1.2 : Why Should I Be Curious About My Writing Practice?

Transcript

Welcome to the Immovable Wisdom Writing Podcast. I'm Karen A. Parker, a Black, queer, non-binary, and neurodivergent Secular Buddhist who's certified in fiction book coaching and holds an MFA in creative writing. On this podcast, I’ll be talking about how BIPOC and QUILTBAG+ fiction writers can build sustainable, decolonial, dharmic writing practice while navigating the predominantly white, cis-hetero publishing industry. And if you don't identify as either BIPOC or QUILTBAG+, but you wanna support underrepresented writers, don't worry. This podcast is for you, too. Make sure you subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode. Thanks for tuning in, and let's get into it.

How's it going, everybody? 

Welcome to the Immovable Wisdom Writing Podcast, season one, episode two. I'm your host, Karen A. Parker, Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing (creative writing), and Secular Buddhist and speculative fiction author.

And on this episode, just as I mentioned last episode, we're gonna be talking about principle number one in my Immovable Wisdom Writing Framework, which I may or may not get trademarked depending on how things go for legal proceedings. 

But to get us started, that principle is curiosity.

Now, curiosity is something that I think all writers just innately have within them. They are typically voracious readers or typically voracious consumers of art and other content in relation to their writing. They're curious about getting feedback from their friends. They're curious about just what's going on in the publishing industry at large. 

But this podcast is going to be talking about curiosity in relation to dharma and decoloniality in order to kind of recontextualize writing practice. Because as I said, like, curiosity is just, like, baseline. Like, that's why I listed it as number one even though, like, there are seven principles that you can kind of study in any order. Like, I don't believe that there is an order. But I did sort of list them in what I think should be, like, tackled first. Or, like, you know, if you're doing like a video game thing—if you wanna tackle the side quest first or if you wanna do the main quest first—like, it's up to you. But this is the order that I'm going to go with for the podcast and just for now as I develop this framework. 

So, let us get into it. 

Curiosity, I attach with the Buddhist concept of ehipassiko, which basically translates to 
”come and see for yourself”. So Buddhism is not a faith-based religion, and it's also not really a religion itself. It's more of a way of life, and it's more of a sort of experiential philosophy. So, to give an example, within Buddhist philosophy itself, there was a Venerable Malunkyaputta who asked the Buddha some very difficult questions about, like, you know, “Where do we end up when we die? Where do we come from?” 

And the Buddha in this sort of canon, in the canon as recorded, was like, “Dude, you don't gotta worry about that.”

Like, we don't know where we go when we die. I mean, we have an idea, we have the cycle of life, death, and rebirth, and karma, and all of that to consider, but these greater questions are not, like—It's okay if you don't know all of the answers. What's more important is that, you know, you are experiencing what you are experiencing in this moment. 

And he basically told Malunkyaputta, like, “Imagine if you have an arrow in your heart and you're saying, like, ‘I won't have this arrow removed until I know the name of the person and the name of the clan that they came from and the man that wounded me. And, like, I wanna know all of this information upfront,’ but as you are so filled with anger and so filled with this desire for knowledge about this arrow, you're slowly dying!”

Like, the thing that's the most important part of this is not the person who shot you or their clan or all of this, like, ancillary stuff. It's that it's that the arrow is poisoned and that you're dying. Like, it's that is what dharma is. It focuses on the here and the now, and it also, like, encourages you to to see things for yourself and to and to try out things for yourself because it's not a sort of thing where you go to a church and you, you know, you profess your your faith in Jesus Christ or whatever deity that you go to. It's something that you have to see for yourself.

And all of these other things that we can't know, we aren't, you know—It's not conducive or, efficient to think about things that we don't necessarily understand, which is which is really contradictory in terms of using curiosity, but this is what I'm talking about here. It's more important that you find out for yourself what something is and what it can do for you rather than just to either demand certainty or just have no certainty at all. There is a middle path that you that you strive for. 

And colonialism doesn't want you to be curious. Colonialism wants you to be ignorant, especially as a writer. And colonialism just wants you to know about Eurocentric literature, Greek literature, all of this canon that has nothing to do with your ancestry or your cultural lineage or oral oral storytelling traditions that you might have grown under. Like, that's the sort of mandate that colonialism puts upon you that goes toe to toe with dharma. 

Like, dharma is about, you know, see for yourself. Like, “Son't trust what I say, trust what you say, and trust what you feel, and trust your experience. And don't get caught up in all of this other stuff.”

Colonialism, however, says, you know, “Trust this other stuff. Don't listen to yourself. Don't listen to your history. Don't listen to your your lineage and where you come from. Trust trust in us. We are legion,” in so many words. 

And so, I think Buddhism and Secular Buddhism wins on that account because, like, there's so much programming and so much just internalized, like, white supremacy and patriarchy that gets thrust upon us i in the writing space that we just kind of go through the motions, and we don't get curious. We don't, you know, sit down and ask ourselves, like, “Why is it that my my writing education emphasized this so much over other forms of storytelling? What is the purpose of this education in forming my knowledge and, you know, making me a citizen or a tool of the system?” You know, these are the kinds of things that you should be curious about because they do have answers! 

We can we can look back at the history. We can look back at how there, in Africa, there were griots, and, there were bards and other oral storytellers that kept history and tradition and lineage alive through their songs and their dances and their poems. And then, colonizers just rolled up on in and, just took that all away. Like, we can see that. We have experienced that. And we are experiencing that to this day within the publishing industry itself, and within academia, and within so many other spaces. And so, that's why I put curiosity upfront because that's that's the starting point. Like, the moment you start to wonder what could be and what there was, stuff starts to open up for you. Your mind starts to make connections that you wouldn't have otherwise made.

And as a writer, that's extremely important. As a BIPOC and LGBTQ+ writer, as a neurodivergent writer who might be struggling with maxims of writing every day or fitting into systems that weren't designed for you, this is why curiosity is important. And so as you kind of sit with that knowledge or sit with what with what I have said, I encourage you to be curious in your writing practice both on a, like, physical level, or not even both, but like on a physical level, a mental level, emotional level, a spiritual level, a historical level, which whichever level you're comfortable with. 

So, for some examples, like, why do you, on a physical level, why do you like to type instead of write in a journal or vice versa? Why do you prefer to type at all if you could potentially dictate your stories and have AI or, someone, transcribe your words for you Why is it that, like, on a on a spiritual level, like, writing feels like a chore and not like an act of creation or an act of celebration? And potentially on a mental level, why could you have been shamed into not pursuing writing as a craft or as a profession? 

Like, once you once you start to peel back all of the layers, you're going to I think—I'm pretty sure, like, I'm not just saying I think—I'm pretty sure that you're going to run up against a lot of interconnecting things in relation to colonialism and just all of this other programming that you're gonna have to unpack as you develop your your curiosity further. And also, another example for, like, physical things, like, where do you feel writing in your body? Where do you feel it in your hands? As you're sitting in the chair, do you have a certain position that's more comfortable for you or a certain position that's not? Is writing accessible to you in ways, or is it not accessible to you?

Really, like, I'm not giving answers per se. I'm just trying to encourage you to ask more questions. Like, that's gonna be a lot of what the podcast is. It's gonna be encouraging you to ask more questions and maybe seek more answers along the way. Whether you find that answer or not, that is up to you and your journey.

But that, I think, is why I want curiosity to be at the forefront of this list because that is really the starting point. Like, you know, as they say, the revolution will not be televised because it happens in the mind. And, this is what you're doing by by engaging with that. 

So just to, just to recap, the principle that I am drawing from in a Buddhist framework is ehipassiko, which is “to come and see” and the idea of encouraging investigation to, see what works and see what doesn't, in your experience as a decolonial writer.

And also just to, get curious about why things are the way they are, but not so much to the point where you are trying to search for every answer. Like, it's a double-edged sword because you want to, I mean, you wanna know history and you wanna know context and you wanna know the past, which is readily available. But things like in the future that we can't know or things that, that are out of our grasp as human beings? Like, that's a little bit harder to tackle. That might require, that might require something else.

But it's still good to be in the act of thinking and feeling and processing rather than being ignorant—and ignorant and numb—about these things. Because that's going to inform your writing, that's going to inform your living practice, and I think it's going to make you a better human being. Like, just to kind of borrow from Noah Rasheta, who is also a Secular Buddhist, he talks about how Secular Buddhism doesn't necessarily make you a better Buddhist. It just makes you a better whatever you already are. And I really like that. II like that it emphasizes or, like, I like that he emphasizes the framework of Buddhism overall all and, you know, encourages you to be a bit of a scientist. 

But, yeah. That's gonna be it for episode one. Hope you find this format pretty good for for learning new stuff. And I will see you or hear you in the next one.

Take care, y'all. 

Thanks for listening to the Immovable Wisdom Writing podcast.

You can find resources and links from this episode in the show notes at karenaparker.com/podcast. 

Special thanks to Pop Villains for the cool theme titled “The Usual Suspects” and to Amelia Hruby from Softer Sounds. 

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast via your favorite listening platform. Also, please consider donating to the Captured Phantoms Pay It Forward Scholarship Fund at karenaparker.com/forward. Every donation helps subsidize the cost of coaching and editorial services that I provide for BIPOC and QUILTBAG+ speculative fiction writers.

Anyway, that's it for me y'all. Stay cool out there and keep writing.