Tag: books

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

524: “Reading Here and There” (Louise Erdrich)

                “Slowly, I go through the stacks, reading here and there until I find the book of which I must read every word. Then I do read every word, beneath a very bright lamp. When my brain is stuffed my daughters and I go swimming, play poker, or eat. Life consists of nothing else.” -Louise Erdrich, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, p. 94

                My father in law texted me yesterday: “Santa Rosa -> SFO -> Nashville -> Urbana?” 
                Yes, I texted back, although “Nashville -> Indianapolis -> Urbana.” For the last leg of our flight Maria José and I were skirting around a big storm front. The pilot took us out east past Columbus before turning back west toward our airport, the clouds outside our window washed with lightning.
                Today I spent hours thinking about and feeling and rearranging thoughts and words for a 700ish word passage in an article draft. Eventually I found, yes, this is what I’m trying to say. Trying to sit with. Yesterday we spent fourteenish hours, all in all, coming home. Or traveling from the home that is being with my parents in California to the home that is here, our garden patch, our zuchinis grown giant while we were traveling. Before bed we read a bit from Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights. The first time I started reading that book, I ploughed through 50 pages, pulled along by some productive impulse to finish and understand. Then I skittered off and stopped. This time Maria José and I are reading a few pages almost every night. Another garden patch we come back to.
                So today I’m thinking about Louise Erdrich and how she reads. How I read: sometimes with that learned, enforced impulse to get through and comprehend, but sometimes grazing, tasting the grass, tasting what’s growing, until I find someplace I am and sink in. Until I’m done reading and go swimming with family. I love the time and space to go all over before I pause someplace. I need that time and space to start. To find a pause, lightning aflicker, and then the rain starts playing its pianos.

by Azlan

520: “I hold onto her foot” (Louise Erdrich)

                “Sometimes I look at men, at the way most of them move so freely in the world, without a baby attached, and it seems to me very strange. Sometimes it is enviable. Mostly, it is not. For at night, as she curls up or sprawls next to me and as I fall asleep, I hold onto her foot. This is as much for my comfort as to make sure that she doesn’t fall off the bed. As I’m drifting away, I feel sorry for anyone else who is not falling asleep this way, holding onto her baby’s foot. The world is calm and clear. I wish for nothing. I am not nervous about the future. Her toes curl around my fingers. I could even stop writing books.”
                -Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, p. 53.

                For the last several nights I’ve been having pretty intense nightmares. And when I do, when I wake up at two and three in the morning, my thoughts spinning in ways I don’t know how to sit with, I reach out and hold my beloved’s hands. Or wrist. Or shoulder. Sometimes knee, if we’re all puzzled on the bed. It varies, like the sense of love and peace and connection varies, and it also flows along to a related touch.
                Perhaps that’s different from what Erdrich is describing here. I also remember holding my little sibling when they were one and falling asleep. Or holding my brother’s children when they were infants, and older, remember their small limb nestled in my hand. Dreaming. I remember being a place where they could sleep and dream. In another way, I think I remember and still feel my own small wrist or ankle or arm held in someone’s caring hands. My mother’s. Father’s. A family friend’s, which means family.
                A lot of my cultural training emphasizes freedom as being not responsible for others, as being free of other people, to choose and do as you want. Whether or not you want to call that freedom, that’s not what I’m seeking. I don’t think I know anyone who’s been made happier or more vibrant in spirit because of such lack of responsibility. And I know too many people who are sadder or lost or frightened from searching for it. So I want to be held, to reach out, to be holding.

by Azlan

510: “A Community’s Emotional Lives” (Billy-Ray Belcourt)

                “I would write a book that reflected a community’s emotional lives rather than just my sensory experience of the present. […] In talking to those who came from where I came from, I also hoped light would be shed on the person I was or the person I might become.”
                -Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree), A Minor Chorus, p. 29-30

                I’ve been wanting to write a post on this quote since October or so. And I haven’t been able to. It’s funny: there are few books I’ve picked up and fallen in love with more deeply than Belcourt’s A Minor Chorus, and still, in the months since I started, I haven’t finished. I think that’s because I realized this book would be useful for my research, and that pushed me toward reading to finish it, and that’s not how I’d started reading. Not how I wanted to read. I wanted to respect it as what I first recognized it to be, which might be something like a meeting place.
                All this is on my mind tonight because I just ran over to my friend Vuyo’s apartment to drop off A Minor Chorus and Belcourt’s This Wound is a World. Vuyo’s thinking through some of her own writing, and these will join the conversations on her page. And all of a sudden this book—which stopped feeling alive to me when I wanted to take something from it; which I had gotten far away from, so even as it sat on my bedside table or my bed or my dresser or my kitchen table, I didn’t read it—this book feels really close. I want to read it, just as I’ve left it with my friend. I think it’s because the book’s enmeshed, again, for me, in a community of relationships. Mine. Billy-Ray’s. Vuyo’s. And more than why, there’s a poignant reminder in the nearness and farness, the wish to read at the moment when the book’s with a friend. Maybe some kinds of being apart weaving through some kinds of being together is part of understanding yourself through a living community. Maybe the emotional lives I’m thinking about unfold in the ways we both have and don’t have a touch of one another. Like a book I’ll fall in love with all over again when it comes back, after missing it, after enjoying the thought of it in my friend’s hands, talking with her.

by Azlan

508: “A Magic Trick” (Jonas Hassen Khemiri)

                “Structure is a magic trick to let us keep writing.” -Jonas Hassen Khemiri, at a Craft Talk at the U. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on March 6, 2025

                A lot of the creative writers I know talk a lot about structure. I guess for the same reason the gardeners I know talk about seasons, soil, water. It’s how they do what they do. A piece of writing (this one, at least) is a collection of words, punctuation, sentences strung together till there’s space—ground—with ideas growing.
                I often feel bullied by structure. By the expectation to put thoughts together in this way, or that way. Why am I writing these words here right now, instead of telling you about how warm it’s getting in Illinois? Instead of saying the phlox outside is in full bloom, and I might have made a new friend today, walking along through campus. Sometimes I think friends grow like flowers. Another friend, Marina, recently wrote a piece in which they laugh at themselves for talking about the weather, and then say something like, what I mean is that I’m wanting to pay attention. To be grounded in the sensory wash of here and now and who I share this with. It’s warm. A little windy. The phlox is purple-pink, like dreaming magic. You could say Uproar is 508 scattered attempts to pay attention. To what I’m hearing. To how what I hear lives on in what I’m thinking, how I’m walking, how I show up to say hello.
                The structure—the quote at the top, the couple of paragraphs, perhaps a moment from my life—is one way I’m trying to do that. So maybe a piece of writing (this one, at least) is a hope and a delight toward being connected, and the words, punctuation, sentences are a magic trick we’re making together to hold how our wishes come apart and together.

by Azlan

505: “It’s Easier To Do This When You’re Here” (Travis Baldree)

                “No, it’s not that. […] It’s that it’s easier to do this when you’re here. And that makes me feel stupid. Have I been sitting on my tail all this time? Doing nothing because I was pretending I couldn’t? Am I so pathetic that I couldn’t muster the energy to do this without…without a chaperone?”
                -Travis Baldree, Bookshops and Bonedust, p. 73

                A few days ago, my friend (and found family) Fin and I went for a walk, pattering our feet to a nearby park and around beneath the branches. Then we came back as a storm blew in, and pulled up dandelions from a garden bed till big spring drops plopped over us. A week or two ago Fin and I learned about the fuse box in my new house, and turned off electricity so we could repair a light switch and an outlet. Both of those were tasks I’ve been meaning to do for weeks (or months). I was a little worried about doing them with Fin. “I don’t want to put this on you,” I Said, or something like that. Fin, wonderful human that they are, smiled and said, “It’s fun! And we’re learning stuff!”
                As Travis Baldree’s character is learning on page 73, I think it’s easier to do stuff when you’re here. But I’m moving to a place where that doesn’t make me feel stupid. Usually when I say “work” these days, I mean something somewhat ugly, tied up in capitalism and social structures that destroy too much. But work can also be what we do toward the world we want to share. Doing that kind of work with someone makes the effort—and the world we’re moving toward, whatever world that is; the well-lit room with a working light switch where we’ll sit and eat orange slices—feel closer. Taste sweeter. Stay shared.

by Azlan

502: “Stories Upon Stories” (Darcie Little Badger)

                “Stories upon stories. Sometime I’m just going to do a story in a story in a story in a story…” -Darcie Little Badger, speaking at the Urbana Free Library on March 12, 2025

                My partner and I just got back from our local library.
                I could skip that part, start with the “idea.” But it’s interwoven lives and places that are alive inside this “idea.”
                We went for a long walk, spring opening warm as we chatted about the work we want to do and the challenges woven through it. Then to the library to hear Darcie Little Badger talk about her wonderful books. (On Saturday we finished Elatsoe). In the library’s auditorium we ran into friends, and acquaintances who might become friends, and other folks with whom I actually have tense relationships, and all of it felt living.
                One of the things that makes me heartsick with fiction is the way a story arc can anoint a main character. Can collapse complexity into the specification narration of what the Chosen One sees, says, and wants. We joke about that, right? About people with “main character energy,” who make it clear that everyone else is a side character at best. And one of the things I love about fiction—one of the gifts Little Badger reminds me about—is the way storytelling can recognize stories as already woven together. Todays with years ago, and your morning with my morning somewhere else, and our shared moment, now, and so many tomorrows. Darcie Little Badger’s book and her talk, and my conversation with a friend, and the walk my partner and I took among opening flowers, and winter’s brown leaves, and a library where for a moment a scattering of us sit together, laughing, listening.

by Azlan

501: “Writing doesn’t feel linear” (Fin McMahon)

                “I love writing because for me it doesn’t feel linear. It feels like a chance to go around and come back, to think with these pieces, move them around, change them.”
                -Fin McMahon, in conversation on March 3, 2025

                I remember in 2020 when video calls were suddenly a core way that I connected with people. I’d been on plenty of video calls before. But I’d never hung out on a video call, or tried to. And then suddenly there I was, stretching on the carpet while my friend did dishes, because it was easier to do these things with someone else and we hadn’t talked to someone else all day.
                I’m interested in how similar tools, similar practices, can be so different when used in different ways. I often struggle with writing precisely because it does feel linear. Which is related to saying, because so often I’ve been taught to approach writing as a problem with a linear solution. And I’ve learned. What do you need to know first? What comes after that? At the same time, listening to Fin, I luxuriate into all the ways writing feels like sinking down into thick carpet—woven, messy, marked by the way other people have walked across it, soft, solid. To put it another way, for a while now I’ve been telling myself I should go out and pile up some of the dead stalks in my garden so that new things have a chance to grow. I haven’t wanted to. I should. I haven’t wanted to. That’s gone round and round. And then today, a little before a cold drizzle turned to snow, I was out in a gray sky crouching down, my tools wet in my hands, the dead leaves slick, and all of it felt like a kind of saying hello.

by Azlan

500: “Welcome Comfort” (Becky Chambers)

                “And to that end, welcome comfort, for without it, you cannot stay strong.”
                -Becky Chambers, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

                One of the fun parts about this project is that people start sharing their favorite quotes with me.
                Years ago my friend and I sat talking about kids, and how we both thought that no one really knows a kid’s gender until they’re old enough to start saying, “This is me.” I said that meant I didn’t know what to do. What to say. My friend, trans and mid transition, started telling me about cool picture books with gender diverse kids. We talked about one (I can’t find it now! Someone tell me the name!) with a kid who’s picking out all sorts of different outfits—shorts one day, a dress another, a dragon costume another. If the kid feels themself in the book, they can say, I’m like that. If not it’s still a fun story about fun people.
                Lately, when people tell me about the art they’re loving, I’ve been thinking about that book. About how so many of us are looking around for the yes or the maybe or the bright that helps us share what we’re experiencing, and so come closer in the ways we want to.
                My younger sibling called me this morning. They asked, “At what point do you quit?” They’ve been planning a certain path for the next few years, and they’re not sure anymore if their plan feels livable. They called again tonight, just back from running around in the rain with some friends. They sounded a lot happier. We chatted. I told them I was struggling with an uproar draft, and they gave me Becky Chambers’ quote. I wondered if this welcome, friendly, relationship-woven comfort was something they were reaching for, given where they were. In the picture book, in the way of picture books, looking for what we need, for what feels right, plays out in something colorful and touchable. All those clothes. In my life, that looking often plays out with people and words and art. Tired and snuggled next to my partner, because it’s still chilly where we love, I wondered if that welcome, friendly, relation-woven comfort was something we’ve also been needing. It’s wonderful how our reaching for what makes us possible can help make our loved ones possible, too.

by Azlan