Hey y’all.
I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling flustered in these, the final weeks of summer. Whether it be back to school for your kids, or back to school for yourselves (as students or teachers), or just back to whatever it is you go back to in the fall, we begin to feel the press this time of year, I suppose. I don’t have kids, I’m not going back to school, and I’m not a teacher, and yet I still found myself compelled to buy school supplies this weekend (some new pens, a new notebook). It’s habit.
This Week at the Journal
Coming up this week, we have:
- The fourth in our conversation series between Georgia poets Sara Hughes and Anya Silver.
- A micro review from our poetry editor Michael Meyerhofer.
- A mixed media piece from MM Editor (and initials synchronicity expert) Matt Mullins.
After this week, we will be taking a two-week publishing break to clean out our files (and our heads) and get ready for fall. I for one will spend time writing new notes in my new notebook with my new pens while vacationing in the very old Shenandoah Valley.
We will be back on September 12th!
Submissions!
Submissions to Atticus Review will re-open on September 12th. We want all your well-polished Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Book Reviews, Excerpts, and Interviews. Please deliver them unto us.
Speaking of Fiction and Nonfiction we understand that sometimes that line can be blurry. And so don’t spend too much time worrying over which category to put yours into. I tend to agree with Teju Cole that the distinction is an odd one. Nobody asks whether a song is fiction or nonfiction. Or, as Cole points out in one of the essays in his book Known and Strange Things, nobody asks this of a painting, either.
Here’s a portion of interview between NPR’s Ari Shapiro and Teju Cole on this topic.
SHAPIRO: There’s a line early on in one of the essays that really made me pause, where you said (reading) I find this stern distinction between fiction and nonfiction odd. It’s not at all a natural way of splitting up the narrated experience, just as we don’t go around the museum looking for fictional or nonfictional paintings.
COLE: That’s right. We want to be moved. We want our eye to be enchanted. So when I look at an exhibition of Degas – like, there was a great one at MOMA recently – I don’t say, oh, that painting, is it nonfiction? Because what actually matters is the state of enchantment he’s able to make out of fictional and nonfictional material. So this insistence in writing, I mean, I understand it for sure if we’re writing a news report. Stuff needs to be factually crosschecked. But we also have to understand that in the writing itself, there’s so much artful placement and arrangement. What we really want to be is in the presence of somebody who has thought about something and has delivered their thoughts in a composed and edited way.
What we’re trying to say is: Deliver your thoughts in a composed and edited way. Move us. Enchant us. That’s really it.
Enjoy the rest of your summer.
Make good things. Begin anyway.
