by Heather Lynn Horvat

When my husband and I moved to Arizona several years ago, he suggested we hike the Grand Canyon. I laughed. "Experience that without me," I said. I wasn't an outdoors person.

As a teen living in central Pennsylvania, I had dabbled in the outdoors, mostly as a means to escape adult eyes. Once, I hiked near a dam in the woods and black snakes slithered across the trail so the ground itself looked like black ocean waves. My boyfriend carried me on his back. I heard the squeak of a tree branch bending and opened my eyes to see a snake dangling above me. There were so many snakes that day that I still question if it was a bad dream. Nightmare or reality, the memory lingered and I stopped seeking nature.

About a year ago, the panic attacks started. Somehow I had become fearful of more than just nature. I now feared crowds, but also feared being alone. I feared my own Self, and the fear paralyzed me. I refused to admit to anyone that I needed help. The attacks worsened in severity and intensity. I stopped writing. Or, the words stopped coming.

"You need to get out of your head," my husband said. "Make new friends. Find a new hobby."

2018 began the year of new: new friends, new freelance work, new hairdresser, new workout routines. I went on a girls' weekend to Vegas barely knowing the girls but embracing the opportunity that presented itself. The freelance work I submitted earned praise and a check. My body boasted muscle definition in places I didn't know could be toned. On the outside, I looked like I had my shit together.

Since my husband is an outdoors person, I agreed to go on a short hike with him to Wave Cave. Like the name implies, there is a cave with a jutting rock in the shape of a large surf wave. A touristy destination per Google and rated at moderate difficulty, I figured it wouldn't be as bad as Camelback, the mountain that left me with three scarred gashes on my left knee two years ago.

Arizona hiking is much different than Pennsylvania hiking. Here, the desert mountains are rocky at best, boulderous with little shade and breathtaking views at high elevations. Wave Cave possessed all the qualities of desert: gravelly, gradual incline to lull you into mental safety until the final elevation gain that's steep enough to make you wonder why you agreed to this.

Finding my footing in the rocks, my thighs screamed while I thought, What the hell I am doing? My husband didn't ask if we should turn around; I'm sure he knew that I might have said yes.

Once we reached the cave and I heaved, trying to catch my breath, I looked back from where we came. The trail was obscure between the jutting rocks and boulders. The desert beyond was serene. Houses and cityscape were further away and didn't seem as claustrophobic as it sometimes feels when you live in a cookie-cutter neighborhood. For the first time in a long time I could breathe.

Ten people shared the cave space with us. I kept to myself huddled against the back wall and ate a snack. A woman about my age, but more fit, more hiker ready, posed on the wave while her partner snapped pictures with his phone. Her laugh made me want to laugh.

When it was my turn to pose on the wave, she offered to take our picture. No judgment in her eyes that I didn't belong, because at this moment, on top of this section of mountain, everyone belonged.

It could've been hunger and thirst or aching muscles, but I felt a euphoric rush.

"Will you hike again?" My husband asked.

I've completed eight hikes since Wave Cave, some of them without my husband. As soon as I finish one, whether three miles or seven miles, rocky or boulder hopping, I begin planning the next. The panic attacks haven't stopped completely, but words are coming back to me.

Heather Lynn Horvat is a graduate of The Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. She currently freelances while writing her next novel.

by Arun Chittur

“Your story matters … because everyone’s story matters,” challenged my instructor as I struggled through my last MFA workshop. I’d heard that before, and always agreed. Yet I denied the idea for myself, convinced instead that one must have “expertise” before sharing any part of themselves. I wonder now if such an argument is meant to reinforce the need for more heady discourse, or to discourage those voices deemed unnecessary to a larger, more dominant narrative.

In my last days as a student, two sentences into this post, a notification appeared on my screen. It was a news headline I would have ignored, except for two words: “shithole countries”. The President of the United States had asked a meeting of legislators, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” As a critical reader in the post-2016 media era, I assumed (hoped?) that the headline was overblown. Fabricated. Extrapolated obnoxiously out of context. Something had to be missing. Then I watched Rupert Colville’s response as spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Then several members of Congress. Several citizens of Johannesburg and Nairobi. The President singled out Haiti, El Salvador, and “African nations,” apparently expressing preference for immigrants from Norway. As one cable news anchor put it, “… people from Norway, with Nordic descent. White people, in other words.” I fought through a series of emotional responses, most of which have become second nature in the previous 12 months. Of those, a standard passivity was replaced by a rush of anger. I expect comments like this now, comments dividing the worlds of white and otherwise, European and otherwise, “Normal” and otherwise. I could have dropped back into acceptance and moved. That would have been easy.

What comes to mind when you think of a “shithole”? Large urban areas stricken with poverty? Whole families living in one-room dwellings without access to clean water or reliable food sources? Or perhaps rural areas so cut off from the world that the newest car you can buy was made when Eisenhower was president? Where every scene in the big city looks not like New York in 2018 but 1968?

There are pockets of Mumbai, India—a sprawling metropolis home to millions—where the dream isn’t for the perfect job, the perfect mate, or even a shot at college. It’s to eat one meal a day, and for the hope that your own waste will not return in the form a mortal disease. This same country, currently the world’s largest democracy, is also famous for its network of post-secondary engineering schools. My father emigrated from India to the United States in 1979 to complete work toward a PhD in chemical engineering. He was funded through a government loan that forced a choice upon graduation: (a) return to India and your loan debt would be forgiven, or (b) you could repay the loan and remain in the U.S. My father chose the latter, winning naturalization as an American citizen and placing his life in the hands of the American Dream and the trust it invoked so confidently back then.

Cuba is famous for its scenery and artistic culture, a popular vacation spot for many Canadian and European tourists. It’s also famous as the capital of a country long lost in the 1950s following the demise of one dictatorship in favor of another and a subsequent American embargo. Despite tourism revenue, Cubans have struggled to keep up with the rest of the world—especially since the fall of Cuba’s primary benefactor, the Soviet Union. Most of the island’s people struggled to access the kind of medical care, education, and commoditized technology that swept much of the world in the twentieth century. My mother’s parents brought her to the U.S. from Havana as they fled paradise for the unknowns of a foreign land. Determined to make her own life as an American, she grew up to follow my grandfather into medicine—into helping people. As a naturalized citizen, she graduated as a chemist and became a hospital laboratory analyst, testing patient samples hoping to find what ailed you quickly enough to save you from it.

My parents both came from oft referred-to “Third World” countries. When our President takes offense at the immigration of citizens from “shithole” countries, he takes offense at the journey my parents made just for a taste of the American Dream. He takes offense at the circumstances that drove them here, into the arms of a country that once sought to embody the call on Lady Liberty’s tablet. For millions worldwide this country has been the last, best hope. In my life, it has proven itself the only place a Cuban woman and Indian man could rise to the heights of their own potential and make a life next door to any other American family; and could give birth to a son with relatives tens of thousands of miles apart and raise him as an ‘American’.

What makes us “exceptional”? What qualities underwrite a state endowed with a responsibility to lead the world? Watching our evolution in the past two years, I’ve come to believe that our self-perceived political and moral supremacy isn’t drawn from a superior political system, nor a respected level of experience acting on the international stage. It’s drawn from the diversity of our people. As Americans, we live with a turbulent past, a history rife with suffering and exploitation. Yet we have transcended before, moving through history still attracting the young and old from all corners. The world could follow us because others could see themselves in us. And now? Promises of shelter and opportunity made in the past are becoming promises broken, dreams cast away to be cared for anywhere but here.

It is easy, I think, to dismiss the President’s words as racist. It is easy to dismiss them with a passivity designed to enable life to go on. But that passivity incurs the risk of losing sight of what was most important all along: America as a ‘beacon’ of hope and freedom. As I reconcile the latest headline with the end of my academic journey, my most important lesson crystallizes into view. As writers, we appreciate the chance to engage in our art without fear of political reprisal. Even without publication, we have our words. When I started my MFA, I debated whether the ambition to publish was the right one, whether my voice had enough authority to earn its place. But to follow that logic, to favor academic discourse over all others, silences those voices deemed unnecessary by the dominant narrative.

Beginning anew two years later, I am convinced that such an ambition is right. Not for fortune or fame. Not for an ephemeral notoriety some know and fewer understand. But because a democracy—any participative government—is based on voices. My instructor was right. Every story matters. Every voice. Every vote. The urge to express in writing is an urge to articulate a story that is already part of our fabric, no matter its origin or what the owner looks like. Writers of all stripes stand ready, willing, and able to articulate on behalf of not only themselves but those who cannot speak for themselves. We provide words for the countless made silent by the will of the few. It is our prime responsibility to ensure all sides discourse freely and responsibly, above the noise of those who would prefer a single storyline.

Arun Chittur is a graduate of The Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. He currently teaches organizational leadership and pedagogy in Nevada.

One Rock at a Time

Hidden Voices