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round-up: 3/28

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round-up: 3/28

reading recs, quotations, tweets, & a few submission opportunities

Despy Boutris
Mar 28, 2023
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round-up: 3/28

despyboutris.substack.com

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.

Twitter avatar for @itsdbouts
Despy Boutris @itsdbouts
did i tell you guys my fiction collection is out? because my fiction collection is out. did i tell you?
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5:04 PM ∙ Apr 1, 2022
291Likes44Retweets

shop


& while you’re here, a question for you:

Twitter avatar for @itsdbouts
Despy Boutris @itsdbouts
hi. tell me your favorite nonfiction by poets?
8:28 PM ∙ Mar 26, 2023
67Likes8Retweets

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:

  • 30 Magazines Paying for Speculative Fiction


Tweets:

Twitter avatar for @itsdbouts
Despy Boutris @itsdbouts
yellowjackets is so well loved and that’s bc it offers incredible representation to those of us who are gay and also insane
10:58 PM ∙ Mar 25, 2023
14Likes1Retweet
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The Notorious J.O.V. @whotfisjovana
this guy gets it
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11:00 PM ∙ Mar 23, 2023
83,563Likes11,816Retweets
Twitter avatar for @frogs4girls
worm food ✨🌸✨ @frogs4girls
i think you should be required to look at this graph and explain what it shows before you can enter general society
Image
11:38 AM ∙ Mar 5, 2023
105,967Likes11,302Retweets
Twitter avatar for @iamcardib
Cardi B @iamcardib
I’m not as mean as I could be and I want people to be more grateful for that.
2:40 AM ∙ Mar 24, 2023
188,284Likes73,542Retweets
Twitter avatar for @RealMona_
Mona @RealMona_
me doing one hour of selfcare after doing 23hours of self-destruction
Image
11:11 AM ∙ Mar 22, 2023
129,113Likes27,628Retweets
Twitter avatar for @cicadaxxseason
emily @cicadaxxseason
trash fire outside grand central this morning and everyone walking by was dumping the dregs of their coffee in to try and put it out. really beautiful completely ineffectual collective effort on a monday morning
1:37 PM ∙ Mar 20, 2023
17,876Likes708Retweets
Twitter avatar for @Zaucause_24
Z Will_BoutPape @Zaucause_24
Welcome to Houston, TX. Where if you miss an exit yo ass might as well go on vacation 🤣
Image
8:54 PM ∙ Mar 17, 2023
35,249Likes5,142Retweets
Twitter avatar for @Steph_I_Will
herald of alien superstar @Steph_I_Will
I remember a year ago around this time my husband told me that he had created wordpress accounts on the low so that he could leave me encouraging comments when I had decided to blog to help with my postpartum depression. That’s a love a never knew I could know.
6:22 PM ∙ Jun 15, 2018
15,352Likes2,462Retweets

Have a great week—

-Despy Boutris
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round-up: 3/28

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ars poetica
Writes Ars Poetica
Mar 29

"your life is a poem," - naomi shihab nye <3

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