Tag: fiction

575: “Where Unfriendly Eyes Might See It” (Nghi Vo)

                 “There was the name I called him, of course, but the habits of a lifetime die hard, and I do not wish that written down in any place where unfriendly eyes might see it.” -Nghi Vo, The Empress of Salt and Fortune, page 69

                 Nghi Vo’s wonderful novella shares this line in the dramatic, dangerous world of high politics and spies and secret messages, but it also captures something I feel in almost all my writing. At least, all of the writing that I imagine being read by more than one person.
                 In a conversation or a letter to a friend, we know the garden in which we’re sharing these words. We know each other: maybe we don’t know if the other one has read and loves The Empress of Salt and Fortune, but we’re somewhat familiar with one another’s interests and worries, with the complex weaves of intentions and relationships that live behind me saying Nghi Vo captures something I feel in almost all my writing. In writing that is read more broadly, the shared space of our conversation’s garden only exists if we make it inside the act of reading and writing. And people might come into the garden of this shared paragraph in other ways. They might come in with their heavy boots on, thoughtless of where they’re stepping, or more. They might come in unfriendly, looking to take what isn’t being shared.
                 I think that’s why I often find myself writing to specific people. To old teachers, some of whom I know will never see this. To distant friends, people I’m still close to or with whom I’ve long since lost touch. To authors still alive or from long ago who talk to me in their writing, and so I am talking back, imagining the space where we could meet and share. That situates the writing inside a seeing that is friendly, or at least respectful, or at least relational. We are thinking about how we see each other. Who we are to each other. And the way writing is used, sometimes that reflective, careful thinking can be left behind: the words torn up, and there are so many roots that I want to share but that I do not wish written down in a place where unfriendly eyes might tear them.

by Azlan

573: Little Red Riding Hood

                Today I was talking with a student about Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” (1697) and Jacob Wilhelm Grimm’s “Little Red Cap” (1812) and all the other versions of Little Red that we’ve met in books, TV shows, games, conversations, and our own or shared imaginations. This student didn’t like that the parents never tell Little Red why the forest can be dangerous, or go with her to teach her how to navigate its dangers. Now that my student mentioned it, I don’t like that, either. I started wondering about a version of the story where the parents and the child listen to each other, learn from each other. Help each other. I started imagining a version of the story that started with a different family and a different Little Red.
                One of my favorite things about folk tales is the way they invite us to ask what if, what else, what if we turned another way, or learned together, or met each other anew. So sitting together, while my student wrote her version, I wrote (and I’m just going to give you the beginning!)

                There once was a wolf called Little Red Patch because she’d been hit in the side by a hunter’s bullet when she was only a pup, and ever since, the fur there had grown red. Despite the wound and maybe a little in response to it Little Red had also grown curious. She was curious about the birds in the sky, and sometimes got dizzy from staring up for so long as she listened to their singing. She was curious about the glistening stones in the river and sometimes she dove into the water to touch them. She was curious about the woodcutter nearby and sometimes followed her nose toward the cooking smells that came from his cabin. Her mother told her to be careful.
                “Sometimes humans are scared of us, and they can attack the people they’re scared of,” said mother wolf. “Sometimes they just don’t want to share the food of the forest so they kill us. You can’t go to the woodcutter’s house!”
                Little Red listened to her mother, and for three days she swam in the river looking at the stones and watching how quick the fish were. But…

                In this version of the story Little Red is still curious. But what if Little Red tries to listen to her mother while still feeling her curiosity? What if her mother sees her curiosity, and decides, not to teach her a lesson, but to help her learn how to move safely? What—we might wonder—then. Or maybe your wonder goes off in another direction?

by Azlan

570: “King Arthur Ct” (Street Sign)

“King Arthur Ct”
-street sign in Santa Rosa, CA

                Last week my partner and I took our two niblings for a walk. Or maybe our niblings took us: they wanted to scooter to a playground, and we adults went along for the swings and the giggles, the careful faces at crosswalks and the delighted sounds at little free libraries. (We brought back a book of ciphers, but we haven’t started decoding it). Along the way we stopped at a house that had 14 dragons out front, as far as we could count. We talked about witch’s brews. We talked about anime demons and the songs that can become magic.
                For a block, we also turned down King Arthur Ct. It’s a little connecting road between Horseshoe Drive and Rainier Avenue. Sitting here, now, it also seems like a delightful (and fraught) reminder of all the ways our myths and fairytales give us characters and motifs and relationships and pieces of meaning to arrange into concepts of courage and family, loss and hope, friendship and power. Perhaps because in two weeks I’ll be teaching a course in all that. I didn’t know King Arthur Ct was there until I saw it on my phone’s map, and announced that’s where we’re turning. Of course I did it playfully. Of course my niblings teased back: “No we’re not!” “There’s no such place!” “You’re teasing!” And then we turned the corner, talking about dragons and witches, groaning at what a fool I was. Walking near Camelot. Or near the places we reimagine as Camelot. Or, passed Camelot, toward the transformed place we make for our witches on their way home.

by Azlan

567: “A Series of Tales” (Arthur Conan Doyle)

                “You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales.” -Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”

                In the last weeks I’ve been spending lots of time at my desk, revising my dissertation, thinking about arguments and stories and how they make different kinds of space for thoughts and relationships. It’s exhausting, consuming. Sometimes inspiring, especially as my dissertation is interwoven with my friends: conversations we’ve had, concerns we carry, hopes we share.
                In the last weeks my partner and I have also been reading Sherlock Holmes stories out loud together. Sometimes in the evening we listen to Holmes audio books and work on a puzzle together, watching mountains and trees as the pieces meet. When I was ten, eleven, and twelve I spent hours doing something similar with these same stories. I was putting together legos, then, my hands playing as my thoughts followed Sherlock Holmes. Reading out loud from Copper Beeches, or listening to my partner read out loud, I find another delight in tales: the delight of telling them again. 
                There’s a lot I love about Sherlock Holmes stories. There’s also a lot of awfulness, from the casual sexism and racism to the rational-as-all triumphalism that somehow protects both. I read out loud and hear the audio books I used to listen to. That voice still in my head. I listen to my partner read and remember untangling these mysteries as a kid. We can make and remake the stories of our childhood, the moments of determination and joy, the quiet misgivings that I didn’t know how to say then but I can say now. How wonderful that stories can live and then live again, changing. Reflecting how we’ve changed.

by Azlan

566: “Lapse Into Silence” (Jay Dragon)

“Additionally, anyone can do the following Whoopsies:
>Drop a soapy dish, and break it.
>Change the subject.
>Lapse into silence.”
                -Jay Dragon, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, page 108

                Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is built around a lot of wonderful, changing game mechanics, One of them is Bingos and Whoopsies. When you play a character, your Bingos are moments of playing to your strengths, fully engaging in the moment and who you are, helping work through a difficult problem, and so on. Your Whoopsies are moments of weakness and old faults coming out, tripping up the situation even more. Both move the story— that is, the game—in different shifting ways. 
                I started this post because, when I sat down to write, I liked the silence more than the sound of my fingers typing. Hours before that some friends and I were playing Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast. The chapter we were playing shows friends trying to share their uncertainty about their place in the world while washing the dishes from a big celebration. In that chapter, all players have additional Whoopsies: break a dish, change the subject (as someone tries to share something important), or lapse into silence. In the context of the chapter, I think “lapse into silence” means stop trying to say something important, or stop trying to respond to the piece of themselves a friend has just shared. But as we played, as the game led us through our characters’ attempts to talk about their place in the world, we found other meanings in that silence. Some of the characters’ most open, connective moments were shared silences. Sitting down to write I kept thinking about that. I didn’t want to write it, not yet. I wanted to listen to all the little sounds of the house. To the sound of voices hours or days after they’ve stopped talking.
                Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is built around a lot of wonderful, changing game mechanics. One of them makes me think about how sharing our brokennesses—tangling a situation even further—can also be part of fully engaging with the moment and who we are together.

by Azlan

563: “No Single Thing” (Christopher Huang & Nghi Vo)

                “Surely a man like Colonel Russell couldn’t be the casualty of someone else’s story?” -Christopher Huang, A Pretender’s Murder, p. 116

                “I am a thousand stories of Northern Bell Pass, and an illustrious career in the capital, of a northern tribunal tricked. I am a father and a grandfather as well as a cleric, because no single thing takes away from the rest.” -Nghi Vo, Mammoths At The Gates, p. 112

                One of my least favorite things that fictions do is act like there’s a main character. A someone who all this swirls around. A someone who will necessarily make the key decision at the decisive moment. A hero. A villain. I think A Pretender’s Murder is commenting exactly on that: on the strange patterns some cultures have of reading themselves as the most important protagonist.
                One of my favorite things that fictions do is notice how so many threads weave together here, with no single thinking taking away from the rest. Mammoths At The Gates ends with a series of stories: connected and almost contradictory visions of who someone is, of who we are in gathering to hear about them, of who we all are together as we go on. Maybe I’m thinking about that modern phrase, main character energy, and about how wonderful it is to be another thread weaving through so many stories. I go for a walk and folks walking or sitting nearby wave at me. I wave back. Some of us are friends and some of us aquaintances and some of us strangers who live near one another. I love the stories that feel like that.

by Azlan

555: “What Do I Toss?” (Stephen Spotswood)

                “When I began the chore of writing all this down, I found I had to keep making the same big decision over and over again. What do I keep and what do I toss?” -Stephen Spotswood, Fortune Favors the Dead, pg. 98

                It certainly does feel like a chore sometimes: sitting down to type something out, to untangle and re-tangle thoughts and images into memories and scenes, people and relationships. There is so very much to put together. Today’s applecore, waiting on the cutting board to be sliced for the compost pile. My partner talking on a zoom call. My friends, a state away, and our long phone call. The cat I’d never seen before watching me through a window. “What do I keep and what do I toss?”
                And it’s not a chore, too. Also. At the same time. A delightful both-and, with meanings branching to meanings, moments nestling into movements. Because in the apple core is the cold water as I washed the apple this morning, and the rock of the knife, cutting slices to share with my beloved, and the sweet kiss of all that sunshine gathered into apple. In my partner’s zoom call (half overheard) are ideas about representation and community and delight. That’s what she’s talking about, and we talked about that too. Including on a walk some weeks ago, the sunlight warm on my bare arms as winter lingers in the shade of the trees. My friends a state away, and also their last visit, and the next time I might visit them. I don’t keep things or toss things. Maybe that’s why it’s less of a chore. I write in circles to feel the all this inside all this, circling and inside, again and again. A cat watching me through the window. The next time I walk by it’s gone, but we’re woven together. In its fur I felt warmth, a stranger, and I also felt the warmth of a cat I knew when I was nine.

by Azlan

549: “I Stretch My Systems” (Barbara Truelove)

                “I stretch into my systems, enjoying the frizz of electricity dancing across my nodes and the widening of my consciousness as more and more servers come online.”
                -Barbara Truelove, Of Monsters and Mainframes, p. 3

                Tonight was our little group’s second night of playing Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, and in addition to dinner, laughs, chats, a crackling fire, and the game, we shared books. Bella and Margie gave us a little stack, including Of Monsters and Mainframes which I started reading as soon as they left. We tried to give Bella and Margie Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned, which they already had, and Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed, which they had, and ND Stevenson’s The Fire Never Goes Out—which, wonderfully, they’d never heard of. And it’s wonderful that they were already in love with Undrowned and Jonny Appleseed. That these two books, swirling up in my thoughts as I wondered what they might like, are things they do like. Are in fact already part of the swirling thoughts through which we meet and become friends. Are part of our shared living world.
                Of Monsters and Mainframes follows a synthetic consciousness tasked with flying a spaceship, but robots in science fiction are so often about what it feels like to be human. (Truelove opens her book, “Dedicated to all those running human.exe files. Don’t forget to take a break.”)I feel myself as part of another kind of network. So many of my ideas, my values, my patterns for being are reflections, echoes, responses, continuations, gifts from people around me. I love that. Love the widening of my consciousness as consciousnesses spin.

by Azlan

548: “Thinking and Seeing” (Nick Sousanis)

                “Perception is not dispensable. It’s not mere decoration or afterthought, but integral to thought, a fundamental partner in making meaning. In reuniting thinking and seeing, we expand our thinking and concept of what thinking is.” -Nick Sousanis, Unflattening, p. 81

                I’ve been making space to think by looking lately, and in looking, I’ve been finding paths of my thinking. Some thoughts in images:
                The overwhelm of this particular work week in the scatter of the kitchen table where I’m typing, the lunch bowl and rumpled napkin and loose handwritten pages and book stacks and dried mango and fingerless gloves. The overwhelm and the delight, too: these inspiring books, that sweet mango, those delicious noodles now a memory in the bowl.
                The power of warm soft touch: my partner beneath a blanket, stretched on the couch, typing her own overwhelm or inspiration. Seeing her steadies me, and when I snuggle in beside her I’ll make sure to tuck the blanket around our feet. It’s 9 degrees outside.
                Which reminds me: a squirrel’s tracks and mine and a bird’s in the bright snow. A neighbor’s red hands at the bus stop. Our shared smile-grimace-smile. The snowy road, worn to patches of cement, as we look back, waiting for the bus, trusting, trust and community infrastructure a pattern of bare trees with sleeping leaves inside and the road and the bus coming soon.
                I’ve been looking as a practice of thinking. Thinking along the paths and branches and tracks and patterns I see.

by Azlan

547: Stories Together (Acosta, Dragon, Harris & Veselak)

                “Sal sighed. Parish sighed. Amelie buzzed softly.” -Mercedes Acosta, Jay Dragon, Lillie J. Harris, and M. Veselak, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, p. 310

                Tonight I stepped out from the cozy room—that’s what we call it; it has a fireplace!—to chop some carrots and celery for snacks. By the time I got back, our friend Margie was drinking tea, and Bella had set on the table a bag of sour gummies. (I love sour gummies). They were talking with my partner Majo about holidays, family dynamics, relationships, cooking. We kept talking. Munched sour gummies. Carrots. Celery.
                “Sal sighed,” alone, isn’t much of a story. “Parish sighed” isn’t much of a story. But “Sal sighed. Parish sighed. Amelie buzzed softly”—that’s a story I might want to be part of. And luckily I could be, because Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast is a storytelling game, the kind where friends gather around and make up a story together. (The game has pieces and patterns to support that). Tonight the four of us played for the first time. I don’t have a new idea in this post—at least, I don’t think I do. Just the old idea, or that returning feeling, that writing is my favorite when there are many hands drawing out the words, and my least favorite when it’s isolated, locked in a word processor, individually controlled, alone. Typing this I’m looking down at lyrics Bella wrote on one page of our shared game. At Margie’s little doodle on another page, titled, “Bath salt.” At the colors Majo gave Amelie’s character portrait. And now I’ll stop writing and keep talking with Majo about the game and our days and what snacks to have before bed, because Sal sighed, Parish sighed, Amelie buzzed softly, and it’s in the mix I feel a story moving.

by Azlan