when i woke,
i was still sleeping
[2024 rg]

a note

WHEN I WOKE, I WAS STILL SLEEPING is a collection of storylets i wrote over the course of about a month during the summer of 2024. it was [and in the moment of writing this note, still is] a time of enormous tension, violence, vitriol, genocide, callousness, militarization, negligence, disaster, dehumanization, and more. the calculated death seems fractal in its self-similarity across scales. i don't know if this ever isn't true. i feel overwhelmed, angry, sad, and ashamed. 

as a person who writes and translates and makes and caretakes books, i'm often unsure what the point of all this time and attention devoted to them is. especially with texts like WHEN I WOKE, I WAS STILL SLEEPING, which have no clearly articulated politics and do little concrete work to respond to the brutalities of our world. and yet, in the midst of this summer, this is the text i ended up writing. 

WHEN I WOKE, I WAS STILL SLEEPING is a text that emerged from my desire to re-kindle a personal relationship with writing. it had been quite some time since my "own" writing [i.e. not translation (though, of course, many translator-poets remind us that all writing is translation, and vice versa)] had interwoven itself with the day-to-day rhythms of my life. and while i wasn't interested in "forcing" it or getting down on myself for how long it had been since i'd written regularly, i was hoping to see if there were steps i could take to make the act of writing feel more approachable. so, as an experiment, i made myself a small notebook with small, unimposing pages where i could write small prose-poem-ish stories. i included enough pages for me to write two storylets per day for ten days — one word-clump in the morning and one at night. after ten days, i was still feeling connected to the practice, and so i made another notebook. after filling that one, i decided to fill one more. 

over the course of this month, i found that i looked forward to these short moments of writing. they felt like a way to linger with thoughts that otherwise might just be fleeting. the little notebooks became the banks of rivers where wandering wonders came to drink, leaving their traces in the mud. i felt [and continue to feel!] grateful for these wonderprints. and although i still don't quite know what to make of them, and i'm suspicious of them [and myself, by extension], i know that they, too, are "true" and "real" parts of my world. not "true" or "real" instead of or as an escape from the less comfortable parts of our brutal realities. but simply "true" and "real" to my me in these past several weeks. and it's a joy now to be able to share these little moments of myself with you, wherever and whenever you are. big hugs and be well <3 [rg - august '24]

an antennal invitation

my hope is that this webpage for WHEN I WOKE, I WAS STILL SLEEPING can serve as both a transmitter and an receiver. do you have a storylet of your own you'd like to share? or a doodle or photo or text snippet in conversation with one of the storylets in the zine? feel free to email your own signals, and i'll start posting stuff below. thx!

received signals

coming soon [i hope!]

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