Another apocalyptic dream
"It ain't over 'til it's over."
Hey all,
It’s been a dramatic week. We are migrating from Twitter to Bluesky. Our Bluesky handle is @identitytheory.bsky.social. Please join us there.
Writer Dorothy Allison has passed away. She talked to Robert Birnbaum for a long while back in 2002. Revisit that interview here.
She said, “You really have to believe in the worth of the work, otherwise anybody who is just a charming fool can get over on you.”
Today, we have new fiction from Sara Lippmann: “Look Yourself.”
She wrote, “The baby looked like a wrinkled, humorless old man, and behaved accordingly. The baby complained all the time. She could practically hear her baby sending back the soup. She no longer slept. It was beyond her wildest imagination, weeks upon months of not sleeping, a military torture technique, a physical impossibility, and yet, all the same, it felt fitting, the not sleeping, as she’d entered a world where dreams went to die. The baby latched to her breast like a permanent fixture. She was a milk machine. She was a repository of want. A reservoir of tears until she wasn’t. Until, like all sources, she dried up. Work receded to distant memory. The magazine shuttered. She was not going anywhere. She was going to her baby. Her husband had no patience for this nonsense. He had to get up in the morning and function like a real person. What else did she have to do? She was a mother.”
Last week, we published some poems: “To buy flowers for Vincent” by Karen Soans and two poems by nat raum. We also ran a short story by Caitlin A. Quinn: “The One Where Jayne Loses Her Shit.” She wrote, “Let’s be real. Everyone thinks they’re basically good, but when you think about how unbelievably fucked up the world is, it stands to reason that not everyone can be a good person.”
The latest from Ampydoo.
We are currently focused on working through submissions and preparing Pushcart, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions nominations. We are going on hiatus from social media aside from Bluesky and the occasional Instagram post.
Speaking of Best Small Fictions, the new edition is available as an ebook and features multiple Identity Theory stories.
“There is a very large number of people who are receptive, even hungry, for new ways at looking at American history and new ways at looking at American society. I think we are deceived by the attention that media gives to our political leaders. By that I mean that, because all we see on television are congressional leaders and the president and the members of the cabinet and so on, we begin to think that they do represent the thinking of the country. If you consider that half of the voting population did not vote and that of that half only half voted for whoever is president — and this is true in almost every election, not just in this recent election — there is a huge number of people who did not vote for the existing president, and many who did vote voted without enthusiasm…”
-Howard Zinn (2001)
Localize and organize, but most of all, write,
M.B.
The Editor
Perfect Howard Zinn quote — thank you.