 Red Room Writer Profile
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Elmaz Abinader's Blog
October 16, 2009
- At the VONA Voices Writing Workshop, I sat with one writer in my political content class and heard the familiar complaint. "I don't feel like I have the time to write." That day she was crowned with a red knit cap, hiding the skinned head beneath. Everyday, a new lid, brilliant in color, a jewel radiating an aura on her face, a little gray from chemo. I knew she was a mother, was ...
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September 6, 2009
- In the movies that acted as my education the journalist were heroes, sleeves rolled up, typing with two fingers on a manual Royal typewriter. They smoked cigars, even the women reporters, they talked as they typed. People yelled, "hold the front page." These heroes ferreted out corruption, took down puppet mayors, defended the falsely accused and uncovered the truth that would ...
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August 26, 2009
- Each year at the Advising Workshop for faculty, the Dean of Admission presents facts about our incoming class: their ethnography, academic records, community service and place of origin. We have watched the diversity of the College grow every year; more students speak more than one language, more perform community service. Then the Dean pointed out, this class, the traditionally aged students, ...
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August 25, 2009
- sleep against daylight diesel against air eyes against screen ideas against fear time against life margins against design politics against people people against progression earring against lobe barking against sleep mist against window logic against dreams disbelief against hope policies against ...
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July 23, 2009
- More than one writer has called herself merely a storyteller. "I just tell stories," we say lifting the weight of "literature" from our books. Seen as a good "story," a narrative can do what it wants--have drawings, jump through time, be told in a peculiar voice. We enchant as storytellers, but also excuse ourselves from a kind of importance that seems to have rules. ...
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June 11, 2009
- I wish you could hear this oud--the way it winds around, spirals up and flutters the high notes. When Marcel Khalife plays Caress, my heart moves forwards, my fingers fill, my stomach warms. I fall into the string of notes, everything shifts out of my head and into the body. I am located. I am in the state of grace where writing originates. I am free.Music is the geography of my writing, the ...
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May 28, 2009
- We tell them to kill their children. it's a phrase i have always hated. The whole idea of comparing book writing to giving birth--oh i get it... the seed planting, the incubation process, gestation, all that. But having children is so much braver. Just knowing or that they can love you breathlessly, keep you captivated, carry you into generations and reproduce a better (or worse you) or ...
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May 17, 2009
- As a child:between the clothes through to the roof attic where starlings made nests in the gutter and sparked nightunder the basement stairs, wooden ones, could see the ankles of mother coming to pull out laundryon a swing, twisting right and left, pear tree leaves just where my feet could reach going upon the floor, legs crossed, school uniform draped over knees, polite and modestunder the ...
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April 18, 2009
- I hear voices in April, every April every year for the last twenty or so years. Any writer who teaches has that glassy-eyed, overwrought, reading-1000 pages a day look on her face, that pale sucked out from the computer pallor, a crick in the neck. Many of us are reading theses for students in Masters of Fine Arts Programs. We carry them everywhere we go: to cafes certainly, on the seat of the ...
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March 4, 2009
- Writing my first memoir, Children of the Roojme, I accessed my characters first through their letters and diaries, then through interviews, photographs and documents. The pile of research helped me form the characters, on the level of their lives and the progessions, but no amount of studious research could create character. Each of my women, my mother, my grandmother and my aunt; and my men: my ...
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February 19, 2009
- The mailman came twice a day, the first delivery was around 9 a.m.; the second at 2 p.m. We received letters mostly, from the family in Lebanon or Ohio--each differentiated by the weight of the envelopes. From the "old country" came the tissue paper light envelopes we could see the arabic writing through; our cousins from Cleveland or Youngstown sent hearty flower cards . The mail ...
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January 11, 2009
- I list the maladies that people talk to their therapists about. Being bullied, having parents who are never satisfied, feeling insecure, how one relationship descimated the soul. Worse stuff: incest, physical abuse, alcoholism, drug use, rape....strands of thistle that wrap around each other until we are wearing our own crown of thorns. The pain keeps us from moving forward sometimes, or ...
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November 22, 2008
- When my dog Durango was alive, much of my day was structured around her bio-essentials: need to walk the dog, got to go feed the dog; can't leave the dog in the car too long. For fourteen years, I scheduled dates, trips, vacations, classes, and social outings considering if she could go, or how she could be taken care of if she did not. But Durango was low maintenance--trained to the gills--she ...
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October 25, 2008
- This hotel off an interstate is a posh one. I am composing in the living room of a suite and anthony is off in another room doing morning stretches before we dress, for a funeral. Down the road, Gertude Larkin, known as Aunt Jack to her friends and family is lying dressed in white, with a tiara on her head. I am told she looks beautiful. I do not look at the dead. I stayed in the house when my ...
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October 12, 2008
- IN the last two weeks, I have gone into my retirement plan and moved around funds--Some poor performers over to real estate, more into the one fund showing a profit. My first dime went into that fund in 1981, the first year of my Ph.D. program and through four universities, I felt assured that, although I live like a perpetual graduate student, the realization of years of working "in the ...
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