01
Write for the Reader Whose Power Just Went Out
Every rule about openings assumes the reader arrives once. Mine arrive four or five times, and a page built for uninterrupted reading loses them all.
The Reading Room
What the room is reading this week. Long-form work by people who write for a living and people who write to stay sane.
02
Censorship Made Me a Metaphor Engineer
A heron passed the review office in 1999 where my brother's name could not. The poem worked because the image was audited, not because it was clever.
03
A Draft Is a Crop, Not a Product
A field has a correct week to be cut. So does a manuscript, and admitting that removes the idea that discipline alone moves a harvest forward.
04
Every Story Needs a Utility Bill
A wrongly estimated light bill taught me more about worldbuilding than any craft book: every recurring marvel needs an owner, a rate, and a dispute procedure.
05
The Sentence You Cannot Write Teaches the Most
I knew the exact sentence I could not write about my father in 2001. Everything else in the poem exists because that one sentence had to stay missing.
06
Writing in a Climate That Refuses to Cooperate
A field season is not cancelled because the wind is wrong. You log the wind and go out anyway, and the log is the point.
07
What the Tape Recorder Cannot Keep
A microphone pointed at one mouth cannot hear the room it sits in. The correction shouted from across the kitchen is often the real hinge of the story, and it never makes the tape.
08
The Untranslatable Word Is a Design Brief
An editor asked for a footnote on a word that does not gloss, it accuses. I built the accusation back into the sentence instead, using three ordinary words in place of one impossible one.
09
The Generator Test for Worldbuilding
The man who services your generator does not read a manual, he knows the expected burn rate. Ask that of your most impressive invented thing before you trust it with your plot.
10
Constraint Is Not the Enemy of Meaning
I believed for thirty one years that a censor was holding my sentences small. Leaving Iran removed him and my writing got worse for two years, not better.
11
Fallow Periods Are Not Failure
A field left fallow is not resting. It runs a process you cannot see from the gate, and ploughing it early out of guilt costs you the crop.
12
What the Ghazal Knows About Repetition
A ghazal I memorised at eleven ends every second line with the same three words. By the final couplet they mean nearly the opposite of what they meant first.
13
The Notebook You Keep Outdoors
The notebook I trust has been rained on, dropped in a rock pool, and left in a coat through a wash cycle, and still has something legible in it.
14
What Lagos Traffic Taught Me About Pacing
A four hour trip that should take forty minutes is not one long delay. It is eleven delays of different shapes, and that difference is the whole lesson about pacing a scene.
15
Every Poem Is a Negotiation With Silence
A student wanted her poem to say everything about her grandmother. I asked her to choose, in advance, which forty percent she was willing to give up.
16
What Fieldwork Does to Sentences
There is a measurable gap between the moment a bird crosses a transect and the moment you can name what you saw, and it is sitting inside every sentence.
17
The Interview Is Not the Story
I built a clean chronological account from a testimony, every fact checked against the tape, and the woman who gave it told me it was not what happened. She was right.
18
Register Is Harder Than Vocabulary
A reader stopped believing my police officer at a line with no wrong words in it, only the wrong address form for a boy he had no reason to respect.
19
The Difference Between Subtlety and Cowardice
A colleague once complimented my most cowardly poem for being lovely. I did not correct him, because the poem's ambiguity was built to protect me, not to accuse anyone.
20
Against the Daily Word Count
A count of eggs laid tells you almost nothing about a colony's future. Fledging rate tells you nearly everything. Writers have been tracking eggs.