CORO BULLETIN + OFFICE HOURS

Being a Quick (And Hopefully Informative) Roundup

GANG!

Thanks to everyone who’s joined us these last few weeks and thanks to everyone who’s been here since the beginning. We’ve just celebrated month four of our substack and I’m still getting the hang of it, but everyone’s been generous beyond words.

I’ve assembled a monthly roundup for folks below (the long delayed CORO) and also it’s time for another OFFICE HOURS.

If you have any questions regarding building stories or building worlds or the creative life in general, please ask your question in the comments below.

Nota Bene, with apologies: OFFICE HOURS is for pay subscribers only.

And now onto our…

CORO - JANUARY EDITION

We’re in the middle of another beyond-important election cycle and of course madness and elite chicanery reigns — all the more reason to turn to texts that illuminate and humanize and re-constitute. We ain’t surviving this version of Omelas without art — or at least, I ain’t¹.

READ

I recently reviewed Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel MARTYR! for the NYTBR and it’s a knock-out. If you’re looking for something to bring your human heart into sharp relief, look no further.

“In Cyrus, Akbar has created an indelible protagonist, haunted, searching, utterly magnetic. But it speaks to Akbar’s storytelling gifts that “Martyr!” is both a riveting character study and piercing family saga. He traces the Shams family back to Iran, to the people they were before Flight 665. We meet Arash as a boy, unnerved by his sister Roya’s fearlessness, and later as a “zero soldier” in the war with Iraq — “zero education, zero special skills, zero responsibilities outside of my country” — and therefore utterly expendable, a martyr-in-the-making. We meet Ali in the days before chickens, before Cyrus, before heartbreak. Best of all are the chapters that home in on Roya. Dissatisfied with marriage, with motherhood, she stumbles into a friendship that opens her up to other horizons, to emkanat — possibilities.²”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/books/review/martyr-kaveh-akbar.html

PLAY

Caught singer, songwriter, rapper, producer and DJ Yayoi Daimon’s farewell show (she’s moving to the US) and she slayed and slayed and slayed. Plus her dancers’ choreography was fuego, no surprise considering that Yayoi started out as a hiphop dancer in Osaka.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQr2nG07sYQ2UIb-aQW2xXQ

WATCH

MIT Student Billy Ndengeyingoma. Foto by Arthur Musah

BRIEF TENDER LIGHT documents the incredible journey of four African students at MIT. Re-watched it last night and it truly is one of the finest films I’ve seen in years in any genre. And for those of us who had to travel intergalactic distances to attend universities, this film is a deeply moving mirror in which we are given the opportunity to see ourselves at last. Produced and directed by Arthur Musah (one of my former students - not that he ever needed my help).

From PBS: “In Brief Tender Light, Musah captures students as they embark on their MIT education with individual ambitions: Sante to engineer infrastructure in Tanzania; Philip to secure a better life for family in Nigeria; Billy to contribute to post-genocide reconstruction in Rwanda; and Fidelis to advance the wellbeing of his community in Zimbabwe. Their missions are distinct, but fueled by a common goal: to become agents of positive change back home.

While their dreams are anchored in the societies they have left, their daily realities are defined by America – by the immediate challenges in their MIT classrooms, and by the larger social issues confronting the world beyond those classrooms. Their new environment demands they adapt if they want to succeed. Over an intimate, nearly decade-long journey spanning two continents, students and filmmaker alike are forced to decide how much of America to absorb, how much of Africa to hold on to, and how to reconcile teenage ideals with the truths they discover about the world and themselves.

“At its core, Brief Tender Light is about whether youthful idealism can survive the process of growing up,” said Director Arthur Musah. “At the onset, I considered following African youths at different stages of college for a single year. As I developed the idea, it became clear that it would be more adequate that the project become a longitudinal documentary filmed over nearly a decade, in order to answer the questions that intrigued me. How does time, and iterations of trying and failing on projects gradually transform one into an engineer? How does a new world become home? How does a Black African become aware of racism in America? How does one’s identity shift, and how do different people weigh living for their community’s expectations versus their own desires? As a gay man, I also drew on my experience of turning away from Ghana and towards America in search of freedom to inform the film.”

https://www.pbs.org/pov/films/brieftenderlight/

FEAST

Because I still haven’t kicked my pepperoni addiction

For everyone coming to Boston / Cambridge for any reason, I cannot recommend Si Cara enough. If you’re looking for your nostalgic slice you go to Pinnochio’s, but if you want something to write home about (especially if home doesn’t have awesome pizza - LA, Chicago, Toronto, NYC and NJ folks need not apply) you have to try Jess Ngo’s creations. Ngo is the chef de cuisine at Si Cara and “draws from her Italian-Vietnamese heritage to create vivid flavors.”³ A handsome relaxing space for lunch or dinner, especially if you’re a natural wine head and need a quick copa in preparation for your meeting or your college tour or whatever brings you to New England. My goddaughter can’t get enough of her garlic bread and Ngo’s meatball sub is in my top five.

https://sicarapizza.com/

1. I’m referring to Ursula K. Le Guin’s story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas

2. Ironic note: NYT insisted on italicising the word emkanat in my review, a word that did not appear in italics in the book itself. Some battles never end.

3. https://blog.resy.com/2022/10/si-cara-boston-pizza/