Are You Waiting for Was? (David Intro) (04/17/2021)

Are You Waiting for Was? | The Weekly Atticus

A recap of the week's writing at Atticus Review and a request for support. Intro by David Olimpio.

In the final pages of Joan Didion's book The Year of Magical Thinking, she writes: "I realize as I write this that I do not want to finish this account. Nor did I want to finish the year. The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place. I look for resolution and find none." These lines really resonated with me. Maybe we all feel a bit like this right now.If you don't know Magical Thinking, the book is about the sudden and unexpected death of Didion's husband of forty years, John Gregory Dunne. The year she spent grappling with that loss. The things she did. The thoughts that happened in her brain as she did. It also is about the simultaneous grief she experienced during that time as her daughter fell seriously ill. Though a big part of the book is spent talking about that illness, the full trajectory of that particular story is left unfinished in the book. Didion's daughter died a few months before Magical Thinking was published, probably several months after the book was "completed." I'd intended to read Magical Thinking for a long while, but just hadn't. I knew about it because I know about Joan Didion. I knew what happened. And because of that, I think, I just somehow didn't feel "ready" to read it. But coming off of the year we've just had, which was full of so much collective grief and loss and sense of crisis, not to mention some of my own personal events along the same themes (loss/grief, etc) I felt like I needed to hear a voice like Didion's. I felt "ready." Sometimes I go to books thinking I will find answers in them. This was one of those times, though I didn't really know what the questions were. I don't think I ever do."The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place."One huge mental hurdle I've had with writing for the last couple of years is a sense of the things I'm wanting to write about still feeling "incomplete" because they are still happening. I have felt that I am still caught up in the "is-ness" of these events unfolding. I don't really like writing in present tense, so I guess I have felt like I am waiting for "was." And so it has felt hard to turn these experiences into a narrative or make sense out of them. Maybe this is perpetually a problem with any nonfiction writer. Maybe this is why poetry has been better for me lately.To me it's hugely significant that Didion's daughter died only a few months before Magical Thinking was published. That Didion wrote what she wrote, "completed" it in the midst of that still unfolding. I felt the strange incompleteness of that as I put the book down. And I wondered how she managed to leave that part of the story the way she did, unfinished, as it were. I imagine it somewhat out of her control, more about publishing contracts than anything else. But I also think there is something important about it, about her daughter's death being absent from the book.I said I came to Magical Thinking looking for answers. And maybe I got one, which is simply the reminder that nothing is ever complete. And that it's okay to have that in a piece of writing. It's probably even necessary sometimes. Some of the best stories I know have felt incomplete when I read or watched them, and maybe that's why I found them good. Because they most resemble life, which is always incomplete: a stack of books next to a chair we had been in the middle of reading. The greatest tragedy we can convey is just that: the messiness of it. The incompleteness. Of a life. Of a loss. Somewhere in the small, seemingly insignificant details of it happening. The odd thought we have while riding in an ambulance, the grocery list we discover months later with words written on it that a doctor told us over the phone, how at that time one of the things we "needed" was chicken broth. The ordinary things we think and do in the midst of a thing like death, full of meaning and at the same time meaningless and lost to time were it not for the observation of them later. No amount of trying to make sense of these things will make sense of them. And yet, there is a kind of clarity and resolution to be found in just pointing to them and saying: these things happened, and at the time they felt like magic, and maybe they were.Thanks for reading. We're glad you're here. David OlimpioPublisher & Editor-in-Chief**PS:An administrative note:We will be taking a two-week publishing break for to rest and recoup and to look for some clarity among the receding craziness. 

We've added several new books to our reading list. 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]. 

THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS

FICTIONTHE PRICE OF LOVEby Anu Kandikuppa"Binu limped all the way to school and all the way back. He limped for weeks and weeks and never walked properly again."READ ON

POETRYISLAND LIVINGby Carolyn Oliver"In a game I don’t know how to play my son turnsme into a cartoon woman with white hair and pigtails."READ ON

POETRYSTILL LIFE WITH MY GREAT AUNTby Hannah Corrie"...she exclaims “What a composition!” as ifit were a Dutch still life, a commentary on transience and mortality..."READ ON

CREATIVE NONFICTIONA LITTLE LIFE WITH METALLICAby Maria SakrPart of our Superunknown: Stories About Songs series"My greatest secrets are kept between my heart and the music. Through the chords are a record of my old self. The songs have become my closest confidants."READ ON

MIXED MEDIAMASTERby Vincent Noto (TheLivingBreathingCurse)"I'm sure a lot of us see or have seen ourselves as disasters or failures at times, and we all yearn to make the change — realizing there is a change to make is where it starts, and is by far the most difficult part."READ ON

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