From my time as a crisis counselor, I learned that the term “crisis” refers to a moment when the body identifies intense danger, either in response to a new trauma or triggered by a former one, compelling it to make the most immediate choices for survival. In curating the following responses to the topic of sexual violence in literary spaces, I cannot help but return to this definition of crisis. On March 6, 2016, VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts published “Reports from the Field: Statements Against Silence,” a collection of anonymous testimonials from women naming a well-known poet as a perpetrator of sexual violence; someone who has leveraged the power and prestige of his reputation to ensure their silence. What does it mean that the responses that have followed are not one of shock and dismay but of the acknowledgment that sexual violence has historically pervaded the spaces in which we write and build community? That other writers have spoken up and forged connections between this incident and sexual transgressions of myriad other forms perpetrated by mentors, teachers, and others who wield certain power across literary spaces?
I think of crisis now because these moments force us to confront the urgent matter of what it means to work within literary spaces that perpetuate violence and silence their survivors. In a sense, what we are experiencing is a series of crises that bring the immediacy of this violence to light. Yet somehow the urgency dissipates just as quickly. Though we often look to the act of writing as documentation and witness, the writing of violence somehow becomes the burden of those who have endured it and forgotten by those with the privilege to ignore.
We at Apogee Journal put out a call for contributors to respond to this very subject because we are against forgetting. In the following responses, contributors turned to poetry, prose, and essay to address a recurring crisis. At times they force us to sit with the grief of surviving such violence. Other times they demand that we take back the spaces that have become unsafe. Contributor Mahogany L. Browne writes that for us to stop this violence, we all must “become louder, even still.” We ask that you consider these responses as echoes—as a response to a history of responses to violence. May they resound with such volume that every response following becomes an even brighter and more unrelenting noise.
-Muriel Leung
Poetry Co-Editor
Apogee Journal
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