Monday Matter: Fruit bowls and flat places

Your biweekly Foreign Bodies roundup featuring essays on fruit bowls, flat places, ADHD meds and more

Every other Monday, I send subscribers and gift recipients of immigrant mental health and storytelling newsletter Foreign Bodies stories I recently inhaled and adored. This is also a chance to do some housekeeping and give shout-outs and all that jazz.

To do: write joy

The last wedding in Tantura, 2022 by Sliman Mansour

Nine years ago, when my manager asked me the dreaded where-do-you-see-yourself-in-three-years question during my first mid-year review as a full-time newspaper staffer, I remember struggling to come up with a title or job description that felt Important Enough to make my employment worth the investment.

But I do recall saying that what I do want to learn in my time here is how to write more like her, the narrative reporter on the other side of the newsroom who would later invite me to lunch and eventually guide me to write beyond the confines of the paper, the same writer who would convince me to join her MFA program once she’d left to lead it, and who would go on to become my teacher herself.

During our first editing session in February, she pointed out a specific line I’d written about living and dying. In the margins of our shared Google doc, she commented that the line worried her, that we’d need to discuss it in person. When we met for coffee, she nestled beside me, called herself auntie, and told me she needed to believe I have the support I need if I’m to continue this excavation work.

I didn’t know what to do with the genuine concern on her face and in her palms; it didn’t read like the familiar obligation of sympathy. She proceeded to wipe my embarrassment of tears and I apologized for the outburst. I am not accustomed to being read in this way; such surgical tenderness and attention is unnerving.

Last week, after months of working together, she told me she has yet to read evidence of joy in my memoir-in-progress. The realization rocked me harder coming from an editor who’s known me for nearly a decade, who’s seen me giggle with girlfriends even on my worst days. She is confident I am capable of profound joy. So where is it? And what good is my writing if all it does is project the pain?

“I’ve watched the world happen to you,” she told me. “Now I want to see you claim your space in it.”

My non-writing “assignment” for the next few weeks is to rewatch Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You and reread excepts of my favorite books of the program so far: The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander and An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken, two books about two very different losses that sprinkle in the moments of levity, joy, and love that keeps us reading and living. I’m to explore how these artists have masterfully infused joy within trauma writing both on screen and on paper, and understand how that joy is necessary for texture, for dimensional character and story, and mostly for hope.

The task shouldn’t feel as daunting as it does, but it’s going to take some unlearning to really believe my joys, too, are worth my words.

Resource(s) of the week

Something helpful and interesting and cool (*storytelling opportunity)

• *Electric Literature is accepting short stories, essays, flash, poetry, and graphic narratives through midnight Pacific Time on April 14 — or when EL receives 750 submissions per category. Submission guidelines available via Submittable. (Hat tip:

  Memoir Land
  )

• Ask yourself what kind of artist you want to be: In this Creative Independent interview, writer and multidisciplinary artist Fariha Róisín talks art and politics — and offers suggestions for liberation-focused life and work. If we don’t have anything to say about the cruelty of the world, can we really consider ourselves artists?

• *Palestinian writers: The National Writers Union and Study Hall have compiled a database of editors specifically looking to work with Palestinian writers (journalists, essayists, fiction writers, poets etc.) for English-language publications; your work does not have to be about genocide or war. Please email sauravsarkar2000@gmail.com or Roshan.Abraham@gmail.com. Hat tip: Jen Soriano.

What I’ve been reading lately

Stories and essays I’m loving, with an emphasis on decolonized readings for Palestine

• Palestinian (Ibrahim Nasrallah/trans. Huda Fakhreddine, Protean Magazine): “I slept without a bite of bread./I dreamt without dreams./I woke up not missing my hands or feet or reflection in the mirror/or the thing I call my soul./I died and lived./I lit myself on fire. I put myself out with my own ashes,/and nothing came of it.” Ibrahim Nasrallah, born in 1954 to Palestinian parents who were uprooted from their land in 1948, spent his childhood and youth in the Alwehdat Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, then began his working life as a teacher in Saudi Arabia. He has been a full-time writer since 2006. Read Nasrallah’s full poem here.

• How ADHD Meds Changed My Life (Said Shaiye, ANMLY): “I grew up in this culture that teaches you to be grateful for everything. Say you come home and say ‘mom, dad, I’m struggling with school. I feel sad all the time, and I don’t know why.’ You would get a shower sandal flying towards your head (for daring to be so ungrateful), followed by a lecture on all the people back home who would kill for the opportunities you take for granted. You might be reminded of all the sacrifices your parents made to get you to this position. The refugee camps, the bullets flying overhead, the near starvation… Being Autistic with ADHD is a unique experience. I have friends who are just Autistic and friends who are just ADHD and friends who are both. The combined experience is something I’ll struggle to make sense of for years, but I am not ungrateful.” A candid, stream-of-consciousness recollection about medication, health care in America and more from Somali writer and disability advocate Said Shaiye. Read here.

• Living With Muscular Dystrophy at 50 Makes Death My Shadow Partner (Alice Wong, TIME): “In my bedroom, with a scary clown ceiling light above me at night, my vivid imagination wondered how I would die–would it be a slow and painful death? Would it be fast from a medical emergency? Knowing my muscles are progressively weakening as I struggled to walk as a child and breathe as a teenager always kept death at the forefront of my mind. Believing I had no future shaped me in ways I am still processing today.” A brief but lovely essay from disabled activist Alice Wong, founder of the Disability Visibility Project. Read here.

• In Defense of Food Memory in Immigrant Fiction (Jessica Yu, LitHub): ”I ate my food on the couch. Then I went upstairs and lay in bed and cried. I couldn’t even explain the significance of this dish to myself. How tangy and gritty that pork was. Soft and firm like my childhood. I feel like a fool for writing this down even now. I hate people who talk about the significance of food to their childhood, who describe every mouthful like it matters to anyone but them. But I also hate that this has become a trope of so-called immigrant literatures, that in an age of what Yen Le Espiritu calls, ‘panethnic entrepreneurs,’ that we’re considered sellouts for talking about things that might matter to us because they mattered to too many other people before us. It mattered to me. And sometimes I just want that to be enough.” Read here.