November 15, 2022
Gleanings
- Every morning I ask — how do I find acceptance, let alone joy in the midst of it all?
- This is my advice to ten-year-old me: Sing it, little sister! You keep doing what you’re doing even when other people think it’s weird.
- It was always on my mind to do it. I had to gather the skills as a cartoonist and storyteller to do it well, and the distance to look at it with new eyes in a way — but not be so far removed from events that I couldn’t remember things anymore. So when it was time to make the book, it was now or never.
- When was the last time you were truly amazed? Astonished? Thunderstruck?
- Washi tape is pretty, am I right? And colourful. But in the quest to believe in your own ideas — those ideas that want to come into the world through you – washi tape is SO MUCH MORE!
- Back to the woman in my group who is reluctant to admit to reading (or writing) memoir. Let’s call her A. Unsurprisingly, A’s view on memoir as ‘cringe worthy’ was formed by remarks made by a man….
- The glory of a cottage bookshelf! Decades of mass-market paperbacks with their cracked spines and dog-eared pages. Put me in a cabin and the first place I’ll head is for the books.
- I feel as if I keep picking the wrong books, as if my reading radar is malfunctioning.
- It feels downright unfair that I figured out how to make the best molasses cookie — thick, tender, but also one-bowl, no hand-mixer required, the kind that makes your whole home smell like the holidays — and you’re only finding out about it today.
- becoming… more resilient by the day. It’s been such a turbulent few years for my family but each day I surprise myself and find ways to endure the rough days.
- It all got managed. Work, warmth, kids, food, laundry, creative thinking, all of it. Like a frosting swirl that is just the perfect amount and not too sweet. Perfect.
- And at last, I see how, through the years, I have been not just making my novel different—I’ve been making it better. The process has been circuitous, and I’ve learned a lot.
- I am not alone in my tears. Every Iranian-Canadian/America/European you know is crying. We are filled with hope, fear, despair, anger, and love for the people, the very young people, who are being killed every day. We are not doing well and we are also doing great. I have never experienced such unity in the collective pain of the Iranian diaspora community, such determination to help, and a sense of closeness with one another.
- I stop today to consider the word family and what it really means. The way life circumstances can turn a family upside down and then add people to it and put it back together anew
- There is a certain tree-falls-in-a-forest-quality of being an only parent. In having these moments of reconciliation with time. I often wonder if what I’m feeling is something other than what it is.
- Writer is a capacious carry-all for my spirit.
