Letters have always been adjacent to my journaling practice. With BLWS (founded in 2019) there’s an ecosystem where this message of CO-historicizing can exist and flourish.

At BLWS, Black penpals and Black stationers intersected over the common ground that, in the wake of cultural larceny and the erasure of Black history in the West (Middle Passage, chattel slavery, Jim Crow, the connection of the diaspora throughout the Americas/Caribbean etc.),
Black folks must divest our words and sentiments
from social media and practice cultural privacy.

Letters are the perfect medium for quieting,
co-remembering, co-archiving, forming community
and coming offline in general.

Today there are over 100 members in the BLWS catalog, daily matched with like-minded Black individuals over interests such as gardening, poetry, Afrofuturism, liberation, reading, entrepreneurship, travel, language learning, genealogy-tracing, mothering, fathering, fountain pens, and decolonizing their lives.

Occasionally we meet virtually and even less frequently there may be an in-person event (our origins were as a meetup!), but most of the work is done offline amongst ourselves as more than penpals… as keepers of our times; co-recording ourselves with ourselves. It’s a beautiful, Afrofuture-ideating ecosystem.