The Write Advice 072: BADRYAH AL-BISHR

As a writer, I need space to work, so that I can write without [feeling trapped in a] constant state of struggle and conflict.  If I'm not being clear, I want my sentence to be for me, mine, and not simply a sentence responding to the comment of another.  When I was writing articles for Arshaq Al Aswat, I found myself always being [in a state of] reaction, and not action.  I believe a successful person is someone who does and doesn't simply react.  I think an intellectual shouldn't spend all his time debating others.

Saudi Writer Badryah al-Bishr: Be the Action, Not the Reaction [23 March 2015]


 

Use the link below to read the full interview with Saudi novelist BADRYAH AL-BISHR:

 

https://arablit.org/2015/03/23/saudi-writer-al-bishr/

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 
The Write Advice 053: MOHAMMAD HASSAN ALWAN

  
The Write Advice 031: JANA EL HASSAN

 
The Write Advice 012: SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Poet of the Month 032: JENNIFER DENROW

JENNIFER DENROW
2011

 

 

HOW THE MIND WORKS STILL TO BE SURE

 

You were the white field when you handed me a blank
sheet of paper and said you'd worked so hard
all day and this was the best field you could manage.
And when I didn't understand, you turned it over
and showed me how the field had bled through,
and then you took out your notebook and said how each
time you attempted to make something else, it turned out
to be the same field. You worried that everyone
you knew was becoming the field and you couldn't help
them because you were the one making them into fields
in the first place. It's not what you meant to happen.
You handed me a box of notebooks and left. I hung the field
all over the house. Now, when people come over, they think
they're lost and I tell them they're not. They say they're
beginning to feel like the field and it's hard because they know
they shouldn't but they do and then they start to grow whiter
and whiter and then they disappear. With everyone turning
into fields, it's hard to know anything. With everyone turning
into fields, it's hard to be abstract. And since I'm mostly alone,
I just keep running my hand over my field, waiting.

 

From the collection  

 

California

 

 © Four Way Books, 2011

 

 

The following biographical statement appears on the Better Magazine website.  [It is re-posted here for information purposes only and, like the poem re-posted above, remains its author's exclusive copyright-protected intellectual property.]

 

Jennifer Denrow received a PhD in Poetry from the University of Denver. She is the author of the poetry collection California (2011) and the chapbooks A Knee for Life (2010) and From California, On (2010). She currently resides in Colorado, where she writes and teaches.

   

 

 

 

Use the link below to read another poem by North American poet JENNIFER DENROW:

 

 

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/untitled-more-i-go-harder-it-becomes-return

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 

 

 

Poet of the Month 030: AYTEN MUTLU

 

 

 

Poet of the Month 020: ANNA SWIRSZCZYNSKA

 

 

 

Poet of the Month 013: KARYS PK

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last updated 13 April 2021  

 

 

The Write Advice 071: TONI MORRISON

No, I'm angry all the time.  Almost all the time, which is why I write books.  That's where I control things, that's where I think freely about things, without regard to the fashion or whatever else is going on, or who's planning to kill whom and whether we should all have guns or nobody should have guns.  All these things prey on you, and I got a little disturbed years ago with some business, political, cultural, I don't know what, but I was very depressed.  It was awful, so right wing, the country.  And I found myself not working, not writing, and my friend Peter Sellars [the opera director] calls me up usually every Christmas, and this time he called me and said, 'Merry Christmas, how are you?'  And I said, 'I feel awful, I really can't write,' and went on, complaining, and he started shouting, 'No, no, no!'  He said, 'Toni, this is when artists go to work!  Not when things are wonderful and calm.  This is the time!'  And I suddenly stopped whining, and I thought about writers in prison, in camps, in the gulag, a history of people who under the world's worst circumstances, write. This was about 20 years ago, but I now understand it better because it works for me.  I can think through my novels, I can react, I can invent, I can create, I can be free.  It's my space, and I am in control. 
   

Goodreads, May 2015


 

Use the link below to read the full interview with North American novelist, editor, professor and political activist TONI MORRISON:

 

https://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/1029.Toni_Morrison

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 
The Write Advice 061: CHARMIAN CLIFT

 
The Write Advice 051: MARIANNE MOORE

 
The Write Advice 041: MAYA ANGELOU

Think About It 005: SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

What should a society be, so that in his last years a man might still be a man?
      The answer is simple:  he would always have to be treated as a man.  By the fate that it allots to its members who can no longer work, society gives itself away; it has always looked upon them as so much material.  Society confesses that as far as it is concerned, profit is the only thing that counts, and that its 'humanism' is mere window-dressing; Society turns away from the aged worker as though he belonged to another species.  That is why the whole question [of ageing and retirement] is buried in a conspiracy of silence.
  
Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable.  The young know this.  Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.
  
La Vieillesse [The Coming of Age] (1970) 



 

Use the link below to read more (in English) about the life and work of French philosopher, feminist, social critic and novelist SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR:

 

https://www.iep.utm.edu/beauvoir/

 

You might also enjoy:

 
The Write Advice 012: SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

 
Think About It 002: C WRIGHT MILLS

 
Think About It 014: DOROTHY ROWE