Tag: books

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

499: “Frivolous, Promiscuous, and Irrelevant” (Jack Halberstam)

                “Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant. The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map a few detours.” -Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

                I’m writing a book for my PhD dissertation. I know, I know, but I couldn’t fit in the bird bath (it looks so fun!) and you have to do something. So earlier today I’m at a cafe with my advisor, chatting about my constantly changing book ideas. She laughed at me. I would laugh at me. What this book is and what it’s about has been changing week to week. We laugh together, and she says, “Well, what book do you want it to be like?”
                And I think about Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure. 
                Now I’m not going to write anything like The Queer Art of Failure. For one thing, Halberstam is brilliant. For another my pages tend to have more personal story stuff than that book. But I did tell my advisor, You know, I wish what I was writing was funnier. 
                Since then I’ve been thinking about why my pages aren’t funnier. And I could say, well, the book’s about difficult things, and that’s true, but so is Halberstam’s. And Halberstam’s is funny as me trying to think my way out of overthinking. (By which I mean, very). I think part of the seriousness in my pages is that I’ve bought into exactly what Halberstam is warning against, what they’re so gleefully refusing: this idea that I want to be a success, and I know what that means, and so I’ll go along the paths I’m supposed to until someone severe and somber says, “Yes. Look what hath you wrought.” And that’s rot. Which is to say: this week I looked at someone who’d made their neck and chin look like a burger. This week I showed that to my friend, and now to you. This week my friend and I talked about her work, which means we talked about how our medical systems fail to support her and her relatives. And we got angry. And we got sad. And we laughed, too, because in person that’s easier, even with the angry and sad, and I think laughter can be pavement for the detours that lead to where we hope we’re headed.

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

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

487: “The Syrup” & The Sun (Robin Wall Kimmerer)

                “The syrup we pour over pancakes on a winter morning is summer sunshine flowing in golden streams to pool on our plates.” -Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, p. 86

                It’s gotten cold in Illinois. My love and I covered our little garden of greens, the kale leaves still vibrant (the spinach a little less so, though still lush after our first two frosts), and we’ve started staying warm with our fireplace. That means I’m splitting firewood again like I remember doing as a teen.
                I love how splitting firewood and planting kale, spinach, and arugula (I can’t leave out those deliciously spicy friends) brings me back to a being-ness and moving-ness of the world. It’s different, for me, when I move the thermostat and a distant hum indicates a furnace that I don’t know how to fix or feed has started. When I started imagining writing this post, I was worried I didn’t have a new thought. Not really. And I don’t think I have, not really, but this isn’t a thought-post. Syrup is summer sunshine. Kimmerer’s line comes from a chapter on making maple syrup. The heat that moves around me is always something: a dance that stepped along before (as gas or electricity or a tree’s reaching branches) and will keep stepping along (out through the front door, and in through me, too, come to think of it). This is a post about being with that being-ness. About recognizing the ways my habits pull me away from the roots of kale and the grain of wood and the bugs, I don’t know their name, who’ve been nibbling from the same plants I’m nibbling. About relishing the practices that bring me back. Whsh. Thunk. I wish I could end this with the sound of an axe landing, or with the touch of dirt, cool and close.

by Azlan