Stories

"Audre Lorde once said, 'the white fathers taught us to say, I think, therefore I am.' She suggested: 'I feel, therefore I am free'. I think it was a wonderful paradigm shift. And yet, why is it that in creative writing courses, today, the very first thing we teach students, is 'write what you know'. Perhaps that's not the right way to start, at all. Imaginative literature is not necessarily about writing who we are or what we know, or what our identity is about. We should teach young people and ourselves to expand our hearts and write about what we can feel. We should get out of our cultural getto and go visit the next one and the next one... In the end, stories move like whirling dervishes, drawing circles beyond circles. They connect all humanity regardless of identity politics."
Aqui
Elif Shafak