Tell them that you yourself are a work in progress, ever progressing, ever progressing. Tell them one of your characters is an accountant who experiences the stock market crash of 1929. And when the librarian asks, tell them you’re writing a novel that takes place over a period of three hundred years. Borrow history books-on Dutch colonization, on world history for kids. Return your favorite books of confessional poetry you won’t need them anymore. Head to the library first thing Monday morning. ![]() Two weeks after it happens, slip on a bright-colored T-shirt, exchange your thick glasses for contact lenses, and when people ask how you’re doing, reply, “I have to admit it was pretty tough at first, but things have started to really improve these past few days.” Don’t say that you weren’t crushed in the least because you saw it coming from the start-no one will buy it. On the now-defunct Rawa Belong Young Poets’ Community listserv “In short, all a young poet needs in order to survive a broken heart is: (1) one button-down shirt or dress, scintillating (2) one sheet of tissue, premium (3) a pair of running shoes, soles intact (4) one novel by a writer with an intimidatingly long name (5) one empty cardboard instant-noodle box (6) the album Blue by Joni Mitchell (7) and one book unburdened by whether “where” in Indonesian should be “dimana” or “di mana” because it’s written in a foreign language, say, Finnish.” Happy Stories, Mostly won the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize and was longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize. Pasaribu is a Toba Batak writer of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. ![]() The following is from Norman Erikson Pasaribu's collection Happy Stories, Mostly.
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