Koorsoo (کورسو)
Note: This is the text of a talk I gave at CreativeMornings Oakland on the morning of January 9, 2026. The theme? Koorsoo (Farsi), roughly translated as a faint glimmer of hope, a theme chosen by the CreativeMornings Tehran chapter.
Opening
Koorsoo is that thin, almost unbelievable filament of light that still insists on arriving even when the world has taught us to expect only darkness. It is not optimism, which can so easily become denial, but a stubborn, trembling insistence that something else is still possible.
For CreativeMornings, koorsoo has been translated as a faint glimmer of hope, a little light you almost have to squint to see. And that feels right for this moment, for Oakland, for the Bay, for the worlds we’re carrying in our bodies right now.
So what does it mean to talk about a glimmer of hope when everything in us is tired of pretending things are okay? When fascism is not hypothetical, when genocide is not historical, when kidnappings, policing, surveillance, and everyday violences are simply the news cycle, the group chat, the lived reality. When so many of us are grieving our cities, our ecosystems, our communities, our own attention spans, our families.
Koorsoo is not here to anesthetize us. It’s not “good vibes only.” It is the smallest, most fragile invitation: what if we did not give up on each other?
The Myceliadic Body
To sit with koorsoo, it helps to change the basic image of who we are.
The dominant story says that we are individuals: bounded, separate, competing for scarce resources, each with a brand to maintain and a personal project called “a life” to optimize. That story has its uses if you’re trying to sell something, or govern something, or police something. It is much less helpful if you’re trying to survive together.
So here is another story: we, all of us—human beings and all other beings—are part of a myceliadic body.
Think about mycelium for a second: the vast, underground fungal networks that connect trees, plants, soil, bacteria, water. A web of filaments passing information, nutrients, warning signals. When you see a mushroom on the surface, that’s just the fruit, the tip of an enormous, living network. The mycelium network from the honey fungus in Oregon's Malheur National Forest is the largest living organism on the planet.
In that sense, maybe none of us is just “a person.” Maybe each of us is a node in a much larger, sensing, learning, improvising body. A myceliadic body that remembers things we individually forget. A body that is constantly trying to keep itself alive in the middle of storms, clearcuts, fires, bulldozers, and now, apps.
If we are honest, this body is sick.
The sicknesses have names: fascism, genocide, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, transphobia, capitalism’s endless demand for more. They also have intimate forms: domestic violence, sexual harm, addiction, depression, burnout that never actually burns out, it just smolders in the corner of the room.
These sicknesses are not metaphors; they are real. They are written into policy, into police budgets, into borders, into jails, into algorithms, into real estate maps, into our nervous systems. They are also old. They did not begin this decade, and they will not end just because we are finally paying attention.
So the question becomes: how does a mycelial body respond to sickness?
Encircling the sickness
One of the things mycelium does when it encounters a toxin is: it encircles. It does not always rush in to annihilate. It tests. It learns. It contains. It moves around, it holds, it metabolizes what it can, and it avoids what will kill the larger body.
The goal is not to become the toxin to defeat the toxin. The goal is to keep the body alive.
If we take that seriously, then our work is not simply to “destroy fascism” in some abstract, cinematic way. Our work is to learn how to encircle the sicknesses of our time so that they cannot spread unchecked, cannot recruit endlessly, cannot eat the entire forest.
So here are the questions that keep arising when thinking about koorsoo and this myceliadic body:
What do our encirclings look like, feel like?
Where do they start, where do they end, how do they move?
These are not poetry prompts; they are strategy questions. Heart-centered poetry, though, can often inform the creation and deployment of our strategies.
Because the truth is, encircling can look like many things:
It can look like direct action, like blockades and walkouts and refusal.
It can look like community defense, like knowing your neighbors, knowing your block, knowing who is vulnerable and what they need.
It can look like mutual aid, like food distribution, rent support, childcare swaps.
It can look like cultural work, like books, festivals, murals, songs, spaces where people can rehearse being otherwise.
It can look like incantations, meditations, traversing the unseen (but felt) to concoct potions that weave through our streets.
But whatever form it takes, encircling is not just a reaction; it’s a form of choreography. It is how the body moves to protect itself.
And so the questions deepen:
What do our encirclings look like in this city, in Oakland, right now?
What do they feel like in our bodies—are they sustainable, are they relational, do they allow for rest and disagreement and repair?
Where do they start—on the page, at the mic, in the street, in the group chat, in the bookshop—and do they end at all, or do they just change shape?
How do they move—from one neighborhood to another, from one third space to another, from one generation to the next?
Third Spaces as Mycelial Nodes
This is where third spaces matter.
First spaces are home. Second spaces are work. Third spaces are everything else: the in-betweens, the places with no clear script. Cafés, bookstores, community centers, barber shops, laundromats, stoops, parks—spaces where you do not have to perform family or productivity, where you can linger and encounter strangers, where something unscheduled can happen.
Third spaces are where the mycelium surfaces. They are the fruiting bodies of the network. They say, “There is more going on under here than you can see.”
In a time of rising rents, closures, and the slow death of public space, third spaces are under attack. When every inch of a city is evaluated by how much revenue it can generate, third spaces get turned into luxury condos, branded “experiences,” or simply erased.
And yet, third spaces are exactly where koorsoo lives.
They are the rooms where people realize they are not alone. They are the tables where organizers meet for the first time. They are the corners where someone sees a flyer that will change their life. They are the stages where a poem cracks something open that a policy paper never could.
Third spaces are the physical expression of the mycelial network. They are how we encircle by gathering.
Nomadic Bookshop as koorsoo
Nomadic Bookshop is one of those spaces. Opened just a month ago in Uptown Oakland by me and my husband.
On the surface, it is a bookshop: shelves, titles, authors, ISBNs, receipts. A place where people come to buy a book or two, maybe eventually a journal, maybe a card.
But underneath, Nomadic Bookshop is a node in the network—a mycelial knot of relationships, histories, and futures. It extends the work that began with Nomadic Press in 2011 and continues through so many writers, readers, and neighbors in the Bay. It sits within a lineage of Black, queer, radical, immigrant, Indigenous, working-class cultural spaces that have treated literature not as a luxury product but as a technology of survival.
Nomadic Bookshop asks a few simple, difficult questions:
What happens if books are treated as tools for collective survival instead of just goods to move?
What happens if a retail space is designed first as a commons and only second as a business?
What happens if we measure success not just by sales, but by how many people feel less alone when they leave?
What happens if a bookshop is also a third space, a sanctuary, a launch pad for encircling?
In concrete terms, that means:
Hosting readings that center voices usually pushed to the margins.
Holding space for conversations that are messy, urgent, unfinished.
Offering a physical place in Oakland where people can encounter ideas that unsettle the dominant stories about whose lives matter and what futures are possible.
Nomadic Bookshop is not “the solution.” It is a koorsoo: a faint, stubborn glimmer in a landscape of closures and extraction. It is one node among many. But in a mycelial body, one node can reroute a lot of energy.
Encircling as Everyday Practice
If we accept that the body is sick and that third spaces like Nomadic Bookshop are crucial nodes, then the question becomes: what does encircling look like as an everyday practice?
Again:
What do our encirclings look like, feel like?
Where do they start, where do they end, how do they move?
Encircling, in this sense, might look like:
A group of neighbors using the bookshop as a meeting point to organize around a local eviction, a school board decision, a policing issue.
A writer launching a book that speaks directly to state violence, and the room becoming a site of collective processing and strategizing, not just “literary appreciation.”
People forming study groups that move through books on abolition, mutual aid, Indigenous sovereignty, not just to feel informed but to change how they act in their daily lives.
Artists, organizers, and cultural workers sharing resources, contacts, and care—so that nobody is carrying the weight alone, and so that burnout is not inevitable.
Encircling can also look quieter:
Making sure the space feels welcoming to people who have been told, repeatedly, that “this is not for you.”
Choosing which books to stock not just for profit, but for possibility: who might need to see this book, in this city, at this moment?
Curating displays that speak directly to what is happening in the world—the genocides, the uprisings, the elections—but from the perspective of liberation, not the perspective of power.
The key is that encircling is not a one-time event. It is a pattern of movement, a habit of attention.
How the Encircling Moves
Mycelium moves slowly but with intent. It learns the terrain. It adapts.
Our encirclings, if they are to work, need that same quality. They cannot only be reactive. They must be rooted in relationships that pre-exist the crisis and that will outlast the news cycle.
So when we ask:
Where do our encirclings start?
Maybe they start:
With the decision to show up in person instead of only online.
With the choice to invest time, money, care into a third space rather than into another private convenience.
With the practice of reaching out before things fall apart, not only after.
Where do our encirclings end?
Maybe they don’t. Maybe they simply transform. A reading becomes a working group. A book club becomes a tenant union. A morning talk becomes a year-long collaboration. A chance meeting in the shop becomes a friendship, a project, a new organization.
How do our encirclings move?
They move through us: our conversations, our group texts, our events, our budgets.
They move across spaces: from Nomadic Bookshop to a school classroom, from a living room to a city council meeting, from a street corner to a festival stage.
They move across time: elders sharing tactics with younger organizers, younger folks sharing tools and frameworks with elders, everyone sharing grief and joy and memory.
Encircling is not just about resistance; it is about redistribution. Moving attention, care, and resources away from the sickness and toward the parts of the body that are trying to regenerate.
Living Inside the koorsoo
Koorsoo, then, is not a naïve belief that everything will work out. It is a commitment to staying with the trouble, together. It is the decision to keep building and protecting networks of care in a time that is trying very hard to isolate and exhaust us.
It asks us: in the face of fascism and genocide and state violence, what do we do with our mornings? Our afternoons? Our nights?
For those of us in and around literature, art, and cultural work, koorsoo shows up as questions like:
What stories are we amplifying, and which are we letting slip quietly out of print?
Who feels welcome in our spaces, and who doesn’t?
How do our events, our lineups, our partnerships either reinforce or undermine the logics we say we oppose?
Are we building infrastructures of care around our artists, our workers, our communities, or are we simply extracting from them more content, more labor, more performance?
Third spaces like Nomadic Bookshop become crucial here because they remind us that we don’t have to do this alone. We do not have to be or do everything; we just have to be connected.
If we are part of a myceliadic body, then the question is not “How do I, personally, fix the world?” The question is, “What is my patch of ground? Who is within my encircling? What is mine to hold and what is mine to pass along?”
An Invitation for this Room
So, sitting here in Oakland, in a CreativeMornings gathering, the invitation is simple and impossible at once.
Take a moment and actually look around the room. These are not just attendees. This is a temporary third space, a pop-up node in the network.
Ask yourself, quietly and gently:
What sickness are we encircling together this morning?
What could this room become if we treated it as part of the myceliadic body, as a koorsoo, as a third space that refuses to be just another event?
What do our encirclings look like here, feel like here? Where do they start, where do they end, how do they move once we walk out those doors?
When you leave today, and you inevitably get pulled back into emails, into headlines, into whatever version of crisis is waiting on your phone, remember that the body is bigger than your notifications.
Remember that there are spaces—CreativeMornings and Nomadic Bookshop among them—where the encircling continues. Where people are gathering, reading, arguing, laughing, organizing, resting. Where koorsoo is not just an idea on a slide, but a practice: a faint but very real glimmer that we maintain together.
And maybe the work, from here, is not to hold on to hope as a feeling, but to become part of the encircling as a practice.
To ask, again and again:
What do our encirclings look like, feel like?
Where do they start, where do they end, how do they move?
And then, patiently, collectively, to answer with our lives.
