Meet Our New Editorial Intern, Naudika!

We feel super lucky here at NaNo HQ to be able to work with some excellent interns! Today, meet our newest Editorial Intern, Naudika Williams. You’ll be getting to know them better throughout Camp, but today they’re here to tell you a little bit about themself:

I remember waking up at 4 am on the weekends to quietly write in the dark, just adjusting the light enough to avoid disturbing my sleeping family. I would sit at the dining room table until my hands would warm the wood and peel away with sweat. My mom would scold me for being up so early, so I stayed up late in retaliation to finish my stories.  

It’s kind of ironic that I’m the Editorial Intern because NaNoWriMo inspired me to write my first novel. I took a beatdown, grey laptop and started typing every day, despite hand cramps or sleep deprivation. I look back now at my novel, some overly complicated fantasy, and recognize it’s absolutely horrible. Atrocious, honestly. I will never share it, but the pride I hold for that mess of a narrative that I produced is something I can’t forget.

I’m never sure if writers choose to be as passionate as they are about storytelling. I can show you my wall of littered notecards and stacked post-its that decorate my room like trophies, waiting to be immortalized in a book or script. I wonder if this is enough to prove my passion. There are times I think of a boring anthropology class I once took, teaching me about oral stories as part of the human experience. Then the silent workshops that hold writing as a healing ritual, and think that maybe just getting a word on a page is my way of expressing nothing more human than wanting to be heard. Maybe I’m a little biased, but I like to think of the moments of my hands sweating, stuck to pages in the dark.

Naudika Williams has been a writer since they could hold a pencil correctly, which, honestly, still depends on the day. They wrote their first novel on NaNoWriMo in 2012 and now is the 2021 Editorial Intern. Naudika continues to make their many short stories, scripts, poems, and choose-your-own-adventure games inspired by Afrofuturism and environmental justice. They hope that one day if someone could summarize their work, it would be described as “chaos and too many animal references”.