K E Garland

By Jasminum McMullen

Writuals explores how our city’s rich literary heritage, cultural diversity, and iconic spaces inspire routines that fuel local authors’ work.

K E Garland is an award-winning creative nonfiction writer and blogger. She writes to demarginalize women's issues. Her essays have been published in several anthologies, including Chicken Soup for the Soul's I'm Speaking Now: Black Women Share their Truth in 101 Stories of Love, Courage, and Hope and Mamas, Martyrs, and Jezebels. Her work has also appeared in online magazines, such as midnight & indigo and Raising Mothers. Garland's debut memoir, In Search of a Salve, was long-listed for the 2023 Santa Fe Writers Project.

CLHOF: What are your “writuals,” and how have they evolved?

K E Garland: Before I write, I must do the following:

• Meditate. I do a 3-2-1 meditation. It’s called the Silva method, where you learn to enter a theta state. It helps with intuition.

• Some form of exercise: cardio, strength training, yoga, something.

• Breakfast or lunch, depending on the time of day. The meal isn’t ritualistic, per se, but I do have to eat. I also like to have some type of tea. If it’s the weekend, then I’ll have coffee with some cane sugar and oat milk creamer.

• It must be quiet. I cannot write with noise. If there is noise, then I wear noise-canceling headphones and play classical music. Otherwise, I have to hear my own thoughts.

• If I’m working on a specific project, like a book, then I devote two-to-four hours a day to writing. If it is an essay for a blog/Substack or anthology, then it’s more like two-to-four hours per week.

When I’m not writing, I’ll listen to music adjacent to the project. For example, when I wrote The Unhappy Wife, I listened to a lot of Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, and Angie Stone. These writuals haven’t evolved, LOL, I mean, I’ve tried to do things like write by the water or in the mountains, but for me, the place doesn’t matter as much as the first four things I’ve mentioned. Key for me is to be spiritually in the right place, then I can write. 

CLHOF: If you could have coffee with any Chicago author, past or present, who would it be and why? How has their work or legacy influenced your writing?

K E Garland: I hope it’s okay to have 2.5 people. Gwendolyn Brooks is first. I’m not sure when I was introduced to Brooks, but her poem “We Real Cool” was one of the first pieces I read, including dialect. Her work helped me to see that writing didn’t have to appease white people, that it could be lyrically Black, if that makes sense, and that it could highlight something cultural and for a bigger purpose. That was important to me. Lorraine Hansberry also showed me that you could write a story about Black people and our experience in the context of sociocultural issues. A Raisin in the Sun skillfully demonstrated an ethical dilemma, right? And on top of all that, she had the nerve for the title to be an allusion. That was always dope to me. It’s like I’m going to write in a totally different genre and reference this other great Black writer’s work through my art, in my way. It’s the expansion for me. Both of these Black women laid out a blueprint for the type of writer I knew I could be—one who isn’t afraid to use dialect when necessary, whose work is situated in sociocultural issues, and who causes the reader to question their mores.  I kinda wanna mention Richard Wright; although he isn’t technically from Chicago, I think he should get a shout-out. Black Boy was genius work; he showed me how to write about one’s life and how to criticize his upbringing and the society where he developed, which is primarily what I do as a memoirist and essayist.

CLHOF: Chicago is a city known for its activism and social consciousness. How, if at all, do these civic engagement and social justice elements find their way into your writing rituals or themes? Do you feel a duty to reflect or challenge the city’s socio-political landscape in your work?

K E Garland: Hell yeah. Not only is Chicago “a city known for its activism and social consciousness,” but I also attended what was at one point deemed the greatest school in the nation, Whitney Young, named after Whitney M. Young, who was a civil rights leader who worked with MLK and others in the movement. Additionally, my grandmother started one of the first daycares in the city, my grandfather worked to unionize Black workers across the nation, like the Pullman porters, and my mother served on the board of a local chapter of the National Kidney Foundation. I preface all of this to explain that I was raised to care about the community; therefore, everything I write is rooted in some aspect of social justice or social consciousness. Whether it is an essay, my blog/Substack, or a book, I consciously explore what it means to be a Black person in society. I question why we interact in familial, romantic, and platonic relationships the way we do. And I challenge everyone to consciously shift their thinking as a way to create a better world. I mean, if my writing can influence you to reshape your dysfunctional family patterns, then you've literally changed your world and, subsequently, the world. I see everything I write as challenging the socio-political landscape because the intersection of being Black and woman in the United States has always been socio-political. So, when I share a different lens centered on Black people and relationships, I’m inherently challenging the socio-political status quo. 

CLHOF: Name a movie shot in Chicago that best describes your writing style. 

K E Garland: My favorite movie of all time, hands down, is Love Jones. It is raw and melodic: two adjectives that folks have used to describe my book, In Search of a Salve: Memoir of a Sex Addict. The rawness of LJ is seen through the story and the characters, and my writing style is similar. I write character-driven narratives, and according to readers, you can “see” the people in my book because they are well-defined. I feel the same about Nina, Darius, and even some of the supporting characters, like Nina’s friend, Josie, or even Wood. 

As I mentioned earlier, with Brooks’ work, lyricism is important to me. LJ is great because of that, not just because poetry is woven throughout, but the entire film is like one long-ass jazz song. Others have said the same about In Search of a Salve. I don’t mean the memoir is a jazz song, but readers often comment on the depth of the imagery and the slickness of extended metaphor (a reader’s words, not mine). LJ is like that. The jazzy backdrop is not just there to serve as diegetic or non-diegetic sound. It’s a living part of the story, showing the highs and lows of the plot.

Similarly, the imagery I use isn’t just there as mandatory literary elements because writers are supposed to have metaphors and such; I use these devices to pull the reader in, to be a part of the narrative, to be invested. Kinda like as we become viewers of LJ, we’re invested in the messiness of Nina and Darius’s relationship. Now, I’m about to go re-watch Love Jones, lol.

CLHOF: What advice would you give someone who wants to write and publish in the city?

K E Garland: Write. Don’t let anyone tell you what you should or shouldn’t write. Write from your heart and write what moves you because if it moves you, then it will move someone else. That’s what art is all about. Someone needs to hear what you have to say, the way you want to say it.  

Jasminum McMullen is an Associate Board Director at the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame who is interested in engaging writers from or living in Chicago about their writing rituals. Her writing has appeared in The Elevation Review, Black Joy Unbound, Mamas, Martyrs, and Jezebels, and is forthcoming in Past Ten.