Tag: writing

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

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