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I came up in a household and in a neighborhood where reading was a sometimes unfiltered experience.
There is no explanation for why I was drawn to these books at the time.
I understood them on a big-picture level.
Love, the anxieties of aging, family.
Their mothers carried them under an arm and, yes, left them unattended on tables or nightstands.
I dont even remember which pages I read or if anything especially salacious was in them.
Im not someone who studied writing in college.
I didnt study much of anything.
Dickey moved through different careers and lives before writing his first book.
He had also traveled to do standup comedy.
He found his path to writing in a way that feels familiar to me.
He forged a path that might seem uncommon to some, but that continued to inform his work.
There is the truth I return to: Youre a writer even when you arent writing.
Dickey became a best-selling author, but Im always thankful for the life he lived before that.
A life where he was still a writer, no matter what else he was doing.
Dickey, Terry McMillan, Pearl Cleage, among others.
What endures, beyond anything else, is the storytelling.
Dickey was an exceptional storyteller who had a big heart for his people.
Books that were contemporary.
Of my time, or of a time close to mine.
Touchable landscapes and characters and problems.
Books where Black people were troubled, flawed, but still offered some grace.
In 2007, Dickey wrote a comic book,Storm.
It focused on the love story between Storm from X-Men, and the Black Panther.
I remember this because I found it in a comic shop soon after it was published.
Storm and TChalla find each other and fight their growing affections before giving in.
I felt like this was the writing Dickey was made for.
Cinematic, swelling, fluorescent, backed by high, otherworldly stakes.
Within them, there is a line:I asked the Gods to not let desire embarrass me.
I specifically remember that line because I wrote it down in a notebook at the time.
A notebook I still have.
From a moment in my life when I didnt think of myself as a writer.
When I took breaks from my job selling CDs at a bookstore to write down lines I loved.
I have endless gratitude for Eric Jerome Dickey and the worlds he offered us in his time here.
I am so thankful I got to grow into his work.
To see it, hopefully, as he wanted it to be seen.
