The Second Draft of the Bindudi Story Done

Just finished working on the Bindudi story and send it along to some of my friends for some comments/suggestions/reactions. I always feel this relief once I am done with a draft. And this moment, when I have sent it out to some of my readers, is also one full of anticipation. And then again, there will be that dreaded phase: REVISION. Today, as I was working on this draft, I was thinking, what is it that I am really trying to say in this story. If I have to push myself a little bit away from its fundamental emotional world, I will say, it is about gender, but more than that it is about this vicious circle of violence. The way we often make certain forms of violence totally legitimate. But, I was a little bit surprised to see, how in this story of mine, violence is really institutionalized. There is an inordinate amount of violence inside the school premises. There is violence within family. This is not something I had paid close attention to while writing the story. I was more interested in developing the character, and the plot and the voice. It will be interesting to see if any of my readers pick up on this.

Just finished reading Lee Smith's collection of stories: Cakewalk. What is it about the American South that has produced such great women writers? So, my own favorites in this collection are: "Between the Lines," "Gulfport," "Artists", "Dear Phil Donahue," and the last story of the collection "Cakewalk." Most of these stories are about women stuck within domestic claustrophobia, and trying to find ways out of them. Smith's women are complicated characters, often fucked up, with layers and layers of contradictions, and they try to deal with themselves within those contradictions. Rarely in this collection do we come across characters whose rage is so deep that she leaves it all. So, as I was reading these book, I was also thinking, how does one write about women who have tried to find their voice outside of the family, the contradictions of domesticity? About women who join social movements? About women who engage in political art-making? In this particular collection, Martha Rasnick of "Dear Phil Donahue" is probably the one who comes closest to it, but then, hers is not a "collective" or "political" solution in that sense. Wouldn't it be great if someone did a collection like that?