In <I>The Lonely Letters</I> A tells Moth: 'Writing about and thinking with joy is what sustains me daily. It nourishes me. I do not write about joy primarily because I always have it. I write about joy Black joy because I want to generate it I want it to emerge I want to participate in its constant unfolding.'<br><br><br><br>But alongside joy A admits to Moth come loneliness exclusion and unfulfilled desire. <I>The Lonely Letters</I> is an epistolary blackqueer critique of the normative world in which Ashon T. Crawley—writing as A—meditates on the interrelation of blackqueer life sounds of the Black church theology mysticism and love. Throughout his letters A explores blackness and queerness in the musical and embodied experience of Blackpentecostal spaces and the potential for platonic and erotic connection in a world that conspires against blackqueer life.<br><br><br><br>Both a rigorous study and a performance <I>The Lonely Letters</I> gestures toward understanding the capacity for what we study to work on us to transform us and to change how we inhabit the world.
