Author: Azlan

538: “Communally Co-Created Ritual” (With and For Latrelle Bright)

“Communally Co-created Ritual

loving, honoring, remembering, nostalgic, bittersweet
we are a village
we tell ghost stories. who/what are our ghosts?
ritual has very prescribed steps
we need to sing old songs / new songs
we need to make spirit houses for our ghosts
costumes, banners, crowns/garlands
cozy

harvest
it’s in the woods”

                -with and for Latrelle Bright

                A friend and dear colleague passed away this semester. Her name is Latrelle. She’s the kind of artist/educator/delight who spent her time co-creating communities, rituals, connections. Lives. She taught theater, and so much else. I can’t begin to say what she taught me. That we can come together, more meaningfully or more gently and more powerfully than we have yet hoped?
                The text above is from a thought map that was pinned up at a celebrations for Latrelle a few days after she passed away. I think it was from her friends and colleagues, co-creating the ritual that I was at when I saw it. The celebrating and remembering rituals that went on to an afternoon in the park with music and movement a few weeks later. Beneath trees, so almost in the woods. It could just as easily be from something Latrelle taught. She taught that way. Grounded in theater, she called it devising: a bringing together of our ideas, a recognizing of where and who we are, and how we’re moving, until we’re moving together. And maybe it’s really both: because like so many others, I speak Latrelle sometimes, or she speaks me, her laughters and reminders on my lips. Maybe I’m writing this because I want to co-create with her again. Maybe because she’s still co-creating me, and us. We tell ghost stories. We need to sing old songs / new songs. Cozy. We harvest. We gather together. We gather ourselves. We gather fruits and breaths and moments from the trees and grass and each other. Gather lives. It’s in the woods.

by Azlan

537: “A Live Fish?!” (Badell, Rebottaro, & Bender)

“Bunker: ‘A live fish?!’
The Wraith: ‘The true crimefighter always carries everything she needs in her utility belt, Tyler.’”
                -Flavor text for The Wraith’s Utility Belt card in Sentinels of the Multiverse by Christopher Badell, Adam Rebottaro, and Paul Bender

                I don’t love this quote just because I love the image. A Batman style utility belt, and inside a live fish—maybe a little dace—of course in water because otherwise it won’t stay alive for long. And I don’t love it just because my friends and I were playing Sentinels of the Multiverse yesterday, and Hannah stopped us, saying: “Wait. This card’s actually pretty funny.” Though maybe in part this post is a you had to be there moment. So much of language is, isn’t it? A connection in a place and time. A hand holding a fish. You had to be there, and it all made sense.
                There’s also something ridiculous about that superhero trope of carrying everything you need. Of somehow being fully independent of context and situation, as though prepared enough could keep you dry in a rainstorm, cool in a heatwave, could help you chat with friends around a board game, cure your cancer, ready you for a loved one’s death or an old friend’s return, or the pipes freezing, or your joints aging, or life, or death. Could be ready for all the endless perhapses and certainties of a changing world. For that you really would need a live fish. Or maybe, instead, you could let the fish go back in the river, where it would rather be. Swimming along. Not helplessly, not mindlessly. Not ready for anything but responding to this. These changing currents of river and world. You had to be there, but luckily, you are.

by Azlan

536: What “I’m Asking” (Tochi Onyebuchi)

“Hell yeah, I’m lost. More lost than I’ve ever been in my damn life.”
“I don’t have the answer you’re looking for.”
“Answer? I don’t even know what question I’m asking anymore.”
“But you’re still asking it. That is the important part. That is always the most important part.”
                -Tochi Onyebuchi, Harmattan Season, p. 178

                I just got back from a walk with my mom. Well, my mom’s some thousands of miles away, actually, so what I had with me as today’s 68 degrees dropped toward tonight’s 36 was my jacket and my phone and her voice, walking along with me. And the blowing leaves. And the shadows of someone else at the park, also talking to someone on their phone. And the trees, the clear skies, the moon. The traffic sounds. The silences in between.
                I’ve lived far away from my family since I was seventeen. For whatever reason, this year’s been especially hard. There are probably several good reasons for that, but instead of trying to lay them out, I’m thinking about the leaves that swirled by with our voices on the evening wind, and the little chill in my fingers, almost pleasant, that’s drifting away now that I’m warming up inside. I think years ago I started wondering what happens if I turn less toward answers. (I know I miss you). I think, these days, I’m also letting go of questions. (What can we say to connect?). Or some of them, at least. There are still the questions that we can’t put into words, and whatever is between and through the questions. The rustling leaves. The wind. Someone else on the phone, talking to their loved one. The branches drawing pictures in the sky. The traffic sounds. The silences in between.

by Azlan

535: “This Is How” (Layli Long Soldier)

                “This is how you see me the space in which to place me”
                -Layli Long Soldier, Whereas, p. 8

                Just now I’m loving reading Layli Long Soldier’s poems as instructions. Or maybe, better, as a kind of script or choreography: an invitation to move through the world in certain ways and then see what’s changed. What’s growing. This is how you see me. I’m walking these steps, steps suggested by her words.
                I think this is one of my favorite approaches to language. Well, that’s hard to say. I have so many favorites. (1. The way I called “Jarrett!” to a friend, and she heard me, and then instead of walking apart we were walking together. 2. The way Anya told me “I usually harvest the seedpods and then kind of crinkle them on a cookie tray,” and now we’ve gathered arugula seeds from the garden to plant next spring. 3. The way my partner calls “Hello honey bunches!” and I call back “of oats!” and then maybe one of us invites us out for a walk. And that’s just getting started). I think I mean that I keep hearing language described as communication, the shuttling of information—“gather the seeds this way”—and while I love that, I also love them as a path to walk. I’m not telling you what you’ll see. I’m saying, look at this space you’re in, look at it this way. “This is how you see me the space in which to place me.” What do you see?
                A script. A piece of choreography. An invitation. A reminder. A walk.

by Azlan

534: “Much Together” (D’Arcy McNickle)

                “Even then, it seemed, they said but little to each other, yet nothing went unsaid that needed saying.
                In those days they were much together.”
                -D’Arcy McNickle The Surrounded

                My sibling’s visiting for a week. In the kitchen just now, actually, baking bread. Ten minutes ago we were lounging on the couch together. Earlier today we were walking beneath sycamores. (I love sycamores: the patterned bark, the broad leaves, the nobby branches like fairytale walking sticks or heretale hands waving hello). I think I feel a pressure, when I get to see a loved one again after a long time apart, to try and say everything. To talk it all out: the catching up, the reorienting, the worrying, hoping, planning, sharing. And I really do like talking. I am, I think most of my loved ones would agree, a talker. But I’ve also been sitting—or walking—with the limitations of all that saying. The saying (for me) can be a way of trying to undo the distance we also live in, our lives growing in different places. It works in some ways, and in some ways it doesn’t. More than words, what I want is our connections. And when we also live far apart, when we are together, I want that time together. Here is still a distance, not undone but not all-doing. And here’s our closeness. And here are these walks beneath the sycamores, shared steps, shared stillnesses. We are much together.

by Azlan

533: “Casting About In Bed” (Ross Gay)

                “…neglects the fact that one of life’s true delights is casting about in bed, drifting in and out of dream, as the warm hand of the sun falls through the blinds, moving ever so slowly across your body.” -Ross Gay, in “43. Some Stupid Shit,” The Book of Delights, p. 127

                I think about this two page essayette often, usually because Ross Gay does something a lot like magic in bringing delight and joy and sunbright power to turn and face horror, and this time because today I tried to take a nap. At the time I couldn’t remember the last time I tried to take a nap. I realize, now, that I’m pretty sure it was during my first bout of covid. “Tried to take a nap” is pretty off the mark for what I felt in that exhausted falling apart, but that’s the last time I was asleep at 2 or 3 pm. Lying in bed at 2 or 3 pm, today, “trying to nap,” as I put it, I thought about Gay because I realized that drifting in and out of dream is a kind of thing I could practice. A kind of thing like drifting in a river, a current-thing, pathless and gently gravity-guided, wandering through depths and reflections and shadows known and unknown. A letting go, if I’m otherwise clutching at somethings. Which I was, because in “trying to nap” today my mind kept turning back to my to-do list, the one I was too exhausted to keep at, and to the ways I should do pieces of it better. I’m thinking about Gay because all that is something I practice too, of course. That busy mindedness, that assumption that rush and press is the performance of importance. Which is something I absolutely do not believe is true. I want to go about learning to nap the same way you go about planting a kale patch. Water. Soil. Time. And someday leaves.
                Which is to say: the blankets? Stretched out. The window? Open. The breeze? Mischievous. Tonight’s sleep isn’t napping, it’s sleeping—we could I’m sure discuss the differences—but I mean for this to be a kind of gardening toward future nappings when all I’ll hold if anything is the gentle being held by sunlight and dream.

by Azlan

532: “The Steepness of My Focus” (Louise Erdrich)

                “Even now, I wonder at the steepness of my focus.” -Louise Erdrich, The Round House, p. 2

                I’ve been sitting with this description of focus as landscape. As topology, a hill rising up to a hilltop of shaded trees, or a ridge falling away in boulders to the distant ribbon of a twilight creek, water bright as sky. They carry my thoughts, these slopes. Maybe they carry all of us. 
                It’s such a different conceptualization than pay attention. Little flashing coins of time, of focus, stuffed into a purse and dripped out toward productive or meaningless pursuits. Such a different conceptualization than I’ve been trying to focus. Me standing over myself, a strict disciplinarian and a frustrated child, the taller me tapping the problem that I’m supposed to be thinking about, watchful for any sign that I’m looking out the window or swinging my feet. Except I’m both.
                Outside the rain of my thoughts sluices off the roof. Runs down through fields and streets until it finds a steep slope, and hurtles down toward what it can’t avoid. Or even, maybe, toward where it needs to be.

by Azlan

531: “Undermine Your Own Authority” (Stacey Waite)

                “17. Undermine your own authority, be certain in your uncertainty, develop a voice that can be trusted even as it is subjective, unreliable, and impossibly to pin down, unless of course, you want to be pinned down in a sexy way.” -Stacey Waite, “How (And Why) To Write Queer,” Re/Orienting Writing Studies p. 45

                Stacey Waite develops a wonderful, poetic list of 63 rules for writing queer, which can mean many things including (for me, at least) write against the ways you were told it had to be written, and write into the ways you need. Which means part of the joy of Waite’s rules is that you can’t follow them, or can’t get to where they point by following them. And part of the joy is that it’s a delight to pick them up like dance steps you’re trying to learn by watching someone across the crowd. In these last weeks as I write cover letters for job applications—so many “Dear So-and-So’s,” so many “Sincerelys,” so many “my experiences”—I’ve thinking back to Waite’s rules. Imagining a few more to go with them.
                64. Write without getting to the point, and then when you realize you’ve meandered off just go back to what you meant to start saying, or as close as you can get to it, by which I mean this is a post about how exhausted and overwhelmed I was at about 3:32 today (and 3:25, I suppose; it doesn’t happen all in a minute). Even with everything—especially with everything—my family has patterns for speaking the things we need to say, so that with my brother I say I’ve just been reading Tochi Onyebuchi’s Harmattan Season, it’s so good, and with my dad I say I’m out for a walk just saying hi, and with my mom I say I hope you slept well last night, and with me my partner says do you want to sit and breathe together for a few minutes, and maybe none of those are exactly where we meant to end up, but they’re where we make space to remind ourselves to start.
                65. Start every sentence with “so.” So we can see you thinking. So you can keep thinking. So the train of your thought can puff its steam as it gets going. So we can hear the steam. So you can mix metaphors willy-nilly. So words are a dance and even if we’re out of step we hear the steps, hear the music, hear how we’re lagging or catching up and dancing.
                66. Forget where you were going. Do you need to be going? Did you want to be coming back?

by Azlan

530: “Things Were Not As They Are Now” (Dayton Edmonds & Darcie Little Badger)

                “When the Mother Earth was extremely young, things were not as they are now. Just as things are not now as they will be, for growth and change are constant. One night […]”
                -Dayton Edmonds (Caddo Nation), “Coyote and the Pebbles,” in Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection vol. 1

                “Yes, there will be a future. There are gonna be generations beyond ours. The question is how these futures will happen.”
                -Darcie Little Badger (Lipan Apache), “A Conversation with Darcie Little Badger,” hosted by the Urbana Free Library. March 12, 2025

                I was seventeen when a need-based scholarship to need-blind Amherst College made it possible for me to fly across the country and start studying in a place I’d never been. (Need-blind meant that Amherst considered my application without factoring in my family’s finances; by admitting me, they agreed to offer as much need-based scholarship as I needed). I thought that was How School Worked. Not all schools, certainly, but some, and I’d set out to apply to need-blind institutions. Later I learned how my grandfathers went to school through the GI Bill. So that was part of How School Worked. Later I tried to support my students as they figured out how to go to school, and if they wanted to, and what kind. I read graphic novels and other texts by Indigenous people telling their family stories of Indian boarding school systems designed to rip children from their parents, siblings, languages, sometimes lives. I learned about the Sixties Scoop, so much more recent than its name suggests. I wasn’t alive in the 1960s but I was alive for part of the Scoop. What I’d thought was far away was close. And the context of my life was close to so many things that were (by some descriptions) far away.
                There is a lot to talk about here, but what I’m walking towards just now is the way stories can ground us into how transitory this particular moment is. There are so many ways that school has been made to work as a horrifying weapon and a wonderful support and sometimes, strangely, both at once, and other things too. As I read the news lately, I think about that famous description (often attributed to Philip Graham) of journalism as the ‘first rough draft of history.’ In that description, for me, history feels almost stable. Written. The dust clears, and we see what’s happened. In contrast, in the writing and reading of so many stories, I feel history as more oceany: with channels and currents, certainly, but always flowing. A wave in choppy seas. I turn to that, now, because Dayton Edmonds and Darcie Little Badger recall me to a practice of hope. There will be a future. Things will be different than they are now. I and my moment will be distant ancestors to another time as How Things Work keeps growing and changing. So, Little Badger asks one evening at the library, the question is how those futures will happen, and how our work interacts with changing waves.

by Azlan

529: “Evaluation: Erratic” (Pandemic Legacy)

                “Evaluation: Erratic.”
                –Pandemic Legacy (Season 0)

                I have an older brother, so I knew about Yoda long before I first watched the movie. I knew he was a teacher, silly and wise. Even if I didn’t know, I think the story—its shape, and the tropes it plays with—tells me to pay attention to this little figure in a little hut. His performance of unimportance is important. His power is just beneath the surface of the swamp, ready to rise. In that respect Yoda is different from almost all the other little creatures we see throughout Star Wars. His difference, his distinctness, is highlighted in everything from the camera’s attention to the precision of his character design to his humor.
                All the video and board games I’ve played build with something like this signaling. A game (by one definition) is about what I can do, and can’t do. It’s important for me to understand why landing on someone else’s Monopoly property led to me losing money. Playing the game (by this definition) is understanding, and pushing the rules around. Even in social deduction games where the point is that everyone doesn’t know the rules, the goal is to figure them out. To learn the limits of my doing, and to use my doings toward a goal. The game is about our agency.
                Which is why it stuck out to me last night when, playing the excellent Pandemic Legacy (Season 0), I had no idea why our team spies received the psychological evaluation: “Erratic.” I’m sure there was a reason. I bet it makes sense. But in this post I’m not really looking for it. I’m interested in the consistency with which I’ve learned that games are about my actions. I’m interested in how much of my life happens for bewildering reasons I can never sort out. How much of my engagement with the world unfolds beyond and outside my ability to control events. And here I am, walking through the rain I didn’t expect, trying to fix the doorknob that I didn’t know was broken. Making friends with someone who happened to say hello. What would a game be like if it celebrated the way that things go unpredictably, without any reference to my plan? Does anyone know a game like that?

by Azlan