round-up: 10/8
reading recs, quotations, an event (!), & tweets
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
Housekeeping:
My dear friend Luke Johnson’s book just came out and he (and I!) will be reading n LA tonight. Come buy his book & say hey.
What I’m reading:
Quotations:
Writing is solitary, but being a writer in a world of other writers should be communal, loving work. Citations are an act of thanks and mentorship an act of kinship.
I am not for everybody. My writing is a gift I give to people who find it, not an emergency siren in the dark for anyone to attend.
If something is overwhelming you, break it down into smaller parts. I broke down my book into twenty-minute promises to myself. What can I do for twenty minutes towards this bigger promise? Then I showed up, over and over again, whenever I could. It’s not that I had an epiphany after twenty minutes or had a breakthrough every time. Sometimes I didn’t do anything but edit out a paragraph. But there was movement because I gave myself no other option but to prove to myself I was worth showing up for.
If I must be reactionary, let my acts at least be productive, let the results be beautiful, and let them heal me and make me better afterwards.
We could not bring ourselves to touch for weeks. To not be able to get comfort from each other. Another ugliness I don’t have the words for. I slept on the floor a lot - I wanted to be as close to the ground as possible. I wanted to bury myself. And in all this time, I could not do the things that used to bring me comfort.
I’m so tired of watching fundamental human rights get “well actuallyed” into oblivion, while these guys just shrug and say they’re just asking questions. A lot of “respectable” reporters do this. Bringing up questions about rights and identity where none should exist, giving air the toxicity of hate, under the guise of respectable disagreement.
-Lyz
The world is part desolation, part hoping that one doesn’t end up in any of the desolate spaces. Sometimes this desolation sits on the surface of things much like a patina does, unsightly yet tolerable. Sometimes, desolation seeps right to the bone, burning flesh on its way down.
I don’t try to distinguish between poetry and prose too much, because I see myself as a bricoleur rather than a practitioner of one genre. In the past, I’ve approached poetry like a fiction writer (invented worlds, writing in the voice of characters) and I approached prose like a poet (resisting closure, writing sentences with a lyric sensibility).
I do see a distinction between my approaches to essay and poetry. In essays, I am more intentional about mapping out the arc of my thinking. I start with a question.
I allow myself more play in poetry. I love to indulge in language and formal compositions, to follow the sonic friction between two words and see what narrative unfolds from it—strangely, I resist the personal in poetry. I prefer to throw my voice, to impersonate, and stretch language to its limits.
Poetry allows me to “just be” on the page, to revel in the sensory, to camp up my phenomenological experience. I find poetry to be very freeing because the process can be so aleatory.
I don’t care about redemption; I want a space for recognition. I want to break a logic of dominance; I want radical empathy.
Tweets:
That’s all for today!
