The Weekly Atticus (09/22/2018)

Don’t Stick with the Plan | The Weekly Atticus

September 22, 2018

A recap of the week at Atticus Review, along with some extras.

Dear ,

This fall I agreed to fill in—temporarily—as an academic program director for a friend on medical leave. Enthralled by the heady burst of all things theory that marked English graduate programs in the late 1990s, I once believed I was in my element among academics, expecting Derrida and Foucault to be gateways to some smarter, better world. I’m over that, now preferring kinder, more inclusive spaces. But times like these, when I’m pulled deeper into an institution professing to focus on writing and reading (but ironically devoid of, or hostile to, practicing creative writers), it’s easy to get confused and a little lost. One of my tasks (a dreadful word, I know) is to finish work on the department writing plan. My first thought? “Hey, I’ve always got a writing plan. I may not stick to it, but a writing plan? That’s right up my alley.” You know where this is going.My writing plan is not their writing plan, and their writing plan looms like Game of Thrones’ great Ice Wall, a barrier intended to protect the civilized kingdom from the Wildlings, only I’m on the inside, safe and bored. I want to run wild, my only plan to venture far beyond safe and bored. I prefer risk to protection, joy to dullness.In this writing plan that is not mine, I am to help determine how our English department will prove to administrators and boards and tax-paying citizens that we know what we’re doing. We must demonstrate that our majors have learned useful writing skills, that we have carefully planned our courses to create employable graduates and will adjust whatever isn’t working as expected.This is important work. It’s just not my important work. An academic writing plan serves many needs. Just not my needs. I need to know that my students are learning, but much of the learning I value can’t be described on an “outcomes assessment chart.” How do you measure inspiration, creativity, passion, self-awareness, or an expanded mind? And why try to measure what isn’t actually valued in someone else’s plan?  We all have necessary jobs and tasks that are part of someone else’s plan and sometimes serve a greater good. I will do my job, complete this task, and hope it’s somehow useful. But I’ve learned from years of surviving as a writer in an academic job to be wary of plans that only appear to resemble what I value. Pay attention not to what it looks like, but what it feels like. My temporary role as program director and coordinator of the department writing plan feels like a burdensome obligation. (Re-read that last sentence…it even sounds plodding and dull.) Writing and reading powerful writing feels amazing, energizing, inspiring.Don’t stick with “the” plan. Plan to do more that amazes, empowers, and inspires you. Write. Read a poem. Watch a leaf turn to gold. Rewrite. Breathe. Ponder. Rewrite. Send us your most inspired words. Thanks for reading. We’re glad you’re here.Chauna CraigNonfiction Editor

ATTICUS NEWS

Atticus Review is happy to announce our second annual Flash Fiction Contest judged by Mary Miller. First Prize: $500. Deadline: 10.29.2018

Atticus Review is excited to announce its nominations for the Sundress Publications Best of the Net, 2018: Amie Whittemore, Michelle Bitting, Darla Himeles, Danielle Weeks, Catherine Abbey Hodges, Clay Matthews, Casey Hannan, Benito Vergara, Mindy Haskins Rogers, Mary Carter.

THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS

FERAL TOWN by Adam Gustavson

BOOK REVIEW: AT LEAST YOU CAN VISIT THROUGH YOUR DREAMSA Review of TUCUMCARI by Patrick Parks from KERNPUNKT PressReview by Alice Lu "The interplay between the dream world and the real world is effective in the discomfort it creates in the reader. Sometimes believing in something may be enough to make it real."READ ON

FICTION: COLOSTRUM by Joe P. Squance"The baby got better, but slowly. Because the baby wouldn’t latch, the visiting writer began pumping her breast milk. 'The colostrum will help,' the nurses kept saying."READ ON

POETRY: THE FLOWERS OF ASSISIby Jane Ann Flint"How in the evening of our summer day, we drifted out beside the fields of rapa humming with the drone of bees and down a bridle path of plane trees..."READ ON

CNF: DECK by Emily James"I am still, backside against the mesh of a plastic chair, tracing the panels left and right, that have held up my life, that creak and moan and sigh with my steps."READ ON

FILM: LOVE IN THE AGE OF NETFLIXOn the rising tide of rom-coms by Allyson Larcom"I don’t think the romantic comedies coming out today will be going anywhere anytime soon. In much the same way that we still sing the praises of Sixteen Candles, Twenty-Seven Dresses, or Sleepless in Seattle, we are witnessing the making of new classics. Twenty years from now, teenagers will likely still be watching To All the Boys and Crazy Rich Asians and Love, Simon with their friends during Saturday night sleepovers."READ ON

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