Tag: life

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

572: “I Love Being a Frog” (Reale & Lobel)

                “I love being a frog in the warm sunny summer—”
                -Frog in Willie and Robert Reale’s A Year With Frog And Toad, which adapts the books from Arnold Lobel

                I’ve been thinking about heat lately—perhaps because the temperature keeps laughing past 90; perhaps because I’ve been remembering my time teaching in India, where the temperature kept laughing high numbers—and then my partner and I listened to A Year With Frog and Toad on a long drive. The heat washing down from the sky. The rain washing, too, though briefly, a flood across the windshield that dried a few minutes later. And my partner said, “There’s so much love for the everyday of life in this.” This the musical. We keep talking about it as something that’s going on. (It is, in my head, like the sun and the rain). This the drive together. This lounging on the couch now as the shade deepens toward evening. This being welcomed home as who you are, as Arnold Lobel was eventually welcomed home. Later his daughter Adrianne Lobel commissioned the play.
                Jay Goede gives Frog his singing voice in the original Broadway cast. He swells up with “looovveee,” drawing it out. Holding it up. As if there’s as much of it as there is warm sunny summer. As, I suppose, there is. When I first heard the song I didn’t like it as much as some of the other numbers. I wondered if it was too much. I wasn’t sure what it was about. Now it’s been running through my head for days, delightfully. And I realize: oh, yes. It’s—in part, at least—about this.

by Azlan

571: “For My Mother” (Malka Older)

“For my mother, Dora Vázquez Older, 
whose careful and appreciative first readings 
encourage me through every book, 
chapter by chapter.

There are other ways to live.”
-Malka Older, dedication for The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles

                My partner and I are in Illinois again, back from our trip to spend time with my parents, siblings, and niblings. Tonight we’re starting a new book: Malka Older’s The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles. Tonight I’m also sending the revised draft of my dissertation to my mom and my dad. Both of them appear in it. They’re there with me, learning and teaching and walking along.
                Whenever I write, I read what I’m writing out loud. I listen to the words, feeling how they rise and fall, wondering if they say what I mean. Wondering how they might carry us along, and to what kind of meeting. When I read I hear my parents’ voices in my voice. I think I was thirteen or fourteen when my dad first read a story I’d written out loud. I listened, surprised, because in his voice the possibilities I’d imagined came to life just like The Lord of the Rings. (He read those to me a lot, at home but also along rivers and up on mountain passes). When my niblings were young I’d go sit with them while my mom read a bedtime story. Some of the stories I remembered, like Enid Blyton’s The Magical Faraway Tree. When I didn’t remember these characters, this world, I always remembered her voice, rising and falling, pausing and dancing along as it carried us. There are so many other ways to live. I listen, grateful for all the ways my family (and Older’s family, and so many families) encourage us to reimagine the possible, chapter by chapter, and in the relationships between us as we share chapters.

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

565: “All Players Survive” (Kenna Alexander)

                “If you all make it through to the end of Turn 8, then all Players survive and win the game for a collective victory! Time to celebrate!
                In addition, if one Leader has more Status Awards than any other, they are elected as chief among all of the communities and are granted an additional victory. Congratulations! […] while it’s great bragging rights to say you had the most Status and were elected chief, it can only happen if you all get a collective win first.”
                -Kenna Alexander, Wolves (2024) rulebook

                It may come as no surprise to folks who know me that I usually prefer cooperative board games to competitive ones. Concept (2013). Pandemic Legacy (2015). The Crew (2019). Tranquility (2020). Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast (2022). I guess I like working with my friends more than trying to outsmart them. But it was absolutely a surprise, at least for me, to come across Kenna Alexander’s wonderful Wolves. 
                Wolves is “a semi-cooperative game about community survival.” I read the rules today, working out how its mechanics work. Tomorrow we’re having friends over to play. Sitting now, the box at my elbow, I’m struck by how easily I accepted cooperative and competitive as mutually exclusive categories. I remember teaching a friend a game (I can’t remember which), and whenever we came across a moment where one player would make a decision without talking to the others, my friend asked, “So wait, is it actually cooperative?” The question made sense to me. It was cooperative, or competitive. It couldn’t be both. 
                Except of course it can. Tonight my partner and I met some friends to ramble around our neighborhood, enjoying night’s cool. We stopped at a neighborhood park with a zipline. During the day it’s alive with nine and ten year olds, but I guess we stay up later. We took turns. We talked about how we jumped and swung and approached the zipline to go the fastest, bouncing off the far end and returning as close as we could to where we started. We saw how far one another went. We laughed, and then we kept walking. It’s a little thing. And the more I sit with it and Kenna Alexander, the more I’m wondering how many of the competitions I’m part of can only happen inside a larger collective win.

by Azlan

562: “Only One Script” (Olivia Atwater)

                “Sir Albus flailed at this, flustered out of his rhythm. He had only one script, Dora observed idly, and absolutely no imagination with which to deviate from it. ‘I…I could not possibly answer such an absurd question!’ he managed.”
-Olivia Atwater, Half a Soul, p. 8

                Many of us might have met a Sir Albus. A someone who, presented with almost any social situation, will probably a) launch into their pet familiar script and/or b) refuse to engage with questions that twist their familiar script in unexpected directions. Atwater’s Half A Soul is a kind of Regency England romantic “season” mixed with fae magic mystery. Albus’—pardon, Sir Albus’—script is purebred horses. The “absurd” question is about a creature that is part horse and part dolphin. It’s a world of magical creatures and humans and inbetween-beings, including the question-asker herself, but Albus doesn’t want to imagine any of that.
                The more worrisome—and perhaps more useful to think about—moments are when I recognize a bit of Sir Albus in myself. The moments when, given half a chance, I set out along my script, sharing my pat observations, tending toward my certain conclusions. I think those moments are part of why I like reading new things. Reading new things from people whose work I’ve never encountered. Reading things from people whose lives are so different than mine. If I have the script, I want to have the imagination, too, ready to hear the question and not simply think it “absurd.”

by Azlan

556: “Lookout For Enchanted Items” (Magic Puzzle Company)

                “Our yellow-suited hero has lost their friends in a vast enchanted maze. As you work your way through the rooms, look out for enchanted items that could help in your quest…”
                -“The Mystic Maze,” Magic Puzzle Company

                My partner and I are puzzlers. We like puzzles. We like the space above the pieces, shared and sweet as we look at the colors and the shapes. (That reminds me of Donald Hall’s “The Third Thing,” which made me think about looking at something together—side by side, not face to face—as a central practice for love). We like the colors and the shapes, the chatting and the time, the frustration—where does this piece go? If you figure it out tell me. We love the click of things settling into place. No surprise I suppose that I’ve posted about puzzles before. And this month the Magic Puzzle Company puzzles we’ve just found add layers to all these things we love.
                The three Magic Puzzle Company puzzles we’ve done lean into Where’s-Waldo-style image searches, themed characters, and small optical illusions when the sections of puzzle can separate and recombine. I won’t try to explain the mechanism more than that. Today I’m after something about the feel. A lot of my friends hate puzzles. I think I can understand (at least some of) the reasons why. Puzzles can feel like exhaustion, a grind, a trick someone’s not telling you— “I know how this goes together, but I’m going to make you shuffle around all these nick nacks before I tell you what’s already obvious.” And I see all that. There is so much, so much serious work to be done. Not against that, but alongside it, the Magic Puzzle Company highlights what else puzzles can be. An invitation to color and shape, story and character, world and time. A treasure hunt. A joke. A series of visual puns. An adventure someone’s inviting you toward. That’s true of puzzles, I think, and it’s also a reminder for how I approach other tasks.Take splitting firewood for winter: it can be exhausting, grueling, repetitive, endless. But it can also be something else. The axe swings. Lands. The wood shivers, or splits. A woodchip flies, and a robin does too, across the sky in front of me and up into the cedar. So much enchanted in this maze.

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

551: Spells, Counterspells, and Selves (Maiga Doocy)

                “It hurt because my counterspell couldn’t distinguish between what was the curse and what was you.”
                -Maiga Doocy, Sorcery and Small Magics, pg. 268

                I love when fantasy and science fiction stories end up reckoning with core cultural concepts. For example: what does consciousness mean? Or in this book, what are the boundaries—and the blurred connections—between who I “am” and how I am being pressed to behave, day after day?
                One of my mentors, Melissa Littlefield, used to study “lie detectors.” As far as I understand, one of her starting points was turning to consider the theory of the world that is a foundation for “lie detectors.” If you believe some technology can sense, in someone’s physiology, that they’re lying, then doesn’t that mean you also believe that a “lie” is something physiological, like a brainwave, or a certain kind of brain wave? Years ago, Melissa and her colleagues did a bunch of brain scan experiments that indicate something wrong with that underlying theory. What “lie detectors” look for (they argued) is actually some kind of stress response, which someone might experience while trying to get away with a lie, and also might experience while telling a truth they expect to be received poorly. There are lots of reasons to be stressed. Hearing Melissa talk through this, I found myself wondering, why was I so ready (at 15, at 20) to believe that lies were a physical category, something like light that the right kind of telescope could pick up? What kind of cultural stories and values made that belief so appealing?
                Now I sit holding Sorcery and Small Magics, wondering at the difference between me and what I’ve learned. Or maybe what I’ve been taught: what’s been impressed into me. If there were curses and countercurses, and a curse could push my thinking onto a certain path day after day, what would the distinction be between that path of thinking and “me”? Would a countercurse be able to distinguish it? Of course I don’t know, but the wondering makes me think, how can I be careful with what I’m learning, and reflective about what I’ve learned. And maybe also: how wondrous it is to be always becoming.

by Azlan