Print is dead, so why chapbook?
Complacency Kills: Rebuild the House of Wisdom is available in full @mirageslight on issuu.com
A man with dilated eyes threatened to shoot everyone at 7/11. His hand caught in his jacket pocket as he yanked out a used train pass and a poorly folded napkin. He spoke in gibberish and racial epithets directed at the Persian man behind the counter. While I bought my midnight coffee, he leaned into me. His breath smelled like the kind of chicken cutlet sandwiches Boston hospitals (ought to) supply to the homeless. He said, “I’m the FBI. You wasted five years.”
Gazing past his pocked and brittle, bronzed features, seeing my wiry reflection in both of his otherwise vacant pupils, I knew he was right. That deep state actors (at the VA, in law enforcement, working at universities) might have an overbearing interest in my identity disturbed me, but this man had entered my matrix with a message: get over yourself.
This is essentially about me, I see, my anxiety, my friendships, my swiftly diminishing influence. This chapbook is not the best. It’s not the worst. It’s an expression of an idea, a call to action that inspired me into a fellowship with The Mission Continues in 2017.
Reading on the lawn outside of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s House, Brian Turner suggested building a new library in Baghdad. He bought the fist book for it, the Warrior Writers Anthology.
Warrior Writers describes itself as a “dynamic journey,” one in which I engaged for five years. Along the way I crossed paths with several strange wonderers, deliverers, mystics, thieves, and visionaries. Everyone had a message or a story or a strange perspective to share. Noticing them, listening, and sometimes joining in their turmoil became the basis of some of the work collected in Complacency Kills. It’s a low key zine that at one point I’d thought could be a yearly endeavor culminating in a fall reading at the Suffolk Poetry Center.
As the de facto editor, I spent years rallying enough interest to publish this issue. In the process, my mind got waylaid and clusterfucked into a state of kerfuffled confusion by a barrage of people who offered opinions, occasionally helped and often flaked. Then I began to see myself through other people’s eyes. I realized how from certain perspectives I appear to be a criminal, a cuckoo and a cluck. I fear judgment. I want to be loved. But this is not about me. It’s about rebuilding The House of Wisdom.
Possibly this collection of creative work could have been pressed into a chapbook five years ago. Some of it grew out of that writing workshop in the summer of 2014 when I first encountered Warrior Writers. Out of efforts by Lovella Callica, Drew Camron, Kevin Basl, Rachel McNeill and Juanixa Spinnato, the Boston chapter emerged in collaboration with The Joiner Institute’s Writers’ Workshop.
Lovella described her founding inspiration on the Eighty One Echo podcast during the organization’s 10th anniversary celebration in 2017 simply: “I wanted to share the writing that I was doing because it was related to just dealing with trauma, my own trauma from childhood sexual abuse and a lot of my writing had been, was, and still is about healing from that and moving forward.” As any group grows, as its members multiply, its mission creeps into new domains.
“They will ruin your life,” warned a former Navy Medic during a Warrior Writers reading at The Old Oak Dojo.
Between drug addicts seeking bathrooms to shoot up, skateboarders kick flipping past vagrants, Veterans riding wheelchairs into glass walls, building managers policing snacks, hooligans damaging property in the name of respect, leasing agents chagrined about showing IDs for keys, and the White Nationalist Navy Reservist who quit after he got caught PWNing his domestic enemies on Twitter, it was difficult to differentiate between “them” and (for example) social algorithms, or developing AI.
“Don’t say you can do something that you can’t,” said a “good friend” who “they” put into a position to access VA records. “What’s the age of onset of schizophrenia?”
Fanny Garcia, U.S. Army Veteran and photographer, asked colleagues to consider the difference between art therapy and artworks at the Veteran Art Summit in Chicago in 2019. Discussing militant ephemera, during a “Conflict Exchange” with Combat Paper, a gathering around a table made by former Army helicopter pilot Alicia Dietz discussed what it might look like to “Rebuild the House of Wisdom.”
