Take note: How note-taking can come in handy when you’re short of inspiration
Watch this print space for the Talespeople's weekly reflections on creative writing.
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Family of feelings: Iffat Nawaz's 'Shurjo's Clan'
Part memoir, part magical realism, this is a story about identity and the idea of home.
Jane Borges’ 'Bombay Balchão' is a crafty explosion of flavour
The characters crackle with life, quirky and contradictory, despicable and sympathetic in turns.
Ink for days: How Inktober is its own medium of storytelling
Pictures are really the most basic form of story-telling, aren’t they? I imagine our ancestors sat around fires doing shadow theatre. They painted on cave walls long before writing came along.
The Sehri Tales prompt is a Rorschach test for participants
If there is one thing that worries me a little, it is that the strong trend for themes of sexual violence that began to appear during lockdown, continues to be favoured by a significant number of our domestic writers.
It gets better
It’s hard to believe, but we only moved out of the sandbox provided by Litmosphere (thanks Rubaiya and Ramisa Chowdhury) two years ago, and shifted Sehri Tales © to an independent platform in 2020! We hope you’ve been enjoying the stories so far.
Ramadan Maghfirat: How I channelled my rage into inspiration for Sehri Tales
I channelled my hurt, anger and frustration into poetry and flash fiction that had nothing to do with my agitator and her cronies.
This is how we do it
This year, most of the frequently asked questions pertain to the selection process behind the stories chosen for our Star Youth collaboration. I hope the following explainer answers most of them.
Not quite what we were expecting
We promised to go big for our fifth year, but we haven't even begun to unveil our big plans, before being overwhelmed by the sheer response from our participants.
Finding ‘Rahmah’ during Ramadan, against the odds
Life in Dhaka provides a thousand reasons to feel hopeless and frustrated. Still, we can find hope amongst it all.
Once more, with feeling
Last year, we got to see some stellar writing and some incredible art. What was more inspiring than the quality of work produced during the holy month, was the community that was formed in the process.
Take a bow
With the moon up and celebrations already underway in a few countries, it’s a wrap for Sehri Tales 2021.
Of words and limits
A frequently-asked question during this year’s Sehri Tales was ‘why the 250-word limit?’ My knee-jerk reaction has been to want to snap ‘Do you also ask why a limerick has to be five lines, or a haiku three?” Since anger never solved anything, I figured a more level-headed explanation was necessary.
All together now
We just crossed the ten-day mark for Ramadan this past week, and the 1000 posts for this year’s Sehri Tales challenge. I don’t know if the thrill of crossing these milestones ever wears off – it certainly hasn’t for me.
I turn to you
I created Sehri Tales in 2016 as a coping mechanism for some melancholia I was experiencing at the time. I knew that the exercise was calming and centering for me, but I didn’t quite think about writing’s potential to heal until I partnered up with the online readers’ community Litmosphere, in 2018.
Words that bind
Some experts say that the “superpower” that puts us humans – weak, slow, and lacking any physical advantages over the natural world – at the apex of
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