Tag: writing

533: “Casting About In Bed” (Ross Gay)

                “…neglects the fact that one of life’s true delights is casting about in bed, drifting in and out of dream, as the warm hand of the sun falls through the blinds, moving ever so slowly across your body.” -Ross Gay, in “43. Some Stupid Shit,” The Book of Delights, p. 127

                I think about this two page essayette often, usually because Ross Gay does something a lot like magic in bringing delight and joy and sunbright power to turn and face horror, and this time because today I tried to take a nap. At the time I couldn’t remember the last time I tried to take a nap. I realize, now, that I’m pretty sure it was during my first bout of covid. “Tried to take a nap” is pretty off the mark for what I felt in that exhausted falling apart, but that’s the last time I was asleep at 2 or 3 pm. Lying in bed at 2 or 3 pm, today, “trying to nap,” as I put it, I thought about Gay because I realized that drifting in and out of dream is a kind of thing I could practice. A kind of thing like drifting in a river, a current-thing, pathless and gently gravity-guided, wandering through depths and reflections and shadows known and unknown. A letting go, if I’m otherwise clutching at somethings. Which I was, because in “trying to nap” today my mind kept turning back to my to-do list, the one I was too exhausted to keep at, and to the ways I should do pieces of it better. I’m thinking about Gay because all that is something I practice too, of course. That busy mindedness, that assumption that rush and press is the performance of importance. Which is something I absolutely do not believe is true. I want to go about learning to nap the same way you go about planting a kale patch. Water. Soil. Time. And someday leaves.
                Which is to say: the blankets? Stretched out. The window? Open. The breeze? Mischievous. Tonight’s sleep isn’t napping, it’s sleeping—we could I’m sure discuss the differences—but I mean for this to be a kind of gardening toward future nappings when all I’ll hold if anything is the gentle being held by sunlight and dream.

by Azlan

531: “Undermine Your Own Authority” (Stacey Waite)

                “17. Undermine your own authority, be certain in your uncertainty, develop a voice that can be trusted even as it is subjective, unreliable, and impossibly to pin down, unless of course, you want to be pinned down in a sexy way.” -Stacey Waite, “How (And Why) To Write Queer,” Re/Orienting Writing Studies p. 45

                Stacey Waite develops a wonderful, poetic list of 63 rules for writing queer, which can mean many things including (for me, at least) write against the ways you were told it had to be written, and write into the ways you need. Which means part of the joy of Waite’s rules is that you can’t follow them, or can’t get to where they point by following them. And part of the joy is that it’s a delight to pick them up like dance steps you’re trying to learn by watching someone across the crowd. In these last weeks as I write cover letters for job applications—so many “Dear So-and-So’s,” so many “Sincerelys,” so many “my experiences”—I’ve thinking back to Waite’s rules. Imagining a few more to go with them.
                64. Write without getting to the point, and then when you realize you’ve meandered off just go back to what you meant to start saying, or as close as you can get to it, by which I mean this is a post about how exhausted and overwhelmed I was at about 3:32 today (and 3:25, I suppose; it doesn’t happen all in a minute). Even with everything—especially with everything—my family has patterns for speaking the things we need to say, so that with my brother I say I’ve just been reading Tochi Onyebuchi’s Harmattan Season, it’s so good, and with my dad I say I’m out for a walk just saying hi, and with my mom I say I hope you slept well last night, and with me my partner says do you want to sit and breathe together for a few minutes, and maybe none of those are exactly where we meant to end up, but they’re where we make space to remind ourselves to start.
                65. Start every sentence with “so.” So we can see you thinking. So you can keep thinking. So the train of your thought can puff its steam as it gets going. So we can hear the steam. So you can mix metaphors willy-nilly. So words are a dance and even if we’re out of step we hear the steps, hear the music, hear how we’re lagging or catching up and dancing.
                66. Forget where you were going. Do you need to be going? Did you want to be coming back?

by Azlan

530: “Things Were Not As They Are Now” (Dayton Edmonds & Darcie Little Badger)

                “When the Mother Earth was extremely young, things were not as they are now. Just as things are not now as they will be, for growth and change are constant. One night […]”
                -Dayton Edmonds (Caddo Nation), “Coyote and the Pebbles,” in Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection vol. 1

                “Yes, there will be a future. There are gonna be generations beyond ours. The question is how these futures will happen.”
                -Darcie Little Badger (Lipan Apache), “A Conversation with Darcie Little Badger,” hosted by the Urbana Free Library. March 12, 2025

                I was seventeen when a need-based scholarship to need-blind Amherst College made it possible for me to fly across the country and start studying in a place I’d never been. (Need-blind meant that Amherst considered my application without factoring in my family’s finances; by admitting me, they agreed to offer as much need-based scholarship as I needed). I thought that was How School Worked. Not all schools, certainly, but some, and I’d set out to apply to need-blind institutions. Later I learned how my grandfathers went to school through the GI Bill. So that was part of How School Worked. Later I tried to support my students as they figured out how to go to school, and if they wanted to, and what kind. I read graphic novels and other texts by Indigenous people telling their family stories of Indian boarding school systems designed to rip children from their parents, siblings, languages, sometimes lives. I learned about the Sixties Scoop, so much more recent than its name suggests. I wasn’t alive in the 1960s but I was alive for part of the Scoop. What I’d thought was far away was close. And the context of my life was close to so many things that were (by some descriptions) far away.
                There is a lot to talk about here, but what I’m walking towards just now is the way stories can ground us into how transitory this particular moment is. There are so many ways that school has been made to work as a horrifying weapon and a wonderful support and sometimes, strangely, both at once, and other things too. As I read the news lately, I think about that famous description (often attributed to Philip Graham) of journalism as the ‘first rough draft of history.’ In that description, for me, history feels almost stable. Written. The dust clears, and we see what’s happened. In contrast, in the writing and reading of so many stories, I feel history as more oceany: with channels and currents, certainly, but always flowing. A wave in choppy seas. I turn to that, now, because Dayton Edmonds and Darcie Little Badger recall me to a practice of hope. There will be a future. Things will be different than they are now. I and my moment will be distant ancestors to another time as How Things Work keeps growing and changing. So, Little Badger asks one evening at the library, the question is how those futures will happen, and how our work interacts with changing waves.

by Azlan

529: “Evaluation: Erratic” (Pandemic Legacy)

                “Evaluation: Erratic.”
                –Pandemic Legacy (Season 0)

                I have an older brother, so I knew about Yoda long before I first watched the movie. I knew he was a teacher, silly and wise. Even if I didn’t know, I think the story—its shape, and the tropes it plays with—tells me to pay attention to this little figure in a little hut. His performance of unimportance is important. His power is just beneath the surface of the swamp, ready to rise. In that respect Yoda is different from almost all the other little creatures we see throughout Star Wars. His difference, his distinctness, is highlighted in everything from the camera’s attention to the precision of his character design to his humor.
                All the video and board games I’ve played build with something like this signaling. A game (by one definition) is about what I can do, and can’t do. It’s important for me to understand why landing on someone else’s Monopoly property led to me losing money. Playing the game (by this definition) is understanding, and pushing the rules around. Even in social deduction games where the point is that everyone doesn’t know the rules, the goal is to figure them out. To learn the limits of my doing, and to use my doings toward a goal. The game is about our agency.
                Which is why it stuck out to me last night when, playing the excellent Pandemic Legacy (Season 0), I had no idea why our team spies received the psychological evaluation: “Erratic.” I’m sure there was a reason. I bet it makes sense. But in this post I’m not really looking for it. I’m interested in the consistency with which I’ve learned that games are about my actions. I’m interested in how much of my life happens for bewildering reasons I can never sort out. How much of my engagement with the world unfolds beyond and outside my ability to control events. And here I am, walking through the rain I didn’t expect, trying to fix the doorknob that I didn’t know was broken. Making friends with someone who happened to say hello. What would a game be like if it celebrated the way that things go unpredictably, without any reference to my plan? Does anyone know a game like that?

by Azlan

528: Reading to “Stay In The World” (Bec McBride)

                “If I don’t read, I get distracted from what’s important to me […] reading helps me stay in the world.” -Bec McBride, in conversation with me today

                At 11:30 this morning the world felt wonderful: Bec and I had been in the park for an hour, sitting in dappled light, catching up about our families and friends, our hurts and how we’re healing, our delights at recent cooler nights. At 5:30 today I was in a real low: a new big chunk of work had landed on my desk, crunching the work already there as it made space for itself. I didn’t know how I would handle everything. And there was something else. My mind clutched, hard knuckled. My beloved Maria José helped me pause for a moment. Helped me remember to step outside. She went with me. Crickets hopped through the grass, and we breathed.
                Lately I’ve been thinking about reading and writing as kinds of worlding. Of making world: of making our world look and feel certain ways. Every day there are so many forces pushing me to world the way they say. Today some commercials, celebrating how world is a chance to buy happiness or bask in “deserved” comfort. My hustle culture to-do list, insisting world is where nothing will ever be enough. News stories about political madmen insisting world is a war that always needs more killing. Posts from activists proposing that right now world is resisting the systems set up to consume us, while building solidarity among all those who resist toward justice. In last week’s post I read Joy Harjo: “Rain opens us, like flowers.” This evening Maria José and I stood outside. I tried to read the trees. They breathe what I exhale. I exhale what they breathe. World as a breath we share.
                For me, reading is one way to slowly, deeply, and sometimes in a momentous whoosh put meaning together. I like reading sounds and silences, movements and words. And learning from Bec, I think I read to find ways back toward the world I choose to keep help making.

by Azlan

527: “Rain opens us” (Joy Harjo)

“Rain opens us, like flowers, or earth that has been thirsty for more than a season.
We stop all of our talking, quit thinking, or blowing sax to drink the mystery.
We listen to the breathing beneath our breathing.
This is how the rain became rain, how we became human.”
                -Joy Harjo, from “It’s Raining in Honolulu,” which I first saw quoted in Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

                My friends, I was writing a different Uproar post—perhaps for next week–when the wind shifted in the window and then it was raining. Clouds’ fingers dancing on the deck. Then I was outside, too, surprised and opened by how thick the water fell. Then I was crouching beneath a little tree in my backyard, making sure the rain barrel was closed, water stitching down around us, earth into sky, now into before into after. Life into life.
                Rain opens us, like flowers.
                There’s been a drought here. The plants lying down, one kind after another, beneath the dry heat. Until I see wilted ground cover like ragged carpet over hard dirt. Now I’m back inside, skin still slicked, long enough to write down that I think the plant stems will lift back up with this. Like I feel myself lifting.
                We listen to the breathing beneath our breathing.
                Long enough, and no longer. And back outside to feel the water soaking down, lavish, luscious, alive.
                This is how the rain became rain, how we became human.

by Azlan

525: “The Dark Gulp of the Sea” (Emily Tesh)

                “So it came now, the dark gulp of the sea, roaring through the Wood.” -Emily Tesh, Drowned Country, p. 129

                Emily Tesh’s Drowned Country walks, in part, through an ocean that was once forest before the waters flooded over. Through the twists and turns of the book’s magic, a knot of friends travel back and forth through time: from the ocean bluffs they were born near to the Woods that lived there before the ocean washed over the land, and back again.
                In Illinois I live on earth that was once oceanfloor, and before that was forestfloor. Earth that knew glaciers and their long melting. I remember one of my first walks when I moved here, staring up at the clouds, trying to recognize the wonderful beauty of this particular place. The closest I could get was a scrap of song: the sky here’s like an ocean.
                I can’t travel like Tesh’s characters. But outside today, I wonder if we all walk the same grand changes. Forested bluffs worn away to oceans. I’ve been in those rolling waves. Lakes filled in with silt till they’re meadows. I’ve disappeared into those shallows. In my short lifespan it can be hard for me to see the currents of these changes. The Woods (Tesh says) see them differently. So today I’m watching the trees, thinking about what they might see, wondering what I can feel of time and earth and sky painting together.

by Azlan

524: “Reading Here and There” (Louise Erdrich)

                “Slowly, I go through the stacks, reading here and there until I find the book of which I must read every word. Then I do read every word, beneath a very bright lamp. When my brain is stuffed my daughters and I go swimming, play poker, or eat. Life consists of nothing else.” -Louise Erdrich, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, p. 94

                My father in law texted me yesterday: “Santa Rosa -> SFO -> Nashville -> Urbana?” 
                Yes, I texted back, although “Nashville -> Indianapolis -> Urbana.” For the last leg of our flight Maria José and I were skirting around a big storm front. The pilot took us out east past Columbus before turning back west toward our airport, the clouds outside our window washed with lightning.
                Today I spent hours thinking about and feeling and rearranging thoughts and words for a 700ish word passage in an article draft. Eventually I found, yes, this is what I’m trying to say. Trying to sit with. Yesterday we spent fourteenish hours, all in all, coming home. Or traveling from the home that is being with my parents in California to the home that is here, our garden patch, our zuchinis grown giant while we were traveling. Before bed we read a bit from Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights. The first time I started reading that book, I ploughed through 50 pages, pulled along by some productive impulse to finish and understand. Then I skittered off and stopped. This time Maria José and I are reading a few pages almost every night. Another garden patch we come back to.
                So today I’m thinking about Louise Erdrich and how she reads. How I read: sometimes with that learned, enforced impulse to get through and comprehend, but sometimes grazing, tasting the grass, tasting what’s growing, until I find someplace I am and sink in. Until I’m done reading and go swimming with family. I love the time and space to go all over before I pause someplace. I need that time and space to start. To find a pause, lightning aflicker, and then the rain starts playing its pianos.

by Azlan

523: “Comes Back” (Hap Palmer)

                “Sitting in a high chair, big chair, my chair, sittin’ in a high chair, bang my spoon!
                -Hap Palmer, “Sittin’ in a High Chair”

                “She always comes back, she never would forget me…”
                -Hap Palmer, “My Mommy Comes Back”

                This week I’ve been showing my beloved Maria José some of the places where I grew up. 
                The path outside my dad’s house, grassy now and scattered with dry pine needles, but deep with snow midwinter when I’m 9, stepping outside to help him shovel. 
                The pier at the lake where we jumped in, the cool dark breaking open to hold us.
                The beach where, at 16, I built a warm, dry little driftwood house with my best friend.
                The pool where my mom held me in the water, and later I learned to swim, somewhere back before my memory of years and ages.
                The hills where I watched tadpoles and frogs, always unsure how one becomes the other, already waist deep in the wonder of mud and algae. 
                Tonight, inside after these places, we listened to songs I remember from before I remember. I’m struck by how lush and joyous such childhood tastes of the world could be. Worlds so full of flavor. I sit with how scary, how sad, these tastes could be. I was a kid sometimes so lost. And grounding. A little more than a year after our wedding, it’s a delight to be sharing these children we were, these delights and uncertainties we’re rooted in, these places we grow.

by Azlan

522: “A Reply” (Moses Ose Utomi)

                “He never noticed that he didn’t get a reply.”
                -Moses Ose Utomi, The Truth of the Aleke, p. 37

                Have you ever talked with someone who doesn’t seem to notice your reply? Who nods, maybe, or doesn’t, and then goes straight back to what they want to say? Have you ever felt a whisper and wondered if you’re doing something like that—if you’re saying without noticing what else is said? I have. Both ways.
                Utomi’s line comes in a moment when his main character, Osi, has written and sent an important letter. And then has gotten caught up in all the other busy, important things he has to do, so he doesn’t notice that the person he wrote to never writes back. I read this and had to sit for a while. Quiet. Whirling. It shakes my ideas of writing and reading. Because the hope is that we’re communicating, yes? That we’re saying and hearing? But how much of my typing away at my keyboard is making space for what I can notice from you (and you, and you)? And how much is leading me back to my own tck tck tcking?
                I mistrust writing. Love it, too, and mistrust it. And I want in it a kind of listening. Which means I love listening practices more than I love writing practices. Which means I’m off, because last night I flew across the country to visit family, and now I want what I hear (my partner and my mom chatting near me) so much more than anything I might say.

by Azlan