6 pm EST | Free MAKING UNFORGETTABLE CHARACTERS with Writing Co-Lab Less of a class / seminar, more of me holding space and bossily giving you writing prompts | In-person is sold out, but online has some slots open | Tuesday, May 15. Here are three I’m teaching in the coming month: ON MEMORY with The Museum of Modern Art and The Asian American Writers WorkshopĪ generative series of writing exercises, using prompts, breathwork, and works of art from MoMA’s collection. The good news is, you don’t need to be enrolled at university to take a class or two with me. I’ll be a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt University in the fall of 2023 (!!) and have accepted a spring 2024 visiting professorship at a place I’m really excited about (!!) -will share more when I’ve signed the contracts and whatnot. For now, some of my film photos came back (thank you to the cuties at Exposure Therapy!) Here’s a little snack: You’ll get to read all about it, soon enough. I cried about seventeen times from the sheer emotion of return, of confronting the long past. Not the time to go into it, but I also engaged in lowkey risky gonzo journalism for current-manuscript research, and feel proud of myself for pulling it off. I touched enormous coral reefs, swam with turtles, saw my family’s old flat, visited my old school, hiked wadis, drove up tall mountains, climbed a two-storey dune in the Empty Quarter aka the largest sand sea in the world, ate dates with a Bedouin mom of three, meaningfully experienced climate change. I went to Oman with one of my close friends and we had a TIME. (well, nine cherished, but hard to narrativize, months were spent in Canada.) This is the year that marks a halfway point in my little life-sixteen years in Oman and India, sixteen years in the U.S. for speaking gigs, and then spent the last two weeks of April in Oman, where I grew up, and where I hadn’t set foot for the past sixteen years.

In February I went back to India, took on a bunch of nonfiction writing assignments in March, went on over to Fairfax and D.C. I decided that 2023 was going to be a year of less pondering, more doing, and I’ve been trying to deliver on that since.

Life has been happening at a somewhat breakneck pace for me. Eliot, Diving Into The Wreck by Adrienne Rich, the Gospel of John. En route to completing my annual spring reading rituals: The Waste Land by T.S.

Thankam mathews