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 your fingers at both ends. The usual reaction to being trapped like that is to pull your fingers away from each other, making it impossible to free yourself. The only way to get free is to let go and let the Trap drop to the ground
The Chinese Finger Trap is what I often think of when I think of the Resistance. There’s a place for it, sure, but 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 status quo of institutionalized hierarchy and social inequity. Every single one of you is doing that, and we’re here for that. That’s what EAP is for.
If you don’t believe me (though I know you do), check out Cliff Beck and his poem Pull back the curtains and open the doors.
We do have a lot of new contributors this issue. Be gentle when you read them, and help them get aloft. 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: An Udderly Legendairy Fluid. 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 his 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?
As we persist.