Knock knock. Who's there? Newsletter.
Greetings, friends!
I read a great little article by my friend Cam Awkward-Rich and wanted to share it with you. The gist? Poems (and probably other forms of creative writing) are a great space to grapple with concepts, historical figures, and narratives that aren't well suited to formal research or journalism. That was a bit reductive so I recommending reading the actual piece, but here's the closing paragraph, which I found useful:
In your own work, consider asking yourself: What are the traces of the past that will not leave you alone? Can you use those traces in order to imagine the ending to an endless story? Perhaps an ending other than the dismal one hinted at in the official record? What language in the archive is suggestive of these possibilities? What language in the archive is only used for the purpose of capture? Can you make even that language do something else?