Shazia Hafiz RamjiTag
-
April 27, 2021How Writing a Grant App Can Make You a New Person
This month I broke down while revisiting the statement for my Research and Creation grant app with the Canada Council for the Arts. I cried because I saw – for what felt like the first time in a while ...
-
March 12, 2021Zoom Class: Omar El Akkad and the Challenges of Writing Resistance
Sometimes there are Zoom meetings that can break you. Last week it took me five days to recover from the nausea, headaches, and light sensitivity caused by one single day of back-to-back virtual meetings. ...
-
February 02, 2021Why We Need to Question “Hobbies” in the Pandemic
On a rainy Thursday morning at the end of January 2021, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling for far too long... I couldn’t remember what I had done in 2020. I remember the past couple of years clearly: ...
-
December 16, 2020Soundwalking Through the Pandemic
Every year, there are a few times I think I’m free from the grip of depression. And every year, there are a few times I realize that I’m not. Years ago when I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder, ...
-
October 16, 2020Poets Becoming Novelists: On Trusting Leaps and Fragments
I finished the first draft of my novel in mid-March – in the first week of isolation. I hadn’t grasped the gravity of the pandemic then, so I was grateful for the sudden reprieve from the real world. ...
-
September 03, 2020How To Become That Kind of Bitch (or, One-Night Stands and New Selves)
Before the pandemic, I had a one-night stand with a person I met at a rave, Tyler. The morning after we slept together, I was buttering my toast and he began to ask probing questions about my life and ...
-
July 28, 2020How to Keep Dreaming in the Pandemic (or, How I Finished the Third Draft of my Novel)
Living in a pandemic means that we are facing death every day. Thinking about death pushed me into survival mode. I was stressed and depressed to the point of migraines and insomnia. I stopped doing things ...
-
May 29, 2020Making Time: Why Now is the Perfect Time for Tarot
I don’t want to pretend that I know the history of the Tarot or how it should be used, but I’ve been using it for the last three years because it’s been immensely helpful. I’m not an “expert,” ...
-
May 05, 2020Making Time: Finding Healing with Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama. You know her. You took a selfie in the Infinity Mirror Room at the AGO. You’ve seen her polka dots all over the Internet. You’ve seen her sobering gaze, her blunt bob.On April 15, Kusama ...
-
March 25, 2020Making Time: Blueprinting, or How Durga Chew-Bose Showed Me the Kinship Between Music and Writing
On the first day of social distancing due to COVID-19, I woke up with my synthesizer beside me. I sat up in bed and stabbed some keys for an hour, fed it into my laptop, put it all aside, and returned ...
