Rush In With Your Arms Raised (Michael Intro) (10/03/2020)

Rush In With Your Arms Raised | The Weekly Atticus

October 03, 2020

A recap of the week's writing at Atticus Review. Introduction by Michael Meyerhofer.

If the pandemic and economic recession weren’t enough, as I write this, there’s a wildfire burning through the forests about twenty-five miles from my front porch, chewing through the crisp dry grass, burning cabins like paper cranes, transforming trees older than I am into a windblown tantrum of ash and cinders. Whenever I leave to go to the store, get the mail, or take out the trash, I find a thickening layer of soot on the steps. Earlier today, popping open my car hood so that I could refill the windshield wiper fluid, I realized that so much ash had fallen through the gaps that I almost didn’t recognize my own engine—as a good a metaphor for these times as any, I suppose.

But that’s only part of the story. 

Something else I’ve noticed lately: nearly every time I talk to writer-friends, they ask what I’m working on, I do likewise, then we lament how sluggishly the words are flowing, like rain through a gutter choked with dead leaves. The same questions follow, the same reassurances, the same tense and faraway gazes. But I don’t suppose the words matter any more than the random questions we ask each other at funerals, all those niceties we use as synonyms for concern and solidarity. Like my grandmother says whenever she sits down to send cards or to write emails: “It doesn’t matter what you say, just that you say something.”

The other day, during a Zoom reading, I joked about how depressed I’d been these past few months. I hardly even noticed that I’d said it at the time, the joke being that during times like this, emotional/mental struggles seem so obvious and ubiquitous that they hardly need to be stated at all. It’s a bit like saying,

You know, I could do without this,

as an earthquake pulls the city down around you. But in the hours after the reading, I received a number of kind, heartfelt messages—some from old friends, some from strangers who’d just heard my work for the first time—that reminded me just how alive, how tough, and how beautiful this worldwide community of writers really is.

I got the same feeling when I saw that horrifying viral video of a little girl in Taiwan who found herself caught in the strings of a kite and dragged high into the air, screaming and twisting helplessly in the updraft, then dropped to what should have been her death—only she came out virtually unscathed because a crowd of onlookers, most of them strangers, all rushed in with their arms raised to catch her.

That kind of thing happens here, too. It happens every day, my friends. It’s happening on the screen, right in front of you.

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

Michael Meyerhofer

Poetry Editor

THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS REVIEW

BOOK REVIEWRECLAIMING THE BONES OF THIS BODYA review of PRIME MERIDIAN by Connie Post from Glass Lyre PressReview by Debby Bacharach"In these poems, we experience earthquakes, contaminated groundwater, fault lines, acid rain, and rabid dogs. The natural world falls apart..."READ ON

FICTIONto objectby Tyler Barton"In the third room an intern was crying and a supervisor was saying, 'Yes, yes, great, but can you do it with a little more moxie?'"READ ON

POETRYPICTURES OF LEAVESby Lauren Camp"On that day in September when we walkedthe garden, admiringthe peaches still succulent, the rainlanding its timpani on the desert, I rememberedthat I began disappearing when I woke."READ ON

CREATIVE NONFICTIONHAY FIELDSby Brianne KohlSecond Prize in our 2020 Flash CNF Contest judged by Nick Flynn"'Why keep doing this?' I asked my father once. 'Someone younger should do it.'"READ ON

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