WEEKLY WRITING ROUND-UP: WEEK OF 12/7/17

It’s hard to keep up with the threats to our livelihood when they seem to be coming in full throttle on a daily basis. I imagine many of you are already doing so, but please continue to keep calling your elected officials. Many of the writers whose work I have featured depend on tuition waivers so they can learn their craft and teach in in graduate programs. Many of them are indigenous to land that keeps being taken from them, with the latest attack occurring just days ago. Many of them depend on DACA, have family in Palestine, and need reproductive healthcare. If you don’t already know, you can check who your representatives are here.

This week I’ve been watching the snow start to lightly fall here in upstate New York and curling up with the following:

Poetry

The Brain Like An Orchestra That Can Play Many Tunes by Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick: “If I had been older, would I have let him / follow through with it. I was twenty / and manic and had mostly quit hurting // myself.”

The Fifth Map by Craig Santos Perez: “I examine the map closely, / navigating beyond the violent divisions /of national and maritime borders”

[a witch is made witchier by a weird dripping tree] by Tim Lynch: “a witch is made witchier by a weird dripping tree / & i’ve become a crow in the fog / capable of murder, laughing at the roots”

LOVE IS NOT LOVE by David Ishaya Osu: “you can memorize your / lemon grass / scent, because / your window is always / open”

Pardon My Gender by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza: “Pardon my gender — / I didn’t mean to make you / question the nature of our reality / or the walls that surround us and / demand we be one thing or the other”

My Inner Child is an Erasure of The Little Mermaid, According to the EMDR by Nicole Connolly: “Addiction workbook suggests: / Erase all scenes where the lover hasn’t kissed you yet / and saves you anyway.”

Essays

Cyntoia Brown and the Commodification of the Good Victim by Laura Leemon: “Most prestigious anti-trafficking allies don’t give a shit about trafficking survivors—they never have. Julie Bindle, Melissa Farley, Gail Dines, Polaris Project, Shared Hope, International Justice Mission, Benjamin Nolot, Alisa Bernard, and Peter Qualliotine—all of them claim to care deeply about survivors, but the “help” they offer them is woefully fucked up and misguided. What have they done to help survivors like Cyntoia Brown, who has spent over a decade in prison for killing a violent client?”

I Changed My Name After I Was Raped by Alaina Leary: “It wasn’t until I was a freshman in college, when I survived a rape at an on-campus college party, that the change felt necessary. It was no longer about feeling like my name didn’t fit or not liking the sound of its pronunciation – this was about survival.”

Revolution and American Indians: “Marxism is as Alien to My Culture as Capitalism” by Russell Means: “I’m not saying that on the one hand there are the by-products of a few thousand years of genocidal, reactionary, European intellectual development which is bad; and on the other hand there is some new revolutionary intellectual development which is good. I’m referring here to the so-called theories of Marxism and anarchism and “leftism” in general. I don’t believe these theories can be separated from the rest of the of the European intellectual tradition. It’s really just the same old song.”

Stephanie Kaylor in based in upstate New York and is currently a MA student in Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought at European Graduate School. She holds a MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University at Albany and is Managing Editor for Five:2:One Magazine and Reviews Editor for Glass: A Journal of Poetry.