My Mind is a Cork Board on Which I’ve Pinned These Notes:

<strong>Forty Days of Mourning a Cat with a Black Face and the Eyes of a Sage</strong>

Issue #6: Faith

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Mai Serhan
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My Mind is a Cork Board on Which I’ve Pinned These Notes:

by Mai Serhan

  • Big words are like big cars- they’re often signs of something else being a teeny bit small.
  • Exclamation marks are for the deaf. 
  • Clouds are not like cotton candy. Clouds are cotton candy. 
  • Ellipsis me, and … I’ll… ellipsis… you…right…back…
  • No one’s born an asshole, not even your villain. 
  • All writing is erotic. Do I get your attention? 
  • Also, abstinence is hot.
  • Place is character and grief is a weather.
  • Arrive fashionably late to your story and leave fashionably early.
  • Drama means doing in Greek. 
  • Don’t make a scene in public, but do make a hell of a scene on the page. 
  • Scenes are mini 3-act structures, by the way.
  • Characters never say what they mean, I mean it. 
  • I don’t want to know anything. I want to anticipate everything.
  • You’re not the narrator, you’re the author. Stay out of it.  
Photo courtesy of Kid Cairo
Author

Mai Serhan

Mai Serhan is a writer, translator and editor. She earned an MA in Arabic Literature from the American University in Cairo and an MSt in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford. She is the recipient of the Center for Book Arts Poetry Chapbook Award for her collection, CAIRO: the undelivered letters, the Narratively Memoir Prize for Return is a Thing of Amber, and the F.H. Pasby Prize from the University of Oxford.

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