Abolition and the Audacity of Writing at Your Own Pace: An Interview with Taiwana Shambley
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Taiwana Shambley is a revolutionary 23-year-old Minneapolis-based abolitionist fiction writer and teaching artist. Her powerful messages not only uplift BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ youth, but also shine a poignant spotlight on abolition. Taiwana is also a Sunspot Literary Journal semi-finalist, a recipient of several prestigious grants, and the esteemed 2022 PEN/Faulkner Teaching Fellowship honoree.
Read on for an exclusive interview with the Loft’s marketing intern Alex Sirek, where Taiwana shares poignant insights on abolition, balancing literary opportunities, and finding her pace while crafting her debut novel.
1. You have extensive experience as a mentor, educator, and a teaching artist. What draws you to guidance-based roles?
My introduction to the literary arts community was when I was maybe 14–15 years old. I started rapping with my cousins. I performed for the first time in late 2015 at this open mic hosted by TruArtSpeaks. Through that community, I met mentors, peers, and people, who just always gave me really good advice. It was putting me on game. I'm going to strengthen my writing skills and my craft. The arts community kind of became an alternative space for me, a second home. I didn't know I needed it at the time, my home life wasn't the best. My school life wasn't the best. The arts community was a space where I felt affirmed. I felt like I could get the liberation I wasn't getting in other spaces. I'm really into education and teaching artists' work because I recognize the power it has to provide an alternative source of love and care for a young person who may not have it at home or at school. A Teaching Artist’s work is usually focused on community. When people ask me what I do I rarely say ‘teacher.’ I always say ‘teaching artist,’ because there is a distinction. A teaching artist is a practitioner, someone who does the art and teaches it. Sometimes we have educators, no shade to them, who don't practice. They just teach it.
2. What are some of the most challenging and the most rewarding aspects of the work you do?
For me, it's been a struggle of figuring out my pace. There are so many opportunities out there. I feel like I've been doing the work for a long time because I've been doing it since I was a teenager. A humbling experience for me is that I haven't been doing it at the current level I'm at since I was a teenager. I am still new, and I have to acknowledge that I'm new. Sometimes I get a lot of opportunities, and I have the audacity to be like, no, because I'm Taiwana. I have more stuff down the line, I'm at capacity right now. It's not worth it for me to overextend myself. Maybe there's a way to say yes to stuff without overextending yourself, but I haven't found it. So I think the biggest challenge is figuring out just how much work to do at one time, how much work is too much in one season.
The most rewarding thing is seeing my students out in community. I ran into one of my students not too long ago, I had just got my nails done and she was going to get her nails done. She was with her mom and she saw me and was like, “Miss Taiwana, is that you? Oh my god, girl, good to see you, hi!” I got to meet her mom, and moments like that show me the impact I have. This young person just ran into a teacher in the community and it brightened her up and made her happy. It made me happy, too. I think the most rewarding thing is the follow-through with students, seeing the impact you have on their lives. I haven’t gotten to this point yet, but I'm super excited for 5–10 years from now when I can check in with my students and see what they're doing.
3. What impact have educators and mentors had on your life and development?
Art school was one of the first times I had a mentor who, I wouldn't say tough love, but who wasn't afraid to challenge me and tell me that I don't know everything. I think I realized how important it is, as a young person, to hear “no” sometimes. We often think we know what's best for us, and usually we do because it's our experience, but there’s so much about the world we don't know. I still struggle with having just sort of tunnel vision on stuff and thinking in extremes: I need to work out every day, or if I’m not working out every day, then I’m never working out. I'm finding that balance. The impact that mentors had on me is really opening my mind. It's showing me there's a third way. It's not the end of the world when you hear no, it's actually good for your character to hear no.
4. It seems like a lot of what you discussed so far is kind of based on this sense of balance, being able to say no, preserving your own well-being, and harnessing the ability to balance. I think young people especially struggle with that because we are taught that when you're being given all these opportunities, why would you not say yes to absolutely everything? But it can be unhealthy.
It’s so hard. I feel like we have a pressure to grind and work really fast. I think that's part of the system, to teach us the grind and grind on and move fast.
5. Can you walk us through your abolitionist work, philosophy, and mission?
I always introduce myself as an abolitionist fiction writer and teaching artist. For me, abolition is a framework that helps us see how we can end systems of harm, and also find alternatives to these systems. There's a deeper philosophical question in there too, what are those things that make a system harmful? What are those things that make a system harmful and can't be changed? We often talk about abolition in contrast with reform, changing something at the edges. For me, abolition is really about radical imagination, about thinking critically about systems, effects on people, and building alternatives that will sustain. Applying that to fiction, I try to write fiction that is explicitly political and that goes further than representation.
Coming from an organizer background, being mentored by organizers, and studying Black radical social movements in college, I realized that it's really important to get to the root. In my fiction, I want to imagine what liberation looks like for us in the Twin Cities. For me, having abolition as a guiding compass is a good way to make sure my fiction is achieving the political goals I wanted to achieve. It’s really hard actually. I’m in an MFA program, and some of my professors keep telling me, “Don't be didactic, don’t be didactic.” It means lecturing people and coming off as preachy. I don't want to write fiction that has the answers as much as I want to explore questions, explore important conflicts, and allow the reader to come to their own conclusion. I'm still learning how to write abolitionist fiction well. It is something I strive to do.
6. What is the role of the storyteller within an abolitionist framework?
I look at a lot of local abolitionists like Kyle Tran Myhre and Jason Sole, and I noticed a lot of their work artwork is focused on narrative stories. The way people talk about revolution could be a barrier, or it could be a tool for acquisition. I remember during the uprising when everyone was talking about “Defund the Police” as chaotic, unreasonable, and irrational. It feels like if we're gonna make any type of progress, or recruit more people into our movement, we can't just let other folks control the narrative. We have to say something. The role of storytelling is helping foster community, and amplifying the stories of community to make clear what abolition really is and why we think it's important.
7. What do you believe is the educator's role in abolition?
I recently left a nonprofit job to teach full-time. My coworker told me that she wasn't upset that I was leaving, because classrooms are a radical space and a movement space. I think it’s really important to think of classrooms in that way–a space where folks can develop the ideas and the skills that they will later use to activate themselves in their communities. We all need a space to train. The classroom is kind of, for me, a training space. It's a space to get better.
8. You’re currently working on your debut novel, which you describe as “playing with the possibilities of anger, youth, and black radical tradition.” Could you tell us about the process?
I’m in year six right now writing it, I’m on my third full draft. It's been really challenging! The most challenging part has been following through on the project. As I get older, I want to write different stuff. Sometimes I feel like, wow, I put all my creative energy into this project that is still not ready for the world. It can give me a sense of doom sometimes like, oh my god, what is my work doing? I'm not having an impact. I need to do more stuff. Again, thinking about balance, I feel this urgency to go publish. My mentors keep telling me to really slow down. They're like, it’s not important that the story is finished, it's important that the story is good. I do strive to be one of the greatest fiction writers ever. I don't want to put a project into the world that I'm not proud of. I have to constantly check and interrogate this urgency I feel to publish. So right now, I'm working really slow. I'm writing pages and sending them to my professor in my MFA program. I get all these “Publish Here!” opportunities in my inbox, and I’ve had to stop engaging with them. I'm like, ugh Taiwana, you can't entertain that, you already know you're going to hit the tension of trying to publish too early, so just focus on your growth. The process for me has really been about learning how to slow down. It is humanizing to be looking at yourself as you're trying to cultivate yourself as a great storyteller. You're more than just creating a great story.
9. Do you have any advice for fellow emerging novelists or writers?
I fume and get angry when people tell me to slow down when I don’t want to. But I think it is important advice, though. I would say to my peers, to also slow down and to focus on ourselves as becoming great storytellers. Lesley Arimah, a professor from my MFA program said, “If you cultivate skills and be a great storyteller, then it doesn't matter what project you're working on, you will always produce something great because you're great." So focus on your craft.
There’s this approach that some folks take to craft that completely shuts down the entrepreneurial side of being a teaching artist. It is okay to still have a website, build a resume of places where you teach, build a client, and build streams of income for your writing. It is okay to do that as you're working on it. I just think the challenge is doing that in a way that feels true to you. Publishing a novel may not be something you're ready for yet, but what about being a contributor for a local magazine, you know? I would say slow down. Find that balance and the pace that works for you. Build writing-based income streams.
10. What literary works influence your work the most? Do you have any recommendations?
Olga Dies Dreaming, by Xochitl Gonzalez. It's an amazing story and a great example of a writing revolution. Black Leopard, Red Wolf, by Marlon James. His writing style calls to me. From my days as a poet, Hanif Abdurraqib is one of my favorite writers as well. He's one of my favorite performers too. Adrienne Maree Brown, and I recently got a newfound love for James Baldwin, too. I think I tried not to read too much of his works. Everyone reads James Baldwin, but like, there's a reason. He's really great.
11. How does community play a role in your creative process?
We often think of writing as this solitary act. You’re in a cabin in the woods by yourself, away from all the people you care about. I think those stints of solitude are important. But also, I find that I write best around other people. I write best in writing circles, where we simply sit in a space in silence and just write together. It's something about the energy of another person that activates it. I'm really into this idea of writing in community and not needing to separate yourself from community to create. I recently received good advice to just go to other people's releases, go to their readings, and go be their biggest fan. I've really found joy in supporting our local writers in the Twin Cities.
Support Taiwana’s work by subscribing to her Patreon, signing up for her mailing list, or browsing her website! Plus, don’t forget to grab her Abolition Zine!