WHAT’S NEW//جديدنا

Read our Autumn newsletter!

WRITING PROMPT//فكرة اليوم

In an interview with Etel Adnan in 2017 for the Los Angeles Review of Books, she says, “Addiction to the sea, addiction to Nietzsche: we come back to them for the same reasons, I am sure. They are ‘infinite,’ not a narration to be understood once and for all, but a recurring source of amazement. The sea was for me, in Beirut, when I was maybe not yet four, the greatest ‘happening,’ the moment I plunged in one of those tiny holes, puddles, spaces among rocks that the short tide of the Mediterranean was regularly filling, on the shore of the city, half a mile from home (by the way, all this disappeared long long ago).”

It is spring. The days are longer, the water warmer. Narrate your sea to someone who has never seen it. If you get stuck, ask the sea five questions — they can be personal, mythical, or historical:

Who is allowed to cross the sea? What pollutes a coast? What is your favorite memory of the sea? Who did you last swim with, and where are they now? Is the sea alive? What stays awake in its deep dark zones, and what doesn’t?

Answer without order or judgment. Then shuffle your answers – let the tide do its rearrangement. Maybe a poem emerges, or a parable, the beginnings of a short story.  

By Nur Turkmani via Etel Adnan