Qurat Dar : My Small Press Writing Day

7-8 am ish: Wake up (again, after having to hear the birds chirp aggressively at 4 am). Stew miserably for 10-15 minutes about having to get up. Get up and slowly go about getting dressed, brushing my teeth, eating breakfast. Panic about what to take for lunch. Hopefully find some leftovers to put into Tupperware and stuff into my backpack.

8-9 am ish: Catch the bus to school/work, depending on the time of year and my class schedule.

9 am -5 pm: Try to stay awake through a series of lectures, labs, and seminars. Hopefully understand some of what’s going on. Catch the occasional engineering concept that sounds awfully like a poem. Try to find friends in between to sit and study/eat with. Think about all the writing I’ll do once I get home. Make notes on my phone when a particularly promising line or metaphor comes into my head. Sometimes pretend to be taking notes in class while scribbling story ideas into margins. Doodle. Daydream. Think about everything I’d rather be doing.

5-6 pm: Take the bus home, decompress (which consists of scrolling on my phone for an obscene amount of time and then stressing out about how much time I’ve wasted). Save links to about a million different opportunities I am definitely not meeting the deadline for. Think about all the studying and assignments I’m behind on.

6-8 pm: Work alternatingly on lab reports, term projects, practice problems, checking notifications, and complaining to anyone within earshot.

8-9 pm: Eat dinner. Realize I didn’t even finish half of what I meant to and that the will to write has almost all but disappeared. Tell myself checking Twitter counts as writing.

9-10 pm: Prepare to sleep. Journal if I have the energy to do it. Maybe do some light reading. Once in a blue moon, work on a poem. Even rarer, muster the courage to submit something.

10:30 ish: Go to bed, convinced I’ll write more tomorrow.

Qurat Dar is an engineering student at the University of Guelph and an emerging author and spoken word artist. She has work currently in Augur Magazine, The Temz Review, and Anathema Magazine, among others, and is a Best of the Net finalist. Qurat is currently part of the Art Gallery of Mississauga’s EMERGENCE artists’ collective. She was also recently a finalist in the 2018 Canadian Festival of Spoken Word (CFSW) and the 2019 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam (CIPS), placing 4th and 6th in the country, respectively.