On Writing Senses of Silence

There's a particular kind of quiet that gets passed down. Not the quiet of peace — the quiet of things nobody agreed to talk about. You inherit it the way you inherit a jawline or a temper: without being told, without a ceremony, without anyone sitting you down to say this is yours now. You just carry it.

That's where Senses of Silence started. Not with a plot. With that quiet.

I kept coming back to Port Chicago — to July 17, 1944, to the men loading munitions onto ships in the dark, to the explosion that took over three hundred lives in a single instant, most of them Black sailors doing the most dangerous job the Navy had and getting none of the credit or the caution that should have come with it. And then the fifty who refused to go back to work under the same unsafe conditions, and were tried for mutiny for saying so.

History tends to file that under "incident." I wanted to write it as inheritance. What does it mean to carry that — not as a fact you read once, but as something folded into your family, your body, the things your elders wouldn't say at dinner? What does it cost to keep a silence like that? What does it cost to finally break it?

Senses of Silence moves through memory and rupture to sit with those questions. It's not a history book. It's a novel about lineage — about what gets handed to us in the space where words should have been, and about the particular courage it takes to speak into that space anyway, generations later, when the people who lived it are gone and all that's left is the hum beneath the skin.

I didn't write this book to resolve anything. Silence doesn't resolve. It gets answered, if you're lucky, and even then only partially, only by someone willing to go first. I wanted this book to be that — an answer, partial and imperfect, to a silence I didn't create but was handed all the same.

Where things stand: the manuscript is with IngramSpark now, moving through print and ePub file review. Once that clears, we'll be opening pre-orders — I'll be sharing that date here and on the waiting list the moment it's locked in. If you haven't joined yet, that's still the fastest way to know first: yohanscreativecircle.com/senses-of-silence.

More soon. Thank you for carrying this one with me.

— YoHan