Kyle J. Hayes
I am a writer interested in the things we carry with us.
Memory. Music. Food. Family. Culture. The lessons we inherit, the ones we misunderstand, and the ones that finally make sense years later.
Salt, Ink & Soul grew from my desire to look more closely at those things.
Much of my writing begins with something ordinary: a meal, a song, something my mother once said, a childhood memory, a question I haven’t been able to put down. I follow it to see where it leads.
Often, it leads me home.
As a Black American writer, I am especially interested in the culture created by Foundational Black Americans after emancipation—the families we built, the food we made, the music we gave the world, the language we shaped, the traditions we carried north and south, and the ways we learned to make a life in a country that did not always make room for us.
I write about that inheritance because I believe ordinary lives deserve to be documented.
But this space is also about living now.
I write about manhood and vulnerability. About getting older. About cooking because it is too hot to turn on the oven. About music that still gives me goosebumps. About what success means after you’ve lived long enough to question the definition you were given. About kindness, disappointment, resilience, and the strange work of becoming comfortable with the person looking back at you.
Some essays are heavy.
Some are not.
Sometimes a rice cooker is just a rice cooker.
Almost.
What connects these pieces is curiosity.
I want to understand why certain things stay with us. Why a song can carry decades inside four minutes. Why food made by someone who loved us never tastes quite the same when we make it ourselves. Why the words people spoke to us as children sometimes wait thirty years before revealing what they meant.
And I want to leave a record.
For my readers. For the people who come after me. For anyone who has ever wondered whether the small things that made up their life were important enough to remember.
I believe they are.
I don’t claim to have all the answers.
I’m just learning to ask better questions.
Welcome to Salt, Ink & Soul.
Salt,Ink, & Soul 