Blog Posts for Elmaz Abinader

Writers, Death and the Network: in memory of Leila Abu-Saba

Elmaz Abinader — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:30:41 -0700

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 ...

What Once was Journalism

Elmaz Abinader — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 10:53:12 -0700

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 ...

Back to School--Nurturing a Violent Society

Elmaz Abinader — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:20:10 -0700

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, ...

Collisions

Elmaz Abinader — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:18:29 -0700

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 ...

It's finally funny

Elmaz Abinader — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 22:55:08 -0700

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. ...

Oud, Electric Bass, Algerian Vocals

Elmaz Abinader — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 09:00:24 -0700

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 ...

Falling in and Out of Love with my writing

Elmaz Abinader — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:22:20 -0700

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 ...

Finding a Place to Sit

Elmaz Abinader — Sun, 17 May 2009 20:52:20 -0700

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 ...

Hearing Voices

Elmaz Abinader — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 21:48:31 -0700

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 ...

my grandmother myself

Elmaz Abinader — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:31:24 -0800

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 ...