Tag: writing

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

574: “TEMPORAL ALLEGIANCE” (Ross Gay)

                “I have since begun cataloging delights that I will save for a future date, which, while stacking delights in itself is a useful activity and practice (sounds like a Denny’s pancake breakfast special: Delight Stack), it defeats this book’s purpose of TEMPORAL ALLEGIANCE, which I actually wrote on my hand in the bathroom of Darn Good Soup in Bloomington today…” Ross Gay, The Book of Delights, page 107-8

                This from near the beginning of Ross Gay’s 35th delight in The Book of Delights, as he’s reflecting on his project of writing a delight every day (more or less) for a year. As he’s noticing patterns, five months in, in how he looks for delights, how he writes about them. These words meeting me.
                This also being the page I opened to just now after my love and I came back from a late summer walk, the evening cool and then warm as we washed through it, muscles waking up after a day inside, fireflies flying their fires, neighbors walking their dogs, the zipline carrying a kid across the playground (and the kid carrying the zipline into his games). Which is to say: I also notice patterns. I’ve been writing Uproar for 570-some weeks. Which is to say: I sometimes start “saving up” Uproar posts, making sure I’ll have them. Have enough. Which is to say: that saving turns away from what I love most about Uproar. Remembering, that is lovely. (Just yesterday my love recalled something funny we’d said, and said it again, and without meaning to I said “good remembery!” Remembery like a spell, like magic, I think). But instead of saving up because I’m worried about having enough, these posts for me are about abundance. About what I’m surrounded by and enmeshed in. Abundance of thought and creativity, abundance of lives and relationships, abundance of community powers and vitalities and delights. 
                TEMPORAL ALLEGIANCE, Gay says, “means, simply, dailiness.” The dailiness of walking into this. The dailiness of being met by so many wonders, and meeting them, open armed and ready to join not just with the possibilities I’ve saved up but the daily possibilities lighting like fireflies or pausing to chat like neighbors.

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

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

564: “Where Are You Going?” (Davies & Aduba)

                “Where are you going with this?” 
                “Don’t know. Won’t know till I get there.” -Paul William Davies and Uzo Aduba (who voices the line), The Residence 

                I didn’t post this on Monday because my partner and I were camping for a few days, out in the woods. Trees to listen to. Downy woodpeckers to meet. Moments to share. It was so good to be out of our usual rhythms. 
                Last week my friend Ishita and I talked about reverse outlining. She just finished her PhD. I have one more year in mine.I’ve been going back through all the different notes and chapter drafts that make up my dissertation-in-progress. Looking at these pieces. Thinking about what needs to come before what, what needs to be cut, what needs more detail. There’s something wonderful in that practice. Somewhere—in Letters to a Young Poet?—Rainier Maria Rilke quips something like, “When you give someone flowers, you arrange them beforehand, don’t you?” Editing can be arranging flowers: considering shapes and colors before I offer them to you, hoping you’ll like them.
                While I’m arranging, I’ve been writing new poems in conversation with a few friends. We give each other a starting place, like Lampshape or Smudged Mirror, and then (usually that same day) we sit and feel and listen and write and follow the images that come up, the memories, the words, until we are somewhere, and we call that somewhere a poem. We share it with each other. We don’t know where we’re going until we get there. That’s how we find ourselves here.

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

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

560: “The Age of a Thing” (Daniel H. Wilson)

                “The age of a thing is in the feel of it. Secrets are locked in the fingerprints of cracked porcelain and the bloom of rust on metal. You’ve just got to pick up a dusty artifact in both hands and squeeze your eyelids shut. With a little thought, the mind-reeling eons of time will stretch out before you like a star-filled sky.” -Daniel H. Wilson, The Clockwork Dynasty, p1

                Here’s a game, or a practice. Or an artwork with you as one of the paints:
                1) Pick up something. Most recently reading Daniel Wilson, I’ve played this with an orange and a plastic fork in the airport.
                2) Hold it in both hands. 
                3) Think about what you know of this piece’s history. Of the movements and relationships and materials that brought it here. That many-crossed web that now includes you.
                4) Think also about what you don’t know. I can imagine an orange tree, imagine soil, try to shift my image from the idyllic scene my mind goes to first to the giant farming operation that surrounded this orange I’m holding. But I don’t know where the tree was. I don’t know who tended it. I don’t know the path it took to here.
                5) Return and remember that you’re holding the object in both hands. Perhaps you can smell it. Perhaps you shift your skin against its skin.
                Wilson’s paragraph reminds me why I love museums, paintings, sculptures. Depending on how you count, I haven’t gotten to hold very many artifacts. I don’t want to diminish how some specific objects are poignant with time and life. But I do start wondering, what does the artifact of this orange whisper? And this plastic mass produced fork? As Wilson describes so beautifully, with a little thought, time and space open for me in ways that make me reel—and rebalance.

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