Graphic Poetry

"I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious."

-Diego Rivera

I found this great site through StumbleUpon (seriously best creation ever!) that combines poetry and art together in a effortless visual manner. The site is www.graphicpoetry.net.

The poet has this written in his bio: "i'm a 29 year old hardcore pinko vegan pacifist metalhead loner blue-oyster-cult-worshipping computer nerd and sometimes revolutionist.  you know, one of those."

After reading several of his poems, I wish I could be one of those too. It really inspired me to try putting my words with pictures and challenging myself to do the three-frame poem that Mr. Pelon uses.

Here's one of my favorites:

Hopefully I won't get in trouble for posting this poem here. All credit is due to the amazingness of Mr. Pelon and I only want to share his awesome work with the world on my humble little blog and encourage you all to check out the rest of his poetry on his site. 

It's  much easier to read the poem straight across as it appears on the Graphic Poetry website, but it shows up weird on here as stacked pictures. Read it left to right though and it will make sense.

Anywho, I'd really like to try this new medium next and see where it takes me. I'll upload my attempts as soon as inspiration hits. Which I hope is sooner or later. Maybe I'll write about the disgusting heat wave I'm forced to endure for the next few days until I leave the country...

Advice from Uncle Shelly

"Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be."
— Shel Silverstein

This poem came up on my StumbleUpon and made my night that much better. I hope it makes yours too.

Questions Questions

pic from http://andicampbell.com

"Our doubts are traitors, 

And make us lose the good we oft might win

By fearing to attempt"

- William Shakespeare

There's nothing like that inner ego to start gnawing away at your self-confidence. Self-doubt is a killer. It's one of my biggest flaws, that fear that grips me into perpetual self-consciousness to do the right thing and be the right person. I've been experiencing the ups and downs of that questioning quite a lot this summer and I'm not sure why. The questioning has been about both my writing and my personal life.  For some reason I feel like the real me is slowly slipping away and I want to bring her back. I'm also afraid I'm not giving the new me a real chance to prove herself. I need to be more patient and trusting, but it's incredibly difficult when you don't want to waste every precious moment you have with no regrets... I'm also doubting my commitment to writing. It'd be easier to just give up and wait till I'm old and desperately wanting to write again , then I'll proceed to sift through all the unfinished notes and documents in my laptop or journal and do something about it. Why am I pushing myself so hard to write all the time when my mind clearly doesn't want to think about plotlines and my butt clearly doesn't want to stay in a chair all day?

This is all making my breezy, light, globe-trotting days a little harder to swallow.

But journaling through it all has helped me. Seeing my thoughts on paper makes it feel like I'm more sensible and I can then read over what I'm feeling and process it better. I guess it's a very writer-ly thing to feel alone and pour your emotions out. I just wish my pensiveness resulted in actual productivity in my projects. I decided it's best to work on the project that is most close to how I'm feeling at the moment since it'll feel more raw and real. Plus it's summer so I can pretty much do whatever I want. Jumping around from project to project is a fickle habit, very appropriate for right now.

That means I'm going to work on the new idea that popped into my head a week or two ago. It's about a Muslim girl and her family who have to go into the Witness Protection Program and how their life alters as they have to keep a cover until the girl can go to trial for the case. The illusion they have to keep strips them from their normal identities, but especially their visible Muslim identities, meaning the girl and her mother stop wearing the hijab. I want the story to discuss all the complexities of what an identity is, what is reality, what is truth and what is destiny. It's also going to have mystery and a bit of action as the girl tries to keep her family safe and figure out how to stay one step ahead of the enemy who is determined to track them down. 

I don't know a whole lot about the Witness Protection Program so I'm reading and researching. It's really really interesting and I'm hoping I can incorporate my knowledge into the story in a believable manner, but at the same time, what's more important is the characters than the actual workings of the WPP system. Still, it would be nice to get it right or as close to right as someone who's not an insider can get. 

Other than that, I'm going to be sketching, working on some poems here and there and hopefully, get a short story done for a Writer's Digest contest if I get it in on time what with my traveling and all. I'd like to write in a London tea/coffee shop and feel like I'm J.K. Rowling. I think that's the inspiration I'd need to finish a darn first draft maybe?

Summer Dissonance

"To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee."
-Emily Dickinson

I'm back from a crazy three and a half week trip to Hungary and Romania with my scholarship group and I'm ashamed to admit my writing production was extremely low. Other than keeping a journal of the day's activities and taking notes at lectures and presentations, I wrote one measly poem during an exercise about Hungarian poetry. 


 This is the poem I wrote up in literally 10 minutes from a list of 8 words that we were given to include. (I've highlighted them)


advice to a tourist


wake up in the city or the town
listen to the never ending sound
of people playing in the cool lake
or sighing after bites of sweet cake
shake off you sleepy slumber my dear
open your eyes there is nothing to fear
with luck and a map, you can fake your way through
make a trip on the metro so you
can travel as far as the city limits
or at least as long as time permits
rake the leaves off the trees in the park
but for goodness sake don't stay after dark
enjoy yourself when you travel abroad
now i'm done with this poem, thank god




...yeah, I know, extremely lame, but I was pressed for time and couldn't figure out how to use rake and sake :(


My creativity was somehow zapped in terms of writing and instead played out with photography. I got a new digital camera and had so much fun capturing the beautiful landmarks and people and food of Central Europe. The picture above was taken by yours truly in the amazing city of Budapest:) If only my memory card hadn't filled up, I would have definitely experimented more and shot way more pictures, but between all of us in the group, we have thousands upon thousands to look through so it's not too bad.


With all the free time I have this summer, I really need to organize and prioritize what stories I want to work on. I have several potentials as I talked about in my previous post and they're all incredibly interesting but as soon as I start trying to dig deeper into any of them, I get frustrated by plot holes and just the magnitude of figuring out all the characters and background.  


I think I'm going to call this the summer of short stories and train myself to do short distance and once I have enough endurance to last me, then I can move on to the big league: the novel. I would love to write a small book of short stories if I could find a collective theme. I originally thought about just doing a short story collection about the American Muslim teenage experience since I'm having such a hard time writing just one book on it. But maybe there are other experiences and emotions I want to explore as well. 


I'm just going to be free and open and soak up anything that comes my way. I think I'm ready for a sizzling summer fling with a fictional premise. 

The Suspense Builds...

"It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City itself is a detective story."

-Agatha Christie

I'm still waiting on the results of the Sparknotes Musical Fiction Contest. I don't feel as good about winning  this one, since I haven't seen as many people mention my story this time around. I didn't win last time either, but "Lunch is Served" got an honorable mention and had many fans.

A lot of finalists were picked and I feel mine was really different. There wasn't a pressing plot or action. I guess it was more writerly, but that's how the song "Honey, Honey" was. I love the song because it's a slow building, heartbreakingly beautiful melody that makes the listener slowly piece together what's happening in the story.

In the end, I don't care what place it gets, but it's nice to get some positive feedback and gratification for the work you do:)

Contests are just good in general for making me buckle down and get some writing done, which I haven't been doing lately over these lazy summer days. Actually, scratch that, I have done some writing, but it's been spread so thinly over three different stories.

I had to put on the brakes on my NaNo story because I realized there was something wrong with it that needed to be changed. I know you're not supposed to revise the first draft. You're supposed to just write straight through a crappy first draft and don't look back. This is very very hard for me to do as a perfectionist. I have to know where things are going for the most part so I don't get bored, confused and veer off. At the same time, I also don't like outlining and planning too much, then I get too caught up in that and use missing plot points or weakly defined character as an excuse to stop writing. NaNo helped because I only had an idea and several characters at the beginning following the rules of no writing before November 1st. And whaddaya know, I wrote a good 130 pages by the end of the month.  (That's still only like a third of a novel.)

I've decided to cut out one of the characters that I thought was important but I realized how the story was split into two ideas and it couldn't survive like that. I've also come up with two novel ideas: 1) two American Muslim teens who are best friends and how boys have affected their relationship and 2) a mystery novel with Muslim girl detective. Both are stories that I'm really excited to write about and have been mulling around in my head for just as long as my NaNo novel. The funny thing is all these plots once tried to be in one book together and I have characters moving from different stories and exchanging names, family members and background characteristics. Everything just has to fit nicely for the story to get going and I feel happier about the progress.

Now my problem is just focusing on one story now that I feel they are each on the right track. I think I favor the detective story but I just need to figure out the crime and victim. Who dies and why? It's kind of annoying how as a writer, I have to also figure out what happened but think from both points of view from the detective and criminal and understand both of their motivations. I have a really good book to help me through the whole mystery novel process though, so I better get to reading and follow the clues.

Mother's Day

"The moment a child is born, the mother is also born.  She never existed before.  The woman existed, but the mother, never.  A mother is something absolutely new."

  -Rajneesh

Happy Mother's Day! 

I hope you all were able to enjoy a relaxing day with your mothers or if you're not with them, atleast sent them a reminder of how much you love them. Moms are quite unappreciated and we shouldn't really need a mandated holiday to put the spotlight on them, but it's still nice to have a dedicated time to show how important they are. I would have loved to take my mom out to brunch and tea just the two of us, but sadly she works weekends so we'll have to postpone our mother-daughter outing for another day.

I wanted to share with you what I did get her, other than flowers and a card, a fabulous book called Little Bee by Chris Cleave. 

Here's what the back of Little Bee says:

WE DON'T WANT TO TELL YOU TOO MUCH ABOUT THIS BOOK.

It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it.

Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this:

It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific.

The story starts there, but the book doesn't.

And it's what happens afterward that is most important.

Once you have read it, you'll want to tell everyone about it. When you do, please don't tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.

So, sounds good right?

I've been wanting to read this book for a while and I love sharing books with my mom since she hardly has time to read and doesn't know which good books are out there. I highly recommend this book to you all if you're looking for something new to read. I have a long list to tackle and now that school is out, I can finally get to it:)

Snap Judgment

pic copyright:http://www.beyucaffe.com

"To be a person is to have a story to tell"

-Isak Dinesen

I found this awesome show called Snap Judgment, all about spoken word, poetry and sharing stories. It debuted on NPR nationally in April, but they have a website where you can upload your own stories with audio, text, pictures and get them potentially onto the radio show. They say that Snap Judgment is "putting the public back in public radio" and I'm very glad they are. 


I'm really inspired by the online community of writers and how they are trying to create more opportunities and chances for publication and expression. Snap Judgment says they are looking for the best stories on the planet. It's nice you don't have to do all the traditional grueling work of sending out your stuff and waiting to be accepted (or rejected) by an agent to get your work noticed. Now the audience can come to you, give you feedback and spread the word!


I haven't dabbled into spoken word before, but I've always dreamed of competing in a poetry slam one day. Snap Judgment has motivated me to get started. It's a great way to practice short, engaging, plot driven stories that have to keep a person's interest. Plus, it would be awesome to be on the radio:)


All the stories I've looked at have such strange, but unique titles and premises. I think I have a lot to learn about a good spoken word piece, though I'm sure many people on there are in the same boat as me. I encourage you all to check out the site and submit your stories too:
snapjudgment.org