Uproar – a quote every Wednesday

505: “It’s Easier To Do This When You’re Here” (Travis Baldree)

                “No, it’s not that. […] It’s that it’s easier to do this when you’re here. And that makes me feel stupid. Have I been sitting on my tail all this time? Doing nothing because I was pretending I couldn’t? Am I so pathetic that I couldn’t muster the energy to do this without…without a chaperone?”
                -Travis Baldree, Bookshops and Bonedust, p. 73

                A few days ago, my friend (and found family) Fin and I went for a walk, pattering our feet to a nearby park and around beneath the branches. Then we came back as a storm blew in, and pulled up dandelions from a garden bed till big spring drops plopped over us. A week or two ago Fin and I learned about the fuse box in my new house, and turned off electricity so we could repair a light switch and an outlet. Both of those were tasks I’ve been meaning to do for weeks (or months). I was a little worried about doing them with Fin. “I don’t want to put this on you,” I Said, or something like that. Fin, wonderful human that they are, smiled and said, “It’s fun! And we’re learning stuff!”
                As Travis Baldree’s character is learning on page 73, I think it’s easier to do stuff when you’re here. But I’m moving to a place where that doesn’t make me feel stupid. Usually when I say “work” these days, I mean something somewhat ugly, tied up in capitalism and social structures that destroy too much. But work can also be what we do toward the world we want to share. Doing that kind of work with someone makes the effort—and the world we’re moving toward, whatever world that is; the well-lit room with a working light switch where we’ll sit and eat orange slices—feel closer. Taste sweeter. Stay shared.

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

502: “Stories Upon Stories” (Darcie Little Badger)

                “Stories upon stories. Sometime I’m just going to do a story in a story in a story in a story…” -Darcie Little Badger, speaking at the Urbana Free Library on March 12, 2025

                My partner and I just got back from our local library.
                I could skip that part, start with the “idea.” But it’s interwoven lives and places that are alive inside this “idea.”
                We went for a long walk, spring opening warm as we chatted about the work we want to do and the challenges woven through it. Then to the library to hear Darcie Little Badger talk about her wonderful books. (On Saturday we finished Elatsoe). In the library’s auditorium we ran into friends, and acquaintances who might become friends, and other folks with whom I actually have tense relationships, and all of it felt living.
                One of the things that makes me heartsick with fiction is the way a story arc can anoint a main character. Can collapse complexity into the specification narration of what the Chosen One sees, says, and wants. We joke about that, right? About people with “main character energy,” who make it clear that everyone else is a side character at best. And one of the things I love about fiction—one of the gifts Little Badger reminds me about—is the way storytelling can recognize stories as already woven together. Todays with years ago, and your morning with my morning somewhere else, and our shared moment, now, and so many tomorrows. Darcie Little Badger’s book and her talk, and my conversation with a friend, and the walk my partner and I took among opening flowers, and winter’s brown leaves, and a library where for a moment a scattering of us sit together, laughing, listening.

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

500: “Welcome Comfort” (Becky Chambers)

                “And to that end, welcome comfort, for without it, you cannot stay strong.”
                -Becky Chambers, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

                One of the fun parts about this project is that people start sharing their favorite quotes with me.
                Years ago my friend and I sat talking about kids, and how we both thought that no one really knows a kid’s gender until they’re old enough to start saying, “This is me.” I said that meant I didn’t know what to do. What to say. My friend, trans and mid transition, started telling me about cool picture books with gender diverse kids. We talked about one (I can’t find it now! Someone tell me the name!) with a kid who’s picking out all sorts of different outfits—shorts one day, a dress another, a dragon costume another. If the kid feels themself in the book, they can say, I’m like that. If not it’s still a fun story about fun people.
                Lately, when people tell me about the art they’re loving, I’ve been thinking about that book. About how so many of us are looking around for the yes or the maybe or the bright that helps us share what we’re experiencing, and so come closer in the ways we want to.
                My younger sibling called me this morning. They asked, “At what point do you quit?” They’ve been planning a certain path for the next few years, and they’re not sure anymore if their plan feels livable. They called again tonight, just back from running around in the rain with some friends. They sounded a lot happier. We chatted. I told them I was struggling with an uproar draft, and they gave me Becky Chambers’ quote. I wondered if this welcome, friendly, relationship-woven comfort was something they were reaching for, given where they were. In the picture book, in the way of picture books, looking for what we need, for what feels right, plays out in something colorful and touchable. All those clothes. In my life, that looking often plays out with people and words and art. Tired and snuggled next to my partner, because it’s still chilly where we love, I wondered if that welcome, friendly, relation-woven comfort was something we’ve also been needing. It’s wonderful how our reaching for what makes us possible can help make our loved ones possible, too.

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

498: “Long-Distance Love” (Ishita Dharap)

                “The Long-Distance Love-Letters program has been rescheduled to take place on Sat, February 22, 2 pm, at Krannert Art Museum.” -Ishita Dharap, in an email sent out this afternoon

                I messaged my dear friend Ishita on December 2nd, inviting her to come over and enjoy dinner and a cozy fire. She was in India with her family, she said, and she sent a picture of a truly delicious dinner that I would’ve loved to share. I met her family once. We talked about joy and rest and becoming an interwoven family as leaves rustled overhead and the stars came out in a deepening sky.
                Ishita and I messaged each other again on January 3rd, looking for a moment to catch up, but we wouldn’t be back in the same town until January 12th. Then things were busy. Now it’s mid February. Whenever we catch up, my friend, it won’t be soon enough—and at the same time, all this—and her email today—has me thinking about how the joy and curiosity and support of our friendship isn’t something put off to that scheduled moment where we can see each other in the craziness of our current political moment. That joy and curiosity and support is already woven all through: long distance love, sweet and playful and sad as we say hello from close and far away.
        I haven’t been to Ishita’s Long Distance Love-Letters museum program. Not yet. But I’ve seen her write about it (in a book and a journal article), I’ve talked with her about it, and in imagining it I’ve felt it. Maybe that’s because I’m thousands of miles away from so many of the people I love. Maybe that’s because the stories I often hear told about “long distance” are about missing, about absence. Ishita’s work makes me think back through all the ways that missing and remembering are kinds of touching and playing and learning and being together. It helps me feel that so many of my beloved absences are presences, day after day, in so many ways.

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