Projects

I dreamed

/ RCRuiz

I dreamed that it was possible to invite people into a space and invite them to dream the past, the present, and the future. I dreamed it was possible to bring people of color from migrant groups in The Netherlands into this space and it would be possible to see their dreams enter the world. When I shared this dream, I didn’t know how it would happen or even what it would look like. I only had a vague idea of how to create that kind of setting and that kind of space.

I think back to the final day of the workshop and I think of the work coming from the hands of the writers around the table, and I find myself completely blown away. On the morning of the final day, when I asked participants to think about a story connected with personal items they’d brought with them, I did not expect that they would all write. After all, throughout the workshop, we’d used all kinds of different methods of story making. But this third day, they were all writing.

Before we did the first exercise, we read the Bridge Poem together. Hearing it read in chorus was just so powerful. It was like a presence entered that space and made it possible for us to reach that place where stories were waiting to be told. I’d brought along that quote from Alberto Rios and shared it with the writers after the first exercise.

“What surprised you?” I asked. “What did you discover?”

We were all in a thoughtful mood because the stories from that first exercise were so personal and moving.

“I didn’t know I had this story inside me,” one of the participants said.

“I didn’t realise that I remembered so much,” another replied.

Writing is also about remembering. Writing is also about being surprised by what you remember.

“What is it that you worry about and that keeps you from making or sharing your stories,” I ask.

“I worry about grammar,” someone says. “Because I want to post my stories on Facebook but when I do, people tell me right away that my grammar is wrong or what’s with your punctuation.”

I think about this thing–this grammar thing–the way in which the world can be so hung up on using perfect language and perfect punctuation as if that were the heart of what makes story. I think of all the things we forget when we jump on someone who is trying to share their story but tells it in a way that doesn’t align with how we think it’s supposed to be told. I think of how we are quick to say: your characters are wrong, your theme is wrong, your story is too bloated, your words don’t match. You are just wrong.

When we do that, we forget the most important thing. Someone who has taken the courage to share their story is someone who’s taken a risk. To tell a story is to come out of the shadows. To put your voice out into the world is to become visible. We forget that story often comes from vulnerable places. That it takes courage to share what’s vulnerable and painful and for writers coming from the margins, becoming vulnerable is risk.

I think about this as I reflect on the workshop. I think about the final exercise of the day. There I was saying: “this final exercise is optional. If you don’t feel like doing it, then you don’t have to.”

I had a moment of doubt where I wondered if I should ask writers to share and so I left it there in the middle until one of the participants raised their hand.

“I want to read my work,” they said.

And after that another one did. And another. And another. Until the circle was round.

These amazing writers who’d never attempted fiction before this workshop, they blew my socks off.

We shape the space in which stories are told. How we receive another person’s story determines the world into which the stories take their place. If we’re really serious about wanting to see more voices coming from the margins, we also need to think seriously about how we receive those voices.

Stand still. Respect the courage it takes to be visible. Speak your story into the world. In your response to the work, tread lightly.

workshop prep

/ RCRuiz

Saturday will be the third and final session for the first iteration of the Invitation to Dreaming series. I am in the midst of preparing what’s called a draaiboek for Saturday. This is a useful tool that I highly recommend for people planning workshops. Basically, what I’ve done is create two different scripts for the day. One that’s detailed and one that’s bare bones. The barebones script is an approximate time schedule with lunch and breaks figured out while the detailed script includes notes and reminders to myself with highlighted notes on what it is that I want participants to take away with them. I’ve also written out my lesson plan so that I hear the words I want to say in my head. They may undergo transformation in the telling as I don’t do the workshop with a script in my hand, but the gist of it remains the same.

For this final day, I want participants to reflect on how the exercises we’ve used during the first two sessions are useful when we think of planning out a longer work and working over a longer period of time on a particular project.

Because not all of my participants may end up embracing a writing project, I want to emphasize that while they might not think of story making in terms of publishing professionally, they can also think of writing or creating and sharing stories as a form of legacy related to their journey as BIPOC and as members of a migrant community. We can never underestimate how valuable such sharings are for the younger generation or for the generations that follow. I am still very grateful that my Dad wrote lengthy letters to his children and that he decided to try and write a little about his personal history before he died. Knowing that I have that record that I can look back on now that he’s no longer here gives me this feeling of still being connected.

I have participants who are very interested in embracing writing or storytelling in some form. Some might want to embrace doing roleplay or theater type performances together, while others may go on to write their memoirs or continue to explore other kinds of fiction writing and that’s definitely something I want to encourage. These different types of making are beautiful and magical and transformative in power.

I feel very privileged indeed to be witnessing such flowerings and also to hear people say that they’d never imagined that writing a story was a possibility for them (even if they’d always wanted to)–well, that’s the reason why I felt and do feel it’s important to bring this workshop to communities.

During the communal worldbuilding exercise, one of the women said that it was hard to imagine in a science fiction way and that it was hard for them to envision a future world without thinking of politics. (Imagine me doing mental squee.) And then, this woman went on to share a story that was so damned good, I was like: what do you mean you can’t write science fiction?

In its naked self, story is about writing, sharing, telling what you see, what you envision and what it means to you. And the best stories are the ones that come from that place of feeling safe enough to be vulnerable. I have heard so much joy and laughter among the participants during the first two sessions and I want to continue to remind them that this is the joy you hang onto when you’re in that space facing your story.

I know there are many other things that go into stories, but on the journey, joy is one thing we need to take along with us. Hope, joy, and love, and also community.

Day Two

/ RCRuiz

It’s the end of the second day of the workshop series. I’m thankful that we’ll have a few days before the third and final session as these two days have been quite intense. We had a number of new participants join the workshop today and so I had to think a bit on how to introduce them into the workshop without making the session feel repetitive for participants who’d attended yesterday.

Here’s what I learned: given a space where people feel safe and accepted, they will share amazing stories. By creating a safe space for others to tell their stories, I’ve created a space that feels safe and warm and loving for myself and created a space to which participants tell me they want to return to.

Removing the mystery around story creation and throwing out the myth of talent or giftedness opens the door for those who’ve felt uncertain about writing or telling their stories. The realisation that story can be as simple as taking a walk around the block and noticing things and talking about them is enough to free participants from uncertainty and the fear of even attempting story.

At the heart of today’s session was a moment of history making. I’d prepared a science fictional scenario. In it, I asked participants to create a history of that future world from the perspective of five groups of people who are often overlooked. It was a risky exercise since I was asking participants who had never engaged with science fiction before, to imagine or envision in a science fictional way. But just as yesterday, the workshop participants blew me away.

Next week, we’ll be holding the final session of this workshop series. I know I am being ambitious yet again. Who in their right mind gives fledgling writers and storytellers only 30 minutes to build a world and create a story?

The thing is…when you tell people to just have fun, they will take you at your word. There will be laughter, there will be lots of chatter, but in the end, they will blow your socks off and to me, that’s just magic.

It’s finally happening

/ RCRuiz

I sit here on the eve before the first day of a workshop series I’ve been working on for quite some time. Thanks to the WereldMuseum Rotterdam and to Dona Daria, the workshop I’ve been dreaming of will finally become a reality. Tomorrow, will be the first day of a three-day workshop for BIPOC participants in Rotterdam and I am looking forward to it with anticipation.

In preparing the final schedule for the workshop days, I’ve had to refine and narrow down exercises. Creating exercises that will be doable for participants who are a mix of people who might have done some writing before and people who have always thought of creating stories as being something not for them for innumerable reasons, has been a challenge. And I am really thankful for my partner, Hodan, who’s given me such great feedback and encouragement throughout the process of putting the workshop and the schedule together.

I still don’t know what the class will look like exactly, but the programme includes a mix of individual and communal work, and a mix of spoken, written and visually expressed work. I’ve used different elements of this workshop in different environments with different groups and now I’m eager to see what will happen when these elements are used and applied together over the span of three days. Perhaps the most challenging aspect of this workshop is the multi-lingual aspect, but I will cross that bridge when I get to it.

Most important to me is to let the participants experience how much fun it can be to engage with story on their own terms. That is what I’m keeping in mind as I wind down for the night.

I just had to quickly write about it because it’s finally happening.

Oh yes. We will have fun.

Lesson Plan preparation

/ RCRuiz

In preparing the lesson plan for three intensive workshop days, I’m putting in the work that I’ve thought about and used in various iterations leading up to these series. I think about this as I finally arrange the lesson plans in the order that I have in mind.

When I first told Hodan Warsame that I wanted to create a space for BIPOC people to write and engage with story, I didn’t know at the time that it would lead to me creating a different way of giving a workshop. But it has led me here and I find myself feeling grateful for the opportunity to share this with the participants who will come to the workshop.

I think about the initial response in the small groups where I’ve tried out some of the things that are going into this workshop and I can’t help but feel excited (although I will admit it is also scary). The thing is, until the workshop happens, there’s really no way of knowing how a particular group will respond and how certain exercises will work. Will the time we’ve planned for each activity be enough? Will it be too much? Have I paced the rhythm of the workshop right so participants don’t fall asleep? Will we be able to shape the space in such a way that it feels welcoming and inviting?

And then, I also have to face up to my own unpredictable stage fright. I know I have to be prepared and so I’m writing as much detail as I can because I am aware that I have moments when I suddenly freeze and my brain just blanks. Not something you want to happen when you’re doing a workshop as that tends to lead to awkward silences or to me just mumbling about unrelated stuff or rifling through my mental notebook.

But I’m learning too to remind myself that it’s okay to have those uncomfortable and awkward moments and it’s okay to tell participants that ‘my brain got stranded for a bit’. In my sharing with the guerrilla writers, as I talk about my own struggles with my work, I realised that doing this, being open about how I don’t know or how I am uncertain or unsure about how to say things also helps fledgling writers as it removes the ‘mystery’ often associated with writing.

I may be a bit farther in the journey, I may have written and done a lot of things, but it doesn’t mean that I am the expert. I think of it this way: my role is to share what I know. But the experts are the participants. Because each one comes to the workshop with their life experience, with their personal history, with the sound and rhythm of their own language, their songs, their dance, with the embodiment of culture, they are the experts. But what I can do is share what I know and gently encourage them to launch out on their own journey. If we can built a support network while we’re at it, that would be fantastic. At the very least, I want to take this opportunity to let participants know that they’re not alone in their journey.

I’m smiling as I think of how we had lesson plan preparation included in curriculum at the conservatory. Back then, I really didn’t know what they would be useful for. Now, I’m putting that knowledge to good use. I can’t help but think of this line right now: Everything you need, you already have with you or you will acquire it during the journey. (I think my son who loves doing those quest games would appreciate that line. 😆)

If you’re reading this, I wish you inspiration as you continue on the journey.

An invitation . . .

/ RCRuiz

Posting the flyer for a mixed media story creation workshop that I’ve been working on and developing with the migrant BIPOC community in mind. Thanks to the lobbying efforts of Hodan Warsame, we will be able to share this workshop with the people we had in mind when we launched our efforts a year ago. This is a project that’s come about through the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam and in collaboration with Dona Daria. There are still places available, so do send your application to Hodan. All that’s needed is an email or a text message. I do want to emphasise that this iteration is specifically for the migrant and BIPOC community.

History and myth-making

/ RCRuiz

I’ve been thinking a lot about history and myth-making as I work on another piece. Edouard Glissant’s work inspires me a lot and it feels like the universe is working to bring various readings across my path that are in conversation with the work of Glissant.

Rolando Vazquez’s Vistas of Modernity enriches my engagement with Glissant’s work and vice versa and I can’t recommend Vistas of Modernity enough. While I was reading Vistas of Modernity, I found myself moving back to some passages from Glissant and then returning again to Vistas. In my head, it felt like there was this rich conversation going on between these two thinkers. There’s a lot to process and a lot to think about and I feel like rushing to make a post on it would not do any justice to the work. But definitely, anyone who’s interested or who is engaged in decolonial work would benefit a lot from looking up Glissant’s work and Vazquez’s Vistas of Modernity.

While reflecting on these two works, and while working on the new short piece, I found myself thinking about the relation between music and mathematics: about algorithms and improvisations: about waveforms and spacetime. A lot of times, I feel like a chicken scratching at the surface of concepts where comprehension lies just beyond my reach–like that word that you know is waiting to be uttered at the tip of your tongue, but you just can’t vocalise it yet.

The new piece is me working on concepts that intrigue me. It’s also influenced by the idea of history, re-membering (as Rolando writes it) and myth-making.

All these thoughts tumble together to inform the practice I am developing when it comes to the workshop practice. The idea of employing various mediums and ways of creating or re-membering or un-remembering history….these are things that I feel are key to the work and are necessary to what we want to achieve with the Invitation to Dreaming.

The hungry mind led me to Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination by Brent Hayes Edwards. I’ve only cracked the book open, but in the introduction there’s a passage that captured my imagination. Here, the author writes that: “Oral history’s importance lies not in adherence to fact, but in its departure from it, as imagination, symbolism and desire emerge.”

I think on how we can sometimes get stranded or blocked by the idea of story not aligning with empirical data and I’ve been thinking too about how a lot of history is told from the viewpoint of the conqueror or the coloniser.

Anyway, this is because I find myself rather obsessed with the question of the use of speculative fiction in the work of decolonisation.

A beloved friend of mine spoke of this kind of writing as a form of exorcism and the more I think on it, the more I love how this resonates with the idea of myth-making and how important it is for us to recognise that the myths we create are not subordinate or less important but are rather of equal value and equal importance. Do we even need to explain why it is important to us? Do we even need to make everything comprehensible or transparent?

Glissant in Poetics of Relation writes this: “For more than two centuries whole populations have had to assert their identity in opposition to the processes of identification or annihilation triggered by these invaders. Whereas the Western nation is first of all an “opposite” for colonised peoples, identity will be primarily “opposed to” — that is a limitation from the very beginning. Decoloniality will have done its real work when it goes beyond this limit.”

I think then to myself that the capacity to think beyond data and to think outside the box, to imagine beyond what is presented as “these are the facts” are tools which help in the work of decoloniality. Myth-making, the de-linking of the personal and the empirical, the creation of tangents and speculations, the ability to think outside of time.

My mind works away and picks at process and about how to bring these ideas into the workshop practice. How to encourage new and aspiring artists to bring this kinds of concepts with them into their core work.

Again, I find myself thinking of points of origin and how starting from the self, meeting the artists at where they are in that moment is an essential part of the work. Histories, stories, songs and other creations which are personal to us are also linked to the wider world. Family stories are where myth-making starts. Family histories are part of our personal myth-makings too. Beyond the personal portraits, beyond the familial, we see the world as a backdrop. How is that family myth set within the world around it? How do we create myths that originate from our selves? What’s important is that these myths come from us. From creators whose voices have often been elided–the sound you miss or skip over–like jazz creators, we must improvise. We create and bounce off each other’s words and worlds, we mix and play to create myths that sound like and belong to the self. They don’t have to adhere to an existing narrative, they belong to their selves, just as we belong to our selves.

There is a lot to think and reflect on as I think of this and as I consider on how to bring that into my practice.

To you who are on the journey, sing your songs, write your myths, dance your dances.

She’d always known space had shape and form of its own. It wasn’t always visible, but it was there. Now, its patterns and undulations were visible to her. She could see it curving around to accommodate her sire; could see it flowing and moving to accommodate static instruments, to accommodate her/self/; and now, she could see too how it lent itself to shadows that took on a form of their own as they came to stand beside her sire. 

-From To the Tune of the Wild Ones-

literary tradition

/ RCRuiz

Small chapbook is happening. I wish I had thought to do this when she was still here. I miss you, big sis. But even though I can’t see you anymore, I know you’re somewhere smiling because I also believe you do see this.

Included in this book: Decolonizing as an SF writer, Dancing in the Shadow of the Once and the English version of the first Dutch story I’ve ever written. In English it’s titled: Hymn to Life.

In lieu of a CV, I thought I would just share a small book with my work in it.

some ambitious dreaming

/ RCRuiz

I’ve been working on our project proposal for the dreaming sessions which would lead to more writing sessions. This is a project that’s flowed forth from a dream I shared with one of my friends sometime before Covid sent us all into lockdown. At that time, I didn’t see how to make that dream become something real. I just didn’t know how to at that time because I was emerging from having retreated away from the world and was just moving tentatively towards engaging with the world again.

So I told this friend who is also a dreamer like me, about my desire to create something inviting for BIPOC writers, thinkers and creatives. I didn’t know what form it would take, but during the pandemic period, when I realised how dreaming was essential to youngsters, I started the writing sessions. When my fellow visionary got back in touch with me, I had already worked out some of the things I wanted to do with a face to face version of the writing sessions.

As I work on the draft for this project, I think about my own history with dreaming and the written word.

My love for writing started long ago, when I was little girl in the mountains who had run out of books to read. Before I thought of writing stories for myself, I remember lying in bed next to my sister long after lights out. I remember the stories we spun for each other in the dark. I remember holding hands when our stories got scary, and falling asleep when they got a bit boring, and dreaming on inside my mind long after my sister had fallen asleep.

Books were magical things created by people far far beyond my line of sight. When I was a child, I didn’t know it was possible for someone like me to one day have stories included in books.

I think of those whose names I don’t yet know–those who I will meet on this journey. I think of those who dream and who are scared to reach out for the pen, I think of the numerous stories, the numerous words, the recollections and the dreaming that are waiting to be brought into the world. I want to say: I can’t wait to meet you. I can’t wait to read your work.

Working on the writing sessions

/ RCRuiz

Life is moving swiftly these days and it’s good to be working again and to be writing at a steady pace as well. I’ve decided to start a new trajectory for the kids who are joining in on the discord writing sessions, moving towards helping the kids think about projects they want to work on or stories they might want to write and how best to help them achieve that.

The project that a friend and I have pitched has been approved and we hope to start working on promoting and inviting participants soon. I think that one of the things we’ll have to do is specifically go and invite potential participants actively. My hope is that in actively inviting, we create a sense of welcome. Bringing potential participants across the threshold to where they say: Okay, I’ll give this a try, is a first step.

My primary focus in the upcoming sessions is the participant. What do participants want to achieve? What stories do they want to tell? To me, it’s important to meet participants where they are in their journey. To give them freedom to connect with the sound of their own voice and the strength of their own stories. In this, I feel it’s important to share the works of writers of colour, to reconnect with musical forms that come from personal history or culture, to think about the forms we use in our own settings and to make those the building blocks on which we tell our stories. To invite participants to play and just have fun in whatever language feels most connected to their inner self. I feel this is where I would like to start as I’ve discovered that often that reconnection with the inner voice brings about a sense of wonder, the realisation that a certain power and magic exists in letting that inner voice come out. To my mind, the technical details of craft, while being necessary are of lesser importance than that discovery.

More and more, I find that colouring inside the lines–adhering to imposed structure and imposed ways of telling story ‘correctly’ (what does that even mean?) limits imagination and sense of joy and wonder. When we move outside of those lines, when we explore and have fun, then magic unfolds.

I think it’s important to emphasise that BIPOC writers write and create because we enjoy it and because we are curious and playful. Imagining and creating our own worlds and spaces bring us joy and hope and helps us work through things we wrestle with. I translate this as freedom to explore structures and other forms of tellings that live outside of the west or the establishment’s experience. It’s also a journey of exploration for me and as with all journeys, there is an element of trepidation. More than that though, there’s excitement and joy.

Looking at where I started with this post, I find myself thinking about jam sessions and improvisation and how it’s when we aren’t worried about ‘what if I play the wrong note’ that the most wonderful things come into being. One of them being: the joy of shared laughter and then the excitement of seeing what we can do with unintended disharmony.