Author: Azlan

498: “Long-Distance Love” (Ishita Dharap)

                “The Long-Distance Love-Letters program has been rescheduled to take place on Sat, February 22, 2 pm, at Krannert Art Museum.” -Ishita Dharap, in an email sent out this afternoon

                I messaged my dear friend Ishita on December 2nd, inviting her to come over and enjoy dinner and a cozy fire. She was in India with her family, she said, and she sent a picture of a truly delicious dinner that I would’ve loved to share. I met her family once. We talked about joy and rest and becoming an interwoven family as leaves rustled overhead and the stars came out in a deepening sky.
                Ishita and I messaged each other again on January 3rd, looking for a moment to catch up, but we wouldn’t be back in the same town until January 12th. Then things were busy. Now it’s mid February. Whenever we catch up, my friend, it won’t be soon enough—and at the same time, all this—and her email today—has me thinking about how the joy and curiosity and support of our friendship isn’t something put off to that scheduled moment where we can see each other in the craziness of our current political moment. That joy and curiosity and support is already woven all through: long distance love, sweet and playful and sad as we say hello from close and far away.
        I haven’t been to Ishita’s Long Distance Love-Letters museum program. Not yet. But I’ve seen her write about it (in a book and a journal article), I’ve talked with her about it, and in imagining it I’ve felt it. Maybe that’s because I’m thousands of miles away from so many of the people I love. Maybe that’s because the stories I often hear told about “long distance” are about missing, about absence. Ishita’s work makes me think back through all the ways that missing and remembering are kinds of touching and playing and learning and being together. It helps me feel that so many of my beloved absences are presences, day after day, in so many ways.

by Azlan

497: “Writing Is Not Natural” (Dylan Dryer)

                “It’s useful to remember that writing is not natural because writers tend to judge their writing processes too harshly—comparing them to the ease with which they usually speak. Speech, however, employs an extensive array of modalities unavailable to writing: gesture, expression, pacing, register, silences, and clarifications—all of which are instantaneously responsive to listeners’ verbal and nonverbal feedback.”
                -Dylan B. Dryer, “1.6 Writing Is Not Natural,” p. 29, in Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies

                Earlier today, sitting at the bar of a bookstore/coffeeshop with our big winter coats slung over the backs of our chairs, my advisor and I talked about how all the scholarship I do and want to do starts with being in the same place with people. The same room. Talking about who we are, and where we are, and what we want.
                “But why?” my advisor pushed. I struggled to answer. That’s why she was pushing: not because she doesn’t believe me, but because she wants to help me say the (messy) perspectives and commitments that weave through that experience.
                We talked for a long time, and I didn’t have an answer. I don’t have one here, either. But I like to think about Dryer’s point this way: talking with someone involves maneuvering through endless branching paths of opportunity. If we’re going to talk about my garden, we could start with the green leaves I glimpsed today, peeking out from the covering of my makeshift plastic sheeting and alive (I think!) through all of Illinois’ hard freezes. Or we could start by talking about your garden, whatever you’ve planted recently, and what other creatures came by to eat some of the raspberries last season, and how you feel about that, and how it changes your relationship to the squirrels, watching them bounding through your planted rows. Or we could start—so many places! And if we talked, in person, we’d find our path of possibility as a kind of mutual rambling, responding to each other in real time, maybe sharing some tea as we shared words. But in writing a writer is often positioned to make all these communicative choices before the you of who I’m talking to even starts out on this ramble I’m hoping we’ll share. Which points to another stark, and for me awful, difference. In talking about gardens we might both have a lot to say, but in the construction of writing there are these two strange roles. Writer. Reader. One “speaks,” one “listens,” it’s harder to play back and forth into the happy camaraderie of conversation.
                        So I was wrong. I do have an answer, or at least a rambling example about gardens. And all this is why I want my scholarship to start in conversation, not in writing. Why I’m more and more interested in writing primarily as a tool for opening and tending spaces in which we’ll come together to talk.

by Azlan

496: “A Dimly Felt Sense” (Aviva Freedman)

                “People learn to write in discipline-specific ways through a “dimly felt sense,” a complicated, lived, sensory, largely un-verbal and un-rational awareness of how things like this are supposed to sound and be presented and be shaped. This dimly felt sense helps generate the text, but it also generated by their ongoing attempt to create the text: it pushes their writing and is pushed by their experience of reading, talking, writing (and having feedback on their writing).”
                -Aviva Freedman, “Learning to Write Again: Discipline-Specific Writing at University” (p. 96)

                I find something soothing—and powerful—in Aviva Freedman’s language of learning through a dimly felt sense. Maybe that’s because I’m trying to learn a lot every day. Trying, in these last six months, to learn to be married—a wonderful, delightful learning, and something I’ve never done before. Trying to learn to work inside (or to resist, reimagine, remake) all of the flawed and broken systems through which my society organizes everything from education to healthcare to road maintenance. Trying to learn the dances of hope and horror.
                So many of the models I’ve been taught for learning are rational, verbal, directional, disembodied, abstract, simplified. In the face of all that Aviva Freedman goes back to the complicated, lived, sensory, un-verbal, un-rational, aware, and I would add, relational. We walk and rest in the ways we are learning, dimly, to walk and rest. In the ways we see and feel something like this done. Which leaves space for not knowing. For fumbling with it. Maybe more like this. Maybe less like this. Maybe here. Maybe not. And in the attempt we’re learning.

by Azlan

495: “Wibbly” (Martha Wells)

                “‘You can do this, babe. You’re a bulkhead.’
                ‘I’m a wibbly bulkhead,’ Arada muttered.
                (The wibbliness was why I trusted Arada. Overconfident humans who don’t listen to anybody else scare the hell out of me).”
                -Martha Wells, Network Effect

                I’ve been feeling pretty wibbly lately.
                With the historical moment we’re standing in, with the situation so many of my loved ones are in, with my own work—pretty wibbly, that’s me. If I were a wall on a spaceship (I love stories with spaceships, and there’s plenty in Network Effect) I’d be worried about how well I was going to hold up. Which is why it’s wonderful to stumble back across this line from Martha Wells.
                Back in college, I remember one of my friends looking at someone laying out how everything had to be, and saying, “Where’s their blessed doubt?” Doubt—uncertainty—I hadn’t usually seen such things held out as important parts of what made people people. And for me, like for my friend, they are. I’m not saying there isn’t work to do (or that I don’t intend to work at it). But I am trying to find a new space and love with which to hold my wibbliness. I am trying to turn toward the kind of trust and connection that doesn’t deny it, but instead weaves with it. If you’re feeling the same, I hope you find some of that space, love, and connection, too.

by Azlan

494: “What are you doing here?” (Monica Huerta)

                “I first found Juaréz the Statue while conducting research for my senior thesis. I was surprised to find him there, in part because I hadn’t been looking for him. Genuinely interested in an answer, I asked him, What are you doing here? And with both seriousness and a sense of play, he shot back, What are you doing here?”
                -Monica Huerta, Magical Habits

                A few days ago my partner and I went for a very cold walk through the trees and the snow, and we watched for tracks. Squirrels. So many of them. Humans, of course, and dogs, and a cat on the edge of the park near some houses. And then a little creature stuck its head up from a little hole in the snow. 
                What are you doing here? 
                What are you doing here?
                I think it was a deer mouse, though I’m not sure. It ducked back down quickly, and I only caught one more small glimpse as it slipped along a snow tunnel that emerged here and there on its way through the tall dead grass. Huerta lays out some of the rules for this wonderful game: it’s serious, and it has a sense of play. There’s a genuine interest in the answers. Remembering Magical Habits, I had the same moment with a sculpture our walk took us by, and again with a neighbor I’ve never met a few nights later as we both walked down the snowy street. The seriousnesses and the senses of play are how we meet. And they’re how our meetings invite us to reimagine and reconnect with how and who we are, here, in the meeting. 

by Azlan

493: The Fox Maidens (Robin Ha)

                “When I first conceived of this graphic novel about Gumiho, I thought it would be a fun, action-packed, fantastical thriller, full of cool scenes for me to draw. Now, I realize that what I’ve actually made is a book about generational trauma.” -Robin Ha, author’s note to The Fox Maidens

                bell hooks writes (in Teaching to Transgress) about going to education in the hopes of being healed. Sitting with that and with Robin Ha, I realize something similar is one of my favorite magics of fiction. We can set off writing, reading, imagining on our way to excitement: toward fantastical thrillers and wondrous adventures and cool scenes and clever lines. And carried along by the excitement of snows and wintry peaks, of magic and holding fire, we can find families, friends, loves. We can stumble openly into the hurts we are and heal, sometimes alone, sometimes together.
                There are so many stories that heal me. Lately I think I’ve slipped back toward thinking about stories largely as entertainment (which they can be), or about philosophical presentations of what the world is and should be (which they can be). Reading Robin Ha, I feel story as red skin, a burn, tender and regenerating. So much is burning, scorching so many of us. Here in The Fox Maidens is a healing breath we breathe together.

by Azlan

492: “The Word ‘We'” (Divya Srinivasan)

                “And Little Owl thought how he loved the word ‘we.’”
                -Divya Srinivasan, Little Owl’s Love

                My partner and I just got back home, pulling into our shadowed driveway and waking up our sleepy chilly house, after a long visit out to family in Washington State. We solved puzzles with our grandpa and great aunt. We cooked with both of our moms, and made pot holders with one of them and with our nieces. We played games with our siblings. Different collections of family went out for walks to a frog pond, and walks beneath evergreens, and somewhere along the way I started making friends with a cedar tree. A small one, probably a little younger than I am. It chuckles nighttime thoughts in nighttime whisperings.
                And oh yes, we read Divya Srinivasan’s Little Owl’s Love with our nieces. My partner read it first to the kiddos, and then found me on the couch and said, “You’d love this one,” And I did. That was the day before a whole family of raccoons went climbing along the fence, I think. So many of the stories I saw around me as I grew up told me that life was an individual thing. Remembering back through all these sweet collections of growing things, I do so love the word we.

by Azlan

491: “At night I would lie in bed” (Sue Monk Kidd)

                “At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room…”
-Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

                                One way to start this post is by trying to remember how long ago I first read these words. It was more than half my life ago, I’m pretty sure, which isn’t long if you measure it by many things—my grandma’s lifetime, or the forests I went walking through today—but it can seem pretty long to me. 
                Another way to start is to say I love that moment between (and beyond?) waking and sleeping. The one where Lily (in the book) watches bees. The one where I, at nine or ten, laid awake in the mountain cabin my grandpa built, watching the fox in the woodgrain. I still look at that face sometimes. And the place where I, last night, lay awake with my partner listening to the rain and hearing one of her siblings moving away down inside the house as we all visit for the holidays. And the place where, at seven or eight, the night would open into flowers and talking animals and other figures from the stories my parents had been reading me. (And nightmares and teeth, sometimes). And the place where, at nineteen or twenty, I thought about all the new people I’d met,  all the different ways they walked through the world. 
                I think I’m saying there’s an openness in that lying awake in bed that lets things come together. The buzzing bees. A sibling’s footsteps. A lifetime’s memories. My partner and I are out in Washington State, visiting family. Yesterday we were with her parents and siblings. Today we were with my mom and siblings. The scheduling can feel like a lot, a kind of family crossword. It can also feel easy, sweet, open, full. I pulled The Secret Life of Bees off my sister-in-law’s childhood bookshelf. In waking and falling toward sleep I wonder if we feel some of the ways lives swirl and weave.

by Azlan

490: “Imperfections and Incompleteness” (Sarah Travis)

                “I sometimes worry about the imperfections and incompleteness of it all. […] But maybe it’s supposed to feel unfinished […] In that spirit, I am resisting my urge to polish up this letter too much…”
                -Sarah Travis, “Friendship as Scholarship: a Path for Living Inquiry Together,” Experiments in Art Education, p. 178

                Someone told me once that reading the beginning of a novel is like walking into a room and meeting an author who hands you things: here, a description of a fallen tree. Hold this. Here, a child climbing the fallen branches. Here, a quick pair of fluttering wings. The author’s trick (this someone said) is to have the pieces pull together into a story the reader wants to keep reading before the reader gets overwhelmed or bored by what they’re being asked to hold.
                I see what they’re saying, this someone. They’re right sometimes. And sometimes…

                In my teens I started lying awake at night, thinking back over the day to trace out what I had accomplished. What made this day worthwhile. I started doing that for reasons that made good sense at the time, and it might be an interesting practice, sometimes. And sometimes…

                If you were to give me today, if you were to hand over the trees and the fluttering wings and the thoughts that child-me and older-me and our friends are having, apart and together, it wouldn’t make a very clear story. As a reader I might say why are you giving me that. That’s what I mean, sometimes, when I tell my partner at the end of the day wow today feels so long. Going over to feed Jackie’s cats? That was just this morning. There isn’t a nice finished arc to this today-ness. There’s a warm crackling fire. Ash on my hands. A cold, cold wind. Voices. A delicious mouthful of fish. Clothes scattered on the floor. Imperfect and incomplete. Sometimes like my friend Sarah Travis I worry about that, and sometimes like my friend Sarah I celebrate that, because it—whatever it is—is not ending right now. Oh no. It’s snuggling up with blankets. Then it’s dreaming. Who knows after that.

by Azlan

489: “On the floor of the tiny room” (Travis Baldree)

                “Viv lay on the floor of the tiny room. Well, almost on the floor. The place hadn’t been built with orcs in mind, and the bed was too short by at least two feet.”
                -Travis Baldree, Bookshops & Bonedust, p. 6

                That’s how Chapter 1 opens. Later tonight, my partner and I will read that together. Maybe she’ll be listening to my orc-narrator voice. Maybe I’ll be listening to hers. Either way we’ll trade off, curled beneath our blankets as outside the temperature dives below 15℉.
                There’s something tremendously cozy in reading together before bed. Part of it is probably that I grew up reading with my family. Unfolding the story together, walking through it, talking about characters and happenings the next morning before we go back to say hello—all of that for me is a practice of home. And in another way I think home is a practice. I’ve been thinking lately about how strange it is that the structures of my society make it so easy to live next to someone, live with someone, and not feel like you’re in the same room. (That has a lot to do with how my society imagines, builds, and understands rooms, but that’s another post). So my partner and I practice. We fold ourselves into the little space of the book, realize how interwoven it is with sounds and colors and being togethers, and snuggle in.

by Azlan