Last Call: Essays About Video Games

Last Call: Essays About Video Games

Plus Olha Svyripa's Dispatches From Ukraine.

This week marks the one-year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. A year ago, many witnesses here and abroad expected an easy win for Russia, but Ukrainian resistance has has held the invasion at bay.We recently published four dispatches by Olha Svyripa detailing her own experiences during the initial invasion. Her prose is concise, offering a stark look at the atmosphere in Kyiv, the emerging crisis in fleeing the country, and the harsh reality of an unprovoked military invasion.A year ago, many American writers, unable to offer much in the way of material solidarity, shared Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky's "We Lived Happily During the War," among others from his brilliant and haunting Deaf Republic. A poem and a dispatch may have little in common craft-wise, but they both share a sense of the immediate. They both require the reader to bring something to the text and do something with it afterward.Many writers will at one point or another be required to bear witness to history as others make it around them. To me, bearing witness is a matter of urgency.To write with urgency is to do what Svyripa does so well in her dispatches: to capture a moment not as a photograph, but as a commandment, to make readers look where we would rather not, where it's easier not to. Kaminsky's poetry does this too. I think the second-most quoted poem from Deaf Republic, "A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck," does this too:"At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this?And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?" 

Last Call: WALKTHROUGH

Our special call for essays for the Attic from/within/about video games ends in three days. Please send us personal essays that draw from your experiences with video games, 100-1000 words, by February 28.We will publish the selected essays beginning May 15. The more we get, the longer the series will go on. Really, it's on you to make this a success. Put down those controllers and send us something to read.

AWP: Where to Find Us

As a reminder! You can find us at AWP in a few weeks (yikes) at the bookfair at table 1340, AND at our shared reading with Barzakh Lit Mag at The Grumpy Bean in downtown Seattle on March 10, 6:30-8:30 PM. Join us for some live readings! As an online literary journal not grounded in a specific location, events like this allow us the rare luxury of sharing our work in person. Plus there's coffee!

In the meantime, I hope you keep writing. The world needs it.Peace,Keene ShortEditor-in-Chief

THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS

BOOK REVIEW

BOOK REVIEW: making oxygen,remaining inside this pure hollow note, by M. Ann Reed

reviewed by Sakina B. Fakhri

"Reed’s musical speech delivers an alliterated conduit to an intimate, perhaps unexpected experience – a brave exercise in relentless compassion."

THE DAY YOU LEFTbyLaurie McKean

SPECIAL CALL FOR THE ATTIC During February, we will have a special call for short essays drawing from experiences with video games, to be published in summer, 2023.

SUBMISSIONS

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for submissions in all genres! We are also open for book reviews, interviews, and mixed media.

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Our Reading List is updated each week. Go check it out!Are you a contributor to Atticus Review who'd like your book featured in the reading list? Send us an email at [email protected]. 

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