Alli Marshall's Blog, page 9

Weekly reading 3

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• “Reclaiming Our Roots: The Story of Tamishan” by Melissa Henry in The Urban News: “The stories of how these African Muslims had succeeded in preserving key elements of culture, some even convincing their owners to set them free and allow them to return to their native lands, amazed and inspired me.”

• London-based spoken word artist Kate Tempest performing on World Cafe. Holy crap.

• Shared with me by my friend Ami Worthen — “Whites Only: SURJ And The Caucasian Invasion Of Racial Justice Spaces” by DiDi Delgado in Huffington Post: “The Spider-Man musical released on Broadway? George Zimmerman’s acquittal by jury? The Holocaust? All of these bad ideas started with a bunch of white folks sitting around a table being extra white.”

• “The Movement Against Smart Women” by Melissa McEwan at shakesville.com: “A great number of men have responded to this by being overt oppressors. And a great many more have responded by ostensibly arguing for equality, while remaining firmly indifferent to social justice.”

THINK ABOUT IT: “Allies take up space and congratulate themselves. Accomplices are willing to take risks … and put other people out front.” — Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza

Filed under: creativity, essay, inspiration, journalism, Writing

Winner! (sort of.)

I just learned that my short story Dysfunctional Slumber Parties was a finalist in this year’s Doris Betts Fiction Prize competition. Though I don’t get any prize money, writing is such a subjective business that any kind of achievement is worth a celebration. There for I am:

A) eating ice cream cake as I write this, and

B) sharing a section from the story:

[image error]You’re supposed to be smart, but you spend your junior year doing all the dumbest stuff you can think of. It’s not really about rebelling, even though that’s probably what anyone would say, if they noticed. No one notices.

Your parents are divorcing and your mom has moved out. You’re commuting forty-five minutes each way to to the magnate school you campaigned so hard to get into, because you had like zero friends at public school, but you’re pretty much wasting the opportunity. You don’t even know what the-airquotes-opportunity is anymore. Maybe to hang out with kids who are stranger than the weird stoner kid who lives next door to your dad and never says anything to anyone. Maybe to write essays on Naked Lunch and Lydia Lunch and whatever.

Speaking of which, the cafeteria monitor relented, a month into the school year, and started giving you a free lunch if one was left over. Usually there’s one left over because the kids on the free lunch program are also the kids who tend to miss a lot of school. They have bigger problems.

You have medium-sized problems. You often stay in the city with your friend Tish whose mom is always out of town. That’s not the problem. What is: You call your dad those nights to tell him that you won’t be home and it’s like he’d forgotten you were maybe coming home in the first place.

You’re not rebelling, you’re just seeing how far you can push things before someone says stop. Says enough. Bothers to remember your name.

Tish tells you she’s planning to airquotes-get-together with Mike after school. He’s bringing Frank and Tish is supposed to bring someone for Frank, so she thought of you.

“Gross,” you say. You mean both of them — Mike, because he has greasy long hair and wears stone-washed jeans and white sneakers every day. Frank because, even though he’s good looking and has different outfits, he’s a skinhead and draws swastikas on his notebook.

“You’re just saying that because you think Frank’s a racist.”

“He is a racist.”

“He doesn’t really mean it,” Tish says. Like someone can just not mean to be a total asshole. Only in a way your goal — if you can call it a goal — is do as many dick things as you can get away with. And you’re not actually a dick. At least you don’t think you are.

Filed under: contest, fiction, Writing

Weekly reading 2

Another round up of articles, ideas, and even a video.

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Dancer Merce Cunningham, left, and writer M.C. Richards met at Black Mountain College. The two were lifelong friends and collaborated at times, though Cunningham was known for only caring about dance, while Richards was interested in the ways various creative disciples informed each other.

• “Going It Alone” by Rahawa Haile in Outside: “There were days when the only thing that kept me going was knowing that each step was one toward progress, a boot to the granite face of white supremacy. I belong here, I told the trail. It rewarded me in lasting ways.”

• “Race is a fiction. Racism is not” by Francys Johnson at TEDxUGA: “From the cradle to the grave, racism — theory, practice and discrimination — matters. And it matters for this reason: Racism, like all of the other isms, is legally constructed, socially maintained, politically expedient and still confers too many economic benefits.”

• “This Is Proof That Institutional Racism Is Still Very Much A Problem” by Mia Mercado in Bustle: “The practice of redlining still exists, which involves denying funding or services based on the racial demographics of an area. Just this month, AT&T was accused of discriminating against low-income neighborhoods.” And more discouraging news about institutionalized bias.

• “How We Met: Merce Cunningham and M C Richards,” in the Independent: “Merce was Jonas the mechanical monkey, Willem de Kooning did the decor, and Buckie Fuller was in the lead – he was there because, I think, it was his 50th birthday and he was celebrating by building the first geodesic dome which, as I remember, fell down.”

• “7 overlooked women writers you should be reading now” on PBS Newshour: “Writers whose work was dazzling or influential, but had been mostly forgotten or overlooked, either because of their gender, the language in which they wrote, or other reasons we had not imagined.”

Filed under: Writing

This is a short story

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Filed under: creativity, flash fiction, photos, short story, Writing

Weekly reading

I opted out of the Goodreads challenge this year not because I’m not that into reading, but because in January I issued myself a different sort of challenge: Read more work by writers of color, LGBT writers and differently abled writers. It’s taken my reading in interesting directions — into more non-fiction and into more magazine and blog articles (as opposed to just books).

Here’s what I’ve been reading and thinking about this week. If you check any of these links out, let me know what you think.

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• How America Fails Black Girls (New York Times): “Mainstream feminism has historically ignored the issues facing runaway and other missing black girls as well as most other issues regarding women and children of color.”

• This Whole ‘Are Trans Women Real Women’ Thing is Gross (Medium.com): “Often, [trans women] talk about a type of interior struggle to realize that it’s ok to like feminine things, and it doesn’t make you worse to embody feminine traits. This is absolutely something I have been struggling with my whole life.”

• This Is What I Mean When I Say ‘White Feminism’ (Cate-young.com): “White feminism is any expression of feminist thought or action that is anti-intersectional. It is a set of beliefs that allows for the exclusion of issues that specifically affect women of colour. It is ‘one size-fits all’ feminism, where middle class white women are the mould that others must fit.”

• Short and sweet recommendation: W. Kamau Bell’s Resistance Reading (Mother Jones)

• Worth noting: Olio by Tyehimba Jess (featured image, right) just won the 2017 Pulitzer for poetry and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (featured image, left) won for fiction. It’s good to see writers of color recognized for their work and made prominent in the collective conversation about literature. We need so much more of this, but these two wins are important.

 

Filed under: Books, essay, inspiration, journalism, Writing

A start

“I carry a notebook with me everywhere.

But that’s only the first step.”

~ Rita Dove

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Filed under: inspiration, poetry, writer quotes, Writing

Bus ride to Glasgow

An essay constructed from notes written in Scotland, March, 2013

The bus departs from the station in a belch of diesel exhaust. Only the locals board there. Tourists are oblivious to the city busses as they wait for their carefully mapped day excursions. Some plush coach that picks up at the Quaitch Guest House.

[image error]Quickly multistory apartment buildings give way to squat stone cottages with neat white doors. A pair of bay windows on each, because light matters. Old mixed with new, sometimes gracefully, but the city’s growth at its far reach is an ugly gash of mud and large equipment. Power lines across a gray sky, bus shelter at the end of the world.

Norton House Hotel, Ratho Station. A guy boards with a short Mohawk and someone’s initials — perhaps his own — inked behind his ear. D.W. in script. Villages rise and fall beyond the bus window. They are stunted and napping, like villages everywhere. Towns don’t buzz like cities do. Cities never sleep. Towns keep hitting the snooze button.

A sudden slice of sun. A bulbous black cab muscles along a dirt road. In the distance, rounded hills sit, iced thickly with snow. Roadwork at Livingston. Traffic crawls. The bus driver has a shaved head with the ghost of a widow’s peak and a pale scar. Stands of pines and bare trees ring a snow lake. Fields of snow rest, undisturbed by traffic or sun.

Bathgate: smell of the bus heater, which is too hot. The guy one seat up blasts Bollywood music through his earbuds. Witburn, Falkirk, Newhouse. Ruins of an elaborate stone bridge. Small town of two-story sandstone buildings, all unembellished. It’s like a housing development, only hundreds of years old, and town-looking because it’s not trying to look like a town.

Signs for rooms with en suite, fish with chips. There’s always the option for less (a room with no bathroom, fish without the side of fries) because here you actually can have less. It’s a viable option. Smaller cars, smaller refrigerators, less personal space.

A church on a hill with its tall steeple and floor-to-ceiling windows presides over a rectangle of ruler-straight graves. The rows could have been planted by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Airdrie, Motherwell: a very old man in the front seat clutches a ruffle of newspapers. He’s dapper in his pocket sweater and striped scarf, occasionally smoothing his haircut with his hand.

Chapelhall, Holytown: The sprawl begins. Warehouses, factories, a clutch of suburban homes. New houses, all tan with red roofs. Billboards and exits. Skinny white birch trees, cows grazing 11 km. from Glasgow’s city center. Signs about everything and nothing. Industry is a dream, but not a satisfying dream. It’s the construct of the anxious mind rather than the restful vision of meadows and groves.

There are no more meadows and groves. Instead: Car lot, church yard, graves that run a mile alongside a housing development. The mingling of past and future dead.

Filed under: creativity, essay, Scotland, travel, Writing

Winter writes to spring

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Is it okay to be happy today, when

the world is so sad? To fold into the arms

of pink and yellow, to carry my grief

like an Easter egg — fragile but vivid.

Maybe I’ll leave this sorrow among the leaves

of new grass, its green the pulse of breathing

and of ceasing to breathe; of all that ebbs

and flows again. Maybe I’ll string this sorrow

among the branches of the cherry trees

for the birds to weave into nests, or for the wind

to carry away. Maybe I’ll plant it deep

in the still-dreaming earth

and see what blooms.

Filed under: photos, poetry, Writing

A Valentine’s Day poem. Sort of.

VALENTINE

This is what you named the rat you bought

from the pet store. White fur and red eyes

that narrowed and darted and never met yours.

Because you couldn’t afford a cage,

Valentine lived in a cardboard box

though it took him less than one night

[image error]to chew his way out and move into the cupboards.

But the apartment you shared with three other girls,

none of you yet eighteen, was empty of food

and furniture and parents and anyone

who could make a decent decision. You lived on

school lunches and leftover desserts

from the restaurants where you washed dishes. You slept

like four orphans curled together on one mattress.

You read poetry sometimes, for entertainment,

but mostly prowled the night streets, stealing

toilet paper from hotels and tampons from the machines

in gas station bathrooms. Scraped knuckles to prove it. Who knew

how adults made their way in the world?

There was no guidebook. You were often hungry

but you didn’t need much food. When you’re young

you can go without a lot. Sleep, love, letters

from home. You lie awake and listen to the sounds

of the neighbors below, or the trucks on the highway

or the rattle of a pet rat gone feral

in the ductwork. Your father stopped by once

with some things. A winter coat, maybe, and fifty dollars.

So the four of you ate like lottery winners. Grilled cheese

and fries in a diner, the windows steamed over

like it was your own world. And you only wondered a little

how far you could have gotten if you’d kept the money

to yourself. But you didn’t know where to go

or how to get there, so you stayed

close to the rattle of the radiator and the other

night noises. The girls with their profiles sharpened, mean,

a shield against everything. Even the good things.

They brought boys home sometimes, for warmth

or distraction. Played cassette tapes of German punk,

ate shoplifted Grasshopper cookies. Minty and green

as a dream of a birthday party. Spring was close

when you finally caught the rat, trapped him

in a corner of the kitchen. Naked pink tail,

no kindness left in his face. Or maybe you’d imagined it.

That’s what you did. Like how you imagined Valentine

happy, living like a king in the dumpster

behind the apartment building. You should have felt sad

about letting him go, but you were only relieved. The night

had fewer teeth, and sleep circled steadily closer.

Filed under: poetry, Writing

New! Chapbook! Yay!

In the fall of 2016, leading up to the presidential election, I started #28daysoflove as an experiment to combat the environment of fear, anger, and hopelessness that was so prevalent on social media. For four weeks, I posted personal essays on the theme of love on my on Facebook page. I didn’t know what to expect, going into it, but found that the more open and raw I could be, the more human, genuine, and accepting the response was. Through those posts I learned a lot about myself and my desire to approach the world with an open heart. Plus, a loose community formed around the posts that felt more rich and real than my average social media interactions. I collected 18 of the essays into this 52-page, self-published chapbook, It All Comes Rushing Back.

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$5 + $1 shipping
Filed under: Books, Writing