Confidence

Submittable, you remind me of bones bleached against the gypsum sands of New Mexico, where time and wind mark the passing of the hours, days, weeks, months since I submitted my creative nonfiction personal essay to The Gettysburg Review.

Movement for Mercy is a live dance performance which honors the intersections of experiences and shared history throughout our community.

“Zahra, where is that from…oh, did you know that Iraq invaded Kuwait?” “Yes, I was there.” He asked what my thoughts about the Taliban were, twice.

The problem isn’t that our laws are flawed (even though they are). The problem is that we care only to the degree that it won’t be an inconvenience or mess with our comfort…or even worse, our narratives. This is our problem.

We thought it would be helpful to periodically summarize what’s out there to calm the storm of information that seems to be swirling around us. So here is a resource list focusing on mental health, wellness and financial assistance to help soften the impact of COVID on all our lives. 

Inevitably someone is going to compare your work to someone else’s. And when someone says, “This reminded me of your work” it’s hard to know what they mean.

The most important detail for you to be clear about is who is in the audience. How much did they pay to get into the event? Say, for an art competition, who are the participants: adults from a local correctional facility or high school students? You’ll want to cater your talk to their perspective.

Guest Blogger Jeff Andersen: “We work with students in local classrooms for an entire year teaching them how to write and perform their own plays. I see the students make the same connections I did. They realize that they can not only participate in the world around them but also, even better, help to shape it.”

Mastery means knowing in your bones what you donʼt know. It also means form is second nature—you didnʼt get up that mountain without learning how to hike. And it means youʼre free. When you come back down, youʼve been changed.

Keshet’s Carolyn Tobias asks: How do we water the seeds of failure to have that pain actually produce something valuable? Learning is a verb; an action; a continual process. Learning from failure is actively choosing to see each failure as the beginning, and not the end.

I was a bookish, literarily-devout writing major. The type who read prose poems and flash fiction anthologies in the corner at parties, that sort of thing. And though I wouldn’t have admitted it then, one of the reasons I didn’t own a smartphone was because I was afraid of it.

Staying silent is a way of obeying the rules and protecting yourself while doing nothing to address the bigotry on display in front of you. Every day that a bigot thinks they can get away with their hatred in public is another day they can influence others to their way of thinking.

There’s a saying you’ll hear all over the arts world that goes, “If you like anything else, do that instead.” It can mean whatever you want it to. For me, it meant, “If you do something else, it’s because you failed at acting.”

How come those graphic-y novel pictures fail to deck the walls of high-class galleries and command the same big bucks? What do we need to do to get taken seriously around here?

I cannot remain silent when someone says “We need to get rid of the damn Muslims!” I will not be silent if I hear a family member bash immigrants, particularly when the basher themselves is a grandchild of immigrants.

I once had a teacher tell me that I had a strong third eye, that I needed to manifest it more, make it sing, make it move. I didn’t understand what she meant but it was something that stuck with me. It propelled me. It did make me sing. It did make me move.