Writing is an act of resistance
-
Endings are beginnings
Hi, folks, K-B and Sara launched Writers Resist with the intention of shutting it down once Trump was out of office. Thankfully, he’s departing sooner rather than four years later, so our ritual killing is nigh. We birthed this baby on 01 December 2016, twenty-two days after Trump was elected, with Rae Rose as our poetry editor. You…
-
Nobody Likes Spock
By Sarah Colón Spock scrolls through his Facebook feed in the early hours of the morning. He hasn’t been sleeping well, and the blue light from his phone shining upward reveals dark circles around his eyes. Today, someone is posting a long description of the origins of the virus. “PROOF that it was created…
-
Post-Election Meltdown
By Marcella Remund I am 60 years old. In my lifetime, my mother’s lifetime, and all the lifetimes that came before, no woman has been president. Don’t tell me to get over it I have TRAINED blonde footballers for jobs I couldn’t get without a penis, jobs that paid ten times my single-mom salary.…
-
A Friability Test
By Kimutai Allan You can try muzzling the press and stifling healthy discourse. They are actions, easy. It’s a different tale down in our hearts. You can’t break us. We aren’t as friable as your petty thoughts deem. Kimutai Allan is an emerging Kenyan writer. His works have been published previously by The Active…
-
Reading Aloud in Kidjail
By Jill McDonough The boys in my local juvie want to work one on one, write stories, poems, mark up the stuff I give them. More than one kid at a time’s less fun: more fussing, more holding back to show how tough they are. When one of them writes on the other’s paper…
-
The Notorious
By Alex Penland Do you remember Yad Vashem? How the path that leads you through the exhibit is chronological and single lined, each point presented on a hair pin turn of events: here is where a new legislation was passed, here is where some diplomat died, here is where the people thought oh, one…
-
Contingency Plans
Sara Marchant, racism, Essay, Presidential Election, family separation, concentration camps at the border, post-election chaosBy Sara Marchant My husband recently retired. His anxiety had increased over the last four years (whose hasn’t, right?) and a few months ago he was having a bad day at work, when he abruptly stood up, announced, “I retire,” and walked out the door. It’s been an adjustment. At first, he didn’t know…
-
Target Practice
#BLM, Geoffrey Philp, police shootings, institutionalized racism, Jericho Brown, Black Lives Matter, PoetryBy Geoffrey Philp After Jericho Brown I ride around this city feeling as if I’m always a target, like the one at a gun range where cops used mug shots of African-American men to improve the shots of their snipers—photos of black men who weren’t dead, but whose images would be useful to kill…
-
I Manage My Dread of the Election by Reading About the Eradication of Murder Hornets
By Debbie Hall In November we inched closer to the ledge over which one only falls once. —Mary Jo Bang One definition of dread (noun): great fear in view of impending evil. As a verb, it can mean to be in shrinking apprehension of. Derived terms include: dreadable, dreadly, and dreadworthy, as in: the…