Several months ago, while reading Joan Didion’s essay Why I Write, I was surprised to read how certain images “shimmer around the edges” for her. She writes that she has these images in her mind—where the figure and background dissolve …

Sait Faik’in Lüzumsuz Adam kitabını okuyorum. İlk baskısı 1948 yılında basılmış. Kitap kısa hikayelerden oluşuyor. İlk hikaye—kitaba ismini veren hikaye—Lüzümsüz Adam, İstanbul sokaklarında dolaşan ve gördüklerini anlatan bir adamın …

I finished Joan Didion’s Let Me Tell You What I Mean, and only after finishing it, I read the foreword. I always hesitate reading the foreword before reading the book myself. Most of the time they are written by people who have already …

I was reading Byung-Chul Han’s The Scent of Time, and in the essay The Scent of Oak Wood he articulated something I had been feeling for some time. He argued that our time is defined by an acceleration of events, where one moment is …

Realizing how simply holding a pen while reading can change the way I read led me to think that there might be a category of practices that increase my attention in a similar way. I am interested in practices that alter my perception. …

I wasn’t much of a reader until I started reading to my daughter every night, around 10 years ago. Since then, reading slowly became a part of my life, and looking back, a handful of ideas made it possible. Here are the ones I can recall: …

I wasn’t much of a reader when I began reading to my older daughter every night, around ten years ago, and I quickly realized there are two kinds of reading to children. The first is the “I am saying the words out loud, but my mind is …

For the past six years, I’ve been keeping short notes whenever something feels like there’s more to it. A sentence, a thought, a small incident—if it stands out, I try to pause, write it down and figure out why it stood out. Over time, …

I was reading Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and at one point, after passing through a famous gate, he reflects on how he did not get a chance to write a haiku there. The remark is brief, but it felt familiar to how I …

I am watching this YouTube video of William Kentridge working in his studio. In this part of the video he has a set-up for projecting frames from a footage on a desk and animating a paper-cut horse on top of it, frame by frame, moving the …

I am sitting upstairs, transferring my notes from Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!. Summer is approaching and the morning sun is shining into the room. The days have been so gray for a long time. Today, I am happy to sit in the sun. I brewed myself …

It was a Sunday and we were spending most of the day inside. Yağmur went and built wings from paper, strapped onto her arms like shields. I told her that she could tape an extra piece onto each wing to make them longer. Her first thought …