If you’re a certain age, you might remember a party gag called the Chinese Finger Trap. It’s a simple bamboo cylinder that traps fingers at both ends. The usual reaction to being trapped like that is to pull your finger away from the other, making it impossible to free yourself. The only way to get free is to let go.
I often think of the Chinese Finger Trap when I think of the Resistance. There’s a place for resisting, sure, but an overkill of resistance has a tendency to energize the opposition. What I want to replace it with is the Persistence. It’s not as showy, but it doesn’t give energy to the fight. Instead it nurtures and grows alternative ways of being.
I’m all for Persistence.
Every one of you who’s a part of this community—of others, too, since we’re not exclusive!—is a valuable part of the Persistence. Every writer, poet, artist who pushes their own boundaries outward and upward, embracing new ways of being, and enriching the old ways of kindness, conviviality, generosity, community and, of course, love, is growing new green shoots of persistence up through the dire-looking concrete of our hardened status quo. Every single one of you is doing that, and we’re here for that. That’s what EAP is for.
So we have a lot of new contributors this issue. Some of them are just finding their feet, and a couple of them have not just found their feet, but are racing ahead. Check out Gabby Woehr and her piece, Milk. She may be our youngest member, and I’m going to pay close attention to how her craft grows. It’s pushing that concrete up and out for sure. Also Justin Wacker, who, amusingly, is an accountant in his day job, something he puts to great use in An Accountant’s Ecstatic Truth. And Tori Ritchie, whose bittersweet One-Eyed Peke gives the reader a shock with some hard truths about growing up rich in a culture that values that over all.
There are others. K.R. Moore somehow figured out I’m a sucker for pieces that move the writer past a transactional yearning for fame and riches to a discovery of the great joy to be found in relationships and creative work for its own sake. Have a look at his Demons in the Ink.
This issue is so chock full of wonderful pieces by writers you know, and writers you’ll come to know, I couldn’t begin to list them. You’ll have your own favorites. Be open to writing you might think is not your kind of thing—often that’s where the most interest eventually springs up.
Through the concrete. We’re under it, but we’re making our move, aren’t we? And the more we know ourselves (see Manzanita from “My Life with Dogs” for my own humiliating discoveries), the more we know about our world. And the more we know about our world, the more we know what it takes to replant it, replenish it, reforest it.
So let’s get cracking, shall we?
Persist.