Category: Writing
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Rough Trade
Perfectionism is a massive hurdle to creative work. The same impulse that is essential to editing, that moves you to check each line, fix up your prose, cut out every junky, nonsensical, messy bit, is the same drive that erases everything thorny and difficult. In the impulse to perfect, smooth out and tidy up is a…
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Nostalgia Mining
Certain songs take on colossal, completely disproportionate significance for me, giving me an inordinate amount of happiness no matter how many times played, no matter the time of day. The Borderlands opening theme song, “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked,” is one of them. I’m playing it right now. It isn’t a particularly great song, not one…
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Arcane Process
Many writers I know wonder most of the time about what other writers, both young and experienced, are doing. The whole process can seem arcane and magical, like you need to find a key locked in a silver box to master it. One day, you will find it. The reality seems closer to a vertical…
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Work and Dignity
Yesterday was one of those blessed days, with a happy confluence of themes that kept echoing and redoubling in every image, video, and show I ran into and through. I first caught the cloying James Gray film The Immigrant, starring Marion Cotillard as Ewa Cybulskia, a Polish immigrant who tumbles off at Ellis Island in…
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Watching
Last night, right at 10:45, I tripped and nearly broke my teeth in the train station as I skipped down the stairs. I hadn’t been looking down, and saw the woman lying on the bottom stair a second too late. My boot caught on her jacket; I caught the rail; I stopped my face from…
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Imagining the Pain You Cause
It’s rare I get a couple of hours to do some pleasure reading outside of class, work and my own writing. But today I found and read “The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” by Junot Díaz, published in The New Yorker in July of 2012. I loved The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and remember, vividly,…
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Greatest Changes, Invisible
I had a short but remarkable conversation recently with a lady I haven’t spoken to in a few years. We had only met once or twice before, in Iowa City. I remembered our conversations were unlike any I had ever had before. She is a writer and actress and she is full of life. We…
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No Words For It
I remember the first time I was frustrated by not having the right words. I was ten. I was in middle school. I was wracked in vague existential crisis. I was losing sleep and valuable Power Ranger viewing time over whether my choices were my own, or just other peoples’ choices foisted on me in…
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After living in Boston this past week.
My feelings about living in Boston at this particular moment become harder to articulate by the hour. My clarity of thought is impeded by little sleep. But, I hear the train starting in again, its rush from downtown, and I’ve never been happier to hear it. Along with so many others, I’ve been up since…
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Like a Boss
“Disgust makes beauty and ugliness a matter of morals.” -William Ian Miller Long been a fan of survival horror games, particularly titles like Silent Hill, F.E.A.R. and Manhunt. These are games made by their atmospheres and the feelings elicited throughout: disgust, fear, revulsion and terror. The game’s Boss, or final combatant, can bring all these…
Nora N. Khan 