Meet Faith Adiele

We recently connected with Faith Adiele and have shared our conversation below.

Faith , thank you so much for making time for us. We’ve always admired your ability to take risks and so maybe we can kick things off with a discussion around how you developed your ability to take and bear risk?

It’s always surprising to me that people talk about me as a risk-taker, someone brave. Because, physically, I’m pretty risk-adverse. I’m an avid traveler, but I’m not the one bungie-jumping off a cliff over a yawning chasm. Rather, I’m the one moving alone to the Golden Triangle at age 16. The one shaving my head, taking a vow of silence, and living in a forest hut as Thailand’s first Black Buddhist nun. The one traveling to Nigeria during military rule to find the father and sibilings I never knew. And then writing about it, failures and all.

So, my ability to take risk is a little nature, a little nurture. I come from people who left their countries for the unknown on faith alone (pun intended): My father left the colony that would become Nigeria to get a degree (UK) and study civil rights (USA). He sailed home, giddy at the prospect of a newly-independent republic, despite the ethnic tensions the departing British had set in motion. My maternal great-grandmother and great-grandfather left villages in Finland and Sweden, respectively, hoping for a better life in America. My foremother was particularly gutsy – a servant girl, she had only $10 in her pocket and forged her letter of invitation while on the ship. My mother was the first to go to university and raised me to want to explore the world and also to stand up for what’s right, which can be pretty risky, especially in our current political climate.

So, I take risks to honor their risk-taking and resilience and to honor the relative privilege I have as a Black woman (while still being smart about the riskiness of moving through the world in this body, often the only one of me in a room, a town, a family). A particularly instructive moment was when I had an emotional breakdown and flunked out of college. That’s what spurred me to return to Thailand and ordain. It was terrifying – physically, mentally, spiritually – and it was also the best thing I ever did. Once you hit rock bottom, there’s nothing to fear anymore. Every risk is an opportunity for growth; every fear faced head-on is an opportunity for freedom. My career motto is JUST SAY YES. If someone asks me to design an international creative writing program, give a keynote address, write an experimental HBO series, step into the pulpit with 30 minutes notice to fill in for the minister, I say YES. The ask means that someone thought I could do it, so I embrace my strengths and my weaknesses and prepare to slay.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I’m a writer who travels the world speaking and teaching personal narrative (memoir, decolonial travel writing, engaged personal essay). I view personal writing as civic engagement, as democracy at work, so I help writers, especially those from marginalized communities, learn how to express themselves bravely, how to innovate structure and form, and how to navigate the literary life, like getting writing residencies (I’ve had 25+ of them). Other aspects of my literary citizenship include hosting African Book Club at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, California (USA) and editing a column for UK-based magazine Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place & Nature.

One exciting thing is that I just had 2 new memoir chapbooks come out from Texas Review Press. They continue my obsession with innovation, mixing collage, film stills, playwriting, family diaries, language lessons to write about growing up brown in a multiracial, multinational, multigenerational family. So I’m planning events and workshops and partnerships for the fall, as this summer I’ll be in Italy finishing up a craft book about travel writing and in Morocco teaching creative writing to youth for the second year.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

I love this question, because I love thinking about our personal journeys. I think one thing that has been most impactful on my journey is my ability to follow my inner voice. Sometimes it means writing in ways that break the so-called rules years before having the language to explain why. Sometimes it means objecting to behaviors that everyone else accepts. Sometimes it means accepting a job beyond a skillset. Sometimes it means buying a one-way ticket to another country and having faith that opportunity and purpose will present themselves.

My journey has also definitely been shaped by learning and respecting history. Not just what my family members overcame but my literary ancestors. People will tell you you’re special and make you think that you invented travel or mindfulness practices or intersectionality or decolonial structure or safe spaces for marginalized voices. But I’ve always tried to educate myself about those who came before and paved the way and threw open firmly-closed doors. Not only do I stand on their shoulders, but whenever I feel overwhelmed, hopeless, or helpless, I take inspiration and purpose from how they made a way out of no way and triumphed.

This connect to a third quality that’s helped me along the journey – my commitment to citizenship. One of my new chapbooks shows me as a young girl observing my immigrant family’s obsession with voting and participating in democracy. Since leaving the non-profit world for academia, much of my activism focuses on being a good literary citizen, something I try to instill in my students. Am I sharing resources, helping students find their voices, editing new writers, celebrating other creatives, defining my success as my communities’ success, working tirelessly to give back?

How can folks who want to work with you connect?

Yes, I love collaboration! I’m looking for partners to organize international writing/creativity retreats, especially those with different but complementary skill sets – chefs, activists, yoga instructors, bloggers, hikers. I also love creative collaborations. My time writing for HBO and PBS makes me want to do more nonfiction / documentary film projects. My experience having comic book artists and photographers illustrate my work makes me want to collaborate on a book or exhibit. The work I do researching and writing Sleep Stories for the Calm makes me want to do more app writing and/or digital storytelling.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.adiele.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meetingfaith/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/faith.adiele/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/faith-adiele-8072ab4/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/meetingfaith
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUeCLMaD_-bHX6P-Q2LTmYQ
• Other: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001H6KY16?ingress=0&visitId=83981eb9-59bc-461d-a902-eb7089d97540&store_ref=ap_rdr&ref_=ap_rdr

Image Credits

Personal photo, credit: Paul Mate/Art + Practice