Continued propaganda for you all to read Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H.
⠀
@rhalgr.bsky.social
261 followers 98 following 2.1K posts
Mar. 20s. White. Dyke. 🌙 [ All night I see that abandonment is me, that the sole sobbing voice is me. We can search with lanterns, cross the shadow’s lie. We can feel the heart thud in the thigh and water subside in the archaic site of the heart. ]
![Don’t write what you know.
I may be wrong about this, but it seems as though so much fiction, particularly that by younger people, is very much about themselves. Love and death and stuff, but my love, my death, my this, my that. Everybody else is a light character in that play.
When I taught creative writing at Princeton, [my students] had been told all of their lives to write what they knew. I always began the course by saying, “Don’t pay any attention to that.” First, because you don’t know anything and second, because I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends. Think of somebody you don’t know. What about a Mexican waitress in the Rio Grande who can barely speak English? Or what about a Grande Madame in Paris? Things way outside their camp. Imagine it, create it. Don’t record and editorialize on some event that you’ve already lived through. I was always amazed at how effective that was. They were always out of the box when they were given license to imagine something wholly outside their existence. I thought it was a good training for them. Even if they ended up just writing an autobiography, at least they could relate to themselves as strangers.
–from a 2014 interview with NEA Arts Magazine](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:i7xnpdu4owqnztfkit5iup42/bafkreiex27h4hllzzrgnb7r2a5bs7hohdxemizhx37eipoxy6lfbjanzhq)
