ayo deforge

  Before I was thirteen, I was content with being a reader. After this period, I began expressing grief through poetry, because I didn’t think I had the voice to sing out my pain. But poetry couldn’t contain everything I had to say, nor could the short stories I began to write after I met the owner of True Love Magazine. Long before I started writing Tearlessness, I knew I would write that story. I carried around notepads with plot ideas and themes I wanted to explore. Around 2004, I finally embarked on the odyssey and in 2007, I was priviledged to workshop a portion of it during Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Creative Writing Workshop. Fast forward to 2015, and I completed the first draft, but that was just the beginning. It has since taken numerous rounds of revision to fine-tune every word, every emotion, and every twist in the story. The process wasn't always easy, but it’s undeniably worth it. After almost two decades of dedication and countless hours of crafting and refining,