2020 began four days ago, and folks around the world are already eagerly fulfilling their New Year’s Resolutions. The Inklette team came up with three questions to jumpstart thinking about their writing lives in 2020. Take a look through our answers, and come up with your own!
What single piece of work are you most proud of having completed in the last ten years?
Between 2018 and 2019 I finished an Afrofuturist short story in which I explore my own experience as a Black mixed-race woman through the lens of a dark-skinned woman who learns she can swap her skin color with other peoples’. This was an emotionally challenging story to write, but it was also incredibly cathartic.
– Naomi Day, Blog Editor
Small Talk, my most recent poetry collection that came out in 2019 and was published by Writers Workshop India, Kolkata, is the work I am proudest of. It is an intimate poetry collection and, at least for me, a radical labour of self-love and self-care, actually. This is the kind of poetry collection I wanted to write and get published as a child, at the start of the decade I believe. And I have now managed it. It feels beautiful.
-Devanshi Khetarpal, Editor-in-Chief
In 2019 I published Survive July, my first fiction chapbook. The collection of flash, mini plays, search histories, and text messages addresses a young woman’s experiences grappling with mental health, sexuality, and relationships. In addition to working with these complex themes, ensuring each piece in the collection was both self-contained and cohesive with the work as a whole was incredibly challenging and rewarding.
-Sophie Panzer, Prose Editor
I’m most proud of my first poetry collection, Uniform published by Aldrich Press in 2016, because I at first thought I didn’t have the courage to write it. Once the first poem was put to paper, the others gushed out of the dark places they’d been hiding. Since its publication, I’ve made meaningful and lasting relationships with other writers and have found a niche of friends in the military writing community. If Uniform would have never come about, I know the poems of my second collection, Permanent Change of Station published by Middle West Press in 2018, would have never found the page. Uniform has given me the confidence that poetry can come out of the times that seemed that most vacant.
-Lisa Stice, Poetry Editor
What projects do you anticipate starting or finishing in 2020?
I’m currently working on a series of short stories set in a fictional world whose timeline parallels our own. In this world, society runs on creativity. Those who don’t have creative abilities spend their lives trying to awaken it, and those who do have the power to shape the course of their world. I’m exploring different gender rules, familial structures, and styles of discrimination in this space. I’d love to complete rough drafts of at least seven more short stories over the course of the year.
– Naomi Day, Blog Editor
I am not quite sure. I want to finish my translation of Pasolini’s text on India, but I also want to write a series of short stories or a collection of essays on trauma, being an Indian woman in the complexities New York while belonging from a small town, and on running. I don’t know what I will complete this year, but one of them, at the very least, I hope I can get close to finishing.
-Devanshi Khetarpal, Editor-in-Chief
My goal for 2020 is to write more queer fairy tales. My second poetry chapbook, Bone Church, is also pending release with dancing girl press.
-Sophie Panzer, Prose Editor
I have couple manuscripts that I’m continuing to edit and submit and one brand new project that might be a finished (except for more editing) manuscript soon.
-Lisa Stice, Poetry Editor
What is one new thing you are challenging yourself to learn in 2020?
Novel structure! I wrote two full novels when I was a teenager, with no awareness of the pace or framework of my narratives. I want to study what is captivating for readers, what is most often used by “alternative” writers, and what the novels of folks writing from the margins look like from a writers perspective. I plan to do this by reading a lot more books intentionally, looking for the structure and the ways the author stitches their narrative together (rather than just reading for the powerful story!). I’d also love to find some classes that do this.
Also, dialog! I’ve been stepping slowly into it with my short stories, but I tend to avoid it because dialog is hard! Written dialog is not the same as spoken dialog, which makes it even harder. This is a challenge I don’t really know where to start with, so this should be fun.
– Naomi Day, Blog Editor
Dialogues and movie/television scripts, I’d say. I love film and television now, thanks to my boyfriend plus Netflix plus iconic New York city cinemas. I am very much interested in cinema as a visual language, as a language with a unique albeit occasionally unsettling syntax of sound, images and movements. And I always wonder what a film in my vision would be. As a writer, a script for a short or feature film, or even a few television episodes, seems appealing. I would love to write a drama largely between middle-class, urban Indian women in the spaces designated to them even as they are continuously disowned and disregarded by them and in them, or are not fully and equally included in them.
-Devanshi Khetarpal, Editor-in-Chief
I would really like to further develop my humor writing in whatever mediums I can find, including prose, satire, scripts, or stand-up.
-Sophie Panzer, Prose Editor
For 2020, I’m challenging myself to learn crocheting and accordion, and to get my dog and I both out doing scent detection again. I find that challenging myself to do something totally different than anything I’ve ever done before helps me approach familiar tasks with a more open mind. My daughter and I both took a couple crochet classes at a local yarn store while she’s been on winter holiday, and I’ve started a project of making my mom a scarf. My daughter has played button accordion for three years. Over that years, I’ve watched each of her lessons and thought, “Heck, I think I’m going to give it a try.” It’s been really fun (yet difficult). My terrier and I have been missing working as a scent detection team, so I have committed for us to regularly work together in 2020.
-Lisa Stice, Poetry Editor
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