The Main Event, by stacy-marie ishmael
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Between the idea / and the reality
August 23, 2020
One problem with loving words, and with doing some version of words “for a living” is that every day you are confronted with whether you read or you write or...
For it is important that awake people be awake,
$ · August 16, 2020
I know Saturdays by the rhythm of the chores I do; I know Sundays by the ritual of the newsletter. Every other day is a blur; every day a new height of...
There is something that those who have been to hell and back possess.
$ · August 9, 2020
We are having the conversation again, about what we will do if / when our immigration status becomes once more a question of life and death. For the moment...
The challenge is in the moment /
August 2, 2020
James Baldwin died long before I could read, and decades before I’d find his work and be permanently changed by the encounter. Through him, I found Countee...
This email respects your privacy
$ · July 29, 2020
Hello. Last night some of you—I don’t know who or how many of you, because I deleted the emails they sent in error—may have been affected by this: Substack...
Feel the water cannons start to press through the walls and soak your feet.
July 26, 2020
The more we—our lives, our choices, the defaults we are granted—reflect the status quo, the less time we are called upon to spend explaining and defending....
There comes a time when you have to say something. You have to make a little noise.
July 19, 2020
Who did we have time for today? What does it mean to practice survival? What does it mean to make time for yourself when all around you the world is burning?...
Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards
$ · July 12, 2020
There’s a kind of bone-tiredness you get from being responsible for a constant stream of micro and macro decisions; from constantly context-switching between...
but when we are silent
July 5, 2020
There we are all were, thinking we’d by now be getting slowly past the point of needing to measure our days by bunches of bananas turned into bread. Instead,...
There are so many roots to the tree of anger
$ · June 28, 2020
If a man shouts ‘white power’ in a video and you retweet that video and then you delete it hours later and then the people whose job it is to defend and...
I will no longer lightly walk behind
$ · June 21, 2020
Every day you learn that you can, in fact, be angrier and more exhausted. And so every day you learn how not to let the anger and the exhaustion win. Joy is...
I wondered how long 400 years is, / how many bodies, /
June 14, 2020
You lose count of the videos. You lose count of the names. You lose count of the circumstances. You cannot escape the knowledge of the deaths. You cannot un-...
it’s hard to / relate to folk who don’t consider their own demise fifty ’leven times /
$ · June 7, 2020
I have a blood pressure monitor, which is a thing my doctors recommended I get. I haven’t used it in two weeks. I don’t need to. I know what it will tell me....
Each time it begins in the same way, it doesn't begin the same way, each time it begins it's the same.
$ · May 31, 2020
From my living room, where I have spent the past few days immersed in The News, I can hear and see both protestors and police. The protestors are chanting:...
and may you in your innocence
$ · May 24, 2020
On Saturday night it was bashment, on Sunday afternoon it was Bach. But it is always music. Even in a pandemic our expectations of each other have not...
I would call my friends on other devices;
May 17, 2020
I was one of those teenagers who’d say things like “if you have no expectations you can’t be disappointed” and who was very into zen kōans and who spent a...
The woman in front of me had been reading
$ · May 10, 2020
Today I am thinking about Wanda Cooper-Jones. About Gloria Darden. About Sybrina Fulton. About Geneva Reed-Veal. About Gwen Carr. About Lesley McSpadden....
Even what was beyond us / was recast in our image;
May 3, 2020
What does it mean, for tens and hundreds of thousands of people to die? Friends, colleagues, children, grandparents, strangers. What does it mean for their...
I am glad / you are so small,
$ · April 26, 2020
Still safe, still well — such is the drumbeat of my days; an exercise in daily gratitude for what I have and who I have in my life. Sad, tired, angry — all...
We are spendthrifts with words,
April 19, 2020
I think about words, constantly. When I am not writing them, I am editing them. When I am not editing them, I am thinking about how to write them. When I am...
Sweet is it, sweet is it
$ · April 12, 2020
I rode my bike today, for the first time in this new state. Texas, pandemic. Kept my distance, waited on the lights. I am angry all the time. At the people...
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, /
April 5, 2020
Last week I joined the ever-burgeoning ranks of people who’ve been smitten by Animal Crossing: New Horizons, persuaded by a friend and former colleague of...
I’m waiting for my right mind.
$ · March 29, 2020
In tragedy you are reminded of the difference between being allowed access and belonging. In tragedy you learn which bonds hold you fast and which hold you...
Sometimes the moral arc of the universe
$ · March 22, 2020
I am mostly furious, and because this is not a good state for me to be in for an extended period I have been trying to redirect my rage into work and works....
Someone is dancing us.
March 15, 2020
I am a person you can text in a crisis. I am never more calm then when all hell is breaking loose. It is one of the traits that I have sharpened and polished...
I have been woman / for a long time
March 8, 2020
There are boxes—mostly of books, to the surprise of absolutely no one who knows me—piled precariously in every room of my current apartment. This is the...
All I want / is to be the river though I return
$ · March 1, 2020
I have a new job, and for the second time in two days, I have a migraine. I haven’t had one in a while (a migraine, not a job) and I had forgotten that you...
One way to erase an island is to invent the waters
$ · February 23, 2020
I am the very definition of the so-called “high-information voter”, except for the “voter” part. I am semi-permanently disenfranchised: I am not allowed to...
Please remain calm,
February 16, 2020
A thing about being a person — a non-white, immigrant, female person especially — is that other people sometimes forget both that you are not entirely like...
Not the blue the orthodoxy of the day
$ · February 9, 2020
I have been trying to practice yoga daily, or nearly daily (rest, too, is part of the practice). I had forgotten just how much the act of making space to...
The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much
February 2, 2020
Saeed Jones, a brilliant poet and memoirist, wrote in January about the ritual of annual determinations: “We don’t make resolutions in this house; we make...
Our bodies spun / On swivels of bone & faith, / Through a lyric slipknot
January 26, 2020
Grief is messy, complicated, unpredictable because people are messy, complicated, unpredictable. The narrative of our lives is not something over which we...
Beyond dreams and the arc of justice
January 20, 2020
[Dear Reader, this is long.] I have long been one of those people moved to irritation and sometimes anger by misattributed quotes. I once intervened to stop...
running and running until she reaches
$ · January 19, 2020
I’ve been thinking a lot about time (this is, perhaps, a mark of having friends who died young). Time in the sense of deadlines; time in the sense of...
awards medals to generals
January 12, 2020
These days, the siren song of ~grad school~ is not quite so loud, replaced by the incessant drumbeat of so what are you doing to reduce all these harms....
Not everything that is faced can be changed;
$ · January 9, 2020
As promised, some riffs on news consumption (and production, dear colleagues) in a time of misinformation. The first thing to remember is that if you think...
Listen.
January 5, 2020
I remember those long nights in the library as an undergrad, inhaling Red Bull and speed-reading my way through the set texts on asymmetrical warfare and the...
to dare to have nothing so much to lose
December 31, 2019
On Saturday I went to a wedding over which a Presbyterian minister presided and on Monday I attended a funeral held under Muslim rites. On Sunday I played...
Does it tell you that your heart is afire?
$ · December 22, 2019
There is an intimacy about Trinidad that is difficult to describe; a familiarity, a possessiveness, a jealousy. Here I am and am not myself. I am more myself...
I do not believe as some / that the vote is an end
December 15, 2019
Housekeeping, ish. I let some* of my domains lapse this year; the tiniest of concessions to the inevitability of how “the desktop web” (and my role in it,...
Some requests for hiring managers
$ · December 15, 2019
As promised, I’m going to experiment a bit more with the $ newsletters. To that end, I’ll be sharing versions of things I’m reading, watching, listening to,...
Now each of us
$ · December 8, 2019
I realize that part of the anxiety that has been stalking my days is related to an upcoming international trip. What if I don’t get back in? What if they...
No air. Breathe in.
December 2, 2019
It’s World AIDS Day. Get tested. Practice safer sex. Work to end stigma about gender and sexuality and about sex work. Work to end HIV and AIDS shaming and...
Free people keep afever
$ · November 24, 2019
There’s a version of my life that is filled with fresh, local, sustainably-harvested flowers and cloth napkins and just enough of everything I want and need....
let this be the healing
November 17, 2019
I moved this weekend, though it feels like I have been in geographic limbo for at least six months. Which means I once again confronted with the reality of...
All of it has always seemed so arbitrary to me,
November 10, 2019
“Very tired” is the only honest answer to the obligatory politesse of “how are you doing?” “Very tired and about three weeks from a quiet, controlled, and...
No one can stop her.
$ · November 3, 2019
I travel frequently, both for work and because of the decisions I’ve made about the architecture of my life. Over the years I’ve developed a few routines and...
and i become relic
October 27, 2019
It is quite a thing, on the day before the first anniversary of the Tree of Life massacre, to see some of the most powerful people in the world defending...
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them:
$ · October 20, 2019
There are many ways to respond to stress. You can drown yourself in books and tea; go for a run; practice yoga; add several new piercings to your collection;...
I love your hair / You always wear such interesting things
October 19, 2019
In Chile the students are marching. In Washington DC, Kirstjen Nielsen is gearing up for the start of her non-apology tour. In two weeks I will walk out of...
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