When I need to step away from the page, I turn to other worlds where imagination is inseparable from reason—my collection of fantasy novels, my Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. Building a character or a universe for D&D reminds me that story begins with wonder, not certainty. Dice rolling across a table sound like a miniature version of fate, and for a few hours I’m not a poet revising a line; I’m a half-elf mapping stars or a bard trying to charm the gods.
That play reopens something essential: the permission to invent. It returns me to poetry with my sense of risk renewed. The game illustrates what writing keeps teaching us—that even in worlds of the imagination, we’re still trying to understand what mercy looks like, what love costs, the strange ways belief survives.
—Brian Gyamfi, author of What God in the Kingdom of Bastards
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025)
Photo credit: Elliot O’Donovan