Tag: writing

521: “A Song I Never Would’ve Heard”

                “…sharing a song I never would’ve heard and been struck dumb with glee by had I had my shit more together.” -Ross Gay, “Among the Rewards of My Sloth…” The Book of Delights p. 123
                “I thought to anchor my essay in an interdisciplinary epigraph, then delve into the reasons and ways that assessment could and should sidestep the standard language ideology […] Here I was.” -Maria José Palacios Figueroa, “Too-long reflections on washback”

                My partner and I have started—well, started again—reading The Book of Delights out loud together before bed. We also started last year, or two years ago, and then fell off. The pages fluttering by fast like fall leaves all a-whirl, then pausing, a frozen winter morning, sleepy and bright. Now it’s turning into a game with us. We just celebrated our first anniversary. We’ve been noting, a delight of being married is this, a delight of being married is that. (And yes, I’m coy: those delights are ours, for us, we’ll share them maybe if you visit, but not here). And a game for the everyday, every day, too. Today’s delight: lying on the floor. The complete release of it. Today’s delight: wrestling with my dissertation. Today’s delight: a friend visiting, and the fried zucchini (from our garden!) we shared. Now the crickets (I think they’re crickets?), not in that written way of crickets to mean silence, but singing.
                By which I mean: it’s 9:30 pm and I meant to start writing this sooner. I knew it was Wednesday. I knew I would post something. By which I mean: I’m glad I didn’t write this sooner. One of my favorite things writing can do is open to an experience of making, a space where I thought to start this way and yet here I am far off from my expectations. What a delight. The little dance of whatever we’re thinking about, together, here, and the crickets singing summer.

by Azlan

520: “I hold onto her foot” (Louise Erdrich)

                “Sometimes I look at men, at the way most of them move so freely in the world, without a baby attached, and it seems to me very strange. Sometimes it is enviable. Mostly, it is not. For at night, as she curls up or sprawls next to me and as I fall asleep, I hold onto her foot. This is as much for my comfort as to make sure that she doesn’t fall off the bed. As I’m drifting away, I feel sorry for anyone else who is not falling asleep this way, holding onto her baby’s foot. The world is calm and clear. I wish for nothing. I am not nervous about the future. Her toes curl around my fingers. I could even stop writing books.”
                -Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, p. 53.

                For the last several nights I’ve been having pretty intense nightmares. And when I do, when I wake up at two and three in the morning, my thoughts spinning in ways I don’t know how to sit with, I reach out and hold my beloved’s hands. Or wrist. Or shoulder. Sometimes knee, if we’re all puzzled on the bed. It varies, like the sense of love and peace and connection varies, and it also flows along to a related touch.
                Perhaps that’s different from what Erdrich is describing here. I also remember holding my little sibling when they were one and falling asleep. Or holding my brother’s children when they were infants, and older, remember their small limb nestled in my hand. Dreaming. I remember being a place where they could sleep and dream. In another way, I think I remember and still feel my own small wrist or ankle or arm held in someone’s caring hands. My mother’s. Father’s. A family friend’s, which means family.
                A lot of my cultural training emphasizes freedom as being not responsible for others, as being free of other people, to choose and do as you want. Whether or not you want to call that freedom, that’s not what I’m seeking. I don’t think I know anyone who’s been made happier or more vibrant in spirit because of such lack of responsibility. And I know too many people who are sadder or lost or frightened from searching for it. So I want to be held, to reach out, to be holding.

by Azlan

519: “You Don’t Know” (Jack Halberstam)

                “You don’t know what your child will be like when they grow up. Just as you don’t know what profession they will have, you probably shouldn’t know what form their social intimacies will take. Maybe they’ll have many friends and date many people. Maybe they’ll be single their whole life. Maybe they’ll join a commune. But the idea that we already know in advance exactly how their life will play out after the age of 23 tames the wild potential of human existence and human complexity.” -Jack Halberstam, in this wonderful interview

                Sometimes—often—I’m sad that so many of my loved ones are in so many different places. Doing so many different things. But today I was outside, seeing all these plants I don’t know growing together and it’s beautiful. With so much up in the air and unknown, I’m trying to listen to Halberstam. To swerve to a kind of open unknowing, a kind of context, in which unpredictability can blossom into wondrous gardens of possibility. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying it’s lovely.
                In the interview Halberstam thinks about “the terms under which unpredictability can thrive.” This isn’t about an individual epiphany. This is looking for social forms that celebrate and support the unpredictable, that make space for different ways that someone might walk. I think about what those forms might be. I think about food systems. Housing systems. Healthcare systems. Education systems. Resistance networks. Mutual aid networks. I think about all the systems that insist they do know what life will look like in fifty years, and how they’re wrong again and again and again. Obviously. Hilariously. Crushingly. With so much up in the air and unknown, I want to feel the wild as beautiful and bursting with life. As it is.

by Azlan

518: “I Needed You Once” (Split Fiction)

                “I needed you once, but not anymore.”
                […]
                “So, she’s finally gone? Good for you. ‘Cause that Dark Mio? Total party pooper.”
                –Split Fiction

                My partner and I are almost done playing through Split Fiction. We’re loving it. But one scene from last week keeps making me shake my head. So yes, minor spoilers ahead.
                Split Fiction ends up sending its two main characters into their own subconsciouses (one after the other). In each subconscious, the two heroines fight some part of themselves. You can guess the parts: Fear. Anger. Guilt. The common “negative emotions” of storytelling worlds. Mio helps push a massive cyber scythe (it’s all robot themed! The whole game has very cool artwork) into Dark Mio’s angry guts. Mio says: “I needed you once, but not anymore.” A few beats later Mio’s friend confirms, “So, she’s [Dark Mio’s] finally gone? Good for you.” Everyone’s healing path is their own, and there’s a place for letting go of ways of thinking that aren’t helping. But for me, I guess, there’s a difference between letting go and actively trying to murder. There’s a difference between trying to get rid of and trying to make peace with.
                I’m thinking here about developmental psychologist Gordon Neufuld, who points out that people in the US and Canada are taught to rely on “cut it out” language with kids—stop hitting, stop yelling, don’t bite. Neufeld says cut it out just isn’t a very helpful instruction: if you’re angry, there is an urge to yell. Maturity (he says) comes not from murdering the angry voice, but from adding in a counterbalancing voice: remember that you love your brother. Remember that hitting hurts, and you don’t want to hurt your friends. Beyond that, there will be plenty of times when you do still need your anger, your fear, your guilt. Even if right now you don’t need them controlling your every move.
                In Scott Pilgrim vs The World, doesn’t Scott end up having to fight Dark Scott— and instead they talk, get to know each other, realize they can be friends? That story makes more sense to me. Or feels more sense. I didn’t want to kill Dark Mio. I wanted to make peace with her, and see how she and Mio could meet, listen to each other—whole, strong, compassionate, angry when they need to be, caring when they need to be.

by Azlan

514: An “Archive of Feelings” (Jack Halberstam)

                “In this other archive [of feelings], we can identify, for example, rage, rudeness, anger, spite, impatience, intensity, mania, insincerity, earnestness, overinvestment, incivility, and brutal honesty.” -Jack Halberstam building from Ann Cvetkovich’s idea of “an archive of feelings,” “​​The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” p. 824

                I think the archive of feelings I’m thinking from, the feelings I habitually sit inside and move from, has a lot to do with where I am. And so I’ve been thinking about how I make that archive from the people I’m around. How I open myself to these connections. How I don’t.
                I’ve spent the last three days at an academic Research Institute— in depth discussions for hours each—and the evenings at my friend’s house, petting their dog, sharing food, laughing and reconnecting and feeling sleepy. The Institute is a combination of making new, inspiring connections with other scholars, and performing a kind of professional expertise. The evenings are fur covered, with deer grazing just outside the window, muh to the dog’s excitement. Or nervousness? Or interest? After three days of this I’m thinking about the archives of feelings into which my experiences grow.
                My friend, intent on putting up another stretch of wall paper. Fixated, they’ve described it. Determined, I might say. I get that way about a thought or a task sometimes. It’s intense/painful/pleasurable/frustrating/presumptive, like needing to sneeze, but the sneeze comes out as sustained meticulous effort.
                My partner, sitting next to me beneath a blanket. A little while ago (when she was in bed) I asked her how she was and she texted back an image of Boo from Monsters Inc looking almost asleep. And I’ve felt that— the image more than the words. At peace/exhausted/overwhelmed, in place, slow, like happy snot sinking into soil.
                A colleague, leaning forward to share a connection they’ve just started making between two kinds of understanding, a connection they’re inviting us to make. Excited/curious/unsure. A colleague and a friend, leaning back, silent, unwilling to pretend the kind of expertise they’re hearing performed. Angry. Silent. Ready to connect another way.
                I think that, from all these, I learn ways I might be. Ways I am. I sit into them, the ones that don’t fit so well, the ones that do, the ones that bend toward a new kind of fitting.
                The dog, paws up on the windowsill. The deer outside. Where do I graze, like she does, tasting world?

by Azlan

512: “My plans are all unmade!” (The Goes Wrong Show)

                “Aaah! Thus with this wound, my plans are all unmade!” –The Goes Wrong Show, “The Most Lamentable…”

                If you haven’t watched it, The Goes Wrong Show puts on plays that—well—wonderfully, and terribly go wrong. Swords swung into theater lights. Scripts aflame. Doors that are supposed to open left locked, and actors stumbling through paper walls that had been painted to look like stone.
                I’ve been talking with scholars lately about their research, and about the strange expectation that they should be able to outline their results or contribution or significance before they’ve started re-ing or searching. How that expectation is even stranger for any research involving community collaborations. How would I know what we want to look for, what we want to do, before we get together to talk about it? Today, sitting on the floor, eyes still half teary from chuckling, all that melds with the silliness of “The Most Lamentable.” Because my plans (such as they are) so rarely go as planned. (A chuckle. I’m even bad at cooking from recipes!). Because in the mad escalation from one mistake to another, one catastrophe to another, there’s a chance to turn from looking for control to playing with a moment. (More chuckles). Nothing on fire—yet—in this writing, but I want that play. And this isn’t quite what I meant to say. Oh dear. I’m stumbling past the point, or around it, or through a painted wall, and then who knows where we are?

by Azlan

510: “A Community’s Emotional Lives” (Billy-Ray Belcourt)

                “I would write a book that reflected a community’s emotional lives rather than just my sensory experience of the present. […] In talking to those who came from where I came from, I also hoped light would be shed on the person I was or the person I might become.”
                -Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree), A Minor Chorus, p. 29-30

                I’ve been wanting to write a post on this quote since October or so. And I haven’t been able to. It’s funny: there are few books I’ve picked up and fallen in love with more deeply than Belcourt’s A Minor Chorus, and still, in the months since I started, I haven’t finished. I think that’s because I realized this book would be useful for my research, and that pushed me toward reading to finish it, and that’s not how I’d started reading. Not how I wanted to read. I wanted to respect it as what I first recognized it to be, which might be something like a meeting place.
                All this is on my mind tonight because I just ran over to my friend Vuyo’s apartment to drop off A Minor Chorus and Belcourt’s This Wound is a World. Vuyo’s thinking through some of her own writing, and these will join the conversations on her page. And all of a sudden this book—which stopped feeling alive to me when I wanted to take something from it; which I had gotten far away from, so even as it sat on my bedside table or my bed or my dresser or my kitchen table, I didn’t read it—this book feels really close. I want to read it, just as I’ve left it with my friend. I think it’s because the book’s enmeshed, again, for me, in a community of relationships. Mine. Billy-Ray’s. Vuyo’s. And more than why, there’s a poignant reminder in the nearness and farness, the wish to read at the moment when the book’s with a friend. Maybe some kinds of being apart weaving through some kinds of being together is part of understanding yourself through a living community. Maybe the emotional lives I’m thinking about unfold in the ways we both have and don’t have a touch of one another. Like a book I’ll fall in love with all over again when it comes back, after missing it, after enjoying the thought of it in my friend’s hands, talking with her.

by Azlan

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