Second paragraph of third essay (“Voodoonauts & Afrofuturist Dreaming: On Creating a Summer Workshop for Black Writers during a Pandemic”, by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu):

It is this reverence for the dream-scape through which I approach dreaming in all its meanings. I have a dream jar. It’s a tiny little vase in the shape of an elephant, my family’s ancestral totem, in which I place all my dreams written on sticky notes. When I’m goal setting, hoping, or even making a bucket list, I approach it as a spiritual practice. When I met Shingai Njeri Kagunda, a brilliant Afrofuturist writer from Kenya currently doing her MFA at Brown University, we talked a lot about Afrofuturist dreaming. To us, Afrofuturist dreaming is imagining what we want in the world for Black creators that doesn’t yet exist or is undervalued, and then manifesting it into a reality.

This is a collection of 18 short pieces (average seven pages each) by writers in Africa and of African descent, describing their experiences as creators and, most of all, as human beings during the pandemic. There is a strong representation from Nigeria, which is fair enough (one African in six is Nigerian), but there’s also a diversity of voices from around and beyond the continent. Stories of the individual writing process intertwine with personal loss and with political instability. It’s an enlightening and bracing read. You can get Bridging Worlds for free here, though I got it as part of the 2023 Hugo packet.

This was the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2023 (actually I had a couple of shorter ones in my catalogue, but could not find them). Next on that pile is Blake’s Seven: Scorpio Attack, by Trevor Hoyle.