1.

Ursula le Guin, Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (a writing guide)

-rhythm in writing; seeing rhythm as something living underneath and through writing, music, dancing, film; like the expressions of it are a wrinkled skin surface of sea and this is the thing/ one of the main things we're communicating through these mediums

2.

Nisha Ramayya, Crossing the Rackety Bridge between Tantric Poetics and Black Study

recommended as part of a zoom poetry discussion group; more on rhythm.

The whole essay is wonderful; it weaves together so many things I had been worrying can't co-exist (breaking down conventions of language structures + intersectional feminism; accessibility + experimentation/ instinctiveness) - I think just because I'd been reading writing that came from one perspective or the other - now I see it's obvious they're coming from the same place.

Document can be found here >

3.

Arundhati Roy, FT article/ Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Roy's article made me think a lot about the effect of lockdown around the world: the place I'm isolating in has become the centre of my experience, I'm with my mum and we watch the main news channels, and it made me realise how I've been viewing this event through a UK-centric/ even Midlands-centric lens. It made me think of the dominant narratives we're surrounded by and the other stories that exist alongside them. Roy describes how (at the time of writing) on of the main issues in India isn't the virus itself, but how the government is treating workers during the lockdown.


This led me to start reading Ministry of Utmost Happiness again (Roy's second novel). Most of the book is written in 3rd person, but there’s a section in the middle where a character who’s gone through a Westernised education takes over the narrative, and writes in 1st person. It felt like he was trying to make everything way more coherent and sense-making, and almost like there’s a single moral to learn from each event, and he describes people he knows into a coherent narrative as though they're one person at a time, whereas in the rest of the book where the characters exist more on the margins of society, the narrative jumps between each person’s experience and tons of things happen at once, almost to the point where it’s confusing, but it feels more honest maybe.


Part of me feels it’s positive that experience has become so local and present, but I also think it’s important to stay open to multiple versions of story.

https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca

4.

Donna Haraway, Storytelling for Earthly Survival

I'd been meaning to watch it for ages; one of the nice things about now, sometimes, feeling the endless time to do things that usually get stored up.
On focusing on one particular story; working through the contradiction of letting multifarious things exist at once, and yet focusing on one particular thing to come to grips with it - to go deeply into something, to make any headway, to continue to make even as such a thing might seem superfluous or individualistic.