Craft · Community · Visibility
DEW Scholar Isaiah Adepoju reflects on the past season of making, collaboration and learning how to be seen.
Three Tenets of the Work
I structure mentorship around three tenets: craft, community and visibility.
Craft is the work beneath the work: attention, revision, precision.
Community is the ecosystem: peers, collaborators, readers, elders — people who make the work possible.
Visibility is how you want to be seen and in what spaces. It’s more nuanced than self-promotion and always on your own terms.
Below are Isaiah’s reflections on the past three months, shared in his own words.
In Isaiah’s Words:
Craft
Prompt: What did you build, shift, or attempt in your practice this season?
One action I am proud of, because of this mentorship, is taking the steps to formally host my first creative writing workshop. I already belong to and have led a writing community on campus where I informally and fragmentarily teach poetry. But I have never had the courage to do this formally. I am learning so many things, ideating the best approach to teach poetry, to ground it in specificity, to give it direction.
What grew in my practice is the ability to distance myself from my poems. After one of our mentorship sessions, I tweeted that I will publish my poetry chapbook next year. I have no ready plan, but the distance I am learning from you with my own poems is helping me learn craft faster from other poems. I feel more confident now. I polished up another chapbook entirely out of this confidence.
Community
Prompt: Where did you feel supported, and what kind of collaboration do you want next?
I don’t yet know how to show my work while doing the work. Not just the encouragement but simple, actionable steps to start doing so are moments of support from you that are deeply meaningful to my work. You also bring a patience and an activity to everything about my work that makes this mentorship an unending collaboration between an older and a younger poet. I always feel grateful for this.
I would like more support here: I want to work closely in the next season with a creative on a community-based project. I might be doing more of this even after university, whether as an MA/MFA student or as a writer-wanderer, and I want to start learning now.
Visibility
Prompt: How did you show up publicly this season — and what did it teach you?
Writing and publishing on Substack every day for 30 days is the rightest-right thing I have done because of this mentorship. I loved the entire experience, the obligation of showing up, not for myself, but for a small community of dedicated readers online. The expectation of response, and the fact of responses made me feel responsible to a wider cult of readers and in a new sort of way beyond just my local writing community.
I have also become more intentional with my Instagram account. I am still tinkering about content strategy—and the skills I will be learning. (I recently bought a design course, for instance, and I am looking to start a weekly Instagram-post challenge from January till April as a testrun. Haha).What still feels premature is efficiently using my four social media platforms of focus: LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and Substack/Facebook. A content strategist in a conference I attended earlier this year talked about streamlining content to suit each social media platform, where the same content with same length is posted on LinkedIn, Substack, and Facebook, and a more catchy and brief content is posted on Instagram and X.
How I showed up for myself
For my writing, especially poems, I returned to it most weeks. But I am in deep season with that workshop and the direction it will be taking.
Challenge and Learning
One challenge I am working through is how to be in deep-work state. My mind is often just stubbornly whiling itself away. So, I have not been able to really engage for long the materials I will need for the workshop— the Africanfuturism pieces you sent.
It is teaching me that spontaneity and setting up a structure are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Next Season – Focus and Intentions
Craft
Christ is helping my family through trauma. And so, I fear I will be writing much about my family. And I will also be writing about Osogbo, the place we live in. Where in this season I placed much emphasis on community and then visibility, for next season, I want to focus on craft in my work.
Community
I have three community-based literary projects in mind. I am working closely with Pamilerin Jacob (a finalist for the DEW Scholarship) on a project called Poetry Evangelism— a group of poetry-centred preachers doing the ministry of art across universities in Nigeria. I am also organising the 3rd edition of an art festival on campus. The third project is the second edition of the “Africanfuturism in Place Poetry” literary workshop, maybe or maybe not with a different theme.
Visibility
I intend to consistently post weekly on Instagram, Substack, and Facebook. (I am not putting pressure on myself, though. I have allowed myself the opportunity to fail. I am just excited to see how my social media platforms will look like after next season).
Afterword
Craft teaches the work how to stand.
Community keeps it alive.
Visibility lets it travel.
I’m carrying this framework — craft, community, visibility — into Year Two of the DEW mentorship. This carries forward into Year Two of the DEW mentorship. More soon.
I’ll be taking a few weeks off from posting to rest and reset before the new year. Thank you for being here — I’ll see you soon.
With love and intention,
Cara
P.S. Archipel is built on generosity — of story, of craft, and connection.
If you’d like to support this work, you can:
Subscribe and stay in the current with us
Visit my Support page
Make a small offering on Buy Me a Coffee
Thank you — every contribution helps this ecosystem thrive.
 | A guest post by
|
I resonate so much with what you wrote here, especially about Isaiah finding the courage to formalize his passion; how do you manage to spark that initial confidence in your mentees, becaus that's often the hardest bit? It sounds like your mentorship principles are truly making a difference and helping people actualise their potential, which is just brilliant to read about.