Make a Nest for the Thing with Feathers (Chauna Intro) (01/25/2020)

A recap of the week's writing at Atticus Review. Introduction by Amber Shockley.

View this email in your browser

At the start of every new year, I feel hopeful. No surprise there. You wouldn’t bother to start anything — a relationship, a car, a novel — if you didn’t believe it would take you somewhere. Hope is practically built into the concept of starting.

But feelings are fleeting, and a lot of starts morph from fresh to stale. I’ve grown suspicious of hope, a road that often seems to lead only to disappointment. Half-finished novels, abandoned ideas, pages that collect dust and dead spiders under my desk. I started a new job last fall that disrupted my writing goals, left my ideas... Like that. Mid-sentence, trailing off, I forgot where I was going. 

I’m not one for despair; I told myself and believed that I would write again once things settled down and the new year came. I’d start small—a paragraph, a flash fiction or two—working words into my daily life again. But then I’d get pulled into some work crisis, miss a day, miss another day, and rapidly circle the drain of “I won’t ever finish, and even if I did, it’s unlikely to get published.” Why bother?  What good is hope?

I’ve always tried to teach my children that love is not a feeling, but a series of actions that affirm commitment to and the valuing of something or someone, so I was recently surprised to realize that my idea of hope was simplistic, the thinnest tendril of optimism. In my morning reading I came across this quotation from writer and revolutionary Vaclav Havel: “Hope is not a feeling. It is not the belief that things will turn out well, but the conviction that what we are doing makes sense, no matter how things turn out.” 

I paused. I printed those lines into a journal. I pondered.

A conviction is something much more lasting than a feeling, and Havel reminds us that hope is less a look to the future than a deep grounding in the present, the affirmation that what we are (currently) doing makes sense,

no matter how things turn out

. When I examine my own writing life through this frame of hope, I see how much — to the detriment of my own joy — I still tend to value product over process and give too much weight to external evaluation. I’ve set aside difficult and complicated writing projects, telling myself they just need to rest. Rest is generally good, but some of my projects have gone Rip Van Winkle on me, stirring again long after the cultural moment has changed. The more that happens, the more I succumb to the belief that the current project will go the same way, that I’m not capable of really finishing, that I’m only wasting my time and energy if I don’t. The opposite of hope.

I have two novels and a memoir filed away in a (digital) drawer. They aren’t in print and may never be. I know I have

some

control over the future of those books. I can seek readers for feedback on what’s not yet working; I can persist in sending these manuscripts out. But even with more sustained effort on my part, I don’t know how things will turn out for any of my writing. I only know that when I’m writing, not just talking about or worrying about writing; I feel engaged, excited, fulfilled, but frustrated, scared, and occasionally despairing too. Deeply human and alive. The act of writing is an act of living — feeling all the doubt and doing it anyway. I realize I can’t think of a better use of my time and energy than to wrangle the rich, complex stuff of memory and imagination and emotion into some form that makes sense to me—even if no one else ever reads or publishes it. 

May you too commit to hope in all you do.

Thanks for reading. We’re glad you’re here.

Chauna Craig

Creative Nonfiction Editor

THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS

BOOK REVIEWCULTURAL ANXIETY IN THE GENRE OF WONDERA Review of READYMADE BODHISATTVAEdited by Sunyoung Park and Sang Joon Park Review by Alice Lu"In the stories of Readymade Bodhisattva, science fiction is not just a medium for playing with ideas, but for thinking about society, whether the clash between Buddhism and technology or conflicts between family units, characters are anxious about their wants and ambitions, which at are odds with the competitive society they live in."GET THE BOOKREAD THE REVIEW

FICTIONWALGREENS ON CALIFORNIAby Rebecca BlondinHonorable Mention in our 2019 Flash Fiction contest"On my bus ride home, I decide I don’t need any bad karma for shoplifting from that rich people’s Walgreens."READ ON

POETRYFour poems from Featured Poet John Hazard.READ ON

CREATIVE NONFICTIONTHE SHIPS OF THE PHAEACIANS RUSH FEARLESSLY ACROSS THE SEA by Julio Videras"The sea is the forest of the child. Monkfish, red sea bream, and grouper swim through palms and mango trees."READ ON

MIXED MEDIALAT LONG RANDOM by Seashore DarkcaveObscure lo-fi raw synth instrumental variations of the classic early years of Factory Records and vanguard dark moods.READ ON

SUPPORT ATTICUS!

Giving = Loving. We are able to bring you content such as this through the generous support of readers like yourself. Please become a regular

Patreon Subscriber

today. Some subscription levels include our Print Annual. Also, free entry to all our contests.

Thank you!!