Friendly reminder that Canada’s railway was built by Chinese immigrants who not only were abused but were payed slave wages. No textpost can properly describe the pain and horror our government caused for the sake of profit.
Not to mention once it was done they imposed a head tax to make it more difficult for them to bring their families over so they would leave after providing cheap labour. Eventually there was a total ban. Chinese immigration policies in Canada were some of the most notoriously discriminatory policies in Canadian history specifically because we brought a lot of them over for labour then wanted them all to leave
Friendly reminder that we aren’t very far removed from this part of Canada’s history. My grandfather’s head tax documents are in my parent’s home.
New Westminster’s municipal government (in BC) had a committee for the purpose of discouraging Chinese settlement. They are the reason when the city’s Chinatowns burned down, they were never rebuilt.
Disguised as dancing African slaves in Brazil would practice this capoeria as a fighting style
^^^^ that’s one of the best pieces of information I’ve heard today
Black ingenuity is everlasting
It’s the reason it’s so acrobatic and requires the use of your legs more than anything. It would help slaves fight when they tried to escape and Capoira was created specifically so they could:
a.) Pass it off as a dance with the slave masters unaware of it being a fighting style.
b.) Be able to fight even with their hands shackled.
Keep this post alive so that when CARLOS is old enough he’ll know these KIDNAPPERS stole him from his MOTHER!
Guatemalan mom: “Please help me my son was taken from me”
Those two assholes: “Lol finders keepers bitch lmao”
Carlos was taken from his mom, Encarnacion Bail Romero after she was arrested during a work raid. Her words, “Nobody could help me because I don’t speak English,” are still resonating deeply within me. This child was kidnapped from a loving mother, and she went to hell and backwards trying to get him back, and a judge literally told her she had no rights to her own child.
Completely unfit parents can get their children back like it’s nothing and this poor woman who loves her child and just wants him with her again cannot? How is this not human trafficking/kidnapping?
Also:
The judge said the biological mother had no rights to even see her child, according to the mother’s lawyer.
Asked if the Mosers would allow Bail Romero to see the child, the Mosers’ attorney, Joseph Hensley, said the couple was “not willing to comment on that at this time.” source
reminder that many children are funneled specifically to Christian families and communities for the same reasons they always have: destroy culture, stack votes, add bodies to communities that otherwise wouldn’t hold majorities. it is literal, actual trafficking.
This is a part of genocide. Removing the children from their parents, who generally desperately love and want to raise them, and placing them with white American families is a way to erase their culture from existence without the ugliness of directly killing children. But it’s still ugly, and it cares nothing for the actual welfare of the child.
you know those posts that are like, “remember when we used to read books and now we all have no attention span because of the internet.” then there’s the very contrived advice that’s like, “if you want to be a writer you have to read”??
well i think they’re completely true but they also really suck, and we of the youngish adult writers of 2018 have it pretty hard, especially those of us in fandom who enjoy reading fanfic more than original fic because it’s mostly tagged properly and possesses the emotional catharsis we’re looking for, pretty much guaranteed.
that said, i think it’s really important – whether you write fanfic, ofic, or both – to read traditionally published work, in part because it can help better inform your fanfic, but also because it will help develop your writing overall. and if you’re interested in ofic, it’s pretty much a necessity to read.
so, i just graduated from an MFA program in creative writing, and contrary to popular opinion, the MFA does not actually teach you how to write. it gives you space to write, and mostly, it teaches you how to read as a writer.
so here is everything i’ve learned about reading as a writer over the past two years:
you do not have to read anything you don’t want to read
part of the problem with “read everything you can!” advice is that there is a lot of stuff out there, and a ton of it doesn’t jive with your interests. moreover, there’s a kind of pressure to read the Classics just to say you’ve read them when in fact a lot of them are boring, irrelevant, and dare i say overrated. so here is me giving you permission: you don’t have to pick up Hemingway or Faulkner or whoever else to be a good writer. life is too short to force yourself to read dead white dudes.
if a book doesn’t grab you by the first 10%, put it down
this is what has helped me more than anything else as a reader, because i found i would commit myself to a boring book and then never want to read it, so i would stop reading for months at a time. so, when you pick out a book, go to the last page and check the number. promise yourself you’ll read 10% of the book. 400 pages? read to page 40 and ask yourself, “do i really want to turn the page? if i put this book down, would i want to pick it back up again later?” if the answer is no, return it to the library or wherever you got it. try the next book in your pile. your TBR list is long; be merciless.
but if you want to make it look like you read the book…
commit to 25%. then go to the wikipedia article, read the plot summary, and fast forward to the last 10-15 pages. bam. you’ve more or less read the book. bonus points if you watch the movie, too. so if you’re really committed to reading Ulysses or whatever but you don’t want to slog through it, you can digest enough to be able to hold a conversation about it in a few hours and move on with your life. you can even pretend you enjoyed it and found it a formative reading experience that helped shape your understanding of the work of fiction, really, absolutely groundbreaking, etc etc. this is especially helpful if you find yourself anywhere in the literary sphere because other writers will expect you to be familiar with the canon.
read selfishly and take tools from everything you read
when you read anything, even the stuff you don’t like, ask yourself, “what tools can i take for my own writing?” let’s say you really love the plot structure – write it down somewhere so you remember to try it out for your own story. if you love the lyricism of the sentences, find a few sentences you really like and jot them down by hand, inspect what about them makes you love them so much. steal aspects of characters you admire, pacing, conflict, stakes. steal as much as you can without stealing the words themselves. you can even use this for things you don’t like by rephrasing the question: “what is it about this story i would like to avoid in my own work?” pivot every single thing you read to be about you and your writing. take notes. mark up and highlight your book if you have to. reading as a writer is not a passive activity but an active one. you’re not being entertained, you’re learning. so let published works teach you.
carve time out of your day to read
at 7pm every day, i put my phone down and pick up an actual physical book. this is my personal preference – i have no beef at all with ebooks, but honestly, i get so tired of staring at lit screens all day, and paper books without the distraction of my phone is such a nostalgic feeling for me, back when i was 14 and the library was my second home and if someone wanted my attention they had to call me on a landline. if you had the same upbringing, dedicating some time to read a physical book will do you wonders. if ebooks are your thing, it’s still important to schedule reading time for yourself, not as an obligation to uphold, but as something to do that’s good for you and that you enjoy.
write letters to your favorite authors!!
seriously. if you love a book, let the author know. they will not be annoyed or upset. they will be thrilled. it’s a good way to network with other writers, and it’s a great practice of literary citizenship.
when someone recommends a book to you, ask why
this is something i’ve only recently learned to do, as someone who gets book recommendations pretty much constantly. if the person knows you decently, i don’t think it’s out of line to ask, “what would i specifically like about this?” because then that will tell if you if the person is only recommending it because they like it, not because they think you’ll like it. if the person knows your writing, it’s fair to ask, “how is this book in conversation with my work?” so you have a head start in the kinds of tools you’ll want to take from it.
follow your aesthetic instincts
as a writer, honing your aesthetic will always be one of your highest aims, which means constantly seeking out writers whose aesthetics you admire and analyzing what it is you admire about it. “aesthetic” is kind of a vague term, but it refers to your overall vibe – the things you write about and why you write about them. my aesthetic is more or less “midwestern class warfare meets sexual identity crises with a lot of dark humor,” so i tend to look for other writers who share facets of that aesthetic and i inspect what’s working for them, where they publish, what their influences are, etc. i try to read both within my aesthetic but also far outside of it too. for example, i love historical fiction but i know i’ll never, ever write it. but i appreciate the aesthetic, and i can take tools from it like dedication to detail, internal conflicts, etc.
read short fiction (please)
this is my personal plea. short stories are a great way to find authors whose work is in conversation with yours, so that you can then go check out their novels with a good idea already of what you like about them. short stories are all over the internet via literary and genre mags. they’re a much smaller commitment than novels and tend to have just as much emotional impact (if done well) as novels. more importantly you’ll always have recs for your friends, and it’s a lot easier getting someone to read a 6k story you enjoyed than a 60k novel.
resources
don’t have time to read but like to listen? try the new yorker fiction and writers’ voice podcasts
like marking up books but don’t want to buy them new? check out thriftbooks (my favorite site on the internet – the link here will get you 15% off!)
want to stay apprised of the goings on in the modern literary community? subscribe to the lithub newsletter and arts & letters daily, two newsletters i’ve been subscribed to for years
as always i’m glad to answer any questions! happy reading!
I like to believe that all the dragons in the world were magically cursed and turned into cats. But cats have never forgotten where they come from, hence the attitude.
I nearly didn’t reblog this but the above comment makes more sense than anything I’ve ever heard.
…that’s…that’s actually a story my mom used to tell me when I was little? That a dragon showed up at someone’s cottage so they gave it milk. And the dragon enjoyed the milk, so it kept coming back and got smaller and softer and purry-er until eventually it wasn’t a dragon anymore, it was a cat, and that’s where cats came from and why we keep giving them milk.
She might have gotten the story from Ursula K. Le Guin, or I have confused it with a different dragon story.
That’s also why cats tend to hoard their toys behind the couch!
Actually the story is even older. Written by a woman named Edith Nesbit, first published in 1899, it is called “The Dragon Tamers”. It predates Leguin and other fantasy biggies like Lewis and Tolkien.
Nesbit actually can be credited with being one of the first authors that began to shift myths and legends to more fantasy-like stories (fantasy as a genre how we know it, wasn’t around then because it was just part of literature, especially British literature). In fact, many scholars who study fantasy literature and children’s literature believe that, since her children’s stories were so popular with children in England, the stories and their content prompted Tolkien (the first to coin fantasy as its own genre in his essay “On Fairy Stories”) to take up the stories of dragons and elves and fairies as they’d have been children when she was writing.
Tolkien was born in 1892. He would have been 7 when “The Dragon Tamers” was first published. Edith Nesbit did a LOT for modernizing myths, legends, and lore as a children’s author, maybe more than we will ever know.
Hello, my name is Ang and I am a 22 year old LGBT, neurodivergent (heavily suspected ASD), and chronically ill professional story artist going through a very devastating situation that has completely halted my professional career right as it started. I am asking for donations to help me survive a very uncertain and in a lot of ways, scary part of my life.
willowfoot 