Commit to being haunted

Dispatch #28: A world of emotionally & psychologically moved human beings

Mar 18, 2024

Hi friend,

The only fiction class I ever took was in my sophomore year of college. My teacher was Nell Arnold, who publishes as N. S. Köenings. Red headed, soft spoken yet strong & clear, her emotions would often rise to her eyes. She assigned us out-of-the-box assignments. For example, we read (only) the first chapter of twenty novels! The first chapter. That’s it. To gain familiarity with how things begin. How things open. For that week’s first chapter, each student would have to bring in an object that represented the feeling of the chapter; not the theme, not a symbol of its topics, but an object for how it made you feel, its emotional textures. One week, a student clunks a stone on the table. The next student puts down three bags of lentils. The next student, a photograph of nuns boxing. One book, vividly lensed through different readers! Nell prioritized the sensory world a book brought out of us & made it tangible. I was amazed. Another one of her out-of-the-box activities has stuck with me for decades: Find a paragraph in the first chapter that you are obsessed with, that you think is stunning, & then copy it over by hand. Through copying, Nell wanted us to assess & inhabit the language, word by word: How did the writer arrive at this word, this sentence? What leaps did they have to make? How did they build the paragraph’s effect? She wanted us to see what it might feel like to have invented that language, to come to those thoughts.

Relatedly, the other day I came across this video of poet Mohammed El-Kurd speaking at the Palestine Festival of Literature this past December 2023. There was something about his speech that I found mesmerizing – or, perhaps that’s not the best word – what I mean is that his words, besides informing me, gave me the urge to be inside them. To fully inhabit, & so perhaps come to understand, the depth of his message & vision & language more intrinsically, from a more embodied space. Immediately, I thought of Nell Arnold’s fiction class & decided to transcribe his twelve-minute speech, now up on my website. I have never done this before, but something came over me. I needed to viscerally sit inside the “I” of the violence he was naming; not as cosplay, but as digestion.

So many images arrive moment by moment out of Palestine. They are so brutal they have caused me to flinch, gag, cover my phone with my hand. So many heartbreaking words arrive from citizens, poets, & journalists on the ground. The onslaught is nearly impossible to alchemize for its sheer ferocity & incessance. But it is because of the impossibility of digesting this brutality that I must sit with it longer.

If it is impossible fully process this magnitude of trauma – & it is – I must at least commit to being haunted by it. Only if I am haunted by it can I be moved. We need a world of emotionally & psychologically moved human beings. We need feelers who become doers. It is the dissociated & dehumanizing who currently run our world. We desperately need the actions of the haunted.

My hope is that you spend time with Mohammed El-Kurd words, whether in voice, or through the transcription, or both. John Cottingham said, “There are certain kinds of truth such that to try to grasp them purely intellectually is to avoid them.” My hope is that you encounter a truth that moves you so much, you need to memorize it through your body, you need to pour it from your own hands.

My entiret February was pulsing with creativity. Angel called our late hours of creating & revising together “heaven on earth.” They really were our small plot of heaven. At our living room table, I steadily worked on the fourth & a half draft of my novel. (Hello from Angel’s point of view, which was wise enough to pause & snap these photos, mid-editing sessions!)

For that whole month, we emptied our calendars as much as we could & prioritized our projects. We kept odd hours, lit candles, brewed tea, discussed passages at great length, flipped poems upside down & inside out. Our home was abuzz with making, each of us respectively revising her book & editing the other’s late into the night. As we enter March, Angel & I keep tending the fires of language, of poems, of novel-making, & of sharing.

The world makes its demands, of course – but to tend one’s craft & creations is balm, is necessary, is sacred.

This April’s In Surreal Life is a chance to prioritize your own creativity, to create space for yourself, to grow alongside others. We are officially open for registration & I’m so excited to see all the applications rolling in! If you’re looking to feel reinvigorated & inspired this National Poetry Month, join us for a month of juicy daily prompts, a sweet community of 50+ writers from all over the globe, & our incredible visiting artists: (legend alert!) the elegant Eduardo C. Corral, the pithy Ana Božičević, & the “unapologetically self-loving” Melissa Lozada-Oliva. Apply today!

• Waves will catch you (oh) / Light will catch you (ooh) / Love will catch you (ooh) / Spirit gon' catch you, yeah / Faith will catch you / Friends will catch you / Time will catch you… Sampha’s Spirit 2.0 is feeding me

• My dear friend Amy Lin’s memoir, Here After, will change you. I promise.

Snaps from Amy's Brooklyn Launch @ Books Are Magic // in conversation with Angel

• This moment of Bisan experiencing joy because of books! Getting to see her smile!

• If another human being’s vivid articulation can be dubbed a delight, well, Omar Sakr says it perfectly in this tweet.

• Speaking of vivid articulation, whew, this Garth Greenwell quote.

• I unfortunately had a severe food allergy attack this week, which covered me in hives. So now that I’m feeling better, I’m delighted by easy & deep breathing, calm skin, easeful digestion, & rest. Not a single thing to take for granted.

• Look at this glimmering jewel I spotted on a walk to get groceries. A pink gem, a dizzying beauty. It’s true, I used to collect crushed cans found on the side of the road, alley cat piss be damned. (I wrote about it for The Slowdown two summers ago.)

• Toronto Ink Company’s Substack is drenched with color & art & wonder. I love the opening quote in this missive which is excerpted from a Jane Hirshfield poem: “I wanted my fate to be human. / Like a perfume / that does not choose the direction it travels, / that cannot be straight or crooked, kept out or kept.”

• I look forward to getting my hands on Fady Joudah’s […]. Here is a stunning excerpt.

• “This is who I write for…” + eight year old Shira + elder Shira + why I teach = this post

• Thank you to reader Lisa Salmon for your kind words!