I moved to Newburgh, NY, from New York City during a heatwave. It was the beginning of July and for almost two weeks, the daily temperature held steady at 90 degrees Fahrenheit. From my porch some mornings, I’d watch a small group of ducks huddle beneath a large weeping willow shading the perimeter of the lake. On other mornings, I’d observe them treading water, barely moving — almost determined in what I perceived to be their commitment to remaining as cool as possible. Exert the least amount of energy is the sound advice regularly given to those attempting to stay healthy in such high temperatures. I wanted to be like the ducks, I told myself in July. Still — resolute even, in this condition.

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When it was time to move away from the city, I also told myself I wouldn’t write about the move, though I realize I’m betraying this choice now. I had left once before only to find myself back again; a second departure required neither fanfare nor proclamation. People move and change and change their minds. In the city, as I finished graduate school (but probably even before I neared the completion of my studies), I registered the impending goodbye somatically. My left shoulder tightened the fall of my second year and nothing could unknot it; not acupuncture, not foam rolling, not the chiropractor. The following spring, I would wake in the middle of the night with a tightening chest. I was spooked. My cardiologist ran tests and more tests and they always came back inconclusive. The best thing you can do for yourself, he told me during my third visit, is to try and take it easy. It was unclear to me just what “take it easy” meant. My life as a graduate student was a mélange of homework, adjunct teaching gigs, a terrible full-time job I eventually quit, and some freelance assignments, all designed to help me keep my financial head above water. Take it easy in this economy? I will do my best, is what I told the cardiologist, knowing that my university health insurance would soon come to an end, presenting another plot twist in this supposed plan.

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Because the heatwave made it impossible for me to sleep in comfortably, I started to wake with the sun. And because this was also the coolest part of the day, I started taking early morning walks to learn Newburgh. Those first couple months, even after the heat let up, I’d be outside by 7:30, maybe 8, thankful to not be choking on the humidity. My weather app would indicate a temperature of 78 degrees with a looming high somewhere past 85. On those days, I kept my routine simple, walking east on 3rd until I hit Grand Street, right in front of the Newburgh Free Library. I’d hang a right, passing a mural created by Garin Baker in collaboration with young artists from the area. One panel depicts six young people sitting on the stoop of an abandoned home; the other shows those same young people restoring other homes. I’d keep walking until I reached Washington Street, make a left, and cross the train tracks so that I could sit at the Hudson River before it became too hot to enjoy the decision to have left the house at all. I’m new here, I’d tell the river.

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My father ritualized an evening routine during my childhood that I hated then but have come to appreciate as an adult. Two, three times a week, he’d pack me, my brother, and my little sister in the backseat of his burgundy Toyota and we would either drive out to the battlefields of Yorktown, Virginia, creeping along the narrow roads to watch deer, or to housing developments throughout the Peninsula and the Southside where we’d tour built and in-progress homes as a matter of middle-class aspiration. I found these outings dull, a waste of time when I could have been playing a video game, riding my bike, or reading a book. My dad, ever the history teacher, would have an entire lecture prepared about the Revolutionary War or the Civil War — those grounds being our home turf — or the reason some random architect chose to build in the location we were touring. Much of this information stuck. But what I remember most is how he used to tell us, as we fell asleep in the car, the point of it all. Whenever you go to a new place, he’d say, it’s important to take your time and move slowly as you take in what’s been here before you.

These were my first way finding lessons.

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Of the many lessons I have learned as a writer, embracing stillness has been the most difficult. I’m sure that in a room full of one hundred writers, you would receive one hundred interpretations of this idea. I use it here to mean a type of quietude and an unhurried position. A state in which I am best able to greet my own mind. At times, the publishing industry has a way of making me feel I need to move a mile a minute in order to have value — but I know this is a myth. I wish we writers would say this more to one another: the market’s sense of urgency does not have to become your sense of urgency.

Instead of returning to Virginia where I was living before graduate school, I chose to move to Newburgh — to welcome stillness — after my dear friend Jet, a writer and organizer, suggested that this place might offer the medicine I need as I attempt to orient my life around my art. Now, as a resident, I am also a resident of the Hudson Valley, and what I know about this region of New York State is that it has offered Black women writers respite over the years.

In her brief and brilliant lifetime, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry called Croton-on-Hudson home. Toni Morrison said that Beloved rose from the river one day while the author was at her writing desk in Rockland County, sat down, and then disappeared. This is when Morrison encountered the solution to the book that would become one of her most acclaimed novels. I began to write full-time as a writer in this place, Morrison said of the Hudson Valley. And I had never felt that before, ever, that level of intense happiness and freedom.

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After Labor Day, I am zig-zagging east to west in Newburgh’s largest park, Downing, in search of the best patch of grass for a reading spot. I choose an area near the weeping willow favored by the ducks and start googling more details about this public space, which was designed by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted. I learn the park has been designated as the final resting ground for the rescued remains of more than one hundred Black residents whose nineteenth-century graves were discovered in 2008 beneath the current courthouse, located south of the park on Broadway. Before the courthouse was a courthouse, it was The Old Broadway School, built on top of the burial ground in 1908.

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I don’t own a car at the moment so I make my way around town mostly on foot. I walk to run errands just as I walk to enter the writing process or to decompress from it. As a result, I think of my writing time and walking time as intertwined. Unless the weather is too unbearable, one does not happen without the other. I’m often listening to music during these excursions. Dorothy Ashby. Próxima Parada. Jadakiss. I think about my day-job responsibilities. I think about how the absurdly priced health insurance I have now via Obamacare pales in comparison to what I had as a student. I’m regularly thinking about my family; my great-great grandmother Fannie typically comes to mind as I imagine telling her, an illiterate woman, that I am writing a book about love and criticism. That this feels like my work.

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When an essay traps me into a corner, I walk as I repeat the problem to myself, reciting entire sentences aloud in hopes the air hitting my face will spark a light. I walk to remind myself that every day I show up with my writing is a day to feel good about. Even when it’s hard. I chart the distance, the discrepancy between what I want to write and what I end up writing, as Renee Gladman once said. On a Tuesday, this might mean I manage to write only three sentences and walk for twenty minutes. On a Friday, this could mean I write three pages and walk for an hour. On a Sunday, a ninety-minute walk is more likely, south on Robinson Avenue to the beauty-supply store to buy whatever new hair tool it is I tell myself that I need. Then over to the skate park via Delano-Hitch Park, where I consistently promise myself I will rollerblade the next day and the next day finds me still on foot.

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The city of Newburgh, the former headquarters of the Continental Army, is located to the west of the Hudson River. On Liberty Street sits the home George Washington used as his headquarters as commander of the Continental Army from the spring of 1782 to the summer of 1783. The current population hovers just under thirty thousand residents. Newburgh is a short drive from Storm King Art Center and Dia Beacon — if you talk to certain people, they might get excited by this fact before telling you to avoid walking on certain blocks during certain times of the day. Which is, of course, their way of not telling you what they are afraid of. You just have to be careful of where you hang out, is what one woman who lived here decades ago as her marriage fell apart told me. This was about a month after I had moved. I was in Manhattan attending an “art” event. At that same event, someone had called me brave for being a writer who chose to leave the five boroughs. I’m sure you’ll still be able to make great connections, they had said.

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In the third act of Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Beneatha informs her lover, Asagai, that her older brother, Walter, has lost the life-altering insurance money her family received in the wake of her father’s death. As the couple go back and forth about this occurrence — Beneatha angry, Asagai trying to calm her — Asagai offers a fix: an invitation to Beneatha to go back to Nigeria with him. And Beneatha, rightfully overwhelmed, cannot make a decision. I must sit down and think, she says. Asagai's response has gnawed its way into my mind since my move: Don’t get up. Just sit a while and think. Never be afraid to sit a while and think.

I am asking myself about the conditions I’d like to preserve for myself in order to keep writing. I am leafing through the blueprints that live on my bookshelf, trying to create a set of my own. I am wayfinding as a new chapter in my life begins. I make my way to the river: sit awhile or walk a while and think. I know this is a great privilege, to write in stable health and relative safety in a country for whom war is sport. To traverse the contours of my imagination without looking over my shoulder. My body feels as though we have arrived at some place that always seemed a little out of reach.

I am writing this on the day the world has learned of the passing of poet Nikki Giovanni, who I feel would amend Asagai’s provocation slightly: sit a while. think. get to work.

Sometimes, I feel I am living a life I am not always sure I’m supposed to experience. Sometimes, I forget how rare it actually is to be a Black woman artist, sitting and thinking. Writing.