Have been wondering about the question of productivity/publicity recently. How important it is to get published? How important are publications as a testimony of one's productivity? My own answer to the second question would be, yes, publications do kind of testify to a writer's productivity. But it is also a very public form of acknowledgement. Yes, I mean acknowledgement. Also, it's a form of approval. We all like them. The approvals and affirmations I mean. I know I do. It's wonderful to see someone acknowledge my work in the form of publishing a poem/a story/ an essay in their journals. It also tells me, I am not writing shit. This is not to deny the fact that a lot of shit do get published and a lot of gems don't. And sometimes, it needs a huge amount of inner strength on the part of the writer/artist to keep on believing the essential quality of one's own work, keep on producing it, honing one's art and craft, even when the approvals of the publishing industry are not pouring in. Luckily, the history of world literature is full of these examples. So, whenever anyone is in doubt, one can turn to these examples, derive strength from them. But then, there is also the pressure to publish. Publish or perish, as we say it in the academic world. Honestly, who would like to perish? So we go on sending stuff out, even when they need more work, more brewing, more marination! I guess, I am one of those writers who would rather like to take one's own time to learn, before getting published.
It's okay if I am not described as "prolific." It's okay if I have only one book in me! Even if Arundhati Roy doesn't produce any more work of fiction, she will be remembered for her God of Small Things. And that's what matters. What matters is doing the hard work. Pouring oneself out for that one work that's within us. Getting ourselves to the writing table and the battle-field everyday. Pushing our work to places where it's hard to go otherwise! And after that, one can only hope to be noticed by some journal/publisher/whatever. If not, email the work to one's friends. If they like it, they will email it to their friends. And as it is, I don't expect my work to be read by more than 200 people. Hopefully, if I ever succeed to write something meaningful, it wouldn't be hard to find that number of people from amongst my friends and friends' friends and friends' friends' friends.
Like everything else, the concept of "productivity" is a historical-social construct. For me, it is important to not fall into the trap of its most dominant social definition. Rather, often times I need to re-define the term for myself, and then work accordingly. The test is, to keep myself accountable to my own definition of production and productivity.
And if you haven't guessed yet, it's not any kind of writer's block that prompted this post. But, the rejections:))))))))))
Friday, September 25, 2009
Saturday, September 5, 2009
What Have I Been Writing About?
I have been looking through the poems I have written during the last couple of years. And yes, also re-visiting some of them. Ahem, trying to revise, that is. As usual, it's not an easy process. I am getting stuck at places, often wondering and asking myself what the heck was I trying to say in these lines. So basically, I am trying to go back to that phase in my life, trying to remember the psychological state I was in, trying to think back the bigger questions that were perturbing me. In a way, one can say, it's a process that requires a certain kind of continuous historicization of my own self. I mean, there is no way that such a process can be "objective," or "full-proof" in any way, but it's a very personal attempt on my part to understand my own growth as a person and writer better.I find that process hard, both artistically and emotionally.
Of course, re-visiting a poem actually requires that I become more rigorous with words. Rigorous with that process through which we transform raw emotions into poetic forms and speech. But more than that, I find this act of re-visiting/re-visioning needs introspection. Honest introspection. And frankly, these days, I find it's hardest to be honest with one's own self. Really! And that's why I guess, it's also hard to be honest in one's own artistic productions. It's much much easier to acquire skills, but combining skills with personal/political honesty, well, that's not just hard, but something that requires life-long commitment to art, living, and most importantly, at least for me, the will and stubbornness to change as a person. Change for better. (One of the reasons I have always been drawn to Mao's thoughts. I mean, change yourself. change this world, is pretty dense, right? And anyone who writes that, his/her thoughts have to be interesting, eh?) But, as usual, I am failing. Failing horribly in this project too as in everything else.
The other thing is, I can now reveal a pattern in my work of the last two years or so. More than anything else, I think, I have been taken up by the relationship between creativity and gender. In short, exploring some of the historical dimensions of creativity. And that does make sense. I have never been much of a believer in those theories of "spontaneous" creativity or art-making. So, it does make sense when I see in my poems, no matter how badly they have been written, I have tried to make sense of the process of artistic creation in social, historical terms. It's sometimes scary to see how your poems, written over a specific period of time, can reveal issues which you have been trying to make sense of in your real life. My writings have always given me these spaces within which I try to process and work through some of my "real-world" concerns and crises. Maybe, that's what all poets or writers do? I don't know. Or is it at all possible that one reaches a stage where all one does is to repeat oneself, without letting one's audience/readers know that it's indeed repetition? I mean, is it at all possible that you create only with your skills and not with your concerns about this world and life? The logic of capital tells me, it indeed is. My writer-self refuses to believe. Seriously?
Reading Cornelius Eady's You Don't Miss Your Water now. The very precision of his language makes me want to cry! Did I ever tell you I am an extremely sentimental reader?
Of course, re-visiting a poem actually requires that I become more rigorous with words. Rigorous with that process through which we transform raw emotions into poetic forms and speech. But more than that, I find this act of re-visiting/re-visioning needs introspection. Honest introspection. And frankly, these days, I find it's hardest to be honest with one's own self. Really! And that's why I guess, it's also hard to be honest in one's own artistic productions. It's much much easier to acquire skills, but combining skills with personal/political honesty, well, that's not just hard, but something that requires life-long commitment to art, living, and most importantly, at least for me, the will and stubbornness to change as a person. Change for better. (One of the reasons I have always been drawn to Mao's thoughts. I mean, change yourself. change this world, is pretty dense, right? And anyone who writes that, his/her thoughts have to be interesting, eh?) But, as usual, I am failing. Failing horribly in this project too as in everything else.
The other thing is, I can now reveal a pattern in my work of the last two years or so. More than anything else, I think, I have been taken up by the relationship between creativity and gender. In short, exploring some of the historical dimensions of creativity. And that does make sense. I have never been much of a believer in those theories of "spontaneous" creativity or art-making. So, it does make sense when I see in my poems, no matter how badly they have been written, I have tried to make sense of the process of artistic creation in social, historical terms. It's sometimes scary to see how your poems, written over a specific period of time, can reveal issues which you have been trying to make sense of in your real life. My writings have always given me these spaces within which I try to process and work through some of my "real-world" concerns and crises. Maybe, that's what all poets or writers do? I don't know. Or is it at all possible that one reaches a stage where all one does is to repeat oneself, without letting one's audience/readers know that it's indeed repetition? I mean, is it at all possible that you create only with your skills and not with your concerns about this world and life? The logic of capital tells me, it indeed is. My writer-self refuses to believe. Seriously?
Reading Cornelius Eady's You Don't Miss Your Water now. The very precision of his language makes me want to cry! Did I ever tell you I am an extremely sentimental reader?
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Poems/Poetry/Poeta
Did some aggressive submitting of my poems this weekend. Now, comes the hardest part. The wait. I have been wondering about this recently. What binds me to poetry. I kept coming back to this question while reading Anne Blonstein's the blue pearl, an exquisite collection of poems. let me say it out loud, i envy anyone who can come up with lines like the ones blonstein have written. it's what i expect poetry to be--personal, political, abstract, concrete, accessible, inaccessible, steeped in history, universal. in short, a mode of expression which allows me to feel and think language differently. to touch the inherent theoretical and abstract in language. and that's why, i indulge in writing poetry myself. although, i am not a poet. not yet.
There have been times when I have been annoyed by the recent trend in American poetry to tell neat stories. I mean, it's not that I am averse to the idea of narrative poems. In fact, one of my most favorite piece in recent times is Slave Moth by Thylias Moss, a novel in verse. But even when I am reading a narrative poem, I expect the writing to move into spaces where conventional prose cannot. To find out the lyricism in the plot. To find out the abstract in the characters' voices. To explore the theoretical in the story which can only be done through the fragmentation of language which poetry often demands. I don't think my work has yet reached that space, but I am trying. I am trying to be both a poet and a fiction writer, and sometimes, I feel I am getting lost in the process. Although, often times, I also feel that exploring both the forms have made me aware of both the intersections and the divergences, and I feel a little bit grateful to myself.
Meanwhile, the diss is looming large in the background, demanding more and more and more attention!
There have been times when I have been annoyed by the recent trend in American poetry to tell neat stories. I mean, it's not that I am averse to the idea of narrative poems. In fact, one of my most favorite piece in recent times is Slave Moth by Thylias Moss, a novel in verse. But even when I am reading a narrative poem, I expect the writing to move into spaces where conventional prose cannot. To find out the lyricism in the plot. To find out the abstract in the characters' voices. To explore the theoretical in the story which can only be done through the fragmentation of language which poetry often demands. I don't think my work has yet reached that space, but I am trying. I am trying to be both a poet and a fiction writer, and sometimes, I feel I am getting lost in the process. Although, often times, I also feel that exploring both the forms have made me aware of both the intersections and the divergences, and I feel a little bit grateful to myself.
Meanwhile, the diss is looming large in the background, demanding more and more and more attention!
Friday, August 28, 2009
Back!
Back in the hole. Or, as DRR says, more like back in the tube. Trying desperately to go back to a regular reading and writing schedule, which is proving hard with all the first-week activities and this weird feeling that my time in this country is almost up. And I need to go back where I come from! Hopefully, regular blogging will resume soon!
Friday, July 17, 2009
Rachel Kann's Workshop, Woolf and Workshops
Just finished an one-week workshop with Rachel Kann on Call and Response:Poetic Conversations. The basic idea was, all the workshop participants respond to a writer/poet and/or a poem/literary text in their poems and then turn in the finished draft for feedback and comments. A poetic dialog of sorts. I have long been interested in the idea of rewriting as a critic, and no one working on neo-slave narratives, post-coloniality, women’s writings can actually bypass the immense significance of re-writing or different modes of revisionist aesthetics and their complexities.
I did not generate any new work for the workshop, but turned in an old poem, written earlier this year. One from the series I am writing on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I have long been intrigued by this text, especially the way it frames the question between women’s creativity and economic independence. And my storytelling mind keeps marveling at this whole idea of Shakespeare’s sister, through which Woolf introduces the primary concept of the book---the need for a woman to have a room in order to be creative. Much later, I had come across Alice Walker’s brilliant essay In Search of Our Mother’s Garden, where she provides an extremely insightful problematization of the very basic premise of Woolf’s work, the very idea of a woman’s separate room, through a racial/class lens. In lots of ways, the series I am writing is based on that premise pointed out by Alice Walker, although I am primarily interested in locating Woolf’s work within more of a context of the colonial drainage of wealth which directly effected the sub-continent, and in an offhand kind of a way, also led to the emergence of British Modernisms. So, one can also say, in this series, I am also trying to confront Woolf’s white feminism and some of its ideological implications, without losing sight of the fact that A Room of One’s Own is indeed a text which has influenced me profoundly, and has led me to think of the relationship between gender and creativity in more complex terms.
My colleagues at the workshop liked the poem, and Rachel herself has provided some really useful suggestions. So, right now, I am busy re-visioning and editing it. This is one of the things I love about the workshoping process ~ the way it often forces a writer to think about the aesthetic-narrative-political choices one is making, and if the need be, to defend them within a community of reader-writers. Of course, it’s not hard to see how that process can become problematic, but I must also say, that during this week, it did feel affirming and just plain good to get some positive feedback about my work from other poets and writers. Especially since, the week before had been one of receiving rejections from quite a few of the journals to whom I had turned in some of my work before leaving Austin.
I did not generate any new work for the workshop, but turned in an old poem, written earlier this year. One from the series I am writing on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I have long been intrigued by this text, especially the way it frames the question between women’s creativity and economic independence. And my storytelling mind keeps marveling at this whole idea of Shakespeare’s sister, through which Woolf introduces the primary concept of the book---the need for a woman to have a room in order to be creative. Much later, I had come across Alice Walker’s brilliant essay In Search of Our Mother’s Garden, where she provides an extremely insightful problematization of the very basic premise of Woolf’s work, the very idea of a woman’s separate room, through a racial/class lens. In lots of ways, the series I am writing is based on that premise pointed out by Alice Walker, although I am primarily interested in locating Woolf’s work within more of a context of the colonial drainage of wealth which directly effected the sub-continent, and in an offhand kind of a way, also led to the emergence of British Modernisms. So, one can also say, in this series, I am also trying to confront Woolf’s white feminism and some of its ideological implications, without losing sight of the fact that A Room of One’s Own is indeed a text which has influenced me profoundly, and has led me to think of the relationship between gender and creativity in more complex terms.
My colleagues at the workshop liked the poem, and Rachel herself has provided some really useful suggestions. So, right now, I am busy re-visioning and editing it. This is one of the things I love about the workshoping process ~ the way it often forces a writer to think about the aesthetic-narrative-political choices one is making, and if the need be, to defend them within a community of reader-writers. Of course, it’s not hard to see how that process can become problematic, but I must also say, that during this week, it did feel affirming and just plain good to get some positive feedback about my work from other poets and writers. Especially since, the week before had been one of receiving rejections from quite a few of the journals to whom I had turned in some of my work before leaving Austin.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Autobiography/Fiction
The new story is happening, but very very slowly.I am not pushing myself to produce huge chunks all at once. Rather, I try to write 200-300 words everyday, and reflect on the story outline before and after producing those words. Although yesterday I did end up writing around 500 words. I wonder, if the difficulty is partly because of the fact that my main character is someone who is hugely different from me-- a small-town teenager, whom everyone reads as too shy, too burdened by social norms, and too ordinary. I have never lived in an Indian/Bengali small-town myself, although I have visited them and have friends who have grown up in there. So, it's not something I know directly in the way I knew of things when I wrote some of the stories of the Pipli series. Although, once I began to write, even in the Pipli series, things began to assume their own lives, and pushed me out of that autobiography mode. Or should I say, vulgar autobiography mode?
In that sense, I am beginning to think, that all writings are autobiographical in some way or the other. I mean, there is no way a writer can write about things if it hasn't passed through his experience or existence. I am willing to go for extremely broad definitions of the words "experience" and "existence," but I don't think it is possible to write even a fantasy tale or a historical fiction (things which are by definition beyond realism, and therefore beyond the so-called real world experience), if the writer hasn't experienced history or the fantasy world in some way or the other. So, I am not surprised, when I find myself unconsciously falling back upon my own memories of how I felt as a fifteen year old while writing about this girl who is vastly dissimilar in terms of background. Now, I just need to continue with the narrative and see where it goes.
In other words,have begun to read Rishi Reddy's debut collection Karma and Other Stories. She has a really strong voice, and a lucid way of writing about people and their complexities, which is magnetic. A little bit like Jhumpa Lahiri, but from what I have read so far, there is a bigger space for rebellion, especially young girls' rebellion in her stories. And I cannot help enjoying that!
In that sense, I am beginning to think, that all writings are autobiographical in some way or the other. I mean, there is no way a writer can write about things if it hasn't passed through his experience or existence. I am willing to go for extremely broad definitions of the words "experience" and "existence," but I don't think it is possible to write even a fantasy tale or a historical fiction (things which are by definition beyond realism, and therefore beyond the so-called real world experience), if the writer hasn't experienced history or the fantasy world in some way or the other. So, I am not surprised, when I find myself unconsciously falling back upon my own memories of how I felt as a fifteen year old while writing about this girl who is vastly dissimilar in terms of background. Now, I just need to continue with the narrative and see where it goes.
In other words,have begun to read Rishi Reddy's debut collection Karma and Other Stories. She has a really strong voice, and a lucid way of writing about people and their complexities, which is magnetic. A little bit like Jhumpa Lahiri, but from what I have read so far, there is a bigger space for rebellion, especially young girls' rebellion in her stories. And I cannot help enjoying that!
Thursday, July 2, 2009
But Where is the Conflict?
Have started the new short story, written like a page of it. Although I am still not sure where it is going, I have a better sense of the narrative. I am trying to experiment with the kind of voice Faulkner uses for his story A Rose for Emily. I am not sure if it will work fully, the we-voice thing, because already I can see the narrator becoming much more of an involved entity, more so than what becomes of him/her within Faulkner's story. So, that needs to be seen. I don't know fully yet...
In the last one year, I have been consistently told in the workshops that nothing much ever happens in the stories I write. I have also been asked, but, where is the conflict? Part of it, no doubt, is my own bad writing. I mean, I am only beginning to write, think through stories,words, representations as a crafts-woman seriously. Previously, my relationship to literature has been pre-dominantly one of a reader-critic. So, I don't expect instant success. But, I have also begun to wonder, if there isn't something more to that conflict-nothing much happens question than just my bad writing. Coming to think of it, nothing much happens in, say, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhayay's Pather Panchali (Song of the Road) for a good length of time. Nothing much happens in Sandra Cisneros' House on the Mango Street or Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye until one comes to the tail-end.So, is it possible that this question is itself ideological in nature? A question that emerges from a generation of white American readers/writers who are used to the catastrophe model of Hollywood film-narrative? I mean, let's face it, nothing much happens in most people's lives, yet a lot happens too! So how does a writer choose a story? In Bengali, as well as in the entire gamut of post-colonial literature, there is a very rich tradition of character-sketches. Kind of a fictional version of life-writing, where the very writing of a character, reveals a lot about the complexities of history, society, culture, narrative. It is true I have been trained within that tradition, and that training has been primarily sub-conscious and un-conscious. And it is within that tradition that I want to locate myself.
So, in a way, I think, I am more interested in exploring the contradictions and the tensions in a story, rather than exploring the conflict (Thanks to UCLA-Extension Daniel Jaffe for pointing this out in a workshop.)
But I also wonder, to what extent, my readers have been expecting me to satisfy their ethnic curiosities? But then, I also want to hone my craft. So, I don't want to use that as an excuse for not working on my craft. So, my question is, where does a third world/writer of color (insert any other non-dominant identity here) go to develop their story-telling skills while clinging onto the complexities of their experiences both in terms of the forms and the contents they are embracing?
In the last one year, I have been consistently told in the workshops that nothing much ever happens in the stories I write. I have also been asked, but, where is the conflict? Part of it, no doubt, is my own bad writing. I mean, I am only beginning to write, think through stories,words, representations as a crafts-woman seriously. Previously, my relationship to literature has been pre-dominantly one of a reader-critic. So, I don't expect instant success. But, I have also begun to wonder, if there isn't something more to that conflict-nothing much happens question than just my bad writing. Coming to think of it, nothing much happens in, say, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhayay's Pather Panchali (Song of the Road) for a good length of time. Nothing much happens in Sandra Cisneros' House on the Mango Street or Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye until one comes to the tail-end.So, is it possible that this question is itself ideological in nature? A question that emerges from a generation of white American readers/writers who are used to the catastrophe model of Hollywood film-narrative? I mean, let's face it, nothing much happens in most people's lives, yet a lot happens too! So how does a writer choose a story? In Bengali, as well as in the entire gamut of post-colonial literature, there is a very rich tradition of character-sketches. Kind of a fictional version of life-writing, where the very writing of a character, reveals a lot about the complexities of history, society, culture, narrative. It is true I have been trained within that tradition, and that training has been primarily sub-conscious and un-conscious. And it is within that tradition that I want to locate myself.
So, in a way, I think, I am more interested in exploring the contradictions and the tensions in a story, rather than exploring the conflict (Thanks to UCLA-Extension Daniel Jaffe for pointing this out in a workshop.)
But I also wonder, to what extent, my readers have been expecting me to satisfy their ethnic curiosities? But then, I also want to hone my craft. So, I don't want to use that as an excuse for not working on my craft. So, my question is, where does a third world/writer of color (insert any other non-dominant identity here) go to develop their story-telling skills while clinging onto the complexities of their experiences both in terms of the forms and the contents they are embracing?
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