like the wind
1/28/24
hello friends!
Because this is a space about my artistic practice, this will be both an update and a thought/question. I have been thinking a lot about what it means to be a writer and student right now. How much of myself I allow writing to fill me, or be used by me, when my hands have other useful things to be doing amidst concurring genocides. I don’t have any answers. Here are just a few helpful things I have been thinking of:
I have often cited Kaveh Akbar’s illuminating delineation: art is not the action, but art gestures towards the action we must take.
From The Invisible Committee, in The Coming Insurrection:
“Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but resonance… A body that resonates does so according to its own mode. An insurrection is not like a plague or a forest fire — a linear process which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It rather takes the shape of music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythm of their own vibrations, always taking on more density. To the point that any return to normal is no longer desirable or even imaginable.”
Now, from Fargo Nassim Tbakhi, in “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide.“
“In this way, what the long middle of revolution requires, what Palestine requires, is an approach to writing whose primary purpose is to gather others up with us, to generate within them an energy which their bodies cannot translate into anything but revolutionary movement.”
This is not to say that my work does any of these. But it is aspirational: how can we act & write & do & speak in ways that gesture towards what we hope to do, what others might join us in; resonate through time and space and move more and more of us; gather, generate, energize, translate our bodies in movement what we can to fight for the survival and liberation of Palestinians and all oppressed people?
May we always try (and do more than write).
so… here’s what’s going on?!
Parley Productions, the company I’ve been a part of for my 7th year now, presents a puppet-show/full-length animation workshop of my play How to Raise a Revolution (for the breaking family)! Streaming from January 28th - 18th. Highly suggested donation of $5. YouTube link here.
Bushwick Book Club commissioned Leanna Keith to compose work based on my work in the Jack Straw Anthology! You can listen here.
Jack Straw partnered with the Seattle Convention Center to create Summit Sound, a sound garden/installation located on the exterior of the building. A recording of me reading my poem “Red Envelopes” is a part of this project. It is mid-block on Pine Street between Ninth and Boren Avenues in downtown Seattle. Stop by and immerse yourself in these sounds, songs, and voices seven days a week, from 7am to 11pm. You can find more information or listen to all the pieces here.
My dear friend and playwriting cohort-mate, Jimmy Fay, has invited me to read at the Close Friends Collective’s Valentine’s Day reading at Blue Stockings, February 14th at 6pm.
The workshop production of This time is going into rehearsal! It opens at Undermain Theatre in Dallas on March 2nd.
please donate: Urgent funds for medical professionals in Gaza
please donate: Help me bring my family in Gaza to Canada
please feel free to keep in contact ~
website: www.brianeatswords.com
instagram: @meowymeow
twitter: @brianeatswords (sparsely used)
sending much joy to all of you,
brian dang