Tag Archives: nqaf

you can do whatever you want to do with words

Good morning good morning. It’s been quiet around here, partly because so many other parts of my life have gotten a bit noisier recently. It’s good noise, though, and I’m grateful for that. How is morning breaking outside your window today? What does the sky sound like already?

This week I’ve attended three performances in which Writing Ourselves Whole writers shared their work. Nomy Lamm, a member of our current Dive Deep cohort, read from her book 515 Clues and put together a gorgeous and elucidatory Kaballistic Collaboret last Sunday evening — as soon as this book comes out, you’re going to want to get your hands on it. And then on Monday night, I attended Breaking Code, a reading curated by Blyth Barnow and Oscar Maynard, a powerfully beautiful event which offered pieces that tangled with the lived realities of queerness and madness. Breaking Code featured, among other former Writing Ourselves Whole writers, our very own former Deep Diver Renee Garcia. We had current Deep Divers in the audience at both events (and supporting from afar, too), adoring our sibling Divers who took the stage and shared the work we already love with the world.

Then last night I went to a Why There Are Words reading in Sausalito, which featured a literary venue called The Fabulist. Most of our Dive Deep group made a pilgrimage up to Marin in support of one of our own, John Zic, whose work will be featured in/on The Fabulist soon, and who read to the assembled listeners from the novel with which we in Dive Deep have been getting to spend so much good time. The Fabulist publishes, as they say, yarns, fables and tales — they focus on the fantastic: science fiction, otherworldly work, fantasy, and other odd and wonderful writing that reaches outside the realms of those particular genre labels. I loved being at this reading — it reminded me how much I adored reading science fiction and fantasy as a teenager, and how much possibility I felt in those stories. I felt that same possibility open up in me last night: you can do whatever you want to do with words — there is a place, an audience, for anything you can imagine. You can let the words (or your readers!) fly off the page; you can follow them into other realms of knowing or reality; you can study with a scrub of language what otherwise could never be known; you can make wild associative leaps; you can let your human protagonist grow a tail and wings; you can write into a world or a happening that doesn’t make logical sense (at least in our known world, in this particular consensual reality we inhabit most of the time); you can let the monsters under the bed have their say; you can experiment and play with time, form, and the laws of physics — and there’s someone (many someones, actually) out there who will want to read what you come up with.

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