Dear Winnie

Dear Winnie,

I remember you as the 13-year-old girl who enjoyed her English classes. Your hand was always up, waiting with anticipation for Madam Sabila to choose you to read stories from your copy of the Practical English Course for the entire class. All the dormitories you slept in and the class rooms you sat in at Iganga Secondary School do bear me witness that you were that teenager who loved her novels. You attended all your first literature classes, from Senior One to Senior Four, having read every novel, play or poetry chapbook from cover to cover. 

You were filled with tales of Oliver Twist in the company of the Artful Dodger who skimmed his way into people’s pockets along the streets of London. When you read Tess of the D’ubervilles, you could hardly comprehend her plight. But age has made you judge her with grace. Life doesn’t smile brightly on us all. She was raped by that shameless Alec and faced indescribable losses early in life. She found love, and it slipped right out of her hands on her wedding night. If Angel Clare, loved her enough to walk her down the aisle, couldn’t he have looked past her ugly history? And why did he show up in the end when Tess didn’t have the freedom to love him forever this side of eternity? Such were the stories that filled your early teenager years. And oh, you were that girl who subscribed to Mills & Boons, whose eyes were glued to those pages as if they were the very essence of your life.

Pretty notebook and cute pencils fascinated you but in all those notebooks were self awareness issues. Your muse was you and you and you alone. I’m glad you took off time to discover yourself at an early age. But can a person get to know who they are 100%? Perhaps 50% because man is always in a constant state of evolution. Nothing, absolutely nothing you wrote ever made it to any of the school magazines and you had zero interest in that. It’s the passage of years with the experiences you have encountered that have turned you my littlest reader into a writer. You breathed in plenty of books and now you’re breathing out words on paper. I am very certain that if the 2025 version of Winnie had to become a Secondary School Student once more, she would join the Writers’ Club and submit articles for every school magazine issue, be part of the Journalism Club and read news every Monday morning assembly (as if she would be the only passionate news anchor in a sea of gifted and passionate young ladies). 

This version of you, would have chosen a writing course at University instead of studying Advanced Level Biology, Chemistry, and Maths. You wasted many years studying irrelevant things but how else would you have become a strong advocate of Passions and Dreams had you not climbed hills, traversed scary forests, crossed huge water bodies to discover what truly sets your heart on fire? Someone has to pay the price of ignorance for thousands to be educated. Good enough, you were wise enough to head to every prompt that led you to pick up your pen and scribble down what was running through your mind.

Winnie Darling, I’ve seen you bleed on paper. I’ve seen you heal. I’ve seen you laugh with your pen. You have been courageous enough to shift from communicating with your notebooks to sharing your mind with the rest of the world. Writers, especially most of the Afrobloggers you have interacted with, are one of the most authentic group of people you’ve ever met. They remind you of musicians. Winnie, you often say that people fall in love with certain songs because those artists were bold enough to express the feelings running through them in their rawest form. Feelings of love. Pain. Joy. Name them. Every authentic creative’s work you have fellowshipped with has infused this necessary ingredient into you. 

I know you still have a long way to go, but I’m proud of how far you’ve come. I don’t like your long sentences. Work on becoming a scholar of short sentences. You tend to use many words and many sentences to describe something that Durman Mastiko Troy would write about with precision. During every Winter Afrobloggers’ Blogging Challenge, you read works from all over Africa and were blown away by the expanse of their creativity and mastery of their skillful writing. Yet I love the simplicity of your usage of language. Even a child can understand most of your stories. I love that you have embraced your style of writing. Winnie you repeat things. You are a repetitive writer and I know you do it because inside you is a teacher who atimes wishes that her readers capture what her heart is labouring to explain. Didn’t Zig Zaglar say that repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action which makes it the architect of accomplishment? So repeat yourself all that you want. If you like, write about the same thing over and over again because you know why you’re doing so.

Winnie, if I were your teacher, I would say take time to describe what’s going on around you instead of what’s happening within you. I agree that you are good at expressing you feelings. Excellent. Very good. Well done. Keep it up. Now, move on to something else. Start painting us pictures of your world. Takes us around your country. Make us yearn to visit the places that are dear to you. Stir up our imaginations. We’re tired of your feelings. When you do that, we will move on to other complex things. Why else would we promote you to Primary Seven when Primary Four is where you belong?

I remind you to despise not every little step you take on your writing journey. It’s because of them that we’re here. From notebooks to blogging. That’s where you met fellow bloggers like Uncle ~B. That’s how you fully realized that you’re not the only one made restless by thoughts until they’re poured out on paper. That’s when you started earning from this craft. It’s because of those steps that you ended up working at Word For Today Publications Limited. Durman Mastiko Troy, the multifaceted creative you met during your first Afrobloggers’ Blogging Challenge, led you to another blogging challenge. For an entire month you showed up and blogged daily on number of subjects. It was a bittersweet experience when that challenge ended. You received a certificate for having successfully finished that race. Two months later, you were became of the Word For Today Publications Limited team for simply showing up to blog daily.

Shortly afterwards, you finally decided to publish that book that you had been working on for over 12 years. Who edited it? Liz N. Ssentamu the CEO of Word For Today Publications Limited. Who published it? Word For Today Publications Limited. Who made your book launch such an honorable event? The Word For Today Publications Limited team. Most creatives know that 99.9% of the time people take them as unserious. That book launch my friend, was the validation you needed for your parents to acknowledge that you’re writer. I could see that they were proud of you. Your friends turned up. Books were sold. And you had panelists among whom were seasoned bookish people from the Word For Today Publications Limited team that amazed your audience. Winnie, I saw Baba and Mama proud of you their daughter whose choice of career has always perturbed them although they seem to be silent.

Which person goes to school and graduates top of their class, works for three months and resigns to come sit home? Which person disturbs people around her that she’s a blogger, a podcaster and an author yet the money in her pockets clearly tells her, “Pick up yourself and go look for a reliable paying job. You’re growing old and time waits for no man.”? I have seen you endure little or no money in the pursuit of your dreams like writing in the comfort of your parents home yet you turned 30 years last year. Winnie. Winnie. Winnie. You have defied the odds and listened to your heart. If you asked me, I would say that it’s both a foolish and a wise move. Foolish in the sense that society has had to look at with questioning eyes. Where’s your job? Where is the husband and the children? My friend, when are you leaving your parents’ house? But wise because first of all, you’re where you dreamt of being. Since time immemorial you’ve wanted to be a homemaker. So if the husband won’t come, you might as well stay in the home that grew you. You love the idea of people coming home to someone (not the house staff but a family member). You love the idea of working from home. 

Your decision was wise because you followed your heart until when opportunities started knocking on your door. They may still be drizzles but I’m starting to hear monsoon winds. The downpour is on its way. That’s why I’m constantly preparing myself. That why I’m following the wise words of my friend Troy to always be adding value to myself. I’m almost winding up with the Teakisi Creative Residency on blogging. Now am part of The Muwado Art of Commercial Storytelling Webinars For African Digital Creatives. I show up every week to write a Passions and Dreams quote which is one of my attempts to keep the book I have written relevant. It’s one thing to write a book, and it’s another for it to become a bestseller. I have many strategies and of them is donating books to the school that grew me. The school where I fell in love with words and literature. I have this dream of having an event there in the company of my fellow Old Girls. Together we will inspire the next generation. We will read my Chapter Two: A Place of Discovery. I know and know that those girls in multicolored cotton uniform dresses with tightened belts around their waists will totally identify with that chapter.

Wow. I thought that I was writing to the old version of you, Winnie. See how the the letter has evolved to your current affairs. Winnie, continue showing up. Continue writing. Continue believing in your dreams as a writer because there’s a writer out there who will identify with your journey. Winnie, there’s a reader out there to whom your words will make sense. And even if you chose not to write, the words within you need an expression every now and then. They will force you to set them free. If I were you, I would do so on my own accord. 

Until then, I will be on the sidelines watching where this thing called writing will lead you.

Yours Sincerely,

Winnie 2025