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Old Memories Murmured in Dreams: Young Love Poetry

May 20, 2024

An old joke claims that thirty years of marriage is when she wonders what happened to the guy she married, while he wonders what happened to the girl he didn’t marry. There’s something special about young love, and poetry themed around this concept has certain unique features as well.

The most important element is of course relevant to rosy retrospection. Young love – our first romantic interactions in teenagehood and early adulthood – might be beautiful, meaningful, and exhilarating, but it’s also confusing, painful, scary, and sometimes dark and destructive.

No sane person would ever want to go through that more than once!

But that’s the beauty of art: It allows us to safely experience and reflect on feelings, thoughts, and states of mind that we wouldn’t want to experience in “reality”.

So I decided – on a whim, basically – to put together Old Memories Murmured in Dreams, a poetry collection focusing on young love. Quite frankly, I’m not even sure we can call it poetry – I tend to see it more like my Medēn art project; something between poetry and prose.

In any case, if we want to call it poetry for simplicity’s sake, it’s poetry from a naïve, young-adult perspective, but with intriguing darkness. Hey, it’s me; what did you expect!

young love poetry; cover art for Old Memories Murmured in Dreams
Cover art, made by yours truly
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Review of A Naked Woman in the Snow by Dariush Beritan

May 13, 2024

A Naked Woman in the Snow is a short-story collection by Dariush Beritan. Indeed, it’s a… short short-story collection, at about 80 pages and containing five stories. In other words, although (as you will see in this review) it’s not a collection for everyone, it also doesn’t require much of your time. That makes it a marvelous opportunity to try something you’re unfamiliar with.

Familiarity with the subject matter – or lack thereof – will be the key concept in this review, because at the same time it’s what assigns the collection much of its expressive power yet also what keeps it from being fully relatable. But this isn’t as much of a problem as you might think. Indeed, I’d even say it’s a literary device – it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

review of a naked woman in the snow; image of wheatfield
A good portion of A Naked Woman in the Snow is set in settings far outside what I’d term “the Anglophone experience”
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The Importance of Enjoying Your Art

April 29, 2024

Have you ever noticed those ruthlessly competitive parents who live their own dreams through their children? Don’t you hate it when they approach 7-year-olds’ soccer practice like it’s the World Cup? It’s the same with art: Enjoying your art is the only way to truly become creatively good at it.

You might recall an old post of mine on whether writing skills can be taught. In it, I explained how hard work isn’t enough (and neither is talent, in case you’re wondering). What I didn’t say in that post (not explicitly, at least) was that enjoying your art is a crucial aspect of improving.

All those tiger moms who send their 3-year-olds to excruciating piano lessons or ballet – without even asking them if they like it – are a surefire way of creating technical gods and goddesses who have no goddamn clue what true art is.

Let’s see why enjoying your art is crucial – and how you can enjoy yours!

enjoying art, image of singer on stage
Enjoying your art is not just the best way of creating and performing it; it’s also the only way to improve where it matters
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