Whisk(e)y Tit

This issue — our seventh — is coming out on Memorial Day weekend, a holiday where Americans remember our dead. This year we have too many dead. It boggles the mind. It beggars belief. One million gone from COVID, more than 17,000 dead from gun violence in the fewer-than-six-months of 2022 that have passed so far. Both those numbers will climb. It’s inevitable. As summer rises, deadly wildfires are inevitable. More dead. 

We want to look away, of course. We’re only human. I find myself returning to climate scientist Jennifer A. Atkinson’s essay “How To Love A Burning World.” In it, she discusses solastalgia — a pervasive feeling of loss for the world that is slipping away beneath our feet. Of course, we want to go back to a time when summer didn’t mean a billion animals will be boiled alive. We want to go back to when mass shootings weren’t a fixture of the news cycle, when obvious problems could be addressed. 

But that’s not the part of the essay I return to. I go back to the line: “When we suppress our grief for the world, we’re also suppressing our compassion for it.” 

We live in a culture that looks at feeling as a weakness, as fluff that gets in the way of logic and confidence and productivity, which are the things that matter. But feeling is a powerful and intrinsic part of our nature. Compassion allows us to find ways to move forward even in the most paralyzing of circumstances. The grief opens the door, and when we avoid it, we stay locked in an airless room filled with indignation, exhaustion, and pettiness. 

Nostalgic yearnings for a Disneyfied past will get us nowhere — suffering has always existed — but voices from the past can help us find our own voices. I find strength by reading the anonymous Pearl poet as he wrestles with grief over his young daughter’s death. I find camaraderie in Petrarch’s observations of a world wrought asunder by raging plague. And much more recently, I find hard strength in Octavia Butler’s shockingly prescient Parable of The Sower and Parable of the Talents, which predicted the phrase “Make America Great Again.”

In addition to drawing strength from the past, we need more voices right now that are willing to directly face the maw of the mounting crises around us. For that reason, I’m proud to bring you the seventh issue of Whiskey TIt. In this issue you will find writers contending with the pain and absurdity of our current moment. And you’ll find writers finding joy in spite of it all.

Meagan Masterman

Managing Editor

Issue 7, May 2022

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Whiskey Tit Journal’s Raison D’Être

Issue 6

Issue 5

Issue 4

Issue 3

Issue 2

Issue 1