“New” publications: botany, recipes, road trips, and scams

It irritates me to no end but I am slow. Slow walker, slow writer, slow to talk about my writing…but announcing “new” publications almost a year after their release is a whole new glacial pace for me. I’m almost impressed with myself!

In truth, it has been a good year, a good several years, really. Writing continues to feel smaller than my life–my relationships, my relationship with myself, a growing trust in my little world even as the greater world burns. My 2021/2022 publications mine fears and frustrations that feel distant, past–until the last few years, what is distant and past is what has felt most real to me. I don’t know if this writing excised things that let me move more into the present. Or if contentment means I need writing less. Or if therapy just really does work! I’m probably posting this now because I am slowly, slowly getting excited about some new work again. In the meantime, I’m proud of and still like these four latest publications (another fresh feeling for me!).

Continue reading ““New” publications: botany, recipes, road trips, and scams”

Two new publications: truth or something like it

kidding-kidding-jellyfish-review-di-jayawickrema

My latest flash, “Kidding, Kidding” and “Plucking Away” up at the lovely Jellyfish Review are my first (self-acknowledged) creative nonfiction-ish pubs. All my recent work is mined from my life and I used to spend a lot of time negotiating the boundaries between fiction, non-fiction, and poetry before submitting, but life and art feel too variable to worry about this anymore. I’ll say these two pieces are close to my real biography, and it is simultaneously easy and uncomfortable to see this work published. I’ve pushed myself to be more explicit in my recent pieces, and I can’t tell if the discomfort stems from “the mortifying ordeal of being known,” or if my implicit writing really is more porous, holds more space for many truths.

Maybe it’s only needless self-deprecation to say the truths of these pieces don’t feel as truthy because they are so fixed. (I know I’m really selling these publications.) Continue reading “Two new publications: truth or something like it”

New publication: fog or cloud

entropy di jayawickrema fog or a cloud hybrid microsI didn’t think this loose hybrid micro series would find a home. The pieces felt too small, some too strange and some too colloquial, and all disconnected even though I knew the pieces were connected in a way I couldn’t articulate. I’m gratified and relieved it found a home in Entropy Magazine’s “Fog or a Cloud” series inspired by this quote from Etel Adnan: “… [images] they are pure feeling. They’re like something that calls you through a fog or a cloud.” The editor, Morgaine Baumann writes of the series: “What do you, or we, rely on our memories for? When, or are, memories accurate representations of the past? Does it matter? A little more specifically, I’m thinking, can memories be passed down genetically? Emotional/ physical traces carried from one generation to another, ultimately showing up in our writing? How can this be shown through syntax? In image? If through image, then are the images by extension also what’s being passed down?”

Continue reading “New publication: fog or cloud”

New publication: (in)completeness

3 Micro-stories by Di Jayawickrema Burning House Press

Photo Credit: Simon Abrams, Unspash

Probably, a day will come when I don’t announce every new publication with a mini-essay on process but today isn’t that day. I’m proud and grateful to have my first microfiction appear in a press I just learned of and already love: 3 Micro-stories by Di Jayawickrema in Burning House Press.

There were eight years between my first publication and my second. I spent that period contending with the immigration system, and the process changed me in ways I still don’t fully understand. I didn’t write a creative word in those eight years. I do some community-based work around immigration now — in my view, immigration is a death spectrum — from actual death to death by countless cuts if you’re lucky, and I was lucky. It isn’t a coincidence that I only started writing again when I got my green card.

Continue reading “New publication: (in)completeness”