To Write Big, Think Small (Michael Intro) (11/21/2020)

A recap of the week's writing at Atticus Review. Introduction by Michael Meyerhofer.

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I was twelve, returning from one of countless medical appointments that characterized my childhood, when my dad got the sudden urge to take me to an arcade. He must have just seen it blinking off the side of the street, and in a split-second decision, he cranked the wheel hard-right and coasted into the first available parking spot. I don’t remember what day of the week it was, or what it said on the big blinking sign over the front door, but I do remember the weight of the quarters my father pressed into my hand once we got inside, and the way he told me to take my time as he sat down on a nearby bench with the same copy of Stephen King’s The Stand that he’d carried into the hospital waiting room. Understand, this was the late eighties. I’d seen arcade games before—one or two, maybe even a small cluster of them tucked away in gas stations and pizzerias—but nothing like this. They stretched on and on, row after row, noisy and confusing and overwhelmingly beautiful. For a moment, I imagine I felt a bit like an adolescent Neanderthal who had just wandered into a Vegas casino. Then, my gaze settled on a particular game called Dynasty Wars.It was really just your average hack-and-slash game, the gimmick being that instead of fighting on foot like most games, the player’s chosen character spent the entire game swinging his sword from horseback. Naturally, many of the opponents were on horseback, too, but plenty more were on foot. That meant that often throughout the game, despite being endlessly outnumbered, the player’s fearless character got to strike down instead of up. He got to fight from a position of strength instead of weakness.We were a poor family and parts of my body didn’t work properly, so it doesn’t take an extensive background in psychoanalysis to understand why the game made such a big impact on me—that and the badly translated opening screens describing the backgrounds of all the possible characters you could choose from, including implausible references to them slaying thousands and even millions of opponents with ease.It’s been three decades since that afternoon yet I still remember the fearless sound of hooves, the animations of a burning countryside, the heady rush after every hard-won boss fight. That brief experience—probably only twenty or thirty minutes—influenced me in ways I can’t even imagine, probably not unlike the first time I got shoved by a bully or held a girl’s hand. I don’t know about you but I often find that I’m shaped less by the shaking of the earth than by small, seemingly trivial encounters. Maybe that’s why I’ve always been drawn to pieces like "To a Poor Old Woman" by William Carlos Williams and "The Panther" by Rainer Maria Rilke. That reminds me of a piece of advice I used to always give my creative writing students, back when I was privileged to have such a thing as creative writing students: think small. There’s nothing wrong with writing big, shout-it-from-the-mountaintop pieces, but oftentimes, humanity happens in whispers. It happens in the tiny memories you think no one else will care to hear. I think that’s what I look for most in the poems I select for Atticus Review, not to mention the books I read in my free time. Well, that and the occasional burning sword.Thanks for reading. We’re glad you’re here.Michael MeyerhoferPoetry Editor

THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS

FICTIONPOINTS OF ENTRYby Abbie Barker"I ask him what he thinks the bat represents, what its presence suggests. I want to know if absence haunts him the same way it haunts me."READ ON

POETRYELEGY FOR LUBE AND PRAYERby Brandon Lewis"...They pray, Please God, help usfind Reuben soon. Bring him homesafely. I don’t say I think he’s dead,or that I’ve pictured him as a mob victim..."READ ON

CREATIVE NONFICTIONBOBOby Christopher Gonzalez"But in spite of my bitterness, I can see the meat pulp of the story: how young boys look up to their fathers, how we glorify unkind men."READ ON

MIXED MEDIASINKHOLE by Dave Richardson"I did not knowhow Dad's energetic roofingwould turn into seeingghosts of people in the corn."READ ON

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