I recently attended a @cathyparkhong workshop on documentary poetics, for BIPOC writers, and can’t stop thinking about it. We debated @carolynforche, wrote to @thisbhanu, 200 souls shared wisdom + light.

The chat was better than any textbook. I saved + am still working thru it.

I loved how @cathyparkhong talked about “extending the document”(Muriel Rukeyser’s term) and using our research, imagination, and work to interrogate official accounts of history and what's been left out. To explore the space around them and put forward renegade interpretations.

She urged us to highlight historical erasures and what has been structurally excluded, and to insert the voice of the historically oppressed into the formal architecture of power and authority.

@utopiaminus’s Defacing the Monument + @jenbervin’s Nets are examples.

We talked about how the white gaze can flatten context while enlarging minute details that seem exotic, giving the illusion of intimate understanding. And the risks of this, as white women (whose perspectives are seen to be reliable) are canonized in ways BIPOC writers aren't.

I see this SO vividly in spaces I move between, where those with privilege work with "marginalized communities". It's bad in most "social good" work but *rampant* in global development.

This workshop should be mandatory for every person working communities that aren't their own.

I really admire thinking + work from @lksriv @meowtree @akrishnan23 @RChandran1 @LenaBheeroo @roselonghurst @intldogooder in this space, and we’ve tried in our own small ways @theReboot, but lord we need more.

Because it's not an issue of comms. It's an issue of dehumanization.

Oh and @vanessid was there nbd + gave an impromptu talk on how she came to write "Beast Meridian”—it emerged out of a refusal to be gaslighted, a refusal to be erased.

She asked: How do we make our own worlds, while we're being punished? I’ve thought about that a lot.

Oh and @cathyparkhong is an amazing teacher. So thoughtful, so incisive, so gracious, so encouraging.

Buy all her books! Go to all her things! CPH 4 Prez!