3-7 November QOTW
Image description: the sky as viewed through a blue-tinted glass window of an OC Transpo double decker #10 bus at the Carleton University campus. A road, a stop sign, people walking, cars parked, autumn leaves still on ssome trees. Sky is full of clouds with bits of steel blue peaking through.
Quotes following the devastation and feelings of anxiety caused by the recent US election appear next week. Thank you to all who’ve reached out to share our mutual dismay and horror at this turn of events. We are here, we are not going anywhere. There is strength in solidarity.
Sunday
Every day, we can choose to show up to our varied conditions and find ways to help, ways to create, ways to care for ourselves and others. We don’t have to mourn the way things were, and we don’t have to settle for the way things are.
T. Thorn Coyle, Keep Breathing. Subscribe here.
Monday
This fall has been full of events, and then there’s the social media posting about the events, and overall, I feel like I’m always shouting LOOK AT ME! I’M A WRITER! But the thing is, the signal only carries so far. Beyond the points where people’s circles of interests and communities might overlap with mine, there’s empty space between writers and readers (or potential readers). I often have this weird sense of being both uncomfortably visible and utterly invisible, at the same time.
Kate Heartfield, Writers, Just Out, Doing Things. Subscribe to Kate’s newsletter for tips and info on her doings.
Tuesday
Mine is not an argument about being ‘absent’ from literary texts; we were not absent. We were in the texts. Potent as life. But we (and others) were trained to remove or skirt our presence, or to observe that presence as something like background, immutable, not subject to the action of the text.
Dionne Brand quoted from Salvage, Readings from the Wreck in her interview with Shazia Hafiz Ramji in Chicago Review of Books, October 22, 2024.
Check out Brand’s session at the fall edition of the Ottawa International Writers Festival where she was interviewed by one of the Festival’s most skilled interviewer’s Peter Schneider.
Wednesday
Racism and bigotry are not polite, and I refuse to be polite in my fight against them.
Mona Eltahawy, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/609114/the-seven-necessary-sins-for-women-and-girls-by-mona-eltahawy/
Also subscribe to Feminist Giant.
Thursday
The details of one place, Max says, can teach you how to see another.
Stay tuned for my glowing review soon in the Temz Review!
Friday
Some of us who draw do so because we had to invent our own language in order to speak. Finding words is really hard for me. And so I draw.
Saturday
In the winter I am writing about, there was much darkness. Darkness of nature, darkness of event, darkness of the spirit. The sprawling darkness of not knowing.
We speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of _____. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith. . .
Mary Oliver, “Winter Hours,” in Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
As quoted by @Renée Eli, Ph.D. in Beyond the Comfort Zone, Mary Oliver: Maybe Hope. Maybe Faith.
A Short Reflection for November.
If you have inspiring and intriguing quotes to share, please reach out. I’d love to include them here.
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