How quickly the news moves.
Since I sent out yesterday’s letter, events of the past week in Afghanistan are already being overtaken. A bombing in Kabul airport that killed at least thirteen U.S. service members and more than a hundred Afghans was claimed to have been committed by a local offshoot of ISIS. Graeme Wood writes here about how the U.S., the Taliban, and ISIS-K play off one another—“[I]n the short term the Taliban are America’s allies in finishing its evacuation.” Biden has said, “We will hunt you down and make you pay.”
And so the loop continues.
Just a reminder that the first part of this dispatch is here. This, the second, is more of a storyteller’s handbook.
A writer on the road
With Afghanistan in the news, a look back at May Jeong’s piece from 2014 about what it was like living and reporting in the country, in a different time:
In candour, I should mention that I do not cover war. I report on the detritus of war, and write about a society whose drama happens to be unfolding just as a war rages on in the background. Which is to say, my day-to-day life is not dangerous by any measure (Hi, mom!). I wake up in the morning. I make myself eggs, tea, and retreat to a study that is equipped with fast-ish Internet. In the afternoon, I might set out with a translator to do some reporting, attend a press conference. Then perhaps yoga. Some foreigners have stopped, but I still go grocery shopping—at a local grocer for fresh produce and a supermarket for processed goods, some of which we assume have fallen off the back of NATO trucks. At night, the dwindling mass of expats gets together for drinks. Someone makes a toast. There may not be ice or lemon for your gin-and-tonic, but for the most part, life in the Afghan capital is like life in any other capital. Sure, bombs go off, and gunfights ensue. Many who have stayed say that it’s only a matter of time, a fact of probability, before you have a near miss. And yet, being on the ground is different from what the news leads you to believe. At times, yes I am seized by fear, but I certainly don’t live mired in it.
In 2018, things had already changed. That year, she wrote, in a story about a suicide bombing that claimed an Afghan friend:
It was jarring, as we spoke, to measure the distance between the living and the dead, and to realize that the distance was much shorter than we cared to admit. […] That math is what had eventually persuaded me to leave Afghanistan, in 2017. When I returned to Kabul, this past winter, I was struck by how much more violent the city had become. Things I used to do without ceremony—going shopping at the nearby market, taking local taxis, exchanging pleasantries with neighbors on the street where we lived—now seemed like impossibly foolish acts.
How we make sense of the world & tell its stories
I wrote an essay on Tim Hannigan’s Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys in Search of a Genre for The Mekong Review, thinking about what journalism can and can’t bring to what I would prefer to call “place writing” (if only it sounded less awkward):
In Hannigan’s consideration of journalism’s role in travel writing, there seems a missed opportunity in not considering the blurred boundaries between the latter and ‘foreign’ correspondence, which occupies a place that has similarly come under scrutiny. In any case, there is an important distinction in travel writing that is central to its survival as a separate genre: travel writers have the licence to be more imaginative, which does not include making things up. To paraphrase an essay of Thomas Swick’s, they can be interpreters of landscapes: two writers can observe the same set of facts but come to completely different conclusions. That’s where the magic of travel writing lies. And that’s why it’s so important that travel writers come from diverse backgrounds. Subramaniam hopes that, one day, we’ll have more travellers from the ‘third world’ writing about the ‘first world’, not just the other way around.
The Hamburg Portfolio Review’s conversation with Filipina Hannah Reyes Morales, a Nat Geo photographer, on how she works in surroundings often considered inhospitable to women:
I worked in the wire for a while, where there was a lot of pressure to be very masculine, you know, you gotta be a tough guy here, you gotta show how badass you are and all of that. And I did that, I tried that, and then I realised later on that I was forming myself into shapes that I was not, and it wasn’t doing a service to my process.
Tips on travel writing from the Unpacking Media Bias newsletter by Meera Datani and Shivani Ashoka:
Don’t use ‘colonial’ in conjunction with superlatives—there’s nothing ‘pretty’ or ‘elegant’ about colonialism and careless suggestions to the contrary are triggering for many. If you’re referencing colonial-era buildings, such as former slave plantations, you’d better believe we’re looking for accurate historical context beyond the architectural descriptors.
Louise Erdrich, Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place:
A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with. One must experience the local blights, hear the proverbs, endure the radio commercials. Through the close study of a place, its people and character, its crops, products, paranoias, dialects and failures, we come closer to our own reality. It is difficult to impose a story and a plot on a place. But truly knowing a place provides the link between details and meaning. Location, whether it is to abandon it or draw it sharply, is where we start. In our own beginnings, we are formed out of the body’s interior landscape. For a short while, our mothers’ bodies are the boundaries and personal geography which are all that we know of the world. Once we emerge we have no natural limit, no assurance, no grandmotherly guidance like the Tewa, for technology allows us to reach even beyond the layers of air that blanket earth. We can escape gravity itself, and every semblance of geography, by moving into sheer space, and yet we cannot abandon our need for reference, identity or our pull to landscapes that mirror our most intense feelings.
Great thread here for journalists:
Wrestling with process
Coleen Baik’s newsletter, The Line Between, which charts the minutiae of her creative process, is a gift. Even if we’re not tending to passions in the same field, there’s a lot she thinks about I can relate to:
Animators often “flip” back and forth repeatedly between consecutive frames in order to “see” and draw fluid interstitial movement. It’s kind of magical because when you do this, your eyes fill in the lines between; the paper plane wants to arc in such and such a way, the scarf to fall in such and such a curve. The flipping makes a sort of after-image in reverse.
When I dally, the magic fades. Up too close, things become deformed. It’s akin to thinking about a word too hard—it loses shape, feels foreign, inspires doubt and suspicion. Try it—say “chair” five times, contemplatively, focusing on the sounds munging together, thinking about what it’s supposed to mean. You see? It is no longer English! It is not even a word!
Malaysian YA novelist Hanna Alkaf is offering advice to patrons on Patreon on how writers from the “Global South” can break into the U.S. book market:
When I started getting offers of representation for The Weight of Our Sky, one of the questions I asked every agent I spoke to was this: “I write stories set in my country, featuring my people, drawing from our folklore and our history and our culture, and I don’t see that changing in the foreseeable future. Is that an issue for you?” I didn’t expect any of them to say no—I’d done my research before querying, after all—but it was important to me that the expectation was laid from the beginning of our relationship. And I do the same with every editor I’ve ever worked with; from the start, I make it clear that I WILL protect the Malaysianness of my stories. I won’t work with anyone who insists on making them something they are not.
George Saunders’ best advice, IMHO, on writing and the importance of subtext. Fuck plans! Let the magic happen between the lines:
If the story wants to go in a new direction, you let it. If a line is good but it doesn’t fit with your plan, keep the line, kill (amend) the plan. I always quote that Gerald Stern bit: ‘If you start out to write a poem about two dogs fucking, and you write a poem about two dogs fucking—then you wrote a poem about two dogs fucking.’ Along with Einstein’s bit: ‘No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.’ Those two quotes are the essence of this approach. Let the story lead you.
Reader rolodex
As more readers join in here, I thought it would be nice to share what some of you have been tending to, professionally or personally.
First up: a fellow Malaysian, dear friend, and actor-writer Jon Chew, who is part of the musical cast of Anything Goes performing at the Barbican Theatre in London until October 31. Maybe catch it if you’re there!
Don’t forget the first part of this letter.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
E.
Thank you so much for the shoutout <3