Thanks to the Counter Narrative Project (CNP) for inviting me back to my home state to participate in the November 2025 edition of their Reckoning Reading series, a monthly literary salon they host in East Point, Georgia. The theme for the salon was “Fathers and Sons.”
CNP executive director and founder Charles Stephens read his short story Honor Thy Father, published in Issue 57 of Story Quarterly. (Check it out for a gut-punching opening!) Houston-based storyteller and poet Donnie D. Moreland Jr. shared poems from his collection my daddy never taught me to write a love song, along with a powerful new piece about his own father’s challenging embrace of Trump’s billionaire “shot-caller” aesthetic. And I read the prologue from one of my novel manuscripts, exploring the dynamics of father-son relations across generations and the ways inheritance and legacy echo down lineages.
CNP is an impressive arts and advocacy organization dedicated to countering narratives about Black queer men and inspiring policy and social change. Their programming spans a wide range of topics on the Black male experience and artistic expression. Learn more about their work.
The reading series takes place at the ArtsXChange, a community arts facility housed in a converted 50s-era elementary school tucked into a quiet residential neighborhood in East Point. The school building’s exterior is splashed with colorful murals, and classrooms have been transformed into galleries and gathering spaces. It’s pretty amazing. Our Atlanta-area peeps keep reinventing and placemaking in the name of authentic community building and connection.
My Notes for the Reading
When I began thinking about this theme—fathers and sons—the first thing that struck me was the plurality of the words. Fathers. Sons. I wasn’t thinking about a single, idealized model of fatherhood. Instead, I saw a montage of the men I know inhabiting these roles today: many fathers, many sons; many relationships, many histories. Stories stretched across a spectrum with poles we often label too simply as “good” or “bad.”
The men and boys living inside these roles today probably aren’t thinking about them poetically as they move through their daily lives. Yet there is always a backdrop of legacy and inheritance: lessons taught, misunderstood, half-received, interrogated, or outright rejected. And some of what gets passed down is literal; physical things. I inherited several of my late father’s dress shirts and ties. I don’t wear them often, but when I button the collar and tighten those Brooks Brothers ties, I physically feel the the legacy I’m supposed to be wearing and carrying.
In my fiction writing when wresting with this topic, I tend to take a wide, generational view: examining how, across time, relationships between fathers and sons produce, induce, and encourage certain behaviors and characteristics in men, and how those patterns ripple through generations. And too, I often think about the circumstances under which a man becomes a father—love, violence, accident, expectation, trauma. Every father–son relationship has an origin story. And as a writer, I try to model empathy and extend grace, to understand the “why” behind the resulting relationship dynamics, especially when the inheritance and legacy is… complicated. One “why” that often revisits me is disappointment and regret.
Years ago, at a writing workshop, I heard a Black man read a story set in a barbershop, the familiar, sometimes cliched backdrop of Black male connection. I initially thought, oh no, not another barbershop story. But then he delivered a line that stayed with me. Talking about the men he the shop, the narrator says something like, “their conversations lingered trapped in a chasm between what they have and what they want.” That line has lingered with me ever since. So much of what fathers try to give their sons comes from a mental space between what they had and what they hoped for. (I often take note of the fathers I see at youth sporting events, especially those shouting instruction or encouragement or berating a coach, maybe trying to rewrite their old disappointments through their sons). This general tension around inheritance and expectation is what I am trying to capture my novel manuscript, particularly as it gets shaped by the arbitrary but consequential fact of birth order of two brothers.
November 2025 Reckoning Reading Literary Salon Event in East Point, Georgia.
