Writing for the necessity of joy and the joy of necessity...

R a s m a H a i d r i

POEMS & PROMPTS

What’s the buzz, tell me what’s been happening…

AWA certification awarded to Rasma Haidri

Yea! I did it! I just finished my AWA certification program. Thankfully for me they did it online this time, and in the morning on the Pacific Coast, so it was at a decent hour for me here in Norway. I’m proud to be the first AWA trained workshop leader in the country of Norway, all of Scandinavia actually. There are only a handful of us in Europe, for now. The AWA method is both revolutionary and nothing new. Nothing new because free writing has been around now for decades and everyone knows, at least in theory, that to write you just have to start doing it.

article on creative non-fiction in Brevity’s blog

I am working on a memoir, have been for a while although it is continually renewing itself so it feels over and over like I’m just starting. Thinking a lot about the process of writing any kind of prose, but in particular memoir. It is a common misconception that it is harder to write fiction than creative non-fiction, because in non-fiction you are just writing what happened. That’s the rub, what did happen? In fiction you get to decide that as you go along. In non-fiction you are a slave to truth, and facts and truth are often at odds.

Check out the article on Brevity.

Anti-Heroin Chic publishes Rasma Haidri

Thanks to Anti-Heroin Chic for reprinting “What the End is For” in their hot-off-the-press Grief and Loss issue.

Wicked Woman Prize - second place

Brickhouse Books hosts a Wicked Woman poetry prize and this year the judge Rose Solari judged my manuscript Blue Like Apples a “close second” to the winner. I thank Rose and the Brickhouse editors for the kudos and good advice as that book keep evolving.

Route 20 Anthology publishes "Following" by Rasma Haidri

My poem“Following” found a home in this book. Road trips were a prime element of my childhood featuring summer treks between Tennessee, New York, Wisconsin and Florida. I haven’t written much about them, but when I saw the call for this anthology I gave it a shot and the poem found a home. The anthology is out now from Foothills Press. Get your copy here!

Waking Up American by Seal Press

My essay “Urdu, My Love Song” appeared in Waking Up American: Coming of Age Biculturally (2005) from Seal Press. The essay was many years in the making. I had been exploring themes of home, belonging, identity in poems, but in the end creative non-fiction was the only genre that let me fully explore my mixed feelings about my father’s Indian background, his exotic ‘otherness’ clashing with the homegrown southern culture we lived in.