Joshua Chigozie

“I Am the Page Before the Pen”

I don’t just write—I become what I write. My creativity isn’t a tool I pick up, it’s a current I live inside. It hums in my thoughts when I walk alone, lingers in conversations when no one else hears the poetry in them. My mind doesn’t see the world in straight lines—it paints sideways, sketches stories in the steam of coffee cups, rewrites history in the shadows of trees.

When I sit down to write, I don’t always know where I’m going. And I love that. I trust the chaos, the rhythm, the instinct to follow a phrase into the unknown. A single word can unravel an entire universe if I let it. I do let it.

Characters speak through me, sometimes too loudly, sometimes not at all, and I chase them like fireflies. My metaphors are stitched from dreams and overheard moments. I invent lives on a whim, worlds out of nothing. I can make sorrow sound like song and joy feel like thunder.

My creativity is not always quiet, and it is never tame. It’s wild-eyed at 3 a.m., begging to be written. It’s delicate, too—like the silence between lines that says more than the words ever could.

I am a writer who doesn’t just tell stories—I open doors. And if you step into my words, I hope you don’t come out the same.

Because I never do.