The Writing on the Wall by Hattie Myers

Editorials

Each of the writers in ROOM 6.25 has captured, in their own way, something of this extraordinary moment we are all living through. This is not easy. In his essay Why I Write, Thomas Ogden explains why. “Part of the difficulty of writing well lies in the fact that writing any sort of analytic essay, literary essay, poetry, fiction is autobiographical,”  Ogden writes; “I must find a way of capturing a situation in my own way, a way that bears my own mark.” This unique issue of ROOM bears the mark of multitudes and holds the scars of generations.   

In the Midst by Hattie Myers

Editorials

The writers and artists in ROOM 2.25 bear witness to what must happen in ourselves, our communities, and our political movements for truth to be faced and change to occur. Some write from amidst genocide, others from their country’s fascist turn, and still others from the impact of environmental catastrophe. Each of these life-threatening events inscribes itself differently on our souls. We live in terrifying times.

ROOM 10.24

Toward a New Collectivity by Hattie Myers

Editorials

In Kara Walker’s words, “history is the oft-repeated fable; power is the oft-repeated script.” From Walker’s art in THSLNWN: In the Colorless Light of Day, to Karim Dajani and Eyal Rozmarin’s conversation in Speaking of Home: An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine, ROOM 10.24 is a testament to our collective heartbreak and resilience. Exactly one week after the 2016 US election, we created ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action. We knew that to “live out,” in Sartre’s words, “that unbearable, heart-rending situation known as the human condition in a candid unvarnished way,” we needed to do it together. For the last eight years, ROOM’s worldwide community has engaged in a collective struggle for recognition and authenticity across generations, culture, and political pressure. Now, just one week after the re-election of Donald Trump, ROOM 10.24 could not be more prescient.

These Words by Hattie Myers

Editorials

Think what it would be like,” Italo Calvino wrote, “to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own, but to give speech to that which has no language… ” Of course we know that no person and no theory can ever escape the limited perspective of Calvino’s “individual ego.” Taken together, however, the authors and artists in ROOM 6.24 are giving language to a world that is rendering us all increasingly speechless.

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SLOW FUSE OF THE POSSIBLE: ON POETRY & PSYCHOANALYSIS by Kate Daniels

Poems

Kate Daniels is the Edwin Mims Professor of English and director of creative writing at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including In the Months of My Son’s Recovery (May 2019). A graduate of the New Directions program at the Baltimore Washington Center for Psychoanalysis, she has been a member of the writing faculty there for a decade. She lives in Nashville.