Writing to Liberate Yourself

Matthew K. Ritchie interviews Lawrence Burney about his new book, “No Sense in Wishing.”

By Matthew K. RitchieSeptember 3, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• Cultural Studies

LAWRENCE BURNEY’S first book, No Sense in Wishing, opens up with an admission that most writers would probably prefer to keep under wraps, revealing that delving into a memoir through a collection of essays wasn’t originally in the cards. Burney (a critic by trade) charts a course through his own deeply personal odyssey, calling upon the rappers, artists, authors, and movies that helped him begin to understand the world as he saw it—and, by extension, himself. It’s a debut that seeks to cause an ache in the reader’s chest (a similar sensation that Burney said he felt at times throughout the writing process), existing as a staunchly passionate love letter to Baltimore, the people within it, and the sounds that filled his ears as he began to navigate the world.

Burney and I met in July over burgers, fries, and onion rings after the release of No Sense in Wishing (during a brief lull in his book tour) to discuss the art of vulnerability, his own obsession with archiving the stories of Black Baltimore, and his yearning to be in concert with the Black literary greats.

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MATTHEW RITCHIE: This wasn’t the book that you said you wanted to write. How did you get to the point where you wanted to start actually talking about yourself and excavating the person of “Lawrence”?

LAWRENCE BURNEY: Initially, my idea was to write about Baltimore club music, and a particular Baltimore club icon who has now passed, but I realized that it was going to take too much time. It was going to take a lot of time, but I wanted to get to work. I was thinking, What’s the most practical way for me to go about attacking this book project? But then, as I continued to read a lot of people, specifically Black writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hanif Abdurraqib, Kiese Laymon, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, a lot of their first books (regardless of theme) were essentially personal essay collections and memoirs.

And that felt like something I should try to duplicate, obviously from my own perspective, because I think that approach is effective—it gets people invested in you as a person, how you see the world, how your experiences shape up to their experiences. Naturally with memoir and essay collections, I think people can find entry points to relate to. And I think if I want to start doing more ambitious books in the future, it’s best to have the audience, whatever audience that is, be familiar with who I am, so I can be a trusted source.

It’s a good starting point, because otherwise, people are like, “Why should I even read your words?”

And we live in that time where—I think, in the past, maybe because mostly white men were writing books or getting published as authors, people were maybe more okay with what they believed to be a neutral voice, just talking about a topic. But it’s different now. If you’re a person who’s going to be like, “I’m going to write about underground queer spaces, underground queer Black spaces,” and you are a straight white person, people will want to call you to question, man, thankfully, thank God. So I think [with] the things that I want to do in the future, this first book is just a portal into many worlds that I want to explore.

How did you settle your relationship with objectivity in this book, sort of dealing with the interplay of memories with facts and everything?

Objectivity obviously exists, but I think there’s a spectrum of objectivity. Like, I think you can try to be as neutral as you can and not be vindictive in the way that you approach things, or maybe too flowery or romantic about how you approach things, but you still are approaching it through your experiences and how you’ve seen the world already. So that’s going to dictate how you write about shit. So, I’m just honest about it.

​​There’s no need to act like all the journalistic or critical work I’ve done up to this point was purely objective. But that don’t mean I’m a straight-up homer to the point that I’m not going to critique what I’m engaging with. It just means that I’m invested in this particular theme or subject or region or diaspora because I’m of it. And I want to explore all the intricacies of it, because I belong to it. I’m interested in it. I’m investing in it.

Truth is still the most important thing, right? But also, truth doesn’t mean totally sterile of all feeling.

I’m trying to strike emotional chords, like, I think those are the most effective stories, regardless of what the story is about. Like, if you can feel something when you’re absorbing a film, a book, an album, whatever the case may be, I think that’s really what I’m trying to get at. And I think my approach at that attempt is just being as vulnerable and truthful as I feel safe being, basically.

How did you decide which artists, which movies, which TV you were going to bring into the fold and write about here?

I would say, every essay or every form of cultural production that I engage with in this book is probably the ones that have had the most profound effects. For sure, engaging with Lupe [Fiasco]’s music, I think, like no bullshit, changed the course of my life. It sounded corny as hell, but it did, you know, like I needed [it to] in order for me to become the person that I am right now. I don’t think that happens in the same timeline without me engaging with his music at the time that I engaged with him, because I think I was really searching or yearning for an alternative way of showing up to the world, but not having a real, solid example of what that looked like, and applying it to my environment. You obviously see alternative options all the time, but does that alternative option make sense for you?

I think Lupe was that. Common wasn’t that, you know, like Kanye wasn’t even really that. Like, my mother put me on to Kanye, you know, my mother was on the neo-soul wave, and he kind of entered the rap game as a performing artist through that, through that scene, and he was older than me. I mean, Lupe is older than me too—by probably almost a decade, but he was young enough where he felt relatable, right? He felt like whatever he was doing was seamlessly engaging with youth culture where, like, Kanye felt like a full adult … So when you’re a kid, that doesn’t feel like a young person to you, right? Even though they are. But like, I think Lupe was probably 23 when he came out, so he still felt young enough where I was like, “Okay, this can hold my interest, at least visually and aesthetically. Oh, I feel very much how this guy feels emotionally navigating his environment.”

Even in the Bruiser essay, like me seeing that film—I thought I was watching a stupid random movie on Hulu, just me and my girl. We just in the crib on a lazy Saturday or Sunday or whatever it was, watching a movie. I didn’t think nothing of it. But then as we started watching, I’m just like, “God, it’s just striking me in every internal organ where I can’t hide from it,” right? It triggered me, essentially. It’s not to a T what I’ve experienced as a father, but it was it. It hit on the emotions that I felt from all the characters. And I’ve never had a film really land to the point where it resonated with me as a parent. It felt similar, two men jousting for position, how you show up as a Black man, emotionally—I related to that.

You brought people into the Baltimore world that you lived in almost by saying, “Oh this is where it is, and then you’re just going to have to get the lay of the land as I continue to bring you along.” How do you balance exposition but also keeping things inside baseball?

So, I revised a lot of those essays. I wrote most essays individually, but there was a stretch of essays, I would say from “A Very Precious Time” up until “Revisiting Ramona”—nah, honestly, shit, all the way up until “Good Government Job”—that are like, semichronological. So I was conscious of how I was talking about Baltimore all throughout it. I didn’t want to explain something that I already explained before. I just trust that the reader will be familiar enough with the thing I already mentioned. So in that respect, I think I took away from, maybe, fiction, in terms of just trusting your readers to catch on to this world that you’re building. Also, I just think that’s like a rope that I’ve walked ever since I started writing for national publications, where I’m obviously talking about something I know very intimately. I would even say going back to being in college and just talking to the guys in the dorm, and just being able to articulate something you know intimately to the outside world to a degree that it is appealing to them, but also inspires them to dig deeper into like this world that you’re introducing them to. So I always try to give enough, but not too much, because I think that’s what I enjoy the most as a reader and just a listener of things: these little tidbits that you get along the way, and then you go look it up and are like, “Okay, now I understand what that is.” You keep moving forward.

And also just trying your best not to operate from a sense of inferiority. I’m not over explaining where I’m from too many times just because I think somebody from a bigger city is reading it and they need that hand held, like I need to convince them why they should care. I don’t really concern myself with that anymore, because I think once you begin to travel and you get older, you meet more people, I would argue that it’s more places like Baltimore than it is most big cities, like most places don’t have a million people living there. Most places actually don’t have a lot of shit going on. They just have, like, the necessities that you need as a community. Got your grocery stores, your playground, your two music venues, your couple food halls, your mom-and-pop shit, and then whatever corporations are in your city, they just in your city, like, that’s most of America. Probably most of the world, really, for sure, most of America is more than not, right?

You drop literary references all over this, like in the Three 6 Mafia chapter where you discuss Southern gothicism and then call out to Toni Morrison—what were you reading to go back further into the Black literary culture?

Well, throughout the process, [there was Morrison’s] Song of Solomon, Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin. I would say “Revisiting Ramona” was my attempt at James Baldwin’s essay “The Harlem Ghetto.” That was a direct, like, let me try to do that. Hilton Als’s White Girls—I would say the early iterations of the “Bruised” essay were my attempts at imitating a piece that Hilton Als wrote about Richard Pryor for The New Yorker, maybe like in the eighties or something, or like the early nineties. But he has that essay in the White Girls essay collection. And “Two Pillars” was a direct reaction to “Hip-Hop Stole My [Southern] Black Boy.” It’s a Kiese Laymon essay from How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. bell hooks has a book called remembered rapture that I’ve read a lot throughout the process of writing this book, because it’s a book about writing, and the things that you need to consider as a writer when you’re operating from a very specialized identity and, like, are you allowed to speak for these people? How do you mine your memory? It’s just all these things. Like every chapter/essay is [filled with] things to consider while you’re building yourself as a writer. Yeah, that was super helpful.

I read, like I said, Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom. That’s contemporary. But what else was I reading? A lot of—the Library of Congress has these editions of slave narratives that they did in every state after the Civil War. I think mostly in the late 1800s, they were going to every state and talking to people who remembered slavery, and basically some of them, most of them, were children. I read Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, because this is the region where my people are from. And I used that just to think about while I was reading, while I was writing the “Love Letter to [Steamed] Crabs” essay, [and the] Frederick Douglass autobiography, his first one I read. I listened to a lot of, you know who David Blight is? He’s like the most trusted historian of all things Frederick Douglass, okay, basically old white man, of course. But he teaches, I want to say, at Harvard. And I just watched, like, basically a semester’s worth of lectures, yeah, from him about the antebellum period. Ta-Nehisi has a talk with him. That’s really good for me. It’s back. So, yeah, I mean, I’m listing a lot of shit, but that’s just a little bit of what I was reading.

It’s like you had to be stoked in the Black tradition of what you wanted to be in; it felt like you were reaching out to other authors—I saw a lot of Toni and James in the way you recounted the idea of “place,” that thing where you were sparring mentally with the writers that you love?

I want to be thought of in the same vein as those people, like, those are the people that shaped Black storytelling as we know it, and people that are continuing that legacy right now. And I want to be in those people’s company. Whether that’s a public-facing thing or just a thing that I feel for myself, I know when I’m thinking of the writer that I want to be, those are the people I’m thinking about. Obviously, I mean, I’ve named books that weren’t just from Black people, yeah, but I’m very concerned with just Black stories, like just studying, and just like digging into Black stories and digging into the history of America in general. Oh, also Blues People. I don’t know how I could forget [Amiri] Baraka’s Blues People. If I can get to that level of a book, I’ll be more than happy. It’s so rigorous and so soulful. So like, man, that shit is just crazy. And [Greg Tate’s] Flyboy in the Buttermilk. Obviously, I have this anthology of hip-hop writing from the 1990s and 2000s and there’s a lot of people in that shit, I’ll show it to you.

When I think about the people that I admire, I want to be one of them. I want to be there. It’s not about the accolade (obviously you want those things). But it’s more about how those people make Black people feel.

That middle section from “Love Letter to Crabs” to “Two Pillars” to “Revisiting Ramona,” it’s as though you’re sitting in the idea of yearning for being from a place.

Yeah, that’s what I’m going for, the way I’ve learned about so many places through writing. I hope my work can be one of those slices of Black Baltimore. Like, I’m not necessarily trying to be a definitive voice, because that’s impossible, right? But like, I wanted to be resonant.

It’s as though you enjoy toeing that line of being like, “I love my place. But it’s not perfect.”

I have a thing with some of my close friends where I coined this term. Like I say to some of my friends sometimes, where it’s me and all my closest friends, like, we just want to be “international Baltimore niggas,” like I want to be. I don’t want it to be no mistake about where I’m from.

But I also strive to be worldly, in the sense of, like, that’s where I want my reach. I want to be in community with international Jackson, Mississippi, niggas. International, fucking, like Dakar, Senegal, niggas. International Montego Bay, Jamaica—it’s [that] I want to be part of a global community of people who are very, very committed to telling the stories of where they are from.

I don’t love nothing more than just being able to learn about a place through the eyes of somebody who is from it and loves it, but is frustrated by it, and wants it to be better. Sometimes I don’t feel like it’s gonna get better. You know, like those people that are passionate about home. Like, Baltimore is one of the places where people who are from here are passionate about Baltimore, regardless of what anybody from the outside thinks, like people here are very engulfed.

I see it in the way you lock into the figures in the book. It felt as though you could have spent 2,000 more words on Tom Miller, Lor Scoota, Mr. Ellis, and others.

I just want to contribute to the archive, you know; I think, unfortunately, there’s just not a lot to pull from. And I’m hoping that my efforts can just contribute to, like, what people can rely on in the future of what was going on in Black Baltimore in the 2010s and up. I guess I’ve taken on that responsibility. It’s not me trying to be a definitive voice, but it’s like a gap that needs to be filled, and obviously that other people contributed to. But I just want to make my people look good.

Mr. Ellis, yeah. Just a stand-up guy, you know. I think you don’t have a choice but to respect somebody that just does some shit because they think it needs to be done. Like, I respect that. I respect that. Because also, like, we live in a time now where it is very rare to come across somebody who’s just doing something because they think it should happen, right? Rather than “I’m doing this because it should happen, but also I’m doing it because I can further my digital presence or my relevance, or my potential for me to earn off of this.”

So, I really enjoy when people are the opposite of that, like they do something with passion and commitment, and maybe they’ll become something or maybe they won’t. Well, I mean, what does that even mean? Like, becoming something—that’s the benefit of being from a place like here, where we lionize our own people: they don’t have to matter nowhere else, but they matter here.

There were a couple sections where I really felt that your prose almost shifted—specifically “Ramona” and “Bruised,” it got really methodical. You always speak and write directly, but it was as though each line was like a jab. Did you feel yourself slowing down?

I mean, that shit just took so long to write, bro; like, it’s the most time I ever spent writing any one thing, and it’s because the emotions around that story are so heavy that I had to just be like, “Okay, am I just emotionally vomiting?” That story went through a lot of iterations. I think I was almost using the movie as a shield to hold me from getting straight to my emotions. The very early versions were more like trying to write about the characters from the movie in a way that blurred, like fiction and nonfiction, like I was essentially trying to interpret the movie into literary form, and then what I was trying to do from there was to go into my own story. But I was writing about those people like I knew them, and it was just getting to summary, it was just dragging, and it was taking too long to get to my story. So I revamped it and rearranged some things. I flipped it.

I don’t know, I really wanted to be careful with that, because that one has probably the most intense and most recent heavy emotions around anything I’ve ever felt. So I just had to be careful, just considerate of everything. So if it feels methodical, it’s probably because it got a lot of attention, in a way that almost felt restrictive at times. And it’s still like, out of any essay in the book, the one that I’m still most uncomfortable about, just like writing that personally. Do I even want people to notice? But you can’t even think about that shit, like, you just gotta write to liberate yourself.

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Lawrence Burney is a writer, critic, and the founder of True Laurels, an independent magazine covering Baltimore’s music and culture scene. His work has appeared in publications such as New York magazine, GQ, and Pitchfork. He has also worked at The Fader, Vice, and The Baltimore Banner. No Sense in Wishing (2025) is his first book. Follow him on Instagram and X @TrueLaurels.

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Featured image: Photo of Lawrence Burney by SHAN Wallace.