Tag: creative-writing

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

484: “Your Strangest and Funniest Friend” (Dave Eggers & Amanda Uhle)

                “Find your strangest and funniest friend. Have that strange friend find their funniest and strangest friend.” -Dave Eggers & Amanda Uhle, Introducing Unnecessarily Beautiful Spaces for Young Minds on Fire

                This is going to be a little all over the place, because you know when a child comes running up to you because there’s a cat outside and the cat was climbing a tree and my friend climbs trees and we love plums and did I tell you we’re building a spaceship that might be a garden? Were you that kid, sometimes? Are you still?
                Today my friend Jackie and I were sitting at a table, enjoying the breath of a gentle breeze and squinting through bright electric lights, and trying to work. It happens sometimes. She was working on an application for funding, which would help make possible some of her wildly cool research. I was trying to read Aja Martinez’s Counterstory, also wildly cool, and important for a journal article I’m revising. It’s all work we believe in. And we just didn’t want to do it. Our snacks had helped, fueling a few more keystrokes, but all the snacks were gone.
                So Jackie showed me Nael’s “The Tiger.” You might’ve seen it before—a spark of a little poem, and it jumped through all sorts of social media a couple years ago. The author’s a child. The poem’s full of a wild, brave, world-making excitement. “The Tiger” was published in a collection edited by 826DC, a very cool place that I’m definitely not reading more about (instead of doing my other work). I didn’t know this strange friend but I immediately recognized them as friends with 826 Valencia—a very cool someone, if you haven’t met them, and probably worth some not-reading of your own. And we do love plums. And there is a cat outside. And sometimes in learning from children (of all ages, 6 and 25 and 92) I remember that I’m a strange friend who loves my strange friends and that together we’re definitely making something.

by Azlan

451: “As Long As It Helps Us Hope” (Weiwei & Stamboulis)

                “I think that it doesn’t matter whether poetry is good or bad… / …as long as it helps us hope.”
                -Ai Weiwei and Elettra Stamboulis, Zodiac, p. 154

                Sometimes I sit and listen to the resonance between experiences. Between these three, for example: 1) When I taught high school poetry in the twenty-teens, one of my favorite practices to do with a class was “short order poetry. Each student asks another for a poem (“about the first day of school,” “about a cracked windshield”). Then in ten-ish minutes each writer makes a poem to give back to the asker. This practice positions poetry as community, a gift between friends. The time limit can also help me stop worrying about “how good” the poem is and focus on putting lines together. 2) Some years after those classes, a mentor and I started talking about a teaching moment when you let go of worrying “how good” your classes are, recognize students’ work and interest as so much larger than you, and focus on offering what you can and supporting your students’ work how they ask you to. After that moment, paradoxically, our classes felt “better”—but something else had shifted, too. 3) During the worst years of feeling farther and farther away from my writing, writing felt more and more like a place where I had to perform expertise and less and less like the reach toward community that made me want to write. In the middle of those years I started writing flash fiction. Tiny paragraph- or page-long stories that touched one moment of connection, movement, need, loss. Writing those came to feel—well, like walking down to the beach every day to splash my face with the water. Or like letting the ocean wash its face with me.The practice helped me start finding my way back toward what I love in writing.
                When I finished reading Zodiac, I sat for a while, listening to the resonance between Ai Weiwei’s thoughts and so many of my (shared) experiences and relationships. I think the sitting—the quiet—was a way to turn towards and understand how the question “how good is this?” gets planted almost everywhere around me. And recognizing that planting is also a chance to stop planting, to focus instead, perhaps, on the ground the question grows in. The ground of what we’re doing, together. Of how what we’re doing together weaves our lived experience. How that doing makes it easier (or harder) to hope actively, playfully, courageously, communally.

by Azlan