Just back from Hedgebrook's Women Playwrights Festival (East Coast edition) @ NYU Tisch School of the Arts. After listening to a symposium of women discuss the highs and lows of the industry -- a mere 17% of all plays produced in the U.S. are written by women -- watched a staged reading of Danai Gurira's Eclipsed, about the Liberian civil war.

Though I never made it down to Yale Rep to see the full production, the reading was breathtaking in its own right. The stories of child soldiers and women and sexual abuse all wrapped into something slightly palatable for an audience. Keep an eye out for actors Uzo Aduba, Pascale Armand and Lupita Nyong'o; for playwrights Danai Gurira, Amy Evans, and Lenelle Moise; for director Liesl Tommy. Those women will inherit the world. We gave the show a standing ovation at the end, but I could have also used a talk-back to decompress all the emotions it stirred in me.

I mourned a little on the subway ride home. First for my creative buzz that was killed by the thirty-minute wait for the damned train; then all the failed expectations, not unlike timely transportation, that categorize my life here in New York; and remembering my little cottage in the woods, the wood-burning stove, owl that cooed at midnight and my long walks on the beach at dawn; and lastly, mourning how I had not found such peace before or since.

Wondering when I will find a room of my own. Altogether joyful to have found a circle of writing sisters to call on whenever I need the inspiration. --AL.

What a rare pleasure seeing Zimbabwean actress, playwright, and Hedgebrook sister Danai Gurira on Law & Order last Friday, opposite S. Epatha Merkerson. I love seeing beautiful, powerful black women command the screen. Especially Gurira, with her chocolate-chocolate skin and close-cropped fro, in a love triangle gone deadly. I do not look anything like her, but at least seeing her allows me to envision an image of myself as beloved on the small (or silver) screen.

Blessedly, I once had the opportunity to see myself this way, shot on 16mm film in a classroom exercise @ NYU on the visual caress. I leaned against a telephone pole on Lafayette Street, wearing a black skirt slit up to the thigh and a wispy floral blouse, my dreadlocks tumbling around my shoulders. The camera started at my feet and tilted up -- tracing my legs, negotiating around the curve of my behind, the softness of my chest, and my face gazing off into the sun.

There is something breathtaking in the image of a black body beloved.

So too watching Gurira, whose presence lit up the screen fresh off a successful run of her new play, Eclipsed, at Yale Repertory Theater. Wish I could have seen the show, but I know a gathering of beloved black women -- Zainab Jah and Adepero Oduye among them -- lit up the stage then too. Soldiering on in an ongoing struggle to claim and reclaim the black body.