Monday Matter: Lullabies, language and lavender lemonade
Your weekly Foreign Bodies roundup
Every 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.
First things first
A little housekeeping
First MFA residency in the books ✔️
I returned from the first of five residency weeks for my Master’s on Saturday and am feeling so transformed, so rejuvenated, and so freakin’ inspired. My new friend and cohort fellow Beth said it well: As we bid farewell after six days of intensive learning and introspection with our new, generous community of aspiring wordsmiths, it was as if we were leaving home and returning home at the same time. I don’t remember the last time I felt so moved to write. Some highlights from the week:
when a bunch of introverted writers order room service and then have to muster up the courage to meet at the hotel bar for one too many glasses of wine and don’t regret a minute of it
getting to chat with the one and only Alice Walker
joking around with my new mentor, who has already blown my damn mind after just one 1:1 meeting
the core four/magic eight
the palpable gratitude and grief in memory of the late Valerie Boyd, who I so wish I had a chance to meet
witnessing the magic of the graduates reading from their works of art in the middle of a museum exhibit
our shared love of and appreciation for Kiese Laymon
lavender lemonades and rose-infused cocktails
Roz, who invited me to join this program <3
writers.
A musical start to your Mondays 🎧
One song to groove to, cry to, drive to and share
This was a song a colleague mentioned in a craft talk this week exploring why so many people seem to connect with country music, a genre I myself have never really embraced. “We cry when melancholy collides with specificity,” Malcolm Gladwell once said. “And specificity is not something every genre does well.”
Resource(s) of the week
Something helpful and interesting and cool (*storytelling opportunity)
Afghan Women’s Mission: A project of social and environmental entrepreneurs that works closely with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) to support health, educational and other programs for Afghan women
*Mic editor Emma Webster is looking for pitches—features, timely stories, essays and more—for the publication’s life/identity sections. Rates start around $400. Guidelines available in this Twitter thread. Email pitches to emma.sarran@bustle.com.
*Sierra Magazine editor Jen Rose Smith is open to pitches for stories spanning adventure and lifestyle, including reported news pieces, personal essays, profiles and service stories. Read this Twitter thread for more information and send your pitch to jennifer.smith@sierraclub.org with the word “pitch” in your subject line.
Read this!
Personal stories I’m loving
With Matrilineage as a Map (Eman Quotah, Guernica Mag): “I understand the scarcity of written histories. I was born the same year as fictional Sara (1971) on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; my father and grandparents had no birth certificates to tell us when they were born. I know how difficult and how essential it is to wrap our arms around the stories of the people who came before us, especially the women.” A beautiful essay response to Mai Al-Nakib’s debut novel, An Unlasting Home. Read here.
I Can’t Separate My Writing and My Diagnosis, So I Use Them to Help One Another (Sydney Hegele, Electric Literature): “My memories from that time are merely fragments. Hot pink pillows soaked with sweat. Flat ginger ale. Nicolas Cage’s voice as the dad in Astroboy, playing from down the hall. A bedroom door on the bottom floor of a green and white Duplex. A fist-sized hole in its center. I have no way of explaining the exact moment in which I split. There is simply a before: immobile and afraid. And an after: a new voice inside my head. Not my own. Someone else.” A gripping essay on how a Dissociate Identity Disorder diagnosis influenced one writer’s craft. Read here.
‘Making It’ in America (Vanessa Hua, LitHub): “For Asian Americans, we might reverse the question and ask, ‘How does it feel to be a solution?’ That is to say, to have their bodies, their children, and their people exemplified? This sudden embrace and elevation of Asian Americans as model minorities is suspicious, given America’s long history of xenophobia against them.” In this reported essay, excerpted from The Passenger: California, San Francisco Chronicle columnist and Chinese American writer Vanessa Hua addresses the myth of the model minority. Read here.
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