The Weekly Atticus (10/21/2017)

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

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Dear ,In Dust Tracks Road, Zora Neale Hurston writes, "There is no agony like holding an untold story inside of you." I've been thinking about the agony of an "untold story" a lot lately, and how it pertains to the stories we tell (or do not tell) about our families. Today (maybe while you're reading this letter) I'll be moderating a panel called "Whose Story Is It? The Ethics of Writing about Family in Nonfiction" at Conversations and Connections.While the stories in my first collection of essays were nonfiction and involved some of my family members, they were mostly about me. The "family secrets" were largely my own: my having been molested several times by a babysitter when I was a kid and how that shaped my feelings about sex growing up; my open marriage and the sexual relationships I've had with women outside that marriage in recent years. While family members played peripheral parts in these stories, they were mostly secondary characters with "non-speaking roles." And where they were more involved, I went out of my way to write those scenes in such a way so as to protect their privacy, not by changing anything "true," but by leaving out certain details that were more about them than about me. The dilemma becomes much more complicated when "your story" and "their story" are inextricably linked. The stories I've wanted to write since my book are complicated in this way. They are stories that some family members don't want told. And yet these are stories I feel deeply compelled to tell. They have changed me as a person. That makes them my stories. And yet, they are the stories of other people, too. People I love. And so the struggle is this: Is there a way to stay true to those stories and true to my loved ones? I've long maintained that we are the stories we tell, and so if our stories are secrets and remain untold, what does that mean about our identity? And what happens when one person in a storied pair wants a story to be linked with their identity, and another doesn't.Recently, I wrote a piece that I was explicitly told not to write. I won't say that the telling of that story ended well, or that the ramifications of that decision have even ended yet. I won't say I feel less "agony" as a result of writing it and sharing it. So why did I do it? Why the urge to share this story and, as a result, hurt somebody I loved? I'm not sure I know the answers. For me personally I think telling the stories that haunt me has something to do with exposing and ridding shame. Nothing eats away at souls more than shame, and I feel like there's something in the act of talking about a shameful thing that helps it feel less shameful and gives it less power. Recent brain science indicates that memories are created from scratch each time they are remembered. So in remembering, we are creating, we are telling, we are writing, we are rewriting. Sometimes I can do nothing else but remember a story. I remember it and I remember it, recreating it again and again until I fear that I am misremembering it and it almost feels unreal. It begins to make me wonder if the story ever actually occurred. Writing has a way of turning a memory from an "unreal" thing into a "real" thing. It's comforting to get the stories down. To relieve the weight of that remembering. To say, this was real. I am real. We are real.Speaking of remembering, don't forget to submit to our Flash Fiction contest! The deadline is tomorrow! Thanks for reading. We're glad you're here.

David OlimpioPublisher and Editor-in-Chief

ATTICUS NEWS

DEADLINE TOMORROW! OCTOBER 22ND!SUBMIT HERE!First Prize: $250Second Prize: $75Third Prize: $25Winner Announced: November 27th, 2017

THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS

FERAL TOWN by Adam Gustavson

HONORA

More BildungsromanA review of IN THE DISTANCE by Hernan Diaz, from Coffee House PressReview by Brian Birnbaum"Hernan Diaz’s debut novel, In the Distance, is defined by such conflation of monotony and vibrancy, abjection and hope—as if gorgeous hieroglyphs of biblical desert wandering were etched over lurid tragedy."READ MORE

FICTION: Blow Your House Downby Stephanie Hutton"My elder sister Agnes built her anti-wolf home from metal sheeting. A box with no windows. Inside the shiny walls, she sits sweating, breathless. Agnes sterilises each metal pane surrounding her in turn. She channels unwanted memories into shimmering surfaces. Her biceps bulge. A radio plays in each room to drown out the loneliness."READ MORE

POETRY: The Hive in Winterby Anastasia Stelse"...This hive he’s namedClara, after his granddaughter.Who will tell her, if they die?"READ MORE

MUSIC: Full Moon: The Gateway Drugby Nathan Leslie"The last several years have been brutal for rock musicians and their fans. Among many others—David Bowie, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Prince, to name a few—there is Tom Petty. We the hungry music listeners want our radio stars to play on, live forever, never fade away. In the case of Tom Petty, his songs were always a reminder of the good times, the party days, the days at the beach, hanging out by the pool, driving rolling country roads."READ MORE

The Passing of TimeGonzo Book Review by David Olimpio"I am so tired of celebrity. When punk-poet Eileen Myles who attracts indie-rock-music crowds at indie-rock-music venues writes a dog-death memoir like Afterglow (A Dog Memoir) people will describe it it like this: “wildly inventive.” They will say it is “a truly astonishing creation.” Big-name publishers will put these descriptors on the book jacket.Conversely, I feel like if any one of a number of talented writers I know were to write a dog-death memoir like this, agents and editors at any number of the bigger presses would only get a few pages in before they would ask: “Who is this? Does this person know how to write?”"READ MORE

MIXED MEDIA: They Vampire NightsA video poem by Douglas W. Milliken"On the page, “They Vampire Nights” reads with detachment, and so as a consequence feels mean, or at the very least lacking in love. As a narrated video of collaged found footage, the story for me translates unexpectedly dream-like and tender, a difference made not through manipulating the language but by changing the presentation. So the story exists as more than one story. Which, extrapolated, means that every story is a multitude."READ MORE