This is the first in a new Assignment Magazine series showcasing tiny letters/ substack newsletters by diverse writers. To subscribe to Chantal’s compelling series, see here: https://chantaljames.substack.com/p/survival-techniques?s=r

SURVIVAL TECHNIQUES

I have been on the survival tip and as you read this I trust you have been too. With the next gun massacre in this blood-soaked land occurring before the victims of the last have been laid to rest, while the pandemic continues to rage unchecked by the officials who have abandoned us to its grip for profit, it grows difficult to nurture in ourselves the belief that we will count ourselves among the living when it's all said and done. Fear and bottomless grief play with our ability to imagine ourselves continuing into the future. The truth is that it is not a game, because many of us know all too well that we are among those in greatest danger. To sustain my belief that I keep going I take stolen moments to work on the draft of my next novel, a discipline that holds me together as only the unifying force of narrative can. It is hidden work that brings the satisfaction of my knowing I can hold it close to myself for a while to come, as the only witness to the shapes it takes while it's yet unseen by an outsider's eye.

The poet June Jordan has called us to ask "And what shall we do, we who did not die?" I find the question to be central. We know that for now, for however long, we are fortunate to be still standing against mighty multiple onslaughts. To me this is an opportunity for us to boldly envision a world beyond this terror we have become far too intimate with. To conceive of and step into structures that hold us in community care and satisfy our material needs in ways policing never will. To extend ourselves to one another in support instead of looking away from suffering as it nears our proximity.

If possible I want to make an offering that gives us strength and hope to carry on empowered. Yes, the world is ending as it has often ended before and it is ending in novel ways nowadays too. Sometimes the urge to continue on comes in the form of a knowing that conditions do not have to be this dire. That there are other ways of being. And even that perhaps there is a world asking to be born from this, something we can build in homage to those who have passed from the earth. There is nothing that will raise them from the dead but how can we dare to imagine things so that perhaps sorrow is not so routine that we are forced to rush past it before even giving it its due?

Lastly as I send this to you I am sharing a recent review of NONE BUT THE RIGHTEOUS that humbly moved me. It's here if you want to check it out. My hope is that the opportunity to put fiction out in the world is one I can always use to give people I may never meet the kind of sustenance, a glimpse of beauty maybe even as they as a reader become immersed in a distant reality, that allows them to turn inward and assure themselves that just for this day it's worth sticking around, and that perhaps they have the strength to outlast just one more challenge, and that as they imagine surviving this one day by putting one foot in front of the other the horizon of the next day they will also survive emerges in their view.

Chantal James is the author of the novel None But the Righteous from Counterpoint Press. She lives in Washington, DC, and has been published across genres—as a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and book reviewer—in such venues as Catapult, Paste Magazine, Harvard’s Transition Magazine, The Bitter Southerner, and more. Her honors include a Fulbright fellowship in creative writing to Morocco, and a finalist position for the Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction prize from the North Carolina Literary Review for 2019