 Red Room Writer Profile
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Elmaz Abinader's Blog
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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September 14, 2008
- My personal shock and aweI am overwhelmed. Drift away from conversations, deflect my eyes from the tv, shut my ears and the noises keep happening. This Sarah Palin strike cut across my chest. Bush's philosophies made his horror imaginable, but this woman's cowardice (aggressive, racist, misogynistic, homophobi)c makes her horror unimaginable. The soothsayers around me are doomsayers. I can't take ...
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August 26, 2008
- Nothing will carry us: not the road, nor home.
Was this road the same from the start,
or did our dreams find a mare among the horsesof the Mongols on the hill, and trade us off?And whatare we to do, then?
What
are weto dowithout
exile?
From Without Exile by Mahmoud Darwish, tr by Anthon Shammas_________________________________________________________________________O, yes, I say it ...
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August 11, 2008
- He says, on the verge of death, he says, “I have no more earth to lose” Free am I, close to my ultimate freedom, I hold my fortune in my own hands In a few moments, I will begin my life born free of father and mother I will chose letters of sky blue for my name Mahmoud Darwish, State of Siege Keep the sky close within reach, keep it blank the names of the storytellers ...
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August 10, 2008
- He says, on the verge of death, he says,“I have no more earth to lose”Free am I, close to my ultimate freedom, I hold my fortune in my own handsIn a few moments, I will begin my lifeborn free of father and motherI will chose letters of sky blue for my name http://www.arabworldbooks.com/Literature/poetry4.html The lines from Mahmoud Darwish's State of Siege sihouette the ...
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August 1, 2008
- The first time I got punished at my Catholic elementary school i had turned around in church to see if my older sister had arrived. Not until after the Mass and we were safely filed behind our wooden desks, did Sister Sophie growl out my name to the front of the class. The nuns lined the windows of the church, their hands inside their sleeves, watching the behavior of their students and i had ...
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