By Ottavia Paluch
For the last couple years, I’ve taken time out of my busy pre-holiday schedule to write holiday cards for my friends. I take my card-writing seriously, because there’s something so exquisite about doing it that I love. They’re everything you could want in the smallest of packages. The cute drawings of wintery scenes! You’d open one and gasp at the cursive scribble, the letters that make up the words that make up the sentences of tenderness and warmth and love. I write these cards because they’re precious keepsakes, mementos of a time that will soon come to pass. I cherish the ones my friends give me, mainly because when they do, they don’t have to, and because the words that they’ve written are so heartfelt, genuine, and kind. Giving and receiving cards makes your heart boom a little faster. You get hugged. You feel treasured. You feel life. There’s no set formula to writing these cards. For future reference, though, if you wanted the general outline as to what my process was this year, here are the steps: 1. Commence your card-writing on a Sunday a week or two before you deliver them. Because Sundays are nice. 2. Buy a nice package of cards from—actually, it doesn’t matter, does it? Make sure they’re blank, or at least ninety percent blank, the ten percent being a nice little phrase. (“…and to all a good night!” “The most wonderful time of the year!” “Hope your stocking is stuffed full of joy this year!”) I always go for the ones that have cute little illustrations on the cover. 3. Run home. Listen to a holiday staple or two while you’re at it. Be of good cheer. 4. Open the package of cards and smell the smell of gold and frankincense and mirth. (Of course, I’m joking, but if only it were true.) 5. Grab a bunch of pens. But not the standard blue or black ones. Not the ones you write your science notes in. Nope. I figure you shouldn’t settle for blue and black, because that’s not good enough for your cards. I like the purples and greens, the oranges, the dark yellows. The neon pinks, if you may. Writing cards in a color like the aforementioned makes every letter and word pop. Your signature turns into calligraphy. Every sentence has more meaning, more punch. It’s magical. And if you’re having trouble picking or choosing colors for cards to your friends, here’s a secret—write your friends’ cards in their favorite colors. 6. The first word you should write is dear. Or dearest. Whatever you prefer. Don’t just dive into the pool right away with the name of your friend. See, Dear has elegance written all over it; it takes you back to the time of tea and biscuits and postcards from who-knows-where. 7. The second word should be your friend’s name, obviously. But write your first two words in your neatest cursive. Everything else can be printed. 8. Then comes the fun part—the actual letter itself. I consider a holiday card a piece of writing, one of the rawer, candid, more heart-on-your-sleeve things you could possibly write. A flash nonfiction piece, even. Greet your friend with a sentence or two that makes them smile. A joke could work. A candid statement to catch their attention could work. Whatever it is, make sure it captures the awe they’ll still be feeling while they read the first sentence, thinking, “Wow. I can’t believe they would do this for me.” 9. Say thank you to them for something. For them, because of them. For taking you under their wing. For talking with you, being with you. For being themselves. For being your friend, above all things. 10. There are so many ways of how you can go about the main points of your card. Speak of the joys your friend brings you. Speak of fear, of the things that scare you. Talk about how they help you overcome that fear. Compose something witty about experiencing the everything of this life with them. Whatever you write, make it encapsulate whatever makes your friendship so extraordinary. Because this friendship you’re describing means something, is something to you, which means it’s not nothing, which means it is all you want and all you will ever need. 11. Be as casual as you want with your diction. If you make a grammatical error, it won’t matter, because it’ll be hard to spot because of how sloppy your handwriting has become. Speaking from personal experience: my handwriting is rather sloppy, but the recipients of my cards could read it, and treasured every word, despite how scribbly the handwriting was. 12. Tell them happy holidays. Wish them all the best that a holiday could offer, that peace, joy, and love arrives at their doorstep, that they’re filled with joy and with light. Ask if their stocking will be stuffed full of joy. Be as kind and as simple as you can with that last sentence. 13. Sign it off with the signature of yours that you’re slowly making consistent. If you feel like it, work on your signature on a separate piece of paper. Refine it. Refine it until it’s the visual equivalent of your voice. If your name is like mine and you have to do the dotting of the I and the crossing of the T’s, do it with flair. You’ll thank me later. And there you have it: the secrets to writing a card your friend will truly appreciate. I’ve loved writing them ever since I started, because they’re personal and come from the heart. There are few things I love more than the feeling of happiness I get when making those I love happy as I give them out, and I hope you’ll feel the same way once you seal the envelopes and do the same.
0 Comments
By Courtney Felle
[Content warning: sexual violence] During my first winter in college, someone I consider a friend is accused of sexual assault. He tells each person I know a different version of the story—some have only one girl involved, some have two twisting around each other, some call them liars, some call them simply confused—and when he tells me, he says, “You know, it’s funny. I don’t even remember their names.” I don’t know. I don’t agree. I quickly come to believe the girls, even without speaking to them, as do my friends. We recall our own experiences: every dinner in which he spoke over us, every secret he told someone after he said he would keep it, every story in which women became bitches and witches and character development for the men. I recall him grabbing my shoulders to get my attention, even after I said I had chronic pain and it hurt, even after I said, “Stop.” I recall how startled I felt, even violated. My friend recalls biphobic comments he made after she stopped dating her ex-girlfriend, despite his own identification with the term “bi.” Another friend recalls discomfort lying next to him on our dorm’s couch, his hips jutting into her, and her own body receding. It seems a logical extension to believe he could commit assault—we just hadn’t recognized it before. We thought we were the only ones; we thought we were exaggerating, making it up. We start holding meetings in our college’s feminist center, confirming our thoughts, learning to believe ourselves. As a simple slogan of support, we say, “I’m hip,” borrowed from mid-Atlantic slang, meaning, “I stand with you,” meaning, “I understand, and I support you, and I believe you, and I believe you.” We end our friendships with him. We move closer to each other as we pass him on the sidewalk, as reassurance, as protective force. I wake at three am with nightmares, ones I never tell anyone else. The main scene, which recurs at least once a week for several months, features a faceless man opening my door while my hallmates sleep and crawling into my bed. He places one hand around my mouth and the other around my hips, pressing so tightly into my skin I can’t scream or fight or feel anything other than pained confinement. Without evidence or explanation, my dream-self knows it’s him, the boy accused. I start locking my door when I’m alone, as early as 8 pm. The nightmares don’t stop. Listless, nervous, awake, I check and double-check the lock. I feel, like Anna Butcher conveys in her poem “(while being sexually harassed) I turned into Joan of Arc,” as if these horrors are occurring “again/ and again/ and again,” so often that I become “used to burning,” the imagined sexual violence ordinary. I don’t know when I stop having the nightmares—they become so ingrained into my daily pattern that, by the end, I barely notice how scared I feel, how routine that fear is. I do know I keep my door locked for the rest of the year, by instinct and muscle memory. When I first set myself the task of announcing our hips-themed contest, I didn’t intend to begin with a personal story. But, before I even thought to search the dictionary definition of hips, to trace cultural invocations, to write what would become the standard description, my own emotions and experiences emerged. That’s the thing about hips as a concept: it’s so personal, inherently so. Though the biological definition of hips involves bones outside our bodies, it also very much connotes what’s between our hips, how we as individuals and as collective units make sense of sex (in every context) and sexual vulnerability, and how we communicate those definitions, implicitly or explicitly. My friends’ choice to use “I’m hip” as a statement of resistance and empowerment, for example, relied on the understanding that “hip” isn’t simply a body part but also a state and an act: to have or show an awareness of something, especially a trend, and to make someone aware, of a secret, perhaps, or a disturbing crime, or a crime so normalized it fails to disturb. I’ve heard the term repeated so many times it blurs in my mind: I am hip, we each were and are hips, in every syntax, angle, and interpretation. “I’m hip” stayed the name of our GroupMe conversation through the summer, none of us registering it as more than a remnant devoid of original meaning, until a nightmare unexpectedly returned and I changed it in the morning, a quick fix no one questioned. It’s almost funny to me, all its uses and misuses, its loss of power throughout time, if not for the horror of its source. Yesterday, almost a year after I first heard versions of the assaults, I tried to write about the time I imagine as the “I’m hip era,” what it meant and still means to me, coming to terms with his mistreatment and its impact on my friend group. I tried to focus into only what I thought was the main story: us recognizing that he had most likely assaulted two girls and the immediate fallout of that recognition, but other moments kept emerging, memories and associations he conjured. Him grabbing my shoulders as an act not simply of male entitlement to female bodies but also of dismissing my chronic pain, refusing to view my invisible illness as something he should accommodate. A poem I wrote when I was seventeen, new to the world of sex and sexuality as a whole, in the beginning stages of coming out and of coming to terms with potential infertility, in which “my stomach feels like a sacrifice in a religion I don’t believe in anymore,” myself perched “on the precipice of my left hip bone… seared into not seeing straight.” The jokes I made to friends about my irregular periods, a method of coping, and him calling me melodramatic for “oversharing,” making a scene of nothing at all. The tattoo I still want with flowers peeking from my left hip bone, snapdragons and lilies (my mother’s favorites), from this poem, proof something can grow, even though my friends called it cliche when I mentioned it. The girl who, upon seeing a picture of my genderqueer significant other, who was using she/her pronouns and “girlfriend” at the time, asked what genitalia they had, and him laughing in condescension when I later told him, saying I was “overreacting.” The only person in my friend group he seemed to respect after we stopped talking to him: a (trans) man, the only man closely involved in the conflict. The nightmares, all the nightmares. The first time I felt such fear: at sixteen, walking back to my car after shopping at a local Target, when a man tried to pull me into his car. The sharp sound of the lock as I narrowly escaped his hand gripping where my shoulders had been only seconds before, him shouting, “You bitch, you bitch.” I couldn’t write the essay draft. I couldn’t write half the essay draft. There were too many scenes, too much stuff. That’s the other thing about hips: it’s not only immensely personal but also blurred, every facet of identity mixed and leading into the next—sex, sexuality, gender, queerness, genderqueerness, illness, infertility, and so much violence, of so many kinds. In her story “To Love a Woman,” Vibhavari Desai describes lesbian sex as “like standing at the edge of the cliff and jumping into the unknown,” not dissimilar to my earlier, imagined “precipice,” the image shifted from illness to sexuality, reconceptualized, the same and yet not the same. Inseparable elements of the same cliff-hips, of hips. For this contest, what I truly want to see are these intersections between identities developed on a vivid, physical, personal plane, as close and vulnerable as hips. I want to see society’s expectations challenged, subverted, upended. In Nawaal K’s “My Short and Indifferent Reflection on You Leaving Me for No Bloody Reason.,” talking to Eve, the speaker cites the fall from Eden as “a revolution in your hips.” I can believe, if the world fell from any person, any body, it fell from one woman’s hips, so readily. “I’m hip,” after all, gave me the words and courage for something much deeper, something still happening. Hips can do that—perhaps only hips can do that. And I want to know about all the hips, the friendships that made them bearable, being hip, hipping, hurting, healing, and every revolution, so many revolutions, always “in your hips.” For more information on our Hips Contest, click here. Songs for the complicated, contradictory mess that means growing older, curated by our editor-in-chief Courtney. Listen on our Spotify here, or see the track listing below:
Honor Roll by bülow Life by WENS Wonder Years by The Summer Set Here’s to Never Growing Up by Avril Lavigne 80’s Films by Jon Bellion Castle on the Hill by Ed Sheeran Diet Soda Society by The Maine Too Young To Feel This Old by You Me At Six Coffee Break by Forever The Sickest Kids Never Grow Up by Taylor Swift Ribs by Lorde Make Time by Mallrat Waves by Dean Lewis 14 Year Old Me by K Anderson Good Ol’ Days by The Script I turned nineteen last Friday, in the wake of Thanksgiving and large displays of gratitude, while driving through downtown Buffalo. I chose to spend the afternoon alone: I wanted to see the small sights of my city—the observation deck of City Hall, the draping willow tree in Delaware Park where I wrote one of my first real poems, the statue of an old-fashioned girl with a shark’s head along the canal, the indie bookstore that I still own a gift card for (my prize from the first poetry contest I won)—without others’ noise. I decided as I drove where I would turn, taking detours past sloping hills filling with snow and streets I imagined as character names.
I love small moments like these more than anything, brief and lovely and distinctly my own. I feel the universe is letting me into a secret, showing me all the slight beauties in the mundane that most overlook, and that even those who do notice will never see exactly the same as I do. Through statues, leaves, and books, through my physical perception of objects, comes a deeper sense of myself and the world beyond me. A body without organs. I started this journal as a way to compile and amplify writing I found well-crafted, pressing, and meaningful, to create a tapestry of small, individual wonders that together build a larger meaning. And while it is true that Body Without Organs has an aesthetic, with many pieces overlapping, synthesizing, or contradicting as if in conversation, I don’t view those intersections as our main work. What brings me the most joy, as I continue to read, edit, solicit, accept, and otherwise interact with submissions, are the little moments in which a piece surprises me. Each sentence, scene, and creator has the power to transport me out of my own body and leave me absolutely floored, stunned, privy to deeper secrets I didn’t know I needed, but definitely did. In the coffee shop near my high school where I first felt compelled to found a literary journal, across from the statue of Padre Pio (patron saint of adolescence) at the local church, this moment of revelation came from Grace Novarr’s recent feature. I published the poems and interview, a continuation of our Fingertips theme, alongside a playlist of “brief and lovely” songs by our blog correspondent Ottavia while drinking hot chocolate on the cafe sofa, not yet knowing where I would drive afterwards. Though I had already read Grace’s words several times while editing, I looked through them again and found new lines to love, other wonders that passed by me before but now left me “exhausted, exhilarated, ecstatic.” I felt immensely grateful for having the platform and community at BWO to publish these works, all our works, any works. We didn’t have a features section last year, or playlists, or even the notion of hiring a blog correspondent. Those elements emerged as we garnered more readers, received more submissions, expanded our focus, aged and grew, beyond what we could have foreseen. They allowed a deeper sense of what it means to read literature, communicate with others, partake in the world, become a body without organs, become Body Without Organs. But, with BWO, I’m aging, too. Nineteen means my last year of teendom, which means my last year with BWO. It was important to me, founding and curating this journal, that it stayed teen-led and teen-focused, without our voices becoming usurped by older writers reflecting on what they believe teendom means or meant to them. That means, shortly, my letting go, though certainly not the end of BWO. I trust that this community can live beyond me, can develop in new directions, can keep providing small treasures that surprise and stun and unsettle. It just won’t include me driving it along anymore. Not yet, though. I still have another year full of teen angst, emotion, experience, and spectacular mundanity. I still have another year full of BWO, including (and especially) writing I don’t see coming. I can still “imagine how this’ll all turn out in the end,” not know for sure, have more hope and possibilities, stop the trees from catching fire and instead sit underneath them, tracing my fingers along the willow branches that extend into the water. I’m still “a warped, bug-eyed child,” a phrase I said aloud in my car, trying to describe how I felt, before I remembered it came from BWO. I caught my eyes in the rearview mirror, and I laughed, the road still ahead of me, a damn good year still ahead of me. Then I opened my windows, turned the volume on my radio to its highest level, and sang “Bad Liar” by Imagine Dragons at the top of my lungs, a song I first heard because of a playlist by our blog correspondent Cate, on repeat until I reached home. A collection of songs under three minutes, brief & lovely & yours, curated by our blog correspondent Ottavia. Listen on our Spotify here, or see the track listing below:
Don’t Panic by Coldplay Song 2 - 2012 Remastered Version by Blur Breathe (In the Air) by Pink Floyd Eleanor Rigby - Remastered 2009 by The Beatles Caroline, No - Mono by The Beach Boys In My Life - Remastered 2009 by The Beatles Between the Bars by Elliott Smith Faust Arp by Radiohead Cancer by My Chemical Romance Golden by Fall Out Boy Blowin’ In the Wind by Bob Dylan This Charming Man - 2011 Remastered by The Smiths A playlist for wishing on stars, wondering what they are, and looking at love from afar, curated by our blog correspondent Cate. Listen on our Spotify here, or see the track listing below:
Born To Be Yours by Kygo and Imagine Dragons Something Just Like This by The Chainsmokers and Coldplay Wicked Game by Theory of a Deadman Praying by Kesha Priceless by for KING & COUNTRY Bad Liar by Imagine Dragons I Won’t Let You Go by Snow Patrol One Call Away by Charlie Puth Find You by Zedd, Matthew Koma, and Miriam Bryant Weightless by Tim Halperin Set Fire to the Rain by Adele Wait For It by Usher By Cate Pitterle
It’s that time of year again—the coffee pots are on, the forums are full, and word counts are rising daily. That can only mean one thing: NaNoWriMo is here! Formally known as National Novel Writing Month and colloquially known as NaNo, NaNoWriMo is a challenge to write 50,000 words in just 30 days. It’s a haven for novelists and other writers (the script writers, short story writers, poets, and other writers of the world, dubbed “NaNo rebels”) to write as much as possible, as soon as possible. Sporting badges, merch, active forums, and pep talks from famous authors including Andy Weir (The Martian, Artemis), Justina Ireland (Dread Nation), and Kevin Kwan (Crazy Rich Asians), NaNoWriMo is a home for seat-of-your-pants creativity. For writers struggling to complete their first manuscript, like I was a few years ago, it can be a lifesaver. For those just trying to make writing a daily habit, it’s invaluable. We're almost halfway through the month, which means many writers are on task to have written 25,000 words or more by now. Whether or not you’re taking on the challenge this month, though, and whether or not you’re going for the 50K, NaNo offers some invaluable lessons for writers: 1. Keep going. When I participated in NaNo a few years ago, this was the first thing I learned. To reach 50,000 words in a month, you have to write 1,667 every day—the sheer volume of words means that you can’t edit anything if you want to finish. It also means that you can’t question yourself or your ideas, which means no faltering and, most importantly, no stopping. Don’t like your first draft? That’s fine—editing is for December. Embrace the affectionately-named “crap draft” and just write. 2. Reach out to the community. Though some argue writing is a solitary activity, NaNo politely pushes that idea out the door. From the “Character Café” to “NaNoWriMo Ate My Soul” to “Word Wars, Prompts, & Sprints,” the website’s forums are full of authors taking on the challenge. If you’re struggling to write, the “NaNoWriMo Ate My Soul” forum is full of support for, as the site says, “novelists in distress.” If you can’t work up motivation, racing against other writers in a Word Sprint is a great way to get words on the page. Even if it’s not NaNo season, there are plenty of ways to engage with the writing community, too. Join a writing group, meet other reader/writers at your local library, or just surf the off-season NaNo threads. The support might be what helps get your novel completed. 3. Find your happy place. Remaining focused for the hour or two that it takes to write 1,667 words every day can be hard, so figure out what works for you. Try listening to atmospheric or 8D music, lighting a scented candle, or finding a “writing spot” where all you do is write, write, and write some more. The repetition forms a writing habit, which is what NaNo is all about—getting writers to write every day. 4. Don't be afraid to dive deep. Being with one story for a whole month can inspire some deep themes. Rather than skirting them by, address them face-on. Writing is a way to make the world better—to expose people to problems we’re facing, to call attention to an issue, to take some moral thread and tug hard on it. Every one of us has a voice, and NaNo is all about letting that voice out. So when you’re writing this month, if something new and unexpected pops up in your writing, if a new light colors one of your scenes, if a character does something wonderful or horrible or different, cultivate it. Explore it. Don’t be afraid of the discovery. And one last tip: NaNo can be hard. Writing in general can be hard, but that’s part of what makes it so rewarding. When I participated in NaNo, there were times where school and life got in the way and I almost quit. But I found a community of other writers who were attempting the same thing, and I kept writing. At the end of the month, I had written just over 50,000 words. But I’d done more than write a novel—I’d become a better writer. So power through. Keep going. You've got this. Congratulations to our short fiction nominees!
“Ribbons” by Paige Stetson “Ghost Story” by Skye Tausig |