Passionate about ordinary things, like how ingredients become food – that detail was included in the winning story told at the Moth event I attended last week. The detail was in reference to the storyteller’s friend (the subject of their piece), and I felt a kinship because of that choice; I too am passionate about […]
I recorded my boro chacha’s stories about the Liberation War one hot summer afternoon in the village house in Kushtia. We went into his private room with the fan turned on, but it was still sweltering; every few seconds I would swat at a giant fly that had swirled in too close to the recorder, […]
When you’re a kid, you cherry-pick the best stories about your family to make them seem grand. I’m still seduced by the tales of immediate family having hijacked trains and defected from the army, given the first contraception lessons in the village or immigrating across multiple continents. As a result, some of my own life […]
Here is a quick-writing experiment I did with describing scenery through a child’s perspective. The houses turned to tiny islands whenever it was rainy season. They flooded the fields, fortified the side walls, and hunkered down under tin roofs to listen to the plink plink and gush of raindrops, signaling that Allah had blessed them […]
This Friday Fiction is (mercifully) short, as to test out the power of a few sentences – enjoy! She watched the bubbles escape from her nose and break for the surface, making tiny rainbows with the light from the sun. It would be so easy, she thought, to just keep pushing downward and let all […]
Ok, so it’s technically a little late to be called Friday Fiction, but if you’ll forgive me a few hours, here’s the start of my next writing project: She woke to the sound of house geckos meeting on the top of her mosquito net. They looked down on her with their beady eyes and […]
Going with a trend on Twitter, I’m going to start posting some of my fiction work on – you guessed it – Fridays. Here’s the first installment of a short story that I’m working on: When the moment was right, Sera snatched the paper crane right out of Sister’s hand. Indifferent to the gasp and […]
Last week, I had the fabulous opportunity to attend not one, but two literary events in NYC: The Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe Friday night slam and The Moth’s StorySlam at the Brooklyn Museum. After getting a healthy dose of Snoop Dogg, I took a 180 degree turn in my live entertainment consumption. And, to put it […]
Jezabelle threw her needles across the chair and hurled herself down after them. The faint scent of his cigarette breath was still on the pillows. She tossed them away and sighed.She was lonely.There was no other way to say it, no sugarcoated term to make everything better – all the girls had figured it out […]
As a writer, I am constantly filling up pages and pages and files and files and scraps and scraps of notes, poems, memories, paragraphs and stories. I guess I don’t think about it too much at the time, because I always feel that there is something propelling me forward into the next sentence or the […]