roughly, urgently—from their delusions that everything, always, is “going to work out just fine.” We need to be prepared, more than ever, to ask the question: “Yeah, but what if it doesn’t?”
That’s the question that propels my fingers across the keyboard these days.
Boyer, Morgan
Bio: Morgan Boyer is a Carlow University alumni and author of "The Serotonin Cradle" (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Boyer has been published in the Pittsburgh City Paper, Rune, Underwood Press and the Critical Point.
Statement: Writing has been my way of shouting my feelings through the darkness when no one listens to my vocal words. The arts have been a means to provide light in the darkest times for thousands of years. As the coronavirus spreads through the world and causes untold amounts of destruction, there's no better time to carry that light close to our hearts.
Brant, S. T.
Bio: S. T. Brant is a teacher from Las Vegas. They have publications in or coming from Door is a Jar, Santa Clara Review, New South, Rejection Letters, Quail Bell, Dodging the Rain, La Piccioletta Barca, Cathexis Northwest Press, a few others.
You can find them @terriblebinth on Twitter or on Instagram @Shanelemagne.
Statement:
On Writing
Words are a pickaxe to the walls, to crack the
casing of the heart
And bleed the fount of god into your Being.
I remember watching a Bob Dylan interview a long time ago where he was asked something about writing; all I remember of his answer was his idea that it's not something you talk about, because if you talk about it, it goes away. Even before hearing that, I felt that was how it went, which is why growing up I always kept my writing secret. If people read it, they'd ask about it. There's a sacredness to it that makes me afraid to feel because of its power, but it's a Power whose power is not in its force but its absence: its most powerfully felt when it goes away, and that fear of it vanishing constantly besieges me. I am in perpetual awe of Words.
I have no thoughts on the pandemic except that it is very difficult to be locked inside a temple of fear for very long because your gods become your demons. Each day I wake up and say a prayer to Words to not leave me.
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