Tag: 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

507: What Happens In a Ross Gay Reading?

                “We all know nothing happens only when it happens” -Ross Gay, Be Holding: A Poem, and read tonight on April 16 in Champaign Urbana, Illinois

                Tonight I got to meet Ross Gay, author of catalog of unabashed gratitude (which my mom gave me in 2012, maybe, or 2014), author of The Book of Delights (which lived for a long time on my bedside table, and on my desk, and for a little bit in my garden), author of inciting joy (which I just got tonight), author of a lovely evening reading, as he’s a delightful and delighted person who paused several times tonight to laugh with us or laugh about what we laughed at. And in so many ways in his poems and beyond his poems Ross Gay brings my communities together.
                By which I mean that so many of the local people I’m close to were there for the reading. Old teachers of mine, and fellow students, and older students who told me “this might help you grad school” when I was starting out, and newer students to whom I’ve tried to mumble useful things, and people I work with, like Carmen who was at my house yesterday, identifying all the different plants dancing up now that it’s spring, like Nathalie who I cowrote with all last fall, like another friend, who’s made for herself the kind of work where lots of what she does is introduce people to other people they might like. A kind of work that Ross Gay’s writing does, and is, as we all got together to be part of singing it while saying and listening and laughing.
                By which I mean that these communities are not restricted to local folks here, but brings me to my mother, who gave me the book that I set aside for a while and then drank down, delighted. To my siblings (both far away) who would love parts of what Ross Gay read tonight. To my friend Dani’s mom, Lesle, who learned about (and started to love) Ross Gay after I shared a poem with Dani and Dani shared that poem with her mom. And now I’ve met Lesle and that poem is something we all share together. In this happening that is not locked to tonight’s reading, I’m also sitting with students in Oklahoma circa 2016 when I taught these poems, us all walking along to each other in Ross Gay’s words. I’m going back to old friends who’ve moved away but who walk these paths and so who I might come back to in these poems.
                By which I mean that Ross Gay, asked tonight about the acknowledgements section in his books, and about who he was feeling indebted to, talked about so many different neighbors. The ones who call over because they’re cooking something, and wonder if he wants some. The one who sent that video of a dog and a person playing Jenga because Ross Gay has a dog in the house since December. The ones who all get together to garden. And in this happening that is not just the now of one moment where one thing is happening, we bump together for a moment, but gently. Or tend the arugula that is yes now tall enough to dance when the wind tickles.

by Azlan

504: “Taunted by Tigers” (Baker & Nephew)

                “…was taunted by tigers. You’re not the ringleader this time.”
                -Keither Baker and Michelle Nephew, Gloom (Second Edition)

                My family’s been visiting this last week, and in between cooking and washing dishes and lounging on the floor we’ve been playing games. Especially Gloom. Have you played that one? Each player is a kind of guiding ghost for an ill-fated family, and your goal is to get the characters in your family as miserable as possible—and then safely dead—while everyone else’s characters remain “happy, healthy, and annoyingly alive” (from the rulebook). And we’ve laughed. Laughed and laughed. I think part of the game’s fun, for me at least, is how it takes up the “good” and “bad” events that tropes imagine for us. Characters get happier (a bad thing, when you’re playing the game) when they do things like inherit money or get “wonderfully well wed” or are blessed by the pope. Characters get more miserable (a good thing) when they get hurt or “grow old without grace” or are “menaced by mice.” It’s all, in a way, exactly how you’d expect, except the goals are reversed. 
                In my day-to-day I avoid washing dishes, rushing along to the moment when I can “relax” by watching TV or whatever all else. I make my plans and try to stick with them. And then this week my plans are interrupted and bent and tumbled over with visiting family, and there’s something tiring in that, for sure, but there’s also something lovely. Gloom mocks my expectations for what’s supposed to happen. And it’s nice not to be the ringleader this time.

by Azlan

503: “Evade and Avoid” (Alexis Pauline Gumbs)

                “What I know is that I love you. Even if you are not interested in being followed. Even if you show up in disguises. Even if I’m not the one who should know you or name you or classify you at all. And I celebrate your right to evade and avoid me. I celebrate your journey however deep, however long. I respect you as so much bigger than my own understanding. And me too. I don’t have to be available to be eligible for breath.”
                -Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, p. 92

                For a while now (a year? More?) I’ve been wondering where it is that Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes about loving whales, even when they choose to stay out of sight, beneath the surface, far from her. And then today in looking through Undrowned for a different section these lines swam past me. And I thought yes. I felt yes. 
                I think I felt yes because so much of my training, my learning, my community-tending is about learning things. Seeing things. Being introduced to people. But just yesterday a dear friend talked about the peace and joy and life that comes from keeping their distance from certain people that they don’t want to be close to, and I felt, yes.
                I think I felt yes because I’ve been feeling the ocean of the sky blow with lightning and thunder out here in the plains. A little while I tried to imagine how big a storm is. Imagine prairie and forest and hill until it stretched out that far. And then I remembered Undrowned and realized to feel a storm I could step outside. Hear one little breath of blowing, and see the towering clouds washed up, deep beyond my seeing. 
                I think I felt yes because I want more learning and organizing that’s about respecting and celebrating the distances and disguises and evasions that breathing creatures choose.

by Azlan

501: “Writing doesn’t feel linear” (Fin McMahon)

                “I love writing because for me it doesn’t feel linear. It feels like a chance to go around and come back, to think with these pieces, move them around, change them.”
                -Fin McMahon, in conversation on March 3, 2025

                I remember in 2020 when video calls were suddenly a core way that I connected with people. I’d been on plenty of video calls before. But I’d never hung out on a video call, or tried to. And then suddenly there I was, stretching on the carpet while my friend did dishes, because it was easier to do these things with someone else and we hadn’t talked to someone else all day.
                I’m interested in how similar tools, similar practices, can be so different when used in different ways. I often struggle with writing precisely because it does feel linear. Which is related to saying, because so often I’ve been taught to approach writing as a problem with a linear solution. And I’ve learned. What do you need to know first? What comes after that? At the same time, listening to Fin, I luxuriate into all the ways writing feels like sinking down into thick carpet—woven, messy, marked by the way other people have walked across it, soft, solid. To put it another way, for a while now I’ve been telling myself I should go out and pile up some of the dead stalks in my garden so that new things have a chance to grow. I haven’t wanted to. I should. I haven’t wanted to. That’s gone round and round. And then today, a little before a cold drizzle turned to snow, I was out in a gray sky crouching down, my tools wet in my hands, the dead leaves slick, and all of it felt like a kind of saying hello.

by Azlan

499: “Frivolous, Promiscuous, and Irrelevant” (Jack Halberstam)

                “Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant. The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map a few detours.” -Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

                I’m writing a book for my PhD dissertation. I know, I know, but I couldn’t fit in the bird bath (it looks so fun!) and you have to do something. So earlier today I’m at a cafe with my advisor, chatting about my constantly changing book ideas. She laughed at me. I would laugh at me. What this book is and what it’s about has been changing week to week. We laugh together, and she says, “Well, what book do you want it to be like?”
                And I think about Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure. 
                Now I’m not going to write anything like The Queer Art of Failure. For one thing, Halberstam is brilliant. For another my pages tend to have more personal story stuff than that book. But I did tell my advisor, You know, I wish what I was writing was funnier. 
                Since then I’ve been thinking about why my pages aren’t funnier. And I could say, well, the book’s about difficult things, and that’s true, but so is Halberstam’s. And Halberstam’s is funny as me trying to think my way out of overthinking. (By which I mean, very). I think part of the seriousness in my pages is that I’ve bought into exactly what Halberstam is warning against, what they’re so gleefully refusing: this idea that I want to be a success, and I know what that means, and so I’ll go along the paths I’m supposed to until someone severe and somber says, “Yes. Look what hath you wrought.” And that’s rot. Which is to say: this week I looked at someone who’d made their neck and chin look like a burger. This week I showed that to my friend, and now to you. This week my friend and I talked about her work, which means we talked about how our medical systems fail to support her and her relatives. And we got angry. And we got sad. And we laughed, too, because in person that’s easier, even with the angry and sad, and I think laughter can be pavement for the detours that lead to where we hope we’re headed.

by Azlan

497: “Writing Is Not Natural” (Dylan Dryer)

                “It’s useful to remember that writing is not natural because writers tend to judge their writing processes too harshly—comparing them to the ease with which they usually speak. Speech, however, employs an extensive array of modalities unavailable to writing: gesture, expression, pacing, register, silences, and clarifications—all of which are instantaneously responsive to listeners’ verbal and nonverbal feedback.”
                -Dylan B. Dryer, “1.6 Writing Is Not Natural,” p. 29, in Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies

                Earlier today, sitting at the bar of a bookstore/coffeeshop with our big winter coats slung over the backs of our chairs, my advisor and I talked about how all the scholarship I do and want to do starts with being in the same place with people. The same room. Talking about who we are, and where we are, and what we want.
                “But why?” my advisor pushed. I struggled to answer. That’s why she was pushing: not because she doesn’t believe me, but because she wants to help me say the (messy) perspectives and commitments that weave through that experience.
                We talked for a long time, and I didn’t have an answer. I don’t have one here, either. But I like to think about Dryer’s point this way: talking with someone involves maneuvering through endless branching paths of opportunity. If we’re going to talk about my garden, we could start with the green leaves I glimpsed today, peeking out from the covering of my makeshift plastic sheeting and alive (I think!) through all of Illinois’ hard freezes. Or we could start by talking about your garden, whatever you’ve planted recently, and what other creatures came by to eat some of the raspberries last season, and how you feel about that, and how it changes your relationship to the squirrels, watching them bounding through your planted rows. Or we could start—so many places! And if we talked, in person, we’d find our path of possibility as a kind of mutual rambling, responding to each other in real time, maybe sharing some tea as we shared words. But in writing a writer is often positioned to make all these communicative choices before the you of who I’m talking to even starts out on this ramble I’m hoping we’ll share. Which points to another stark, and for me awful, difference. In talking about gardens we might both have a lot to say, but in the construction of writing there are these two strange roles. Writer. Reader. One “speaks,” one “listens,” it’s harder to play back and forth into the happy camaraderie of conversation.
                        So I was wrong. I do have an answer, or at least a rambling example about gardens. And all this is why I want my scholarship to start in conversation, not in writing. Why I’m more and more interested in writing primarily as a tool for opening and tending spaces in which we’ll come together to talk.

by Azlan

496: “A Dimly Felt Sense” (Aviva Freedman)

                “People learn to write in discipline-specific ways through a “dimly felt sense,” a complicated, lived, sensory, largely un-verbal and un-rational awareness of how things like this are supposed to sound and be presented and be shaped. This dimly felt sense helps generate the text, but it also generated by their ongoing attempt to create the text: it pushes their writing and is pushed by their experience of reading, talking, writing (and having feedback on their writing).”
                -Aviva Freedman, “Learning to Write Again: Discipline-Specific Writing at University” (p. 96)

                I find something soothing—and powerful—in Aviva Freedman’s language of learning through a dimly felt sense. Maybe that’s because I’m trying to learn a lot every day. Trying, in these last six months, to learn to be married—a wonderful, delightful learning, and something I’ve never done before. Trying to learn to work inside (or to resist, reimagine, remake) all of the flawed and broken systems through which my society organizes everything from education to healthcare to road maintenance. Trying to learn the dances of hope and horror.
                So many of the models I’ve been taught for learning are rational, verbal, directional, disembodied, abstract, simplified. In the face of all that Aviva Freedman goes back to the complicated, lived, sensory, un-verbal, un-rational, aware, and I would add, relational. We walk and rest in the ways we are learning, dimly, to walk and rest. In the ways we see and feel something like this done. Which leaves space for not knowing. For fumbling with it. Maybe more like this. Maybe less like this. Maybe here. Maybe not. And in the attempt we’re learning.

by Azlan

493: The Fox Maidens (Robin Ha)

                “When I first conceived of this graphic novel about Gumiho, I thought it would be a fun, action-packed, fantastical thriller, full of cool scenes for me to draw. Now, I realize that what I’ve actually made is a book about generational trauma.” -Robin Ha, author’s note to The Fox Maidens

                bell hooks writes (in Teaching to Transgress) about going to education in the hopes of being healed. Sitting with that and with Robin Ha, I realize something similar is one of my favorite magics of fiction. We can set off writing, reading, imagining on our way to excitement: toward fantastical thrillers and wondrous adventures and cool scenes and clever lines. And carried along by the excitement of snows and wintry peaks, of magic and holding fire, we can find families, friends, loves. We can stumble openly into the hurts we are and heal, sometimes alone, sometimes together.
                There are so many stories that heal me. Lately I think I’ve slipped back toward thinking about stories largely as entertainment (which they can be), or about philosophical presentations of what the world is and should be (which they can be). Reading Robin Ha, I feel story as red skin, a burn, tender and regenerating. So much is burning, scorching so many of us. Here in The Fox Maidens is a healing breath we breathe together.

by Azlan

491: “At night I would lie in bed” (Sue Monk Kidd)

                “At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room…”
-Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

                                One way to start this post is by trying to remember how long ago I first read these words. It was more than half my life ago, I’m pretty sure, which isn’t long if you measure it by many things—my grandma’s lifetime, or the forests I went walking through today—but it can seem pretty long to me. 
                Another way to start is to say I love that moment between (and beyond?) waking and sleeping. The one where Lily (in the book) watches bees. The one where I, at nine or ten, laid awake in the mountain cabin my grandpa built, watching the fox in the woodgrain. I still look at that face sometimes. And the place where I, last night, lay awake with my partner listening to the rain and hearing one of her siblings moving away down inside the house as we all visit for the holidays. And the place where, at seven or eight, the night would open into flowers and talking animals and other figures from the stories my parents had been reading me. (And nightmares and teeth, sometimes). And the place where, at nineteen or twenty, I thought about all the new people I’d met,  all the different ways they walked through the world. 
                I think I’m saying there’s an openness in that lying awake in bed that lets things come together. The buzzing bees. A sibling’s footsteps. A lifetime’s memories. My partner and I are out in Washington State, visiting family. Yesterday we were with her parents and siblings. Today we were with my mom and siblings. The scheduling can feel like a lot, a kind of family crossword. It can also feel easy, sweet, open, full. I pulled The Secret Life of Bees off my sister-in-law’s childhood bookshelf. In waking and falling toward sleep I wonder if we feel some of the ways lives swirl and weave.

by Azlan