Check Your Writing Roots (Amber Intro) (09/14/2019)

This letter is a recap of the week at

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Autumn is creeping around the corner. Time for cozy socks, steaming mugs of cider, crisp air, quick darkness. But not so fast—as I’m writing this, my corner of the world is battening down the hatches against a hurricane that slides slowly along our coasts, reminding us that summer isn’t quite over yet. Looking out the window, I see treetops swaying, their leaves fluttering from the winds of a one-eyed monster. I pray their roots are deep, and strong.As we approach another equinox, I’m reflecting on the fact that I’ve been through several trying seasons of my own this year—several storms. I made the necessary financial decision to dissolve my own business promoting other writers in order to take a full-time job writing for a small software company. I was nominated, and ratified, as my city’s first poet laureate, but made the heart-wrenching decision to resign a few weeks later. I began and left an apprenticeship to take over a small, well-established publishing company. I was promoted from content writer to Director of Marketing within months of starting my full-time job at the software company, tasked with an enormous amount of responsibility, yet received no increase to my pay. I took a deep breath and resigned from that position as well. I’m in a place now that has me checking, and questioning, my own roots.  I’m asking myself whether or not I am, at my roots, a writer. Writers write, and I have not been writing lately. I could point to the storms that I’ve weathered as an excuse but, truth be known, there have been vast periods of calm waters when I have not written.  I think about writing, though.I have an attachment to the idea of myself as a writer. But that idea is a rather romantic, idealistic notion that doesn’t actually include very much writing. It involves a lot of gazing upon a garden.  I sip lots of hot tea. (I don’t even like hot tea.) I go to the farmer’s market on weekends. I cook pies from scratch. (Ha!) There are bonfires.  Clearly, what I yearn for, more than writing, is a slower, calmer, more inspired life. Fewer storms, less debris, more order. I keep thinking, if I could just get to that, then I would feel like writing. Did you hear that? It was Writing, laughing at me.  Writers write, regardless of the circumstance.  Following my heart, setting boundaries, I have made so very many choices lately. Today, I commit to choose writing, regardless of my current circumstances. My writing life may be different from the writing life I’ve imagined over the years. Hot tea and bonfires aside, maybe my writing life looks more like editing, or coaching.  I know only that I want to steep myself in stories, in literature, in imagination.   What does being a writer look like for you? What path do you choose? Thanks for reading. We’re glad you’re here. Amber ShockleyAssistant Poetry Editor 

ATTICUS NEWS

ANNOUNCING OUR FLASH FICTION CONTEST!!We're happy to announce our third annual Flash FictionContest judged by Danielle Evans Submit one piece of flash fiction up to 1000 words. First Prize: $500! Deadline:November 3rd, Midnight Pacific Time.READ ON

THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS

BOOK REVIEWTHE BODY’S BETRAYALA Review of LOVE ME, ANYWAY by Minadora MacheretReview by PJ Dominski"Tonally, Macheret’s work is often brutal as it recollects, with a sense of battered detachment, the incongruity between the narrator’s body and the bodies of the other women she enviously observes..." GET THE BOOKREAD THE REVIEW

FICTIONMINERAL VEGETABLE ANIMALby Helen McClory  "I am mineral—begun or began again in the breach position inside of a stone. That’s the way she tells it."READ ON

POETRY"COULD THIS BE WHERE I PREMIERE MY MEMORIES?"by Ace Boggess"Pluses & minuses. I’m a poet again,writing my history as if a castle I might explorethen leave to walk through bare gardens &labyrinths of gray-dead oaks."READ ON

CREATIVE NONFICTIONBONES FOR THE TELLINGby Signe Land2nd place in our 2019 Creative Nonfiction Contest!"Eight feet up, and we could see the whole wide world: miles of open prairie as far as the eye could see: flax fields and corn, sunflowers, squawking pheasants, our giant sacred boulder..."READ ON

INTERVIEW"WHY DOES FEAR SPEAK TO US SO STRONGLY?":IN CONVERSATION WITH JACKIE SHERBOW"...a harbinger could be anything from a piece of stone found on the beach... to a teen magazine sitting on an end table." - Jackie SherbowREAD ON

FILM REVIEWTHE HONEST COMEDY OF WOMEN IN RECOVERYA look at THIS WAY UPReview by Allyson Larcom"The growing number of such “traumedies” raises a handful of questions: What is funny, what can be funny, and who is allowed to make it funny?"READ ON

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