Posts Tagged ‘process of writing’

• How Dare We! Write FREE DESK COPIES

  Date: 2017.05.21 | Category: How Dare We! Write a multicultural creative writing discourse, The Art of Writing | Response: 0

  WRITING INSTRUCTORS PLEASE NOTE:

   
  “If you are teaching a high school or undergrad or graduate Creative Writing course in 2017-2018, we are accepting requests for desk copies of “How Dare We! Write: a multicultural discourse.”

  Please email info@ModernHistoryPress.com from your faculty email address to request a copy and include the following:

   
  1. The course number, name and institution where you teach
  2. Your complete shipping address and whether you would like printed or eBook edition

   
  We can only guarantee that the first 50 instructors who reply will get a desk copy. You are encouraged to share
  this information with interested colleagues.

  (Review: https://thelinebreak.wordpress.com/…/on-how-dare-we-write-…/)

• Excerpt from How Dare We! Write

  Date: 2017.03.23 | Category: Writers Who Dare | Response: 0

  “The tinikling offers a visual explanation of how bilingual writing
  works. Like the agile dancing feet of a tinikling dancer, a bilingual
  writer’s mind is connected to her feet at all times, transferring and
  translating the beat of clapping bamboos from a hearing experience to
  a whole body experience. Living in a predominantly English-speaking
  culture means you cannot stop to think or even attempt to explain
  your actions and your meanings, or you will lose track of the dominant
  beat and find yourself caught in the thorns of misunderstanding. I can’t
  help but relate this to the spate of recent attacks on black bodies we
  have witnessed. There is never time to explain your black skin or your
  brown skin to someone intent on eradicating your black or brown
  body because he or she feels threatened by the mere sight of you. You
  have to keep dancing between the clapping bamboos of race
  perception. Those who tried, hands up or not, have ended in tragedy.
  Is this a far-fetched metaphor? If it is to you, you’ve never had to
  dance/write between bamboos.”–Marlina Gonzalez, How Dare We! Write

• Excerpt from How Dare We! Write

  Date: 2017.03.23 | Category: How Dare We! Write a multicultural creative writing discourse | Response: 0

  “I would add that many programs do not even offer courses dealing
  with race and writing as an elective. I didn’t know such a thing existed.
  Over the duration of my program, my writing became less race conscious
  instead of more. Sure everything thing I do and say leaves the
  mark of blackness behind. However, instead of drawing a circle around
  the mark, expanding it, aiming the camera directly at it, I placed
  translucent covering over it, not completely hiding race, but placing it
  in the background. Without knowing it, I was learning to write like a
  white woman because I must have believed that they knew what they
  were doing. They were award-winning authors. They were where I
  wanted to be. They were my teachers.”–Sherrie Fernandez-Williams, How Dare We! Write

• First Drafts, Broken Rules

  Date: 2017.03.19 | Category: Assignments, Imagining Love, Poetry, The Art of Writing | Response: 0

  First Drafts, Broken Rules

  Someone said, and many have repeated it-where the rumor started, I don’t know-that a writer shouldn’t send first drafts out for the public eye.  But, I am a writer who makes up her own rules, does her own thing, ‘cause someone said, and many have repeated, a writer needs to take risks or she will just sound like the choir (although I do like the music of choirs, but the point is sometimes I need to sing alone).

  On another note, a writer I truly respect told me I revise the energy, the spirit, the meaning out of my poetry when I revise.  It’s true, revising for me is like shopping.  Once my cart is full, I throw out some things, others I put back and exchange them for another.  Sometimes I do this again and again.  This basket of strawberries.  No, this one, the similes are endless.  These tomatoes on the vine.  No, these are are full of contradiction.  Chocolate marshmallow fudge ice cream.  No, vanilla, subtle.  This bread.  Yes, give me all the nuts, the flax, the wheat-concrete images. Yet, sometimes I just say, be gone, be gone.

  Some say a writer must write every day, early in the morning in fact.  Early for me is 10 a.m., and by then I am already running late.  I write when I’m sitting in a class and the demand is to write following the guidelines of a particular writing exercise.  Surprisingly, I’ve gotten some good poems this way.  But, I don’t often sit in writing classes.  My norm is, when self-pity fills my lungs, when anxiety and fear punch my stomach, when country songs and chic flicks don’t soothe my troubled soul, I reach for my 3 x 5 or my 4 x6 index cards, my leaking roller ball pen, and I write.  I number the front, the back.  The stack rises. The purge releases words I don’t know.  There’s a rhythm too it.  A longing.  A stunning revelation.

  It’s been months, years, sometimes only weeks.  Yesterday’s sorrows became yesterday’s poems.  I read them over and over mouthing each sound, whispering, repeating, louder now, faster now.  Until, I’m inside out, exhausted.

  Awake now, today now, I risk giving these poems to anyone that wants them, anyone that might need them, anyone that wants to rip them apart and theorize them.  This is a selfish gift.  A gift nonetheless.  Someday I may want to return, to revise, to revision-to edit, and I’ll know where they are, and that they served me well.  And maybe you will not notice the blemishes, but the possibility.  And maybe your next poem might be about your great-grandmother or begin with “If truth be told” and maybe you will give it to the world pleased with its inception, free with its release.

  ©Sherry Quan Lee, March 19, 2017

   

  IF I TOLD YOU THE TRUTH

  If truth be told my friend is a born again Christian, my son is a redneck.

  If truth be told, loneliness is my demon and always has been.

  My sister does not talk to me my mood swings cause her stress; she’s

  done it before, stopped loving me when I loved a woman,

  and the woman, my mother, well my sister stopped talking to her, too.

  If truth be told, according to Mother, I am white, white, white, but I’m not

  and neither is she.

  If truth be told I’m not a writer, my advisor was right they didn’t teach

  me and somehow I knew it was my fault.

  If truth be told I don’t want to go to church, or book stores or plays where

  I know I either have to listen or perform;

  or comedy clubs.

  If truth be told I want to see my three-year-old granddaughter.  My nine year old grandsons.

  If truth be told the gig is up-shopping, gambling, even eating and though the smoke has

  already cleared I don’t need therapy or an excuse to hide my feelings.

  my heart is an old open book full of clichés, chocolate truffle smears, and tears.

  If truth be told I have been cloistered-it’s not my calling but my situation.

  If truth be told my car isn’t safe, my house isn’t breathing, I could in a wink of an eye be homeless.

  If truth be told I don’t want to fly I don’t want to wander; I haven’t missed anything in 70 years.

  If truth be told I’ve fallen before, but this time the fracture wasn’t worth mending.

  If truth be told I want to sing it is done, get over it, I am over it.

  If truth be told there is nothing beyond survival, I have nothing to give you, the world

  is wound too tight we can only untie knots, try not to slip on the laces.

  If I told you the truth I always wanted to be the clown the stand-up comedian the one no one

  would guess wasn’t me.

  If I told you the truth I wouldn’t tell you the truth but ease into your life.

  If truth be told being of a certain age is not what someone else says it is, not what you expect,

  and everyday is a question mark.

  To tell the truth today I looked out my window.  Satisfied.  Rocking. Back and

  forth, catonic-like, rocking.

  If I told you the truth the youth have the words, the works, the camaraderie, the meet and greets,

  the relationships.  Solidarity. Each other’s backs.

  If I told you the truth I’m not a bridge, never pretended to be one.   Every breath, every step difficult.

  If truth be told it’s too late for me to be anything, but

  righteous.  And, alone.  And, lonely.

  The truth is I’m tired.  It’s late.  I have [no] regrets.

  The truth is I don’t want to recycle.  Spin it anyway you want, but I won’t step outside

  my skin. The stretch is all mine.  Was mine.

  If truth be told the world sees no one, story becomes someone else’s theory, and you

  and I don’t meet online, or in a bar, in the future or the past.

  The truth is tomorrow, I might leave my house, walk to the mailbox, but today in this moment

  I’m in my pj’s, eating popcorn, watching Netflix.

   

  ©Sherry Quan Lee

  March 18, 2017

   

  Saint Patrick’s Day 2017 (1948-    )

   

  Dear red hair son of the Irish plantation owner do you know how complicated you’ve made my life?  You, so absent in your southern ways.  A prickle in history not so long gone, nameless, yet, ever present in my naming.  Did your father teach you not to fear consequences, did he tell you my great-grandmother was yours for the taking because he owned her.  Or did he say, hands off, son, she’s mine?  Money can’t buy everything, it certainly can’t buy complacency.  But, yes, Ms. Greer kept your house clean and the both of you, sons of southern hospitality, well fed.  And you, in return, paid her in lust, in rape, in pregnanc(ies).  Sure there were the rumors, you loved her, my great-great grandmother, her glistening, black skin and textured thick hair; strong legs, warm hands; but, it wasn’t a love story.  But grandmother was born anyways.  Beautiful, free, and independent.  It was her own doing she traveled North, married a man with his own black white history and the babies kept coming.  Mother denies she is born black, but if black was a lie, she would have nothing to lie about and I, her daughter, would have no truths to tell, secrets to uncover.  So many secrets that have filled books and heartache and joy- sometimes joy- knowing there once was a plantation and a red hair boy, but if she had only known she really needed only this, this one poem, this one little splash of green, a bit of humor, and a blind eye, if she only knew she didn’t have to give up her life to know who she is, if she had known.

   

  Sherry Quan Lee

  ©March 18, 2017