round-up: 3/28
reading recs, quotations, tweets, & a few submission opportunities
Happy Tuesday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Opportunities
Tweets
Housekeeping:
As you may (or may not) recall, about a year ago, I published a tiny little collection of fiction, and a friend let me know the other day that there are actual reviews of it on Goodreads, which feels really sweet and special.
Anyways, you can buy a signed copy for $6 here.
& while you’re here, a question for you:
What I read last week:
A Map to the Door of No Return, Dionne Brand
Dickinson’s letters, again
Quotations:
Whatever human din and rumble, whatever unhappiness or raptures, the sea took it in and flung it back like nothing.
-Dionne Brand
It’s difficult to live near the sea. It overwhelms. Well, not true. It owns. Your small life is nothing to it.
-Dionne Brand
People here believe in uncontrollable passion, in mad rages, and in the brusque inevitability of death. Or damage. As if a face would not be a face without a scar, a finger not a finger without being broken, or a foot not a foot without a limp.
-Dionne Brand
Even beauty was brutal.
-Dionne Brand
It is always twilight.
-Dionne Brand
What language would describe that loss of bearings or the sudden awful liability of one’s own body?
-Dionne Brand
The body is the place of captivity.
-Dionne Brand
Pray for a life without plot, a day without narrative.
-Derek Walcott
Here […] in this place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They do not love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick ‘em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And o my people they do not love your hands. They only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them.
-Toni Morrison, Beloved
I awake in the foreign country of silence.
-Dionne Brand
I’m nostalgic for a country which doesn’t yet exist on a map.
-Eduardo Galeano
The routine of life is continually upheaved by colonial troublings.
-Dionne Brand
Home suggests order and routine, tradition, family.
-Dionne Brand
Representation becomes a stereotype.
-Dionne Brand
One is born into history, one isn’t born into a void.
-Dionne Brand
You write about life. It is life you must write about. It is life you must insist on.
-Dionne Brand
I could with some self-defacement go about the business of making my living. I could say in that way that many do: oh, it’s not so bad, your writing need not show your skin, it need not speak of trouble, history is a burden after all.
-Dionne Brand
When the world changes, even when it is the change you have longed for and dreamed, it must be destabilizing.
-Dionne Brand
It is not the job of writers to lift our spirits. Books simply do what they do.
-Dionne Brand
You are in the world and you want to stay.
-Dionne Brand
So you are here alone then, and you cannot hold on or control the orderliness of the real world, but you are here as all around you the light goes suddenly and quickly as light goes here and the noises of dusk rise, describable and indescribable; the noise of crickets singing loudly and all at once, beginning at the same moment as darkness envelops you.
-Dionne Brand
I would prefer the world to stop now, or at least my part in the world.
-Dionne Brand
I never bathed in the river, I never jumped off the bridge in town. Life was always something waiting to happen later.
-Dionne Brand
I cannot bear the possibility of losing her. So I haven’t seen her. An odd way of loving her, I know. It’s the way I love my family. If I don’t see them, if I don’t know the particular details of their lives, I won’t miss them when they go, or I’ll stave off their leaving, or they cannot possibly leave without my knowing. If I do not know a thing then it has not happened.
-Dionne Brand
All within my breast was tumult, wildness, and delirium!
-Olaudah Equiano
Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly, they leave the elusive, which is all the story. They leave much more than the words. Words can be thrown together. It is their order and when they catch you — their time.
-Dionne Brand
Two books shaped me. And I suspect that I have been writing these two books ever since, recalling and reimagining them. I have been seduced by them. The fact is, I remember them only in my body. I cannot quote a single line from them, and I have not ever felt the need to return to them physically, though I know that I always return to them as I write.
-Dionne Brand
Writing is an act of desire, as is reading. Why does someone enclose a set of apprehensions within a book? Why does someone else open that book if not because of the act of wanting to be wanted, to be understood, to be seen, to be loved?
-Dionne Brand
Life, if we are lucky, is a collection of aesthetic experiences as it is a collection of practical experiences, which may be one and the same sometimes, and which if we are lucky we make sense of. Making sense may be what desire is. Or, putting the senses back together.
-Dionne Brand
Forgetting is a crucial condition of living with any peace.
-Dionne Brand
It was a gift. Forgetting.
-Dionne Brand
I’ve lived nearly all my life with two incompatible ideas in my head: I wish I were dead and I’m glad my suicides failed.
-Clancy Martin
Opportunities:
Tweets:
"your life is a poem," - naomi shihab nye <3