“… if the story is starting to feel very forced, or if you become excited about an alternate possibility for your story, feel free to abandon or modify one of these constraints”
the wild is where we belong
“I find myself writing about family and the little betrayals that can occur between parents and children, brothers and sisters. The family is such fertile terrain for fiction, because there’s shared history there, such intimacy and love, and yet our families are forced on us. No one knows quite how to push our buttons like our family members, and small gestures can take on huge resonances.”
enough of that
“Often my entry into a story is a pair of characters…”
buried alive
“FORMATTING: All manuscripts for this class should include your name …”
hot with fleas & filled with rats
What I’m Reading:
You don’t end up changing the system, the system ends up changing you.
— Omar El Alkad, to Dan Sheehan /“Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West“/ Lithub
image: Theodor Jung / “Farmland, Hillside Type, Thoroughly Worked, Garrett County, Maryland” / 1935, in public domain
textures are failing
it is impossible to fail if u don’t neglect the watershed inspiration to exasperation
the black bile of a black age coursing thru ur vena cava
inflamed + debased with the glory of thee all mighty failure
fail fail again fail until the cows come willingly to the abattoir
these blues are the hotbed of a mind colonized by the fraud of fraternity
textures are failing to elicit a response the boulder is cracked + immovable
we are arthritic the plague is upon us
we are impotent
image: Hans Holbein / “The Knight” / Der Totentanz / 1523-1525, in public domain
What I’m Reading:
You know, the reason I find myself having had such a hard time talking about this is because I’m just so preemptively furious at the moment, many years from now, when we’re gonna get all of those, you know, “Hiroshima”-type stories. The after-the-fact shared grief, the how-could-we-let-this-happen type stuff. I’m just so furious that we’re going to do it again. You know, we’ve got the president of the United States talking about mass ethnic cleansing as though it’s a tourism opportunity and we’re all going to sit around and wait until the taking is done and the killing is done and everything colonialism needed it has gotten. And then we’re all going to feel sad about it afterwards. And I find myself so furious about that all of the time.
— Omar El Alkad, to Dan Sheehan /“Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West“/ Lithub
. . . and with a deep suspiration she set her thumbs to tapping on the gorilla glass:
a disconnect with attainment of desired goals a disconnect with engagement of daily responsibilities a disconnect with realizing this awareness and affecting change
an over engagement with the virtual world a disengagement with the physical world
few, if any, goals are actuated by the aforementioned
it’s fight or flight time . . .
then on with the headphones, on with her iphone, on with sic alps’ message from the law and on she danced to a new transcendence . . .
What I’m Reading:
Pantalone, like a parrot, Sat and grumbled in the garret— Sat and growled and grumbled till Moon upon the window-sill Like a red geranium Scented his bald cranium.
The men who carry the stretcher move with urgency, as if the doing of care, of gentleness, can undo what has happened to this girl, to this place, to the bodies yet to be dug from beneath the rubble. Someone nearby asks God for revenge. Perhaps God is here somewhere, also searching.
— Omar El Akkad / One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
You’ll still try to destroy me in your own way
Maybe with your hands Maybe with your silence Maybe with your tacit approval of this machine
— Joshua Jennifer Espinoza / “It Doesn’t Matter If I’m Understood”
. . . follower counts on social media compress your importance to a single number judged by humans and algorithms alike. Want to be a writer? Be prepared to tell publishers how many TikTok followers you have. Want to sell handcrafted soaps? The number of Instagram followers you have is likely more important than the number of weekends you spend at the local farmer’s market. I’ve seen applicants for a teaching position beat out others for an interview by having a larger YouTube following. Even the importance of politicians is now sometimes measured by the number of social media followers they have. Real impact, meaningful personal connections, and deeper forms of friendship all become secondary to this shallow game of online quantification. Social media is pushing us all to act like social influencers— whether we want to or not.
— Noah Giansiracusa / “Ruled by Numbers: How Data Dominates Every Facet of Our Daily Lives” / Lithub
I’m a traitor. A confirmed traitor. And happy.
— Reinaldo Arenas / “Goodbye Mother”
I can’t tell you if this is a good book or bad book. I don’t know if any of my writing is worth a damn, but the process of writing it has forced me to contend with my own complicity within the empire and how with much being within the empire has shaped me, because my knee jerk reaction has always been dependent on this idea that, no matter what, the Democratic Party is better on every issue. That no matter how awful or grotesque they may be, you should always just pick up the ballot and vote for the person with the D under their name, right? I can’t do that anymore, and that has messed me up quite a bit, both in terms of how I think about being in this part of the world, pragmatically and strategically, but also in terms of having to come to terms with my own cowardice, and my own intellectual and moral laziness. I’d been fed this story that, no matter what, you have to vote Democrat because the alternative is so much worse. Maybe that’s still true, but I can’t commit to it anymore.
I find that my fury is directed more at people who looked away than the people who actively cheered this on.
— Omar El Alkad, to Dan Sheehan /“Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West“/ Lithub
Listen, crying bird: To live without this grief is to see the mountain without its weight, rivers without depth.
— Zhang Xian / Departure: To the Tune “Mu Lan Hua: Magnolia”
One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.
— Omar El Akkad / One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
What I’m Listening To:
Manifesting his destiny He says to me, “It’s cold outside” Cold outside So naturally I humble thee Who come to me to be alive Be alive
The prelate drafts an encyclical announcing that the werewolves and camellias will be delivered on Friday to all diocese in the mountainous regions. It encourages all Englishmen and yogis to traipse about nude and re-stage the highlights of the Inquisition.
The document goes on to explain that castanets, “fingertip cymbals” (for he has forgotten that they are called zills) and censers will be distributed liberally among the cairns about the ridge tops—“Help Yourselves,” he flourishes in his complicated calligraphy.
He insists that discussions of reincarnation will not be part of the programming. And furthermore, that “Virgins Need Not Apply.”
He’s buoyant with his ideas, they come to him in torrents. He surmises that it must be something about that moldy bread at breakfast. He continues with momentum:
“Recently 50,000 perforations were distributed throughout the bishopric. The adhesives which bound them were of an open-ended and mysterious nature—lacking in optimism and alternating and overlapping in swells of violin trills when touched or added to morning cereals. They are altogether too piquant and picaresque for our flock’s conservative constitutions—Please Avoid! Toecaps and personal backyard derricks will be distributed in their stead. A recurrence of tedium and inefficiency is all that is required and asked of you. OBEY!”
But a sort of boredom swamp bounded by alienation hammock islands spread out before him. Never has he been gripped by such a visceral ennui—as if it was bequeathed to him as a grand heirloom that he should wear around his neck.
And he does! He wears it around his neck.
And it is heavy, baby. A ‘heavy-o-sity’ he’s never experienced—or maybe once, when he missed the 1847 College of Cardinals’ sabbatical.
He considers the Ancient Mariner and the awful pestilential albatross crawling with monosyllabic bird mites (wa, wa, wa, wa, wa…they stridulated) around his neck, and the ‘heavy-o-sity’ becomes too much to bear.
He tears up the draft encyclical, inkwells his pen (he never liked the damn thing anyway) and laments, Why’d I ever take up writing? He descends to the cellar for a bottle of wine.
There is no remuneration in fermentation, but the bottom of a bottle is as good as any place in this world, he reasons.
And he adds: At the least I’m not in Florida, so I have that going for me. But there was something poetic about werewolves and camellias…
He’ll eventually come round to that.
What I’m Reading:
The Earth wobbling on through space, riddled with life, from the thickening mothers of vinegar to insomniacs anonymous who see a future of unscheduled meetings with death, from sap-green bamboo for Shanghai scaffolding to an old dog running away in his dreams.
flickering my eyes i will decenter the I like a flicker film
caught in the gate / melting down / the WE — is the one thing reel
What I’m Reading:
i’d wolf abuela’s nopales and howl this resuscitated river | this map tethering figure to ancestor’s grief | this tongue that heals only to burn again at the swaddle of its birthright
With the waiter largely offscreen, none of the cheeses are what they seem . . .
Absorbing his friend’s accident—a taciturn stoicism gone limitless and flagrant—growing increasingly unsettling as midnight strikes and the Gouda appears.
Bystanders switch perspectives as the rubbish becomes the menu incarnate. Mold elementary.
Windscreen marks on his forehead and rinds on his cheeks . . .
The crash of canned Spam ever-shifting into an unexpected perversion with the Camembert.
Are you ready to order?
What I’m Reading:
The solipsism of low self-esteem is one of the wonders of the human psyche. So inexplicable is its grip, so binding its influence, it can feel almost mythic. And why not? Myths are what we invent to accommodate the mysteries of nature: our own if not those of our surroundings. Scientists can explain daylight and darkness, gravity and rainfall, but who, after all, can explain why we are born with a need to think well of ourselves, and why, when we don’t, life becomes an exercise in humiliation?
— Vivian Gornick / “Always Inadequate” / The New Yorker
implore the dishes as an ill-fated magazine might after a few tumultuous departures spent amiably among the geraniums
she wheels an epilogue of desires words pale in sequence misericordia perhaps a sugar narration for certain cut along the arthouse seam
it rains all day here episodic and flat the haze of woodsmoke disintegrating on a sugary cloud beggaring at the sunset elliptic and amorphous
he omits knocks along the charnel house doors counting on the spectator to dot the i’s and cut the t’s taking stabs at the cult of the inflatable earth
fingers the absurd artistic crown he’ll never wear
What I’m Reading:
Evil has no alternate plan. It is simply incapable of assuming failure.
Massive black horses in water—a marsh, blue sky, angry cumulus darkness roiling in the distance.
They need this, a disembodied voice says. They stand in this water to take the weight off their veiny haunches. It’s therapeutic.
Instantly, she and her horse are a mile out at sea in deep swelling water. The horses swim as if a maelstrom wasn’t upon them—they’re enjoying it—the ocean breaking over their heads.
She isn’t enjoying this—briny fear and seafoam in her nostrils.
And in another instant the sea is drained, there is no tumult, but she is suspended two feet above the seabed, just feet from the old beach line. The marsh is now reedy savanna.
Someone is screaming—bear, bear—in the reeds behind a tall chain-link fence. She has to start her long hike, but she can’t get out of her frozen hover. She can’t move.
These were a few of the dreams. Then she remembers her Shelley. She mutters:
We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep; We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day…
This is a bit of the wreckage.
What I’m Reading:
Quite often I talk about being a pacifist, and about how important non-violence is to me, but by virtue of where my tax dollars are being spent, I’m one of the most violent people on earth.
— Omar El Alkad, to Dan Sheehan /“Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West“/ Lithub
thee istsfor manity reader 