young, I didn’t feel like I fit in my family. I was the outlier … the only creative, the “quiet” one, the one who didn’t look like anyone else or move through the world in the same way. I have always known the feeling of being on the outside. But now I wonder if that distance gave me something. What did that vantage point allow me to see? What did it allow me to understand?

The more I read, the more I realized that belonging was not something you simply found. It was something you intentionally built. Something you designed. Home and belonging were not separate ideas. And love was the container that made both possible.

Designing home started to expand outside of just a theme in my writing. It became an engine. It shaped my creative life. It shaped my business. It shaped how I hold space for others.

I’ve come to believe that as creative people, we are all designing our dream homes which I see as the inner and outer spaces we do not wish to escape from. There is a very particular kind of freedom in that.

One of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received is that I live what I teach. It matters to me because I believe that when we embody the way we want to show up—when we build the foundation of these dream homes—we begin to recognize and welcome the right pieces as they arrive.

These writers helped me understand that.

Toni Morrison taught me that we are not separate from our work. That how we see the world shapes what we create. She taught me that language carries responsibility.

Maya Angelou taught me that home is not the same as a house. That a true home holds the missing pieces and the messy middles. That living fully, on your own terms, is both art and resistance.

bell hooks taught me that love is not abstract. Love is a practice. Love is a structure. Love is something we define and build with intention. And that the way we define love determines whether the home we create can hold our freedom.

I didn’t grow up surrounded by these voices. But I found them. Or maybe, in finding them, I found pieces of myself that had been waiting for language.

I understand now that the world can fracture. That we all live inside systems that shape us, and that we carry a responsibility within that. But I also understand something else: we still have agency in how we show up. In the small, daily choices that define a life.

We get to decide where our time and energy go. We get to change our minds. We get to say, no, that doesn’t work for me anymore. We get to say, yes, I want more of that.

We get to notice what sustains us and what depletes us, and act accordingly. We choose. We decide.

We can say, with clarity and without apology, that does not belong in my home.

And we can mean it.

I hope to see you this summer … we are going to put all of this to the test. We are going to start to build these dream homes.