The Weekly Atticus (12/08/2018)

Put a Whipped Cream Smiley Face on Your Writing Pancake | The Weekly Atticus

December 08, 2018

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

Dear ,

In her memoir Let Your Mind Run, Olympic medalist runner Deena Kastor credits her running successes largely to having a positive mindset. One theme in the book is her transformation from being someone who got frustrated easily and who put too much stock in raw talent to someone who saw obstacles as opportunities and who approached every new goal as obtainable. High winds smacking my head as I run uphill? Great! It's just the extra challenge I need to become stronger and faster.Kastor says that to successfully adopt this mindset as part of her training, and for it to become second nature, she had to work to think positively in all facets of her life, not just running. She read dozens of books on the subject, and she practiced, practiced, practiced. She strived to makeover her general outlook and character. So, for example, when a customer in the restaurant where she worked was grumpy toward her, instead of feeling injured, she made a whipped cream smiley face on the pancakes he ordered. The grumpy customer smiled in turn.Some might say the life of a professional runner is nothing like the life of a writer. A professional runner is only as good as his or her performance in competitive races. Without winning results nobody cares how hard the runner trained. Writers are perhaps privileged in that their daily training is their performance. We don’t ever have to race. We can take all the time we need.On the other hand, writing and running have long felt intimately linked for me. Both become harder and more discouraging the longer I sit them out. Vice versa, the more routinely I run and write, the stronger and more confident I feel. Both can be wonderfully exhilarating. Both can make me feel sometimes like I’m made of dull, heavy stone.To return to Kastor’s point about how she had to adopt positivity in all aspects of her life to become good at invoking it in her running life, writing well requires a similar kind of continuity between the act of writing and everything else. I don’t mean positivity, though certainly positivity can be every bit as beneficial to a writer. I mean the way that writers observe and interact with the world. We don’t just write when we’re sitting down putting words on paper or a screen. We’re always paying attention, always picking up scraps for our work — the life of a writer is the life of a scavenger.Here’s another thing I take from Kastor: it’s okay if the habits of mind that will most benefit our work don’t come naturally to us. That doesn’t mean we’re not meant to be artists, that we’re destined to fail. We can practice habits of mind as much as anything else in life. We can change how we see obstacles. We can change how we see the world.Thanks for reading. We’re glad you’re here.Michelle RossFiction Editor

THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS

FERAL TOWN by Adam Gustavson

BOOK REVIEW: IDENTITIES CHANGED AND PARADISE LOSTA Review of LOVE SONGS FOR A LOST CONTINENT by Anita Felicelli Review by Alice Lu"Perhaps this is paradise lost: the concept that humans are so close to each other yet so lonely. Each human in Love Songs for a Lost Continent treks through a different world, and the circles only briefly overlap."READ ON

FICTION: BRIDEby Erin Swan"I was never a baby. Not possible, you might say. But how many years have you lived on this planet?"READ ON

POETRY: WHAT THE DEAD TELL US ABOUT A CHICKEN WITH ITS HEAD CUT OFFby Brett Ortler"...The mouth opens and closes,quickly at first, then more slowly, a futile attempt to conveyeverything it has just learned."READ ON

CNF: WINNERS AND LOSERS, 2004by Hannah Storm"The men in the armoured personnel carriers ride through the crowd like knights on horseback. They wave at the women in their tight Lycra tops and the other men wearing their knock-off shirts, brandishing the names of their heroes."READ ON

MIXED MEDIA: THE MORALITY OF OWLSA short film based on a sculpture inspired by a poem of the same name by the Irish poet Rory Brennan. READ ON

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