Thrilled to work on yet another project with my favorite west coast literary mag. Michele Raphael, co-founder, asked me to teach a class last spring– when New York was hit so hard by the pandemic. And like so many others, I was so afraid. So I said yes and devised a 30-day workshop that I hoped would carry me and the participants safely through the next 30 days, And it did. Below is the description of the workshop, and an excerpt, published in this issue, Apart=Together. –Lillian Ann Slugocki, Project Editor
We weren’t refined or perfect. Our voices were pretty raw at times. I led the workshop, 30 Days: Journaling Through Catastrophe. Every night at 9:00 p.m. EST, I posted a prompt–writers had 24 hours to respond. It was structured like a Massive Open Online Class (MOOC). I wanted us to co-create a narrative, a story, a public document that would carry us through the early days of the pandemic. The work we shared was blunt, poignant, often brilliant. We wrote about the perfect day in the future, the stress of food shopping, the disruption of our lives, but also the poetry and unexpected grace of a bird or a hike through the Calfornia desert. We wrote about our children and our lovers. I chose Prompt 3 for this issue: Describe the world outside your window because, in the new normal, the world had taken on a new shape—paradoxically familiar but also very strange
Lillian Ann Slugocki 