Embracing the term 'collective' and a few (life) updates 💜
On recovering from burnout, building community, and supporting a fellow writer | This is a five-minute read.
Hello and Salaam my friends 👋🏾
It’s been a long time, so I pray you’ve been well and have been writing. To say this year has been a rollercoaster would be an understatement. But I’ve been trying to learn how to do better with putting myself, health and wellbeing first. It’s not easy, but it’s one of the reasons why 2024 is my ‘Year of NO!’ (I’ve shared this with a few friends to hold me firmly accountable to this). 2024 is also my ‘Year of Qalb’, that is to say, expect more consistency and commitment with the newsletter, and a lot more exciting things in shaa Allah.
Let me update you on my writing progress so far. In August, right after the final deadline of the first year of my Masters, I crashed and BURNED OUT. I needed the entire month to recover, but at some point I became so worried I’d never be able to write again. I legit was like, ‘Allah, this cannot be my life. I’ll do better, I promise. Please just let me craft one sentence that makes sense.’
As we eased into September and second year of university started, the words slowly started to flow. While I’ve struggled to work on a novel-length project, I’ve been focusing on my thesis which is a short story collection featuring Black Muslim women trying to simply be. I’ll be sharing more about this in the near future, in shaa Allah.
In November, I went on a four-day black women writers retreat in Sintra, Portugal, organised by Georgina Lawton of Take World (find me on TikTok to hear all about my experience). It was absolutely phenomenal – I wrote at least 2000 words every single day, I got a lot of clarity, I ate good, worked out and made new writerly friends. Organising retreats is one of my many goals for the Qalb Writers Collective community, so this really reignited that fire, and I’m looking forward to doing this!
God knew I needed that retreat, because when I returned to reality, life hit me left, right and centre. I’ve had to navigate a lot of challenges in the past couple of weeks, so my writing routine was thrown out of the window. But as we wrap up 2023, I hope to spend some time finding my writing stride again. Perhaps we can have some community write-alongs soon; I find that I’m inspired when I’m surrounded by other people who are writing whether virtually or in-person.
Let me know in the comments how your writing has been this year so far, what your goals are for the new year, and if you’ll love to take part in a write-along!
Reflections 🍉
The blessing of being burnt out and unable to write was that it forced me to re-interrogate why I write. I’ve written previously about the several reasons why I write, and what keeps coming back to me is ‘to bear witness’.
To show people that this is my life, this is what it means to navigate the world as a Black Muslim woman.
Of course, this is just a starting point, but sometimes simply bearing witness is enough. And I think this is why I’m growing more and more concerned about whose stories get to be told, and how who the teller is influences how the story is portrayed and positioned. I wrote all about this in an essay published last month in ‘The Unheard Stories’ anthology.
As I write about this now, I think of Palestinians, and the people of Gaza, and how they have honoured as well as freed us, by virtue of them sharing their stories with us, inviting us to bear witness to the horrors and joys of their lives.
You must have heard by now that the Israeli army continue to target journalists, and I keep wondering what the world would be like if we didn’t have Palestinians showing us the truth (which they have been for decades, btw). Of course, there are people who have chosen to look away even with the truth blatantly in front of us, but we must not look away. We owe them so much, but the least we can do is look and act – whether with your words, voting or boycotting power.
On December 7, Israeli airstrike also targeted and killed poet, author and academic Dr Refaat Alareer alongside six of his family members. Several of his writings have been shared across the world, but what has stayed with me most is this clip where he talks about what makes fiction more important than non-fiction, in its power to returns us back to our humanity.
If you would like to support another Palestinian writer with following her dreams of becoming a writer & conduit for Palestinian stories, kindly donate to the fundraiser to fund Eman Basher’s MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University of London or share the link far and wide with your network.
Changes to the Newsletter
The newsletter content remains free because I want the knowledge and resources I share to be accessible to as many people as possible, but you can become a paid subscriber to support my work.
Paid subscribers will get monthly bonus content such as insights into my research placement at Pan Macmillan & Storymix, my short story writing process, and my thesis research.
The newsletter will now be going out on a weekly basis – every Friday – to the following structure:
1st Friday: Craft Lessons / Essays on Writing
2nd Friday: Author interviews (let us know if you have any authors you’d like us to interview)
3rd Friday: Article from a community member*
4th Friday: Round ups, recommendations, reading lists, competitions etc
5th Friday (Bonus): Answers to your questions about writing/publishing/life
*We’re excited to be embracing the term ‘collective’ in our name more. So, please get in touch (qalbwriterscollective@gmail.com) if you’ll like to contribute to our newsletter. It’s an exciting opportunity to get editorial feedback and support + build your writing portfolio and online presence.
As usual, if you found this beneficial at all, please shout about it to your family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances!
Till next time,
Suad x
P.S. There’ll be more announcements to follow in the new year in shaa Allah!
My writing fell off with following the news and grieving the genocide of Gaza and ongoing crisis in sudan etc etc but alhamdulillah I feel motivation coming back and inspiration for a new writing project.
Assalamu alaykum. I've never got emails from Qalb until today and so I'm happy to see it's still active! This year I finished my first novel-length project. Editing it has been slow because I'm mostly focused on finding a new project to latch onto.