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Salman Rushdie comes to Atlanta

On my way to work a couple of weeks ago, right as I pressed the button to change radio stations after my commune with NPR radio on my way to work, the words “Salman Rushdie speaking on memories at Emory University” snagged in my ears. Rhianna was moaning about whips and chains on the new radio station and I was in the mood to sing along, so I made a mental note to hit Google up with those words later since the Emory campus is down the road for yours truly.

It turns out that Salman Rushdie is a visiting professor at Emory University in Atlanta, GA this semester. I had already missed the first public dialogue he’d done with Deepa Mehta. (Midnlght’s Children is being turned into a movie with Deepa Mehta directing it. When I have my novel published, I’m going to hold out for Deepa Mehta to come knock on my door – or, the more likely reality, go bang on her door until she answers just to rid herself of the knocking.) So, amidst disappointment, I scanned on down on the press release and saw that Rushie was doing another public conversation on the role of memories in writing that coming Sunday.

Now, I’m not a super-fan of Rushdie. Magical realism just isn’t my thing, so after reading the first two pages of Midnight’s Children, I walked away from the book. In fact, as long as I’m playing confessions here, I haven’t read a single Rushdie novel. However, what does intrigue me as a creative non-fiction writer is the role and use of memories in writing; plus, there was the fact that Rushdie is a renowned South Asian writer and I want to be one, so I figured I should go be in his presence.

The event was held in a church auditorium on the Emory campus, on Sunday at 5 PM, free and ticketless. On the big day, I showed up at 3:30 PM and was fifth online. All 5 of us had plunked down onto the floor and buried our heads into a book as we waited for the doors to open, which I now find amusing. I snagged a seat front and center in the first row. Make no mistake: Salman Rushdie saw me. When I finally get my book published and he sees my photo on the back jacket, he’ll say, “She was the woman who kept fidgeting and texting while I spoke.” To clarify: I wasn’t texting. I was taking notes on my cell phone so that I can write this blog entry for the good of mankind and memoir writers everywhere.

There were a few highlights throughout the event. It was a conversation between Rushdie and a senior member of Emory's upper echelon around the construction of memory, of how we believe the truth of our memory more than the actual facts themselves. Rushdies example elicited chuckles from the audience. He explained when the Indo-Chinese border wars were happening and China essentially beat the Indian army, conversation amongst the adults took place that he overheard about how, now that India was no longer part of the British empire, we might become part of the Chinese empire and how people might have to learn to speak Chinese. As he mused on this memory with his family, Rushdie's mother interrupted him and essentially told him not to be daft because he was in boarding school in Britain when all of this went down. When Rushdie checked the actual records, he found that he really was in Britain at the time. Rushdie had literally reconstructed this memory through others’ and placed himself in that moment in time. This made him fascinated with the construction of memory.

Since I have every intention of writing a memoir, I'm quite fascinated with this idea of a construction of memory, especially since the only thing I have to compare the fallacy of my own memories is those of the family and friends. In that scenario, how does one determine whose truth is stronger? This is something I’ve struggled with in my writing – my perception of what I know happened versus others’. I felt marginally at ease when, as Rushdie discussed problems of truth in the novel, especially for things like verbatim dialog, he very bluntly dumped on our heads that “there's no way people remember dialogue the way it is written in memoirs. It is partly--if not completely--made up, but they are making it up in service of the truth.” Memoir authors, including myself, are clearly making things up; the question is how much are we making up.

The conversation meandered its way through how we look at the past with the eyes of the present and the way we see the past is transformed by the times of the present, which is quite true. Three years ago, I might have ended my bestseller with the main character going on to live a morose, melancholic life, the sort of life heroines in Bollywood movies live when fate takes her down before her happy ending musical. Today, however, I know my main character, no matter what she does, will live, whole-heartedly, wildly. None of the facts of my past has changed; my perspective, however, has, so I shake my head in agreement with Rushdie.

Then we came on to one of my favorite subjects: on how to write a memoir, about the differences and similarities in writing fiction and non-fiction. Rushdie stressed that one must create "novelistic elements," in non-fiction writing, where we must make the people come to life on the page, even the character baring our own name. "If you can't make them live on the page,” he stated matter of factly, “then it doesn't matter that they really live." One point that struck home was that, in writing a memoir, we have to be particularly critical of the character representing ourselves. We cannot go easy on ourselves - and we cannot write out of revenge. Rushdie encouraged really looking into if something needs to be said or not. Of course, if it is vital to our story and truth, then it must be told, but if it's not, he recommended rethinking it, to examine why we feel the need to recreate an event that didn't add to our truth - which essentially is saying that if it doesn't add to pushing your story forward, you don't need it.

Rushdie was quite witty actually - there were a reference to how he's quite tight with Jerry Springer after being on a talk-show together (long amusing story that involves poking fun at a leader of the gun rights group in the U.S.). When the topic of the abundance of memoirs in the market was brought up, he attributed it to Oprah Winfrey and the creation of the confessional culture.

Q&A took the conversation all over the place. Somewhere in there, it came up that Rushdie himself wrote the screenplay for Midnight”s Children, describing the experience "like cutting off both arms and limbs" since he had to cull the novel to exactly what needed to be in the movie and what could be abandoned. Someone piped up with the question of whether Rushdie regretted writing Satanic Verses; Rushdie shut that question down with a quick no and moved on. When asked for tidbits on how the progression of his own memoir was going, Rushdie was quite tight-lipped on the content but elaborated that he believes that if he keeps his mouth shut, then the words will come out through his fingers; he finds that projects often lose their steam because people talk about it too much. I wonder if that was a message specifically for me. When asked if he would choose to categorize himself as a writer or as his public speaking self, Rushdie ended with "I chose the life I chose to tell stories."

The man is strangely charismatic in person. I have a feeling Padma might have had an effect on his fashion sense. Rushdie very charmingly was dressed in a quite dapper suit with red socks. His voice and accent, if I closed my eyes, I could quite attribute to a much younger, debonair man.

He's going to be at Emory the entire semester. On my way out, I overheard a current Emory student casually toss of that Rushdie would be visiting his creative writing class. I wonder if he truly comprehends the depth of the privilege he has or if he will look back years later in amazement and thump himself on the head for the opportunity he let pass by.

DWL pilots its YouTube channel

Exciting news! We've just taken a significant step to cementing our online presence as an international writers' community. With the soft launch of the new DWL/Papercuts channel on YouTube, we're looking to reach out to a wider audience and to promote our writers in a more diverse manner.

The experience of reading something, be it a poem, story or article, totally changes with some context or perspective. Audio-visual content provides both. We hope that supporting A/V material will make the content more accessible, easier to interpret and more interesting for readers.

Just to clarify: this is a pilot. We've only put two videos up so far and are gauging the response to them. If people like the concept, we will launch the channel formally and improve the production quality. The videos will always have an 'at home' feel to them, though, because we want to keep them real and to represent the true essence of amateur writing.

Go to http://www.youtube.com/user/DesiWritersLounge to check out the channel. AND DON'T FORGET TO CLICK ON THE 'LIKE' BUTTON!

Karachi Literature Festival – Day 1 contd.

By the end of the first day, the festival was running well behind schedule. Mics weren’t working, sessions were starting up to an hour late and audiences were getting fidgety. Fortunately, an amazing aura of excitement continued to surround the hotel, so while there was some annoyance amongst the festival goers, no one really cared for too long. In retrospect, it’s quite possible that the organizers just didn’t plan for so many people to attend the event and got overwhelmed with the response. Some of the sessions were crammed to maximum hall capacity, particularly the Works in Progress session at the end of the first day.

This session was going to be a crowd puller from the start. The US embassy, which was a major partner in organizing this year’s KLF, had brought together quite the celeb group at one table: Ali Sethi (The Wish Maker), Daniyal Mueenuddin (In Other Rooms, Other Wonders), H.M. Naqvi (Home Boy), M. Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes) and Sunil Sethi (The Big Book Shelf). I don’t think anyone was expecting anything really solid to come out of this little sitting; for most of the fans sitting there, it was probably just a chance to kill five birds with one stone. Considering that, one still managed to walk away with some interesting little nuggets from the aforementioned writers.

Ali Sethi was the youngest and the most intense member of the panel. Everything about him was geared to create an impression, from the stark rims on his glasses right down to the dramatic way in which he read out passages from texts about religious minorities in Pakistan. Evidently the writer still most concerned with ‘finding himself’, Sethi spoke passionately about the need to know one’s social reality and to figure out what one’s ‘social and economic inheritance’ was. His investigations into violence against religious minorities were driven by this same need to understand events as they unfolded around him; a process that his idealistic education abroad did not prepare him for, he said. Writing could help you decide what you believed in, said Sethi. This was an interesting turn from what one had normally heard, which was that you inevitably put to paper what already exists in your head and heart.

Daniyal Mueenuddin was by the far the most relaxed person sitting at the table. Leaning back comfortably for the most part, he listened with careful (though at times incredulous) attention to the rest of the panelists. He was adamant that writing was play for him – that he sat down to write when he wanted a break from real life. This stood out in sharp relief from the others’ descriptions of the writing process. M. Hanif, for example, spoke about the sense of loss that he felt when he was done writing a book: as if ‘an old friend or lover you’ve quarreled with every day has suddenly upped and left’. “I think all writers are mad,” Hanif grinned. “What kind of person sits in a corner and makes up stories and expects to be taken seriously?”

Sunil Sethi then followed with the opinion that all writing was ‘a hardship post’… by which point Mueenuddin, who’d clearly had enough of all the intensity, was compelled to sit up and disagree. Somehow, listening to him speak, one understood why he felt this way. Daniyal Mueenuddin’s work thrives on honesty and simple statements of fact. Nothing is strange in his world. The entire strength behind his debut novel was its easy, un-judging frankness. So yes, if I were to imagine Mueenuddin working at his desk, the image would not be of a tortured artist wringing his hands over the multiple layers of meaning hidden behind every sentence; it would be more a picture of a slightly relieved man writing his diary after a day of not quite being himself.

It was Hussain Naqvi who brought the whole picture back into perspective.“The production of prose becomes incidental,” he said. “Being a writer means negotiating life, family, making a living; and producing something that resonates within you as well as with others.” While Ali Sethi's write-or-die attitude was infectious and Mueenuddin's writing-is-play approach made sense, it was probably Naqvi's exposition of the process that summed up the reality of being a career writer most effectively.

Karachi Literature Festival - A DWLer's observations

This entry has been submitted by Hamdan Malik.

Day 1: Confused, anxious, even shivering slightly.

My first KLF sitting was the Zulfikar Ghose writing workshop, which was quite interesting even if more of a lecture than a workshop. Some of what he discussed had already been advised on the DWL forums. He encouraged writers to write with brevity and recklessness and insisted on avoiding generalization and abstract notions.

At the end of the session, I met Jalal, Batool, Afia and Faraz. After a few minutes of chitchat, they ordered lunch and I took a zuhar break.

Returned to attend “Kia Urdu parhney waley kam hotey ja rahe hain” late and was sure I won’t find a place to sit, but all went well for me since they'd had technical difficulties and were running a half hour late. 

The session started with Ms. Arfa Sayeda Zehra apologizing for the delay in very pure, refined Urdu. After a few initial remarks, she handed the floor to panel members - interrupting only when the discussion veered too far off its course. It was pointed out that regional languages were facing the same problems across the Indo-Pak region as Urdu; various causal factors were put to light. One of the problems noted was the print and binding method used here; others were more abstract like natural birth and death of languages.

Day 2: Ego, anger, compassion and conclusion.

"A talk on Sufism with a foreign majority panel... this should be interesting," I said to myself. It was interesting but to be honest I felt the only thing they did was to endorse contemporary mazaar culture and very safely ignored the real essence of tasawwuf . I had a question for Wasim Frembgen that I tried to ask in the lecture but they didn’t have the time to field it then.

Came back after Zuhar to find Afia distributing flyers. Then she had to buy a book and at the bookstall we bumped into fellow DWLer Madiha. We went back to the same table where we were sitting the day before and started chatting with some people who were sharing the table with us. They left after a while and we still hadn’t placed our order before Afia started running around again, trying to catch celebrities to milk interviews out of them. Finally, we had coffee and a short while later I spotted Wasim Frembgen and had my questions answered. It didn't change what I thought of the Sufism talk, but we finished off nicely with a walk to Karen Armstrong’s lecture.

We're Back!

So that didn't take too long! We're back online after having switched to our new host. The forums are up and running and within the next day or so, Papercuts will finally be available on its permanent address www.desiwriterslounge.net/papercuts.

Meanwhile, watch out for the next installment of Vol 7 material, coming your way on February 15th!

We are grateful for your patronage and your patience during the host switching.

- The DWL Team

Website down for maintenance

Hi everyone,

Just an update that the DWL website is undergoing maintenance right now. We hope to be back online within 24 hours. Till then, you can always head over to the temporary Papercuts site www.paper.takhleek.com and read the latest issue and comment on the pieces.

We'll see you soon!


The DWL Team

Karachi LitFest - Day 1

Well into the first half (okay, the first paragraph) of this blogpost, a nasty little strain of Karachi fever came around to make my acquaintance. It started with a pain in the legs that, in the subsequent delirium of the fever, was misdiagnosed by me as a blood sugar surge (this assessment also had something to do with the fact that I’d guiltily consumed half a tub of pure, Swiss chocolate ice cream just minutes earlier). It was only after I’d groaned to Shehla that I’d finally given myself diabetes and had started preparing for my final farewells that a well-timed cup of chai parted the heavy curtains of delirium and showed me that I was simply running a temperature.

Yes, Lipton can do that.

Anyway, the fever's been beat and we're back to the real blog entry! As we’d mentioned earlier, there was a DWL contingent at the Karachi Literature Festival 2011, which kicked off on the 5^th of February at the charming little Carlton Hotel in DHA Phase VIII. One look and you knew that the programme was an ambitious one. The organisers had divided the day into one-hour sessions running simultaneously across several of the hotel’s halls. This meant that attending one session almost always entailed missing out on another promising one, which was frustrating but also made one feel like one was pleasantly spoilt for choice.

It was evident that the ‘celebrity author’ card had been played to pull in the crowds and that the strategy had worked amazingly: an enormous number of people attended the event and there was a fantastic buzz throughout. The true success of a literature festival probably depends on its ability to create that vibe, trumping other more obvious indicators such as the number of books being launched or sometimes even the quality of the discussion. For two days, one could have contentedly sat in the central café area of the Carlton and soaked in the charged conversations for hours without getting bored or attending a single session. It also helped that after every twenty unknown faces you’d see a famous one. (I’m a celebrity junkie… now stop raising your eyebrow and move on.)

Those of us who were there the first day were excited about attending the creative writing workshop by Zulfikar Ghose. If you’re interested in creative writing, here are some of the lessons we took away from that session.

Probably the most valuable thing that Mr. Ghose tried to drum into our heads was to ditch the nonsense and get straight to the point. He spoke in some detail about the model of the traditional, well-made story as exemplified by Anton Chekhov’s work and shared some golden ‘rules’ of writing stories (all the while insisting that there were no rules, btw) that Chekhov himself had penned in his time.

The key thing about this form of writing is that it is pretension-free and doesn’t beat around the bush. Clarity and brevity are the order of the day, and the skillful storyteller is expected to steer clear of abstract words, generalizations and subjective assessments. Consequently, Mr. Ghose himself seemed to be a little wary of a stream of consciousness approach, which lends itself more easily to the dreaded abstractions, biases and generalizations that Chekhov warned against. He seemed to be more in favour of a good, old fashioned story, written with complete objectivity and brimming with expectation, continous action and ‘fluid movement’.

Not to worry, though, as achieving this is not as difficult as it sounds. Mr. Ghose made a simple and (I thought) utterly gorgeous articulation of what we as writers set out to do. In his opinion, writing is nothing more than a formula of language to understand the world around us. In other words, everything is an ongoing story… you just need to figure out how to get it down on paper. And for this, you don’t need an idea or a great Point to get started; you could just as well begin with an image. After that, stay with objective description and the rest will take care of itself, said Mr. Ghose. Aim for clear images, cliché-free messages and none of the tedium of lengthy, overly descriptive paragraphs.

The technique he suggested for this was to imagine that you, the writer, are a camera and that you can only see as much as the lens will show you. Move from character to object to situation, describing things as you see them. Weave background information into that description, thus allowing the reader to absorb the details at a subconscious level without being hammered over the head with them (we keep saying this on the DWL forums as well: show, don’t tell). Aim to create an image that will convey a larger story, basically, and that will give the reader subtle insights into the plot.

There’s a hilarious example here from a short story that he was reading out to the workshop group (A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor). The writer describes the character of the mother as ‘a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit's ears’. To compare a face to a cabbage was odd, to say the least, Mr. Ghose pointed out to us. But could she have done it any better? Probably not, in my humble opinion, because the cabbage says it all. It implies that the young woman’s face wasn’t radiantly innocent as the face of a saint may be, rather it was bland and insipid. Right from the first sentence on her, we get the feeling that this is a woman who lacks character. Another thing our workshop moderator pointed out was that no woman in the West would wear a head-kerchief unless she was bald (unlikely in this case as the woman was young) or her hair was unwashed! Suddenly, the young mother was sketched out clearly in front of us and we knew exactly what kind of person was being introduced here, all with the help of a cabbage reference and a hair accessory.

Mr. Zulfikar Ghose highly recommended reading O’Connor’s story, incidentally, as a perfect example of a narrative with continuous action. For an alternative look at restrained characterization, he pointed to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. As general reading, he suggested that any aspiring writers go through Henry James’ famous essay, titled The Art of Fiction.

Hope you enjoyed reading this and got something out of it. God knows it took long enough to write! Next we’ll be posting a more informal entry by Hamdan Malik, one of our DWLers who was present at the festival and who proved amazingly adept at dragging unwilling waiters to our table to take down the order!

This Business of Books - KLF 2011

The Karachi Literature Festival (5^th and 6^th February 2011) has followed fast on the footsteps of its counterpart in Jaipur and, some say, has held its own against larger, better funded literary events elsewhere in the sub-continent. With an impressive array of authors in attendance even in its nascent stages (Kamila Shamsie, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Ali Sethi, Hussain Naqvi, Mohammad Hanif and Mohsin Hamid, to name a handful), the festival has boldly sent out an important message to the literary community within and outside Pakistan: We can do this, and we can do it well.

The festival is being attended by a contingent from DWL, mainly: Hamdan Malik, Jalal Habib Curmally, Batool Habib, Afia Aslam, Faraz Mirza and Madiha Riaz. Perhaps more than a learning experience, this has been a fantastic networking opportunity for DWL and Papercuts. We have distributed our signature yellow flyers promoting Vol. 7 and have brought the magazine to the attention of many authors at the event, ranging from the newbies on the scene to the biggest names in the industry. 

Keep watching this space for news on how the festival went! We're going to start compiling it for you as soon as it rolls to an end on Sunday, the 6th of February.

Thank you, DWL.

It was my birthday on the 17th. My husband's family was here, and he decided to take on a DIY project for the weekend. We are the people who laze in front of the TV on Saturdays, put off doing laundry until we can see the bottom of our drawers (no pun intended), and call a plumber for fishing out a nail out of the sink. A DIY project in this house presented itself like a looming disaster. And this is not just any project I am talking about. It's not like he was planning to hammer some nails and hang our pictures, not at all - a monkey could do that. My husband, ladies and gentlemen, was planning to put tiles all over the kitchen walls above the granite counters to create a dazzling backsplash. Aaaaarrrgh!!!

So, the project began on the 15th. The boys made several trips to Home Depot, selected tiles and grout, and began putting adhesive on the walls, christened chipkum by our cousin, between annoying sessions of FIFA on PS3, endless cups of chai, and loud, harmless cursing. By the time the chipkum was done, it was the 16th, and my kitchen was in complete and utter chaos. At this point, they started to press down the tile sheets on chipkum while I was cooking a birthday feast...wait for it...for myself! Yes, I was, in fact, required to cook a feast for the entire family on my birthday to celebrate. Charming, right? God bless our cousin's wife, she did most of the cooking while the boys showed mock annoyance and worked around us. At midnight, a wannabe black forest cake from a chain grocery store was cut by yours truly. All of us looked like construction workers. Grout was all over our clothes and all over my kitchen counters (gasp!), the chai was still flowing freely, and of course, FIFA was still being played.

Such was my birthday celebration. Imagine my surprise then, when I logged on to DWL on the morning of my birthday and found AMAZING, beautiful, thoughtful, absolutely wonderful birthday wishes from the mods and members. It REALLY made my day, guys. All of a sudden, it was OK that I was working like crazy on my birthday, cleaning up wretched dried-up grout from the newly installed tiles. My arms were ready to fall off, but it was all good - DWL loves me - and that made it all bearable.

Almost a week later, I am sitting in my living room. My husband is STILL cleaning the grout. We are almost ready to seal the tiles, and in two hours, my kitchen will look amazing.

For this difficult birthday and horrible week, I thank you, DWL. The 'Lounge has been with me through some grave times; this last week was one of the "insignificantly troublesome" variety, but I would have pulled my hair out if it weren't for DWL and Papercuts.

Brimming with love,

N.

Papercuts Volume 7 is out!

This is going to be short and sweet:

Volume 7 of our biannual magazine is now available. We've all worked really hard to revamp the magazine, and we're hoping you will enjoy reading it. Don't forget to comment on any pieces you might like.

Go to www.desiwriterslounge.net and click on the Papercuts tab to read!

Delusions of grandeur

The first time we were going back to India after moving to the States, in the summer of ’97, my father declared that I was allowed one pair of jeans, one pair of sneakers and a shirt to travel in. My attire after landing in India was to be salwar kameezes, lenghas and long skirts. As a fifteen year old and a part of the 1.5 immigrant generation growing up in NYC, I cracked a few smart ass comments at my father’s dictate, but didn’t fight it too much. See, this wasn’t worth beating my already sore hands on the drums of teenagedom caught in the middle of the immigrant experience. I could mouth off to mom and dad, insist on my independence, rail against the stereotypes they attempted to impose on me and generally be an Indian version of the bratty American teen (where, really, my parents got off quite easy) all in the safety of my life in Queens. Being on Indian soil, however, wasn’t reality; it was vacation, where what happened in India, stayed in India. For a month or so while we visited family, I could play pretend and be the Sati Savitri type if that’s what my family wanted.

While in India, I never made an attempt to explain my life in NYC to my family members. Maybe it was sheer selfishness on my part of wanting to avoid the lectures on how I’m still Indian even though I live in America that came with opening up with my conservative family about my life in NYC. Staying general usually worked best: yes, school was good; yes, I still remember how to speak Kannada; yes, I do have Indian friends. I smiled a lot, I ate a lot, I wore what they wanted me to wear and I wrote in my journal a lot. I was polite, respectful and most of all, just plain quiet. We never discussed anything deep and certainly nothing related to sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.

My writing, however, has never been quiet. I will break my personality into pieces for the various different compartments of my life, but my writing is one place where I live, whole and complete with total honesty. It never concerned me in the past that when I get published (yes, I said it - when, dammit, when), as a creative non-fiction writer, I would be laying my life out for public consumption. With my immediate family, I began to hang the family’s dirty laundry out to dry starting at 16, so it would be nothing new to them. Everything else, I justified. My parents are so closeted about their lives that it’s not like their friends and acquaintances would recognize me as the child of someone they know. My extended family in India – well, I’ll just make sure the book never gets translated into Kannada and besides, how are one brown woman’s words ever going to travel across the ocean anyway? It’s tough enough getting published and being known locally.

What I hadn’t counted on was technology shortening the distance between my lived reality and the person I pretended to be to keep the peace with my extended family. Before, there were phone calls between NYC and India where surface words lay like sweet, sickly icing on top of a cake. Now, there are emails and Facebook updates between my life and my cousins’ in India. With the internet came Google and Facebook and off they ran, snatching my delusions that my writing and my life could be kept separate from my extended family in India.

While working with Noor to edit a short piece of mine for volume 7 of Papercuts, towards the end of the process, I realized I hadn’t changed one of the characters’ name. That realization broad-sided me as I realized I was telling quite an intimate tale that involved people other than myself. With Papercuts accessible online and subject to Google’s tentacles, there’s a possibility that my cousins in India would now have access to that part of me that I hid from them. (Sidenote: I’ve seen the re-designed website for Papercuts and it rocks. It’s shaped up to be quite a strong representation of the talent at Desi Writers Lounge. You all should be uber-excited!)

There was a brief moment where I considered breathing into a paper bag, but then the writer in me, the one who has always had the backbone, snarked, “Well, then you either better hope they never find it; hope that if they find it, they’ll understand; or if they read it and don’t understand, then you better get ready to deal with the fall out - because this story is getting told.” After another dirty look thrown at the hyperventilating pansy, the writer strode off to start penning the continuation of her story.

Plans for the Resource Board

Our team was extremely excited about the resource board when it was launched last year. We are very pleased with the exercises that some of you participated in, specifically the ones featured in "Breaking the Block." I find those to be very helpful and now that the content for volume 7 has been finalized, which we are all completely in love with, I will be making frequent appearances on the forums in order to encourage everyone to write more.

I will be introducing an interesting new dimension as well. I am taking a course here at Stanford titled "This is your life: Personal Stories in Poetry and Prose" and I am eager to share all that I learn with DWL members. We all write personal stories in our poems and stories from time to time. Even if we think a subject has nothing to do with our own lives, we can often trace back the roots of a piece to one personal experience or observation. This is why I am eager to take this course. Not only will I learn how to pen down personal experiences, I will also rediscover ways to critique such writing. I know we run into critique disagreements frequently. Keep your eye out for tips regarding helpful and honest critique in "The Critic."

Another plan for the resource board is to post more of the classics in "The Critic" for discussion. I know we touched upon a few pieces, just brushed the surface of them, really, but I plan to update that thread with more short stories and poems for us to critique and discuss. I have some of my favorite and widely enjoyed authors and poets on the list. So stay tuned.

Finally, guess what?! It's January - beginning of the year, which means there will be a lot more competitions to look forward to. Keep checking "Publication Avenues" for updates. I encourage all of you to send your work to these competitions. Usually there is a nominal non-refundable reading fee, but consider it a creative investment. Remember, we are all here to critique and polish your work so it is in its best shape. Please post your entries on the forums and wait for your peers to comment before submitting to a journal/competition. More often than not, you will find that critique on the forums will make your work more competitive.

A special scoop: there are a few other major plans we are working on, including but not limited to another writing competition. More on this later.

All of you who are able to make it to the DWL Reading and PaperCuts Pre-Launch Event, have fun. It has taken a huge effort to bring this together and our team in Pakistan has been working tirelessly to arrange it. If you are able to attend this event, please do! And don't forget to contact Shehla to let her know that you'll be there.

I am getting super excited for all these new plans, and I better get to work now so I can deliver all that I promised above.

See you on the forums!

Happy New Year

Happy New Year, everyone.

I can't believe it's 2011. Babies born in nineteen ninety are going to turn twenty one this year. I feel ancient. I am a mid-eighties baby myself and really detest the ugly hairstyles and questionable fashion trends associated with my decade. But really, my decade was the nineties, the late nineties particularly when I finished school. Ah, those last few years in an all-girls missionary school were full of day-dreaming teenagers. The poster boys were Shahid Afridi (he still is a hero, was just younger and clean-shaven back then), Shahrukh Khan ("Kuch kuch hota hai, Anjali. Tum nahi samjho gi" and "Senorita, aisay baray baray shehron mein aisi choti choti baatein hoti rehti hain" - eww, and yes, I still remember these lines!), The Backstreet Boys (I thought they were horrible, frankly), and the ones who wanted to be really "different" liked Saqlain Mushtaq/Shoaib Akhtar, 'N Sync/Boyzone, and Amir Khan/Salman Khan. Sigh, ten years after graduating, I still think my world at that time was perfect for the fifteen-year-old me.

I remember these trivial details well. There was no fear, no worry, just a normal and healthy childhood. When I called home this morning from the warm comfort of my commuter train, my thirteen-year-old brother answered. After exchanging pleasantries he said, "Do you know Salman Taseer was assassinated today?"
"Yes," I said. "It's horrible."
"Not so horrible for me. I get a day off from school tomorrow," said my brother.
Both my sister who was sitting near him, and I, a world across from him said "Shahzil! Someone DIED! Should you be saying this?"
"Sorry, sorry," said my brother, completely non-committal.
How's it possible to think this way? Did I have the same mentality as a child? Granted he is twelve years younger than me, but in that moment this morning, I felt decades older. I have never felt so distant from him before.

In this situation, who do you blame? We've both had the same parenting, same facilties, similar schooling. The circumstances, however, of our respective childhood are different. When I was his age, I never heard a bomb blowing up my neighborhood marketplace. I didn't ride my bike across the carnage. My mother didn't go looking for me frantically in the street because she had heard hand grenades going off two roads down our house. My brother has seen and experienced all this in his thirteen summers. He has switched three schools to be closer to home. He has lost distant family members in street violence, bombings, and suicide attacks. His mother and uncle have been robbed multiple times at gunpoint. He has seen two monumental natural disasters in his country: the earthquake and the floods, along with the mass migration of internally displaced persons. His parents and sisters are paranoid about his safety. All this has led him to treat death as something trivial, an everyday occurrence. Something about his childhood is lost and damaged. He has grown up too fast, too soon. His eyes have hardened and narrowed. I don't see the mischief in them that was so apparent when he was five and was waving goodbye to me at Lahore International Airport in 2003.

It is two thousand and eleven, everyone. My little brother will turn fourteen this year. When I was as old as him, I was writing really bad poetry inspired by nineties Bollywood. They are horrible poems, but my childhood was beautiful enough to turn me into a poet. Hopefully we can all make an extra effort this year and do what we can to improve the world we live in. Resolve to make the world better in any way you can. Go green, even if it involves a small change like switching to paper bags. Write a small check for a charity every month this year - every dollar helps. Blog about what you see around you, raise awareness for the causes you believe in. Write to make someone's life better, even if it is for an instant. Put a smile on someone's face even if you have to contribute a joke to a local paper. This year, don't make colossal commitments. Start small. Do something for someone else. A tiny little thing. And see where it takes you.

Happy New Year from all of us at DWL. Sorry for the sadness, but some days laughter eludes me after the first paragraph.

Best wishes.

Papercuts Pre-Launch Meeting/Reading

Exciting news! We're holding a small reading in Islamabad next week to promote the next volume of PaperCuts! Kuch Khaas has graciously agreed to host us on January 4th, but we HAVE to be certain of the number of people in attendance! If you are planning on being there, please get in touch via email at shehla(at)desiwriterslounge(dot)net. This event is not open to the public, so get in touch with us if you want to attend! (And to get the details, of course).

DWL Update

It has been a while since the blog was updated, and in case you're wondering what happened, here's your answer: shortlisting and editing for volume 7 of PaperCuts is in full swing!

This means the editorial team is working hard at putting together the content, and not really focusing on blogging too much :) We are super excited at how the thematic content is coming together. There are several wonderful articles in store for you in the next issue, and of course, we will be featuring prose and poetry from the forums as well. In the coming week, the DWL members whose pieces have been selected for editing will be getting emails from the editors, so if you are on the forums, make sure your email address with us is current.

We're also looking forward to sharing with you the brand new look for PaperCuts, which is being finalized by the creative team as we...type.

So, as you wait for January to roll around, why not come up with some suggestions for next issue's theme? We would love to hear from you!

Translations

posted by Noor

We recently posted Mohammad Umer Memon's interview conducted by chapatimystery.com on the DWL forums. I was particularly intrigued by the quality of work he has translated from Urdu to English. I have always felt that literature in Urdu is overwhelmingly rich - like the arable lands of the country it originates from.

I grew up reading books and short stories in Urdu - literature that was perhaps more suited for an adult than a child. My parents, both writers by profession, maintained an overbearing library - a room with an imposing desk, carefully decorated with fountain pen holders and crystal paperweights, rocking chairs, floor pillows, sketches of writers, my parents' awards, and wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling shelves overflowing with books and magazines. From a very early age, I began to know names like Bano Qudsia, Nazir Ahmad, Ishfaq Ahmad, Qurat-ul-ain Haider, Imtiaz Ali Taj, and the like. I devoured these books just like I ate up every last word of Dickens, Shakespeare, and Eliot.

I remember, I was in the library once, and my father came in and saw me with one of Manto's anthologies. "Perhaps this is better suited to a young lady's tastes," he said and extended a copy of Mira'at-ul-Uroos towards me. "After you're done with this one," he said pointing to the book I was holding. Manto is nothing if not controversial. But so layered is his work that I find something new and rather chilling every time I read one of his stories. So rich with metaphors - there was this one story in which a man collects empty cans and bottles and ends up marrying someone who looks like an empty bottle after getting rid of his collection. Sigh! I have butchered it. If you have not read Manto, READ MANTO! His work contains perhaps the most powerful social commentary that I have ever read. Alas! I digress.

I slowly discovered poetry in Urdu, too. I cannot claim to fully understand Ghalib and Iqbal, but took a particular liking to Mir Dard and Mir Taqi Mir. Contemporary Urdu poetry opened up to me like a ball of yarn running loose around the house. The romance in Parveen Shakir's work took me through my angst ridden adolescence. I found thehrao, control, clam (how would I translate this?!) particularly in Mansoora Ahmad's work. Gulzar's "Chand Pakhraj Ka" remains a favorite to this day.

There is such a wealth of Urdu literature in our country - both classic and contemporary - and it's tragic that many in our generation are not familiar with it. In a time when Urdu is no longer the fashionable or cultured language to speak, Mohammad Umer Memon is translating books and short stories from Urdu to English to introduce the depth of human emotion, understanding, and wisdom contained in them.

It's unfortunate that I, too, living in a world where Urdu is seldom recognized as a language in existence, let alone spoken or read, am losing my command over it. Sometimes, I find myself wondering how a word is spelled - if it uses "tay" or "tuaein." Small, everyday battles to keep a little bit of my roots alive. For people who are not familiar with the richness that is in the works of authors who write in Urdu, Memon comes as a fresh breeze, a rescuer of the ignorant. More importantly, he is an ambassador of literature written in Urdu and is a voice that reaches everyone in the world and proclaims: "This is how we do it!"

Currently reading: Harper Collins Book of Urdu Short Stories by Mohammad Umer Memon.

Get a copy!

How to Tackle Writer's Block (By Indirection!)

posted by Noor

We have all encountered this beast at some point in our writing careers. Sometimes you can fight it head-on; other times you have to cheat it, find a way around it, and give it a surprise defeat.
These techniques may work for you!

1. Start with Chapter Two. Pretend that you have already given all the background information about your characters. Start writing the second chapter.

2. Dessert First. When you're just writing, write the delicious parts, write the parts that you like.

3. Resist the rapture of research. Stay away from Google, the library, reference books. Look up information later. Write now.

4. A good idea that doesn't happen is no idea at all.

5. XX factor. When you don't know a fact about your story, don't stall to ponder it. Put XX there and move on. When you are ready, go back and fill the gaps later.

6. Listen to your characters. How do you know who they are?

7. Interview your characters.

8. Take a shoebox and put physical things in it that remind you of your character. For example, you see an easy chair in a catalog and your character should be sitting in that chair or you can imagine him/her sitting in it, cut it out and put it in the box.

9. What if? Ask creative what if questions that might just jump start your story.

10. Even if you feel like life is interfering with your writing, remember that you need that life and its activities in order to write.

11. Banish the devil on your shoulder - the critical voice. You need a critical voice at some point, but certainly not when you're blocked.

12. Write letters. Besides being an emotional catharsis, it also leaves you with a bank of emotions that you can withdraw from later.

13. Responsive writing. Keep asking yourself questions, they can be random questions, and keep answering them. Question-answer loop on a page to break out of the block answer by answer.

14. The Hemingway Technique. Hemingway often stopped writing at a high point, frequently even in the middle of a sentence. Instead of writing and writing until you get stuck so that the next day you're dreading the point where you left of, you should perhaps stop when you are in the zone and you're loving to write, so that you will be looking forward to the writing the next day.

15. Sometimes writer's block is a message to you that you have picked something inherently wrong to write about - emotions, material, characters, voice, it can be anything. Once you have recognized and acknowledged this message, the writer's block becomes a building block.

16. Sometimes the silence of the black screen is really a shout - it's the silence of incubation.

Useful Resources, Good Books, Websites:
JEFF HERMAN'S GUIDE
Publisher's marketplace http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/
Halldor Laxness - Independent People
Art of Racing in the Rain - Garth Stein
Enzo - book written from the perspective of a dog - Garth Stein
http://theopening.org/
What If?: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers - Anne Bernays, Pamela Painter
The Paris Review Interviews (3 volumes)
Bird by Bird - Some Instructions on Writing and Life - Anne Lamott

My friend: The Social Media

posted by Ayesha

The ever changing social media vs. the conventional word of mouth advertising was the debate I read recently on a blog. Not a known blog, just a random rant of an advertising professional who had retired to blogging to pass his time.
On most of these blogs that analyze the impact of social media, while the writers rave on about the role of tweets in changing the world to a well informed, well read contruct; I read on for some heady stimulation that will tell me something I don’t already know.
Or something that I have not already read (Not that I am suggesting I am a reading addict, far from it actually - just imagine my disappointment thus).
Maybe I am jaded but then I know this for sure, from the blogs that I follow to the Facebook likes that I love to click on, I am yet to find a real place for social media in my world.
Other than filling my free moments, I have yet to see if it really fits the role of a life changing, an opinion shaping, an earth shatteringly strong/ mild dose of information inject that it is perceived to be by the analytics. Does it shape my opinion? Yes.
But I don’t think I can *share* it yet. Maybe I can do it on the next Tweet that catches my attention.
But then that’s the whole point. Social media is offering us freedom and superfluous socializing opportunities.
The idea behind this particular article that I read was about interaction having become two way through the medium. One relevant point that I am all for; of course it’s all about clicking submit.
The writer managed to convince me that conventional advertising through word of mouth was in an incomplete campaign in itself. The consumers when now have the chance to use a product and then comment on it, have the power to now change the dimension of advertising completely. I totally agree.
What I do have a problem with is the fuss that is being made about the social media in the process. Fully aware of the fact that it is a medium that cannot be controlled in any of its dimensions, how much can we trust an entity that is absolutely free?
I understand how one relevant opinion piece by Fasi Zaka is repetitively *shared* on facebook for that mere percentage of our youth who can read and ARE able to connect on FB.
I also appreciate how it serves to highlight an issue that would probably not find its due share of attention on traditional media. bBut what happens to an anonymous writer who makes a point and is not able to put it on an authentic blog; does he/ she find h/is/er trust with the reader? Just a random thought.
In his 3 dimensional advertising theory, the writer talked about the content spreading like a wild fire. I then wondered about the fires that do spread in our part of the country.
The wondering being that I am, I couldn’t help but also wonder about the use of the word ‘wild’ by the author.
How wild is the news we read on social media. Oh better yet, how wild are we to believe it? And how many of us are wild enough to write it? Okay that last question is perhaps better left unanswered.
While I am ABLE to comprehend the power of social media in the small, budding life of the PR industry in my country where literacy is little and internet penetration a small seed; I often think about how significant is social media for us?
Here I am referring to the US - Us who are the elistist facebookers and are linked on the In. With our supersonic broadband / wiresless connections, we who are the real people affected by the social media in this time and place, WE - who can read and write and rewrite. Wonder some more and then wonder again.
I am wondering still.
In the PR industry where I am a professional content developer, I understand and realize the constraints that research resources of the noble social media bring with them. When I speak of constraints here, they are not lack of speed or how I cannot stream enough. They are a wee bit more complicated than that.
For one, authenticity of content is such a huge issue for people like moi that I’d probably never be able to whine enough about it. Maybe someone else out there can scream for me.
While having the internet is such a great blessing, Google being the best thing that happened to man since the telephone, I am also faced with the downside of the blessing.
In the big bad world of internet, for me nothing is real and nothing is safe. Everything I see is a creation (not always in a good way) or a re- creation and I don’t mean recreation there.
With all due respect to inspirational writers on the social media and the analytics of its impact, I believe that the this untamed world belongs to an intelligent user/ writer/ reader.
A person who understands that not everything on the social media can be *shared*. Not everything is credible and not everything is correct.
I don’t believe we can entirely keep up with the pace of the changing phenomenon but what we can do is be a part of it. However little is the feedback we can provide, we must do our part at least. Interactivity could be the key.
One thing to note is the communication we make - It reflects on us, on what we portray; the world of internet is only visual, a little care to choose the interaction could go a long way. Choosing the interaction means two things:
One - Choose a platform that helps you.
Two - Choose your words wisely.
When the flood relief news broke on the channels, I was already a little informed because of the industry I am in, but the way the information spread over blogs, Facebook and websites gave me a fair idea of what a wild fire actually is.
The same content that I had prepared was all over Facebook and telecom blogs. Even now I see it being replicated and pasted, even in places I wouldn’t want to be seen but there it is. I have no control and little control is what drives this form of media. Whether I like it or not it is *shared*. A great way to make noise but is noise all we want to make?
So while I am jaded and a little old fashioned, a wee bit wary of the content I find on my RSS feeds and a little fed up for the lack of real NEWS on news feeds, I am a little hopeful too.
Maybe the social media will evolve into some kind of a process or an institution in itself. It is possible that we will give birth to the intelligent user who will not be carried away in the fire but use its warmth and light to see the way.
And carry it too. More power to interactivity and a little wisdom to us - the users!

On The Dock

posted by Jalal

- in which the author discovers a new condition to his life, attempts to develop a whole new communicable disease, tries to change, is targeted by Halliburton, out does the Pakistani Cricket Team, takes a hike and socks it to big Pharma.

It starts innocuously enough.
There’s a pounding in my head, my vision is swirling, I have a shooting pain in the left side of my chest and three fingers in my left arm go instantly numb. So I chalk it up to:
a. Stress
b. Bad posture (damn those office chairs)
c. Last night’s, not-gas-attack-inducing-at-all, masala daal fry
d. The horrible project briefing my team is giving me
Until it gets scary and my colleagues are staring with giant ‘O’s at my face.
“Eeeerrr…boss?”
His voice is a whisper in the thundering now emanating from my ears.
“What?”
“You look pale,” my colleagues have a gift for understatement I discover.
And from that moment, from my desk to the emergency room, it took only twenty minutes to be introduced to the rest of my life as a blood pressure patient.

My dad was using the car when I called for it so he came along for the ride. Distinguished elderly gentleman that he is, the doctors and orderlies all assumed that it was he I was accompanying and not the other way around. So they all looked at me funny as I lay down on the bed when the doctor ordered, ‘Will the patient please lie down!’
‘What’s the issue?’ says he.
‘I feel funny,’ Says me.
‘Oh holy crap! Why are you not dead?’ says he, ‘You call this a BP?’

British Petroleum has instructed me inform you that they disavow all knowledge of the unnatural disaster that is this post and besides…it was all Halliburton’s fault anyway.

Halliburton at this stage have also instructed me to inform you that nothing is ever their fault. Nothing. Whatsoever. SAY IT BITCH! OR THE US ARMY WILL BOMB AND OCCUPY YOUR DILLHOLE!

You know you have a serious problem when your heart has a higher score than the entire Pakistani Cricket tea…DAMN YOU CRICKETING SCANDAL! NOW I CANT EVEN BE SURE OF MY JOKES ANY MORE! And here I had this awesome joke about how my BP hit 190 over 140…higher than our cricket team’s batting average.
HOW DO I KNOW! HOW DO I KNOW THEY WEREN’T MATCH FIXING THAT DAY TOO! Dirty Buggers.

The doctor in the emergency room put me on BP meds and gave me tranqs and told me to just lie there and go to sleep. Three hours later…I’m still not asleep. The doctor looks at the monitor and says that if the numbers don’t go down soon, I’m getting hospitalized. They go down. I go home. Word travels that Jalal was in an emergency room for three hours. Everyone, family and friends, gathers at my house that night, all concern for my brush with high blood pressure and soothe down me frazzled nerves and racing pulse with such comforting homilies like,

‘YOU GET A STROKE IF YOUR LOWER FIGURE GOES OVER 110!’
‘IT’S A SILENT KILLER, YOU KNOW THAT!’
‘BLOOD PRESSURE KILLS MORE PEOPLE THAN CANCER, AIDS AND RERUNS OF DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES! COMBINED!’
‘DUDE CAN I HAVE YOUR XBOX WHEN YOU DIE?’

What followed were constant trips to the doc’s to figure out the optimal chemical concoction that is to keep my BP within normal ranges and out of the stratosphere. And doctor’s room conversations with my beloved like the one below:

‘No salt.’
‘Really…just a little…from time to time’
‘NO!’
‘FUCK!’
‘Mind your language. And don’t get upset. You have high BP! You’ll pop a blood vessel! What will I do then?’
‘Well I wouldn’t be on edge if you let me eat a little salt.’
At this stage the doctor feels she needs to interject to prevent my then fiancé now wife from killing me with kindness and worry, ‘Actually, he can eat normal food salt. Just don’t sprinkle on more on the top like you have been doing…’
‘HAH! See?’
‘Shut up Mr. 190 over 140.’
‘Are you sure you two aren’t already married…?’

And injunctions from all and sundry that the best thing for BP is constant exercise and the Miracle of all Miracle exercises, God alone knows how we ever lived without it, was…
Prepare yourselves
It may sound like crazy talk
The miracle, universal panacea, the Holy Grail cure for-every-frakkin’-thing is….

…Walking!

Doesn’t it strike you as strange as how the healing powers of tramping up and down are touted as nothing short of miraculous? Or that over 30 odd years of education to become a highly qualified physician and ‘talking a walk’ is the best that you can do for a patient? What next will you be prescribing?
‘Doctor! I’m Dying!’
‘Quick! Take two Nikes and one Reebok then call me in the morning!’

Well after spending 10 minutes circumnavigating the Aunty ridden walkways of Hilal Park, I called up my beloved, then fiancé now wife, and said,
‘Hi Baby! Guess what. I’m off to go shoot myself! Love you. Bye!’
And then life has since settled into a comfortable rhythm. I take my meds, watch what I eat and walk regularly…
Okay. Semi Regularly.
Okay. I walk sometimes.
FINE! I THINK about walking sometimes!
Oh have it your way Mr.Factanista! I lounge on my ass all day and play computer games in the evening and call it exercise. Happy?

And the BP has not been that bad to live with. It could have been much worse. Sure I have my episodes when I push myself or am irregular with my rest. Some days I wake up feeling low and like I’ve been running. The numbers are 150 over 110 and the office gets a phone call from me, ‘Hi team. I’m not coming in today because I’m sick. Don’t do anything that could make me get sicker. Just do what I’ve told you to do. Don’t use your heads too much and remember that I will yell at you if I see you haven’t used your heads at all. Enjoy figuring that out. Bye!’
I am now doing my best to turn high BP into the world’s first disease communicable over cell phone.
No Twitter, I am not talking about you.
At one point, when my episodes kept coming with more frequency, it was time to go get a professional consult. The cardiologist pooh poohed it and told me to get an ECG. That resulted in a rather humorous episode involving a cell phone, two tubes of Anne French, Magic Carpet Rides and perhaps the most bizarre trip to the loo I’ve ever taken.
The ECG is clear so the doctor advises that I quit smoking,
Oh yeah! Absolutely. Tomorrow.
That I keep up with regular walks
Uh huh. Yup. As soon as there comes out an XBOX Walk. Till then…will lots of guitar hero do?
And that I maintain a Zen like calm and inner peace to manage my stress.
Now those of you who know me also know that in my head I am much akin to the hyperactive squirrel from Ice Age, on speed, and crack, with ADD, trying to decide between the world’s biggest pile of nuts or Mad Donkey Stud Monkey sex.
But methinks I have discovered the ultimate groove to mellow out in. Once in that groove not even work can harsh my calm, bro.
It has to do with the Missus. I can come home raging like a lion, pace the floor like a tiger and tirade against the world like Hitler addressing Berlin. Then all she needs to do is go,
‘Aw Poor Baby! Did yoo haz a bad day?’
I pout.
‘Aaaawww,’ she melts. ‘Did the big bad world eated your cookie?’
‘It did! It did eated my cookie.’
‘C’mere!’ she holds out her arms…
…
Hah! Suck on THAT big Pharma!