A few days ago on Bluesky, I posted a link to a years-old issue of a literary magazine that contained a short story of mine.
In 2019, I wrote a short speculative fiction story called "Joey Button." The story meant a lot to me. It was an idea I'd had rattling around in my mind for a while, one I had finally put down on paper, and it had come out just how I had envisioned it.
I was thrilled when, in January 2020, it was accepted to New Reader Magazine for publication. I was even more thrilled when New Reader Magazine said they wanted to make me a featured author of the issue it would debut in. They asked me for photos; my husband and I spent an entire day in an old cotton mill doing a photo shoot (he's a filmmaker and photographer). Meanwhile, NRM conducted a really thoughtful interview with me about the story and about my craft. It was all lovely.
So too is the finished product! The layout of the entire issue was wonderful, and my interview with NRM remains, to me, a really special encapsulation of who I was as an artist at one very specific point in time. That very specific point in time, as even the less eagle-eyed among us have likely noted based on the timeline I've laid out so far in this post, was the months leading up to the pandemic. A time in which I thought (rightfully, I think) I was hitting some momentum when it came to my creative writing.
In that interview, I spoke as if I thought the interview was the start of something, not the final act before a very strange, very foreboding intermission. It was almost as if I had no idea that the world was about to be turned upside down, taking my writing career prospects and creative energy with it (temporarily).
As it happened, the issue of New Reader Magazine that the story and interview were contained in was released on March 13, 2020. For reference, that was the same day I got a call from my daugther's childcare indicating that they were strongly considering closing the school indefinitely due to the suddenly-bubbling pandemic. By that Sunday, March 15, the school was shuttered.
I don't know how many people read my story or my interview back then. I do know that I was far too distracted to notice who was or wasn't. So this week, I decided to re-share both a link to Joey Button. It wasn't so much because I think it needs new readership. It would of course be lovely if people did read it, but that really wasn't my concern. When I shared it, I was actually sharing it for me. It was an attempt to reclaim feeling good about seeing that story and interview laid out on the page. It was an attempt to reclaim the momentum I felt back then. It was a way to reclaim the way I talked in that interview: confident and seemingly unaware anything could possibly knock me off my rocker.
A short story's debut and an interview are not the biggest losses of the pandemic, of course -- not for me, not for anyone. But for artists, there was some serious ground lost when we were all simultaneously thrown into a stew we couldn't make sense of, let alone express. I'd like it if more of us could find ways, big and small, to celebrate the wins we were about to have back then. The art is still there, now, on the other side. Relic or not, it's there. We might as well celebrate it.
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