Last month, I spoke to the first of my three Season 4 guests! Diana Dominguez, founder of Más Libritos bookstore in Springdale, Arkansas, had so much to say about the day to day life of a bookstore owner– I learned so much!
View our full conversation below, and check out Más Libritos when you get a chance. It’s an intersectional feminist bookstore of new and used books that center Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), and it’s the first and only Latina-owned independent bookstore in Arkansas!
This week on Tightwires, I’m so excited to feature a recent conversation with poet and Ph.D. Taylor Byas, who shared some incredibly valuable words on poetry and process.
I have long been a Taylor Byas fan and so enjoyed reading her debut full-length collection, I DONE CLICKED MY HEELS THREE TIMES, this summer. It’s the sort of book that rewards repeat reading, a poignant journey full of careful considerations that have come to feel like hallmarks of Taylor’s work. (A tiny example: The first line of the first poem is in conversation with the last line of the last poem.) I already can’t wait to revisit!
This week on Tightwires, I’m sharing a conversation with writer and comedian Mary Ryan Brown, who had so many insightful things to say about comedy, craft, and performance! I learned so much, which comes as no surprise— Mary Ryan and I met in my first poetry workshop at the University of Southern Mississippi and she’s been a dear friend and inspiration since!
View our full conversation below!
Interested in being a future featured guest? Let me know!
It’s Week Three of National Poetry Month! I’m still sharing poetry collections and prompts every weekday on YouTube, but in anticipation of Earth Day this Saturday, I am also participating in the Authors Take Action #ClimatePoemProject!
You can find links to climate poetry prompts from your favorite children’s authors and poets here.
Here’s my contribution:
Write a poem about your oldest and most distinct memory of a weather event. Place either yourself or a favorite fictional character in the scene, and end the poem on a hopeful note.
I love poetry! I hate poetry sometimes too. I always hate cooking.
My first quarter on YouTube was wild! I’m so grateful for all your support and willingness to humor me, truly.
And I’m ecstatic to start my second quarter with another challenge, one that’s somehow become more challenging than last quarter’s challenge, when I wrote an entire 50,000 word collection in 10 days–
In honor of National Poetry Month, I’ve promised to share a poetry collection every weekday, as well as a writing prompt and recipe inspired by that collection.
Each week’s featured titles form a spine poem! The first week was incredibly fun. We looked at American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes, Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith, A Fortune For Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib, If They Come For Us by Fatimah Asghar, and Girls That Never Die by Safia Elhillo.
And we made imitation McDonald’s apple pies, elevated grilled cheese paninis (for my Ramadan birthday!), digital cheeseboards, aloo keema, and apple Nutella rolls. Some recipes were more successful than others.
Here’s the original announcement video for the challenge:
When I envisioned Tightwires last summer, I knew— because of my journalism background—I would eventually want to interview other people. Specifically, that I would want to interview other writers.
Interviews build community, and if there’s one thing I learned in my MFA, it’s that building a community is paramount to success in writing. Initial creation might occur in solitude, but nurturing an artistic practice requires throwing the door wide open. I am who I am because of the communities that nurture me.
How fitting, then, that my first Tightwires interview is with author and diversity advocate Karuna Riazi, an absolute powerhouse of a creator who becomes an invaluable part of every community she enters!
I so enjoyed reading A BIT OF EARTH, Karuna’s latest book, last month. This searing reimagining of a beloved classic is sure to be a big hit. I can’t wait for everyone else to read it too!
2022 has been a wild year full of endings and beginnings. The nature of endings in particular is that as they happen, they call to mind other, more painful endings.
As a college sophomore in 2016, I launched Swipe Right, a humor column for my college newspaper. Pieces from the column went on to win awards, were republished in 34 newspapers across the U.S. and Cuba, got me early agent interest, and probably even landed me some grad school acceptances.
It was an incredible experience that I miss dearly. I left the newspaper and ended Swipe Right because, as a senior double majoring in the honors college and applying to MFA programs, I wanted to prioritize my creative writing. It wasn’t an easy decision by any means, and it always felt like it lacked closure.
I’ve long thought about bringing Swipe Right back in some capacity, though I think I’ve always known it would have to be different. To bring it back now— after I’ve finished grad school, made it to the next step in my writing career, and obtained a frontal lobe— feels like a full-circle moment; an attempt at closure.
Meet Tightwires, a somewhat-unhinged vlog series about navigating life after the MFA and attempting to rediscover the joy in writing! Think of it as Swipe Right but with a frontal lobe, a camera, and much more free time.
I floated the idea earlier this year with some of my former newsroom colleagues and was so ecstatic to reconnect with the original Swipe Right logo designer, Cameron Cummins, to create the new Tightwires logo and also the animation above. [Thank you, Cameron, for rendering my vision so perfectly and holding my secret for so long!]
Through Tightwires, I’ll be posting writing vlogs, tutorials, analyses, interviews, and reviews. I’ll also be completing quarterly writing challenges. The first of these begins next Monday, Dec. 19, when I’ll be challenging myself to write a 50,000 word novel in the last ten weekdays of 2022 and documenting the entire process in daily vlogs on YouTube. I’m so excited to get this started, and I hope that my reasons for delving into this challenge (explained in the video below) will convince you to join me!
Hiba Tahir 