About Jarid Nidal Manos
I am the author of Ghetto Plainsman [2010] (narrative non-fiction), my recently completed first novel Her Blue Watered Streets and the short story collection The Sun and the Water, both of which are now at my agent the incomparable Ms. Marie Brown.
I have finally started work on my second novel I Could Be a Desert, about two trauma-bonded men who are increasingly pulled toward their ancestral desert lands. This book project has already become a pretty intense process. It’s started taking on its own life, which is how and when I know a new book is now it’s own living entity. I’m sure it will become even more so once I travel to Northern Africa later this year.
This Substack newsletter will feature short literary pieces, especially narrative non-fiction, posts about the writing life and writer’s process, features like “Random Throwback Story” and others, and bring you along on the creative writing process, as well as include meditations on culture, the natural world, current events and politics from the perspective of an American writer, activist and vegan athlete.
Let’s go deeper together. Several years ago I found myself confronted with this inner thought: What does it mean to die and die and die so many times yet somehow still stay alive? The answer, clearly, is “thrive”. That was followed by another question: What does it mean to love so hard this love becomes holy? We have no evidence of any place in the entire Cosmos like our Earth. Yet we treat this living sacred planet as disposable and limitless and something to defile.
The experience of being alive in these times is so raw and ragged and exhilarating, painful, terrifying, powerful, beautiful and specific and particularly it’s mind-blowing.
One of my main creative writing premises is the tension of our times, and the landscapes we inhabit, that surround and envelope and shape us, are characters themselves.
My agent calls me non-derivate. Why be like everybody else when you only have this one life to be yourself?
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