What's Stopping Your Flow? (Chauna Intro) (06/05/2021)

What's Stopping Your Flow? | The Weekly Atticus

A recap of the week's writing at Atticus Review. Intro by Chauna Craig.

I've already written a newsletter intro about finishing my memoir draft, so to mention it again risks sounding like bragging. It's not. That work had been in progress for over ten years. If you're an actively submitting writer, you know the feeling of checking Submittable and seeing your submission's status switch from "received" to "in progress." Waiting for that next status change feels like an eternity. Though I wasn't waiting for an acceptance or rejection from someone else, my memoir was stuck in a self-designed purgatory of "in progress." I wondered if I'd ever see any change of status, even after I was writing faithfully again. Then those incremental changes and additions and revisions over days then months turned, as if by magic it seemed, into a book.If that inspires you to keep going on your own projects, great. But my point is actually about a different kind of limbo. After I sent that memoir to first readers, I was suddenly bereft, the gap of non-writing while I waited for feedback filling up with restless anxiety. Used to working through words on the page every morning, I combed through the files on my computer and oh, hey, hello short story collection I arranged and…got distracted from finally finishing? And that flash fiction chapbook, a finalist in multiple contests fifteen years ago. Just stopped sending that out. And a novella-in-flash, so polished and ready and still-relevant that I'm stunned I forgot it existed. The submissions page for Atticus Review claims, "We are also writers who are bad submitters." Guilty as charged! Essays, stories, even entire books in limbo—forgotten in computer files for reasons I can't fully explain. I wonder if that memoir, with all its heavy emotional wrangling, had to finally move on out to make room for the rest of my projects to breathe and dance and reclaim my attention. That book, unfinished, haunted me, feeling both urgent and impossible.With that memoir, I burned through my deep reserves of shame and self-doubt and fear to get through the writing. After that, sending out work that hadn't been occupying all my emotional space felt, well, easy. Better to toss that work into someone else's Submittable queue than have it clogging up my computer and psyche. I don't know what will come of this fresh, bold burst of energy, but sending that memoir away and outside of my own mind was like pulling out a cork. Good things pouring out before I could get in my own way. What's stopping your flow? What can you send out this summer in a burst of bubbly enthusiasm?Thanks for reading. We're glad you're here.Chauna CraigCreative Nonfiction Editor

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

FICTIONAFTER THE WAR, THE FUTURE IS FURIOUSby Gary Fincke"His mother buys him gloves. She has a heavy bag hung from a basement beam. When he touches it, he inhales as if sinking in sand."READ ON

POETRYTHE GARDEN IN ST. PAUL'S HOSPITAL, ONE AND TWOby Robert McDonald"The nurses here are kind and they make a good soup; it's my duty to eat, and drink water, and convince the nurses I am well. It's not my duty to consider yellow — I have to say this to the olive trees growing here."READ ON

CREATIVE NONFICTIONA BRIEF REPORTING OF TINY CONFLAGRATIONSby Amy Bee"We read the Air Quality Index every day now, day 10, day 15, day giant question mark. Open our phone screens like fortune cookies: what is our daily destiny?"READ ON

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