THE DEEP FIELD

A few weeks ago, Boo Trundle and I sat down over Zoom with Steven, a retired cardiologist, to talk about his career, his interests, and his refreshing scientific essay, "The Deep Field." It was a far-reaching conversation covering topics such as his medical and astronomy backgrounds, his perspective on coming to writing later in life (he is 78), his experience at Breadloaf, and the importance of writer groups. We also took some side-roads into physics, the problems with aging in America, and of course NFTs. It was a real pleasure to chat with Steven and get to know him. Steven's story is a great example of how a person can pivot and become a great writer in their second chapter of life. As a 52-year-old who increasingly feels past his literary prime, I felt quite edified by the conversation.

Take a listen for yourself. We think it'll give you plenty of reasons for why you should collect Steven Swiryn.

In Steven’s own words:

“I’m not religious, but I think of myself as a spiritual person. I look up at the night sky and it’s not all science for me. It’s wonder. And it’s amazement. There’s a tendency for people to think, oh, it makes you very small. But I don’t think it makes me small.”

Support our Artists (and Decentralized Finance)!

You can show support for Steven and Adriana by purchasing one of the NFTs from this collection. When you buy an NFT using your crypto wallet, funds are split evenly three ways to Steven, Adriana, and Atticus Review. Funds are delivered immediately to these three wallets and aren’t routed through any corporate third-parties such as Visa/Mastercard, a government, or a big bank.

THE DEEP FIELD

If you’re thinking, but I don’t know how to get a crypto wallet, well, we have tutorials to guide you through that on our website.

To learn more about our new publishing model you can read our past newsletters and our blog.

Here’s our latest podcast with our interview with Steven:

And if you’ve never seen the famous Hubble “Deep Field” image, we’ve included it below. There’s a reason why it has it’s distinctive L-shape (or stair-step shape) in the top right quadrant of the image, and it has to do with how Hubble's “Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2” (WFPC2) was designed. We would relay to you the details, but we think it’s rather long and complicated and, most importantly, we do not fully understand it, so we trust that if you’re curious about it, you will seek answers from the AI Gods.

Thanks for reading. Keep making good things.

David Olimpio
Publisher
Atticus Review

And nothing beats a good conversation about writing. Except a good conversation about writing that includes talking about bread.

Too good to be true, you say? Et voilà:

We sat down over Zoom with the author of our latest literary NFT collection, Meg Thompson, to talk about what inspired her to write her memorable essay The Bread Winner.

Topics include:

1. her process, and the decision to use third person in a personal essay

2. motherhood

3. writing as “career”

4. how to write while also “winning the bread”

5. do writers (and literary magazines) need a patron spouse to survive?

6. what could literary NFT marketplaces look like in the future?

7. how baking bread can settle the obsessive mind

Great Writing, Great Digital Art

“The Bread Winner” is our first NFT featuring original art by illustrator and graphic designer Adriana Quezada. Stay tuned for more on Adriana in our next newsletter!

For now, check out these great illustrations she made for “The Bread Winner:”

Support these Artists!

You can show support for Meg and Adriana by purchasing one of the NFTs from this collection. When you buy an NFT using your crypto wallet, funds go immediately to the wallets of Meg and Adriana and aren’t routed through any corporate third-parties such as Visa or Mastercard or a big bank.

If you’re thinking, but I don’t know how to get a crypto wallet, well, we have tutorials to guide you through that on our website.

To learn more about our new publishing model you can read our past newsletters and our blog.

Thanks for reading!

David Olimpio
Publisher

THE BREAD WINNER

Meg Thompson has written a “whole slew” of essays about motherhood and is working toward a collection. With pieces published in The Sun, Adroit Journal, and Mutha magazine, Meg joins a powerful collective exploration of the wild, wild world of early childhood, and the role women play in this controlled chaos. (Witness, companion, personal chef, dream catcher, costume designer, restraining device.)

You can collect “The Bread Winner” as a Literary NFT.

And you can learn more about how to do that with the tutorials on our website.

Atticus Review, The Second Season

“The Bread Winner” is our first NFT featuring original art by illustrator and graphic designer Adriana Quezada. Feast your eyes on the colors and images in these inventive compositions. We’re thrilled to have Adriana on board for this year’s NFT adventure.

We’ll be introducing Adriana in a separate newsletter, but you can see from the artwork in “The Bread Winner” series that she’s taking us in an exciting new visual direction.

More About Meg: Humor and Gravitas

Meg Thompson has a stack of humor pieces up at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency including: “Title to a Modern Art Exhibit or Text from One of My Parents Where the History of Autocorrection Is Unclear?” and “An Open Letter to the Sociology Professor at My University Who Wrote a Letter to the Editor saying “I Don’t Think That a Single Woman Has Been Assaulted on this Campus in my 33 years Here.”

She cites poetry influences who pack a punchline into their punch: Sharon Olds and Denise Duhamel. Recent prose inspirations include All Fours by Miranda July and Dear Girls by Ali Wong.

In Meg’s words: “It’s bizarre to think about the person that I was ten years ago and how much of a journey I have gone on . . . I wrote my essay in third person because I literally think of myself as a different person, when I think about who I was before I had kids. And the pep talks I had to give myself! That it was okay that I didn’t have a job. Now I look back at it, and I feel bad for that person. That I had to do that. . . A lot of parents end up in that space, because we still have such a simplistic view of a stay-at-home parent . . . It’s a very rich and fulfilling and crazy and demanding world, more so than any other job I’ve ever had, and one that you can’t ​​prepare for.”

Meg Thompson has also published two books of poetry: Farmer (Kattywompus Press, 2016) and Eruption Sequence (Another New Calligraphy, 2023).

Go check out The Bread Winner now!

THE BREAD WINNER

Boo Trundle
Editor-in-Chief
Atticus Review

We wanted to send a little end-of-year round-up to recognize the authors we published this year at Atticus Review. We're grateful to all of these writers for trusting us with their work and for taking the leap with us into the blockchain. We're proud and honored to have published these pieces on our website and as NFT Collections.

Before we recap the past year's work, a quick note about NFTs and the blockchain. You might be wondering, what is the difference between putting work on the traditional web at [insert any literary magazine name here] and putting work on the blockchain and publishing a piece with Atticus Review? Why are you guys doing this, again?

Well you can find a lot that we've written about this on our blog and in our newsletters. We have several tutorials on our site.

The differences mostly come down to three things: 1. the establishment of provenance and originality in work; 2. the free and unregulated exchange of value for that work; 3. ability for work to generate royalties for both the writer and for the magazine and have a life beyond our magazine.

If you're interested, I go deeper into this topic in this piece I just wrote and put on our blog. In it I detail The Lifespan of a Literary NFT vs the Lifespan of a Literary Blog Post.

The Lifespan of a Literary NFT vs A Literary Blog Post

One last thing before we brag about this year's authors: I want to thank my colleague and friend Boo Trundle for doing an amazing job spurring this project along, for keeping my nose to the grindstone on the various technical tasks I needed to finish, and for curating all the fine writers listed above. Without her, none of this would have happened.

The 2025 Atticus Review Season

"Smoke" by Melody Wilson

Genre: Poetry

About the work:

Sparse, unpretentious, tightly tethered to image as well as the emotions underneath.

"Puppet House" by John Reed

Genre: Poetry

About the Work: 

A sequence of sonnets on the theme of marionettes. Exploring control, free will, and the hellish lack of it.

"Benny and the Heart" by Katie M. Zeigler

Genre: Fiction

About the Work:

A charming, complex blend of satire and fantasy. The suspense revolves around futuristic heart science. What can a mother’s heart survive?

"A Misplaced Tropical Pond Leads to a Feminist Daydream" by Marcia LeBeau

Genre: Poetry

About the Work:

The title speaks for itself. Pay attention to the raspberry preserve. The wild elegance of the word "laundered."

“Connie and Paula” by K. Uwe Dunn

Genre: Nonfiction

About the Work:

Deeply, achingly human. And because it is human, it’s a little bit sexual. A jewel of gentle observation.

Thanks again to all of these writers for trusting us with their work!

I hope everybody has a safe and happy new year celebration and we'll see you in 2026 for the next season of Atticus Review.

David Olimpio
Publisher

For me, the best reason to collect this NFT is that it rose to the top of our submission pile on its own merits. “Connie and Paula” is a banger.

View the Collection

About the Atticus Review Submission Process

I joined Atticus Review as the editor in January 2025, and this is the first time I was involved in an open submission period. David Olimpio, the publisher, walked me through the steps of the submission review process. I find it fascinating to be on the other side. Although I’ve never been a hardcore submitter (I write novels), I have assembled my fair share of applications and entries on Submittable. But Submittable faces both ways. Writers lob their talent and hard work from one side of the orange wall. Editors, waiting right on the other side, catch the spears and try to figure out how hot they are.

Whoever is acting as judge opens the pieces one by one, reads them, reads the bio and any available artist statement, then votes yes, no, or maybe. For me, it's so much easier to vote no than yes. There are many no’s inside me, but only because they are clearing the way for one huge YES. David, I learned, is a fan of maybe. It's a personality style, probably. I didn't assign maybe to anything I read.

Back to “Connie and Paula.” I'm going to be totally honest, I said no to this piece in the first round, but David made a compelling case for it. The reason I initially rejected “Connie and Paula” had nothing to do with the quality of the writing. It’s simple, not over- or under- thought and written. It's funny, gritty, beautifully observed and touching.

But the story is set in a memory care unit at a nursing home. And when I first read this submission, my ninety-year-old mother had just gotten kicked out of her second nursing home for violent behavior. She attacked a nurse with a pair of scissors. I had been on the phone with my brother and sister for days trying to figure out what to do for her, and about her. The last thing I wanted to think about was a nursing home.

Fortunately, David talked me into giving “Connie and Paula” another chance. I put my personal life aside and gave “Connie and Paula” a second read, then a third. That was just the beginning, because from there I went into several back and forth revisions with K. “Connie and Paula” shows me more truth every time I read it. Ironically, I’ve come to see that the setting, the memory care unit, is the unique, powerful detail that takes “Connie and Paula” to the next level. 

So, collect it please.

Here’s how to set up your NFT wallet in a browser or on mobile and put a little crypto in it.

Here’s how you buy the NFT in your browser and on mobile.

Thank You for Submitting Your Work

David and I want to thank everyone else who submitted to the open reading period this past summer. We read so much fantastic work. One thing about creative nonfiction is that you learn about humanity when you dive into it. I’ve always known it’s hard to be a human. It’s not breaking news. And your submissions didn’t suggest otherwise. Atticus is grateful for the opportunity to get real with all of you.

The Woodblock Process

Rather than close this newsletter with a pat cliché about acceptance and rejection, I will make one more pitch for why you should collect this NFT. It's the fifth NFT in our first series, which we started in January 2025. For expedience and affordability, I illustrated the first five. I was a baby woodblock carver when we started. I had taken one online class which told me the best supplies to get and how to not cut off my thumb. This first batch of NFT illustrations is primitive, raw, even crude. But we are switching to a new artist (or artists) in 2026. So, snap up my crude, raw, rough, naïve, outsider, fauvist NFT art while you can! I've already gotten less crude … like The Rolling Stones.

Boo Trundle
Editor

1. her writing process and how she sometimes needs to make a longer poem shorter
2. writing from prompts and historical places or events
3. how energy work is similar to a writing practice
4. on finding surprises in your writing and how that's where the good stuff is

Atticus on Air: Episode 2

I love Marcia's poem, A Misplaced Tropical Pond Leads to a Feminist Daydream. I really connect with the underlying sense of "place" and "home," what that land around White Lake in New Jersey might've meant for Johann Vass and his four wives. 

Home has been something I've been thinking a lot about for the last few years. It's what has been bringing me to the blank page, when I manage to come to it at all. And Marcia's poem brought to mind my home in New Jersey, a state I lived in longer than anywhere else I've lived as an adult. Before I lived there, though, it was a place I never thought I would live, much less feel a fondness for.

Telling people where I am from has become a more-complicated question to answer the older I’ve gotten. When I'm asked it now, New Jersey comes to mind as one of the first responses. I grew a lot in that place. Became the person I am now while living there. Wrote my first and, thus far, only collection of essays there. A part of me will always identify with that place, will be inextricably linked to it.

But before New Jersey, I lived in Washington DC. I also was born and spent the first four years of my life there. I feel a keen sense of “home” there, too. When I lived in New Jersey, I used to tell my friend Jenna that I was coming "home" when I visited her in downtown DC, and I meant it. I owned an apartment there near the convention center for nearly 20 years. I knew the fastest routes to different parts of town, which streets would have the best timed lights. I didn’t use Google maps or any other GPS. In many ways, DC might be the best answer to the question of where I “am from.”

And yet, I have trouble giving that as my "hometown" because from the age of five through high school I lived in Texas, mostly in Houston. I say "mostly" because, while my mom lived in Houston — and that is where I went to grade school and made the kind of friends that live in your heart forever, and played sports, and had my first kiss — I would fly to Dallas every other weekend to see my dad. So I also sort of lived there as a kid. Then I lived there again after college and met the woman who would be my spouse for 20 years. And so even though I "grew up" in Houston, Dallas is the Texas city that actually feels a little more like "home" to me. But they both are places that make up who I am.

After my divorce I moved to Philadelphia. I only spent about 4 years there, but those four years included the time around the pandemic. And so I became intimately close to that city in a way I could never be with any other city in one lifetime. A part of me is still there on 2nd and George in Northern Liberties, and will forever remain there. That apartment was only a few blocks from where Edgar Allan Poe lived when he resided in Philadelphia. It's the house where he wrote several famous stories, including The Black Cat. I visited the basement that probably inspired that story.

As I walked around that city I used to think about Poe, and all the other American figures who had lived there, and how their DNA, their souls, are part of what make up that town. And that town is part of what made up their souls, their DNA. 

And now mine. And now mine. 

Currently, I live in Denver. For a bunch of sentimental and/or metaphysical reasons I won't go into, Denver is a place I've always kind of felt was "home" to me, even though I only set foot in the town a few times up until 2022 when I actually moved here. The routes I drive, the ever-present foothills on view to the west, these have become my new reality, my new identity.

A few weeks ago, I flew back to Houston to see my best friend. We drove to the house I grew up in, the house where he and I spent many of our formative years together, where we played, and laughed, where we cried and got hurt. I looked at that house and that street and I felt a profound sense of personal identity and, at the same time, a complete sense of detachment. I felt everything and nothing about that place, that home. 

A few days later, about to fly back to Denver, walking to my gate at Houston Intercontinental Airport, an airport I was in every other weekend of my childhood but which was now pretty much unrecognizable to me, I walked by a gate that read "Washington Dulles." I walked by another that read "Philadelphia." I walked by another that read "Newark." I looked at the people waiting at those various gates. Were they returning to a "home,” to places that I used to call home? I felt everything. I felt nothing.

Have you felt this way? Have you been in a place that felt like home the moment you stepped foot in it? Have you wondered what happened there before you, what will happen there after you? 

Write it down and send it to Atticus Review.

We are opening submissions on the theme of HOME until Thanksgiving Day. Any genre you like up to 5,000 words.

If you’re looking for some inspiration, try watching the interview below. In the middle, Boo talks about how there can be “unseen energies” in a poem. There can also be “unseen energies” in a place. And sometimes those unseen energies, the ones in a poem and the ones in a place, are the same thing.

Show us those unseen energies.

Atticus on Air: Episode 2

Thanks for reading.

David Olimpio
Publisher

View the Collection

The title and the content stimulate my thinking because I’m a feminist. Like most people, I no longer know exactly what the word feminist means. Second wave, third wave, no wave—some readers may feel the word is empty or meaningless at this point. I embrace it–the vague and specific thrust of it–and this poem, which it’s married to.

I also love the history here: this poem arrives in a bonnet carrying a musket. It’s erected on hard ground with materials as solid and handsome as the old Vass homestead itself.

Like much of Marcia LeBeau’s work, this poem plunges into its subject, reconsiders it, turns around with a wink, and ends with a punch.

Atticus Review is placing our digital chips here not just because of the poem, but also because of the poet. Marcia LeBeau is a hardworking, innovative writer whose first collection, A Curious Hunger, was published by Broadstone Books in 2024.

LeBeau has displayed her work as broadsides at suburban hair salons, art galleries, and community centers. She also runs a coworking space in New Jersey, The Write Space. The language on The Write Space’s website emphasizes what Marcia offers as a member of the collective literary headspace:

"Being a writer is hard. Not being able to get the words from your head to the paper can be frustrating and deflating and will leave you with an unfinished project. We’ve been there."

Yep. So have we.

But back to White Lake. It exists in the real world (in Warren County, New Jersey.) LeBeau had never seen it when she wrote the poem. She heard about it from a kayaker and dug up its history on the internet. A recent visit to the site was somewhat disappointing.

In the mind’s eye of the poet, the lake had become a warm, white tropical sea. In reality, it’s more of a weedy, brown pond (and cold). This is the power of a poem to puncture reality. Through that pinhole, the magic.

Please enjoy this wonderful poem by Marcia LeBeau. You can collect it as an NFT. You can learn more about how to do that with the tutorials on our website.

READ THE POEM

Back Cover of the NFT

Boo Trundle
Editor

Atticus on Air: Episode 1

I understand this all may seem like remarkably similar behavior to what somebody would do if they were starting a podcast. But it's probably not a podcast. Unless we do a few more of them. Then maybe it will become one. The way an awkward caterpillar becomes a beautiful butterfly. Or the way a hole in the knee of a pair of my simple jeans in college eventually lead to a glorious pair of stringy grunge jorts.

And because we just want to prepare for that possibility (of butterflies, of grunge shorts) we decided to give it a name. And so this thing that is currently not a podcast shall henceforth be called Atticus on Air, which we find appropriate, given our penchant for referencing old media while working with new.

During the call, Boo Trundle led a stimulating conversation where we talked about the possible benefits blockchain technology could have for artists and writers in helping to establish provenance and ownership of digital assets. Some highlights include…

Jo Unruh asked: “Why does capitalism undervalue art so much? Shouldn't there be a way for (digital) art to be more sustainable or people to earn meaningful compensation for their efforts?”

Ana María Caballero questioned why poets, unlike other artists, are taught to never expect to make a living from their craft: "It was very intuitive for me to say — something has to give, like there has to be more for writers. We deserve more."

Katie M. Zeigler described what collecting writing could look like: "Once you purchase and you have this almost emotional ownership of this beautiful piece of writing, then you could build your collection of that writer...having that pride of ownership that you are an early adopter...I still think that that has so much potential. I really do."

If you are a writer and have ever thought that the current model of publishing is just not working, then you will find this conversation interesting.

Atticus on Air: Episode 1

Also, thanks to everybody who has submitted their nonfiction last month We are getting to work reading it and hope to be in touch by the end of August.

David Olimpio
Publisher

BENNY AND THE HEART

We discovered the writer Katie M. Zeigler during an ordinary, half-baked Google search. David was trying to find other astronauts in the literary magazine space who are publishing or minting NFTs. He landed on the home page of NiftyLit (get it?), based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Many of the writers and editors on the NiftyLit masthead were grads, or current students, at MFA programs across the country. In other words, it was a literary magazine. Katie M. Zeigler was the founding editor and first editor-in-chief.

I now knew that Katie was an early adopter of NFT publishing, and I also saw that she has a collection of flash fiction, The Last of the Cursive Writers, coming out this July on Flume Press. Here’s more about the book: “the eyes in this collection obsess over the hinges in our lives—the moments connecting that which came before to that which came after, employing a surreal lens through which to understand the very real.” (Farnaz Fatemi)

You can pre-order The Last of the Cursive Writers here.

When I was researching Katie’s work I read an interview where she said the following: “For my short stories and flash, I tend to primarily tell the stories of women; I’m eternally inspired by the women in my life, and have found that writing short stories is almost a way to pay homage to the heartbreak and heroism of women.” She had me at homage, heartbreak, and heroism. The h’s.

I decided to cold call, or cold e-mail, Katie and see if she had any short fiction she might want to submit to Atticus Review. When I reached out to her, she did me the immense spiritual and artistic favor of knowing who I was. (what??)  She wrote back that, “I have your piece ‘Searching for Truth by Writing Fiction’ from Lit Hub bookmarked on my computer...it was such an essential piece of motivation and clarity as I've been working on my novel. So to receive an email from you seems like serendipity in its best form.”

Katie M. Zeigler

The deal was sealed. To top it all off, or at the root of it, is this: I fell in love with the story she sent me, “Benny and the Heart.” I want to say, “It's a hoot.” But that dates me all the way back to the 1920s, flappers, and gin mills. The entry for “hoot” in the Cambridge Online Dictionary directs you to these other idioms:

❝

be a good bet
be a great one for something
be a hard/tough act to follow
be a hit with someone
be a hoot
be a law unto yourself
be a legend in your own lifetime
be a license to print money

That last bit. That’s what we’re doing here with NFTs, isn’t it? New motto: Be a license to print money.

And how about our word count? “Benny and the Heart” weighs in at 7,000 words. It’s not flash fiction. It isn’t even pretending to flash anyone. We hope this inspires you to keep up with the Atticus Review submission schedule, our open reading periods, and our contests. Do you have a crazily amazing piece of writing that no one would publish because it was more than 70 words? We’re here for you.

We had the help of an assistant editor for “Benny and the Heart.” Margaret Hutton is a fantastic writer whose debut novel, If You Leave, will be published in October (Regal House Publishing). You can pre-order it here. Thank you, Margaret Hutton!

If You Leave by Margaret Hutton

In closing, here's a Venn diagram to further convince you that today is the day to start collecting NFTs, beginning with “Benny and the Heart” by Katie M. Zeigler.

So go check out “Benny and the Heart,” a story by Katie M. Zeigler.

BENNY AND THE HEART

Back Cover of “Benny and the Heart”

Boo Trundle
Editor

SUBMIT YOUR CNF

We have very specific likes and dislikes when it comes to memoir, personal essays, and essays in general. We felt it was only fair, and maybe fun, to dig into what moves us.

So here are some thoughts on that:

In college, I took a class called "The Blues." It was taught by the writer Albert Murray, who was a guest at my school that semester. It was 1993 and I was nineteen years old. I enrolled in the class because of my interest in jazz and blues music, and because Murray, 77 at the time, seemed like a living legend who I'd like to meet — somebody who had known Duke Ellington and had been close friends with Ralph Ellison.

I went into that class thinking I was going to learn more about the history of a musical genre I had come to love. I came out of the class with much more than that: a changed understanding of the creative process, of how ritual, play, and game theory factored into it all. A perspective on how improvisation could be seen as a sort of conversation, a dialogue, an extension and elaboration upon tradition and convention, and that was how new idioms were created. Nearly all literary, musical, and artistic movements could be explained in these terms.

For me, this wasn't just a class on "the blues," it was a class about everything, or at least everything important to me. It was about all art, all human expression. Cubism, Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Classical Music, Hip-Hop, Bloomsbury, Beats, the Lost Generation. I’ve never seen a whole kit and caboodle, but I imagine this is what it would look like.

One of the most important concepts I internalized in that class is that blues music isn't about having the blues. It's about stomping them away. You can appreciate this in how the music and rhythms of the blues often serve as counter-statement to the lyrics. While the words may express sadness and pain, the music can get you dancing. It’s about fighting the blue devils, not giving in to them.

I’m somebody who loves contradictions, dichotomies, yins and yangs. The kind of art that has always spoken to me is work that pits great sadness next to great joy. The times I’ve felt the most alive is when I’ve felt both of these things at the same time. Somehow, experiencing this has always felt like a road towards transcendence. It’s a way to move from chaos and entropy into a kind of order. Albert Murray had a phrase for it. He said all art was "survival technique." And the blues, he said, was "survival technique for 20th century culture." I loved that.

What do we want at Atticus Review for our first creative nonfiction NFT? We like smart, but not necessarily academic. We want personal and raw, but not precious. Improvise with form, not to prove that you can, but because it makes sense to do so. Need some room to tell your story? No problem, we’re probably one of the only lit mags left who will publish up to 8000 of your words.

We are looking for necessary writing from minds that survive by getting it down. Have you been getting it down? Send us your stomp.

SUBMIT YOUR CNF

David Olimpio
Publisher

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We invite you to spend time in the Puppet House, where you might be reminded of words you’ve misplaced and feelings you wish you’d forgotten.

PUPPET HOUSE

The Gallery Model

The idea behind the “Why You Should Collect” newsletter is that we are, in part, operating our magazine similar to an art gallery model. Most art galleries curate a list of artists over an extended period of time. The gallery signs artists based on the curator’s personal taste and appreciation, and then makes an investment in that artist’s future by helping to attract collectors. This is a simplification and, as usual, we welcome your corrections, impressions, indignation, and curiosity. My understanding is that a visual artist benefits (ideally) from the right gallery relationship, and pays the gallery a commission on all artworks they sell. The artist and the gallery are therefore business partners.

That's not exactly what we're doing at Atticus Review when we present NFTs by established and emerging writers. But we are inspired by this “partnership” model, and the potential to work together to nurture and benefit from the value of the artwork, as well as the artworker.

John Reed

However, we're still a literary magazine. And each writer is obviously free to publish new work wherever they want. The gallery energy is this: it’s our goal to offer you literary NFTs that we think are worth collecting. If we're offering a written work by a new, unknown writer who's just starting out (and we plan to), then the value of the NFT will necessarily rest on the quality of the individual piece. But for veteran writers and persistent sonneteers like John Reed, the collector can rest assured that they are investing in a writer with depth, breadth, and long-recognized talent.

About John Reed’s Sonnets

John Reed has been experimenting with the sonnet form for many years and his fiction, criticism, and other projects have been inspired and influenced by cultural icons as wide-ranging as William Shakespeare, Charles Manson, George Orwell, and Ana Mendieta. As a third-generation New Yorker, and a second-generation artist, John knows his way around the contemporary art world and has contributed to such respected publications as Art Forum, Hyperallergic, and Bomb.

Courtly Love*

The sonnet as a courtly love tradition includes hitmakers like Shakespeare and Dante, and it particularly showcases the poet’s originality. John Reed's contemporary approach to the constraints of the form offer wit and heartache in equal measure.

We present to you Puppet House, a sequence of eight sonnets by John Reed.

PUPPET HOUSE

* not to be confused with Courtney Love, a troubadour of a different kind

Boo Trundle
Editor

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We’d love for you to check out the entire interview if you’re interested. (We find it quite a fascinating discussion, if we do say so ourselves.) But since it’s a little on the long side, we thought we’d recap some highlights here for you.

On why writers should care about NFTs

"...artists of all kinds should care very much about NFTs because they represent a new way for people to buy, sell, and trade their art. It’s as simple as that. The thing that has been missing from digital publishing is a way to create value in the online writing artifact, the same way you would with a physical object like a book. As well as a way to exchange it. NFTs fill that gaping hole."

Read the Full Interview

On the insularity of the literary magazine world

"...there is a perception among many editors that the magazine is the “product” and that they are selling this product to a “reader.” But that isn’t it. The “product” is the writer. At the same time, the “reader” is the writer. What this leads to is that, for a magazine to be “successful,” it has to attract writers by being liked and well-regarded by the community of writers. Not only does this not generate revenue, it is a terrible model for publishing good work."

Read the Full Interview

On an NFT model vs the traditional “subscription” model in publishing

"There is a very clear need for online publishing to explore different monetization technologies. Think about the current [paywall] situation with news outlets. What if there was a way to use NFTs as keys that unlock the paywall and allow access to articles I’m interested in, without having to subscribe? We are hoping that NFTs can offer authors an alternative to the subscription model."

Read the Full Interview

On what are the main goals or values driving us to experiment with NFTs

“…[we] want to support and help develop a literary platform/community/publishing collective that encourages wild, difficult, unique, unpredictable, inventive, revolutionary writing. Soul work. This kind of writing is non-mainstream, and might sell very few copies. But could it influence, attract, or resonate with a discerning collector with the same values and dreams? I think yes.”

Read the Full Interview

On the potential benefit of literary NFTs to readers

“When I buy an Atticus NFT, I buy a certificate that records my financial investment in a creative idea. It demonstrates what kind of creative ideas I value. It also puts a little crypto currency into the wallet of an artist or writer who’s doing work I admire. And there is no middleman like Amazon, Instagram, X, or Facebook.”

Read the Full Interview

If you read the full interview, we’d love for you to let us know what you think! If we can collect enough opinions, reflections, questions, and ideas about what we are doing we will post a crowdsourced newsletter.

So get in touch and let us know!

 Respond to this email, or send it to
[email protected].

*NOTE

The Conniving Roots of Shill

"The action at the heart of the verb shill—promoting someone or something for pay—is not, on its face, unseemly. After all, that is what marketers and public relations firms do. But when someone is said to be shilling for something or someone there is a distinct note of disapproval, and often the implication that the act is somehow corrupt or dishonest, or that the product or person being promoted is not to be trusted. This connotation is actually the word’s birthright: in the early 1900s, the noun shill referred to a type of con artist, specifically one who aided others in their efforts to part people from their money. For example, a shill might be paid to fake a big win at a casino to make a game look easily winnable. The first uses of the verb shill, appearing around the same time as the noun, show it applying to the kinds of cons shills did, but the term eventually came to be used in cases when someone was simply promoting someone or something. Perhaps fitting for a word with a criminal past, shill has a mysterious origin: it’s thought to be a shortened form of the older synonymous term shillaber, but the etymological trail goes cold there."

“Shill.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster. Accessed 9 Apr. 2025. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shill

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We’re up and running with our debut NFT, or non-fungible token, a certificate to authenticate, and celebrate, our foray into blockchain publishing.

Please enjoy, and collect. We have tutorials. Here’s one for opening your first crypto wallet. And here’s one for collecting your first NFT from Atticus Review.

About our Inaugural Poem

In early January we announced our plans to explore the NFT format. We asked for “greatest hits” nominations from our community, with the idea that we would start by minting a poem that had already appeared on the Atticus Review website. (On that note, if you’re worried that we will mint an NFT from writing that you published with us in the past without your permission, don’t worry. We won’t.)

As a side note, here’s a shout-out to everyone who nominated work, whether their own or somebody else’s. Hell, yes!

In the end, we chose a poem recommended by poet and community-member Arvilla Fee. She suggested Melody Wilson’s “Smoke,” partly because roaring, wind-fueled fires were swallowing whole neighborhoods of Los Angeles.

Timely, of course, but we also chose it because we like it. Sparse, unpretentious, tightly tethered to image as well as the emotions underneath. Easy to visualize, and therefore illustrate…but why try to explain? See for yourself.

We present you with “Smoke,” a series of 5 NFTS:

View the Collection

A Blend of Digital Words and Tactile Art

We included two pieces of original artwork in the PDF, woodblock prints by Boo Trundle (me), because I happened to be available and would work for free.

Woodblock printing meets our needs for NFT batching. We can switch out attributes like ink and paper color, creating trackable variations on otherwise identical images. This makes it possible to easily distinguish the separate NFT collectibles. One PDF shows white ink on a green background, another shows black ink on a blue ground, and so on.

We also like the very concrete, human feeling of marks carved in wood. The tactile medium offers a contrast to the deep digital dive we are taking. 

If anyone out there makes woodblock prints, please get in touch! We have more NFTs in the lab. We could use some interesting visual art to fill out the packaging.

We invite you to explore and collect “Smoke,” by Melody Wilson.

And remember, habent sua fata libelli. (Little books have their own destiny.)

Boo Trundle
Editor

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This sounds great, but is it true? In my limited experience, poetry is its own special kind of hustle. Wine and cheese conspiracies, revenge of the chapbook, deadly slam takedowns, crimes of the state laureate, enjambment. Do the hustle! But poetry won’t get you rich. This, we freely admit.

Then why are we encouraging you to start a digital wallet? So you can purchase, collect, curate, trade, and display your literary NFTS, of course. And what exactly is a digital wallet? Rather than trying to explain it myself, especially since I barely understand, I’m going to share the definition listed on Coinbase, the exchange platform where I successfully bought my first cryptocurrency:

Crypto wallets keep your private keys – the passwords that give you access to your cryptocurrencies – protected and accessible, allowing you to send and receive cryptocurrencies.

Unlike a normal wallet, which can hold actual cash, crypto wallets technically don’t store your crypto. Your holdings live on the blockchain, but can only be accessed using a private key. Your keys prove your ownership of your digital money and allow you to make transactions. If you lose your private keys, you lose access to your money.

Creating a crypto wallet is not that hard, but there is a learning curve, which, if you’re like me, includes “new-tech” resistance. Don’t worry. It’s not any more threatening than your first try at online banking, paying through the Venmo app, or posing nude on OnlyFans. We made a cheat-sheet with some detailed instructions for how to open a Lace wallet. We’re suggesting the Lace wallet because we will be using the Cardano blockchain to offer NFTs. The Lace wallet is user-friendly and allows you to hold and exchange ADA, the native cryptocurrency on that blockchain.

Learn how to Set up a Cardano Lace Wallet

Okay, I have a Wallet. Now what?

When you get your new crypto wallet, it will unfortunately be empty. Time to purchase some crypto! I had big challenges with this step. My first attempt to buy crypto was via the Lace wallet itself, which sends you to outside vendors. (Banxa, Moonpay, Transak, etc) I don’t recommend doing it this way. The problem I had was with identity verification. Long story, I never got it to work.

I had immediate success when I switched to Coinbase. I bought about $150 worth of crypto there (200 ADA). It went down in value immediately, plus I had to pay a fee of $8.38 for the honor of purchasing the crypto.

(When I say it dropped immediately, it dropped by something like twenty bucks in five minutes.)

Editorial Note from someone who knows more: the value of your crypto will fluctuate from moment to moment. It does not mean you've lost (or made) money, unless you sell the crypto at that lower (or higher) price.

Anyway, we aren’t doing this to get rich or trade crypto. Just think of it as ADA, not dollars. And with that ADA you’re…starting a library? An art collection? A curio display case? Something like that. I used the address of my digital wallet to transfer the crypto into the Lace wallet. Here’s a good tutorial on just about everything you need to know (maybe more than you need to know) for getting started with the Lace wallet. (Atticus Review highly recommends James at MoneyZG as a trusted source for learning about crypto.)

This is all so scary! Money on the interwebs! Digital funds transfers! And with crypto wallets, you get something called a Seed Phrase. 12 to 24 words in a very specific order and if you ever lose it, you lose ALL the money in your crypto account for ever and ever and ever. I’m getting Treasure Island vibes. Then again, what’s more hopeful than buried treasure?

(But seriously, DO NOT LOSE YOUR SEED PHRASE!)

Again, this is a literary magazine, not a ponzi scheme. I’m keeping my wallet at a (fluctuating) $150. A bloodthirsty speculator can collect a lot of poetry and short fiction with a budget like that. Am I right?

Boo Trundle
Editor

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We leave you with this poem:

The Gaming Room, by Charles Baudelaire
from Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal)

The armchairs of worn satin; the aged courtesans,
Livid and rouged, their eyes relentless, their eyebrows blacked,
Jingling eternally from their withered ears, to attract
Attention, their huge earrings, and ogling behind their fans;
The long green table, the rows of lipless faces, the lips
Drained of all color; the gaping, toothless mouths; the unrest
Of hundreds of white nervous fingers, stacking the chips,
Or searching the empty pocket, the convulsive breast;
The dirty ceiling, the blaze of crystal chandeliers,
The low-hung lamps illumining with a crude glare
The ravaged brows of poets, the scars of grenadiers,
Who come to risk the earnings of their lifeblood there.
— Such is the lurid spectacle that with calm dread
I saw as in a melancholy dream unroll:
Myself, too, sitting in a deserted corner, my head
Propped in my hands, mute, weary, jealous to my soul,
Jealous of all that rabble, of the lust of it,
The terrible gaiety of those old whores, the smell
And noise of life, for which they frantically sell
Some remnant of their honor, their beauty, or their wit.
And suddenly I was affrighted at my own heart, to feel
Such envy of all men running wildly and out of breath
Nowhere, and who prefer, like those around that wheel,
Pain, horror, crime, insanity — anything — to death!

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I first got into website building at the end of the 1990s, I had just read a work (posted to the Internet) called The Cluetrain Manifesto which made the argument that "markets are conversations" and that the Internet would fundamentally change the relationship between businesses and consumers.

Cluetrain got me drinking the Internet/website Kool-Aid pretty heavily. I wasn't sure how somebody like me, an English major who had never studied computer science, was going to be a part of this digital revolution, but by god, I wanted in, particularly since it had such a poetically-titled manifesto.

I knew I would have to eventually build a website in order to ... build websites for a living. So I picked up a thick textbook at Borders titled "HTML 4" and made my first personal webpage. It was 1999. Here is a screenshot of the homepage:

My first personal web page, circa 1999

It's kind of embarrassing to show this to you. Questionable design choices aside, it wouldn’t be considered very “usable” today. But I was quite proud of it, then. I’d coded it all by hand, and I spent many weekend hours figuring out how to get the navigational menu items (those Miró-like hanging things) to move when you moused over them, and for the text to change color. (These visual tricks were part of what made pages "interactive" back then — I mean, you couldn't do that shit with a newspaper article or a brochure, now could you!)

I kind of love using the Wayback Machine to look at old websites and to see how design and functionality has changed. The first iterations of websites were clunky by today's standards. We were all learning together the kinds of things we could do with this new platform. Much of what we did then seems amateurish now. We didn't have the intuitive understanding for what would work best on a screen, and how that could be different from what had worked for print.

It strikes me that we are in those early innings now with NFTs and blockchain technology. The examples we have now for trying to wrap our brains around NFTs are these square gifs that seem ridiculous to many people. I kind of wonder if Bored Apes or Crypto Punks will end up being kind of like the flashing gifs and animated text of early websites. Even if that’s the case, I still think they will be culturally significant, and therefore have value.

Bored Ape #9528 and Crypto Punk 1040

The real-world uses for cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and smart contracts don't make complete sense to us yet, but I think we will eventually come to depend on them in ways we can not imagine today. Uses will evolve that will make them as indispensable as smart phones and credit cards. If the internet revolutionized the way we exchange information with one another, blockchain will revolutionize the way we exchange value with one another.

Atticus Review values important, emerging, literary writing, and we are already in the business of publishing it on our website. We just met with our first NFT poet, somebody we previously published and who was nominated by a member of the Atticus community, and we will be releasing her poem as an NFT in the coming weeks!

We are welcoming and adapting NFT technology because it offers new opportunities for digital stewardship of the written arts. The first thing you will need, as an NFT author, or NFT collector, is a crypto wallet. Our next newsletter will explain this in greater detail and show you how to get started.

Thanks for reading.

David Olimpio
Publisher

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The Latin title translates as “Things Desired.” I assumed it was ancient wisdom, especially since “The Desiderata” is often accompanied by: “found in St. Paul’s churchyard, AD 1692.” But the origin story was badly botched. An Indiana poet named Max Ehrmann wrote it in 1927. According to the Poetry Foundation, the confusion started when a minister in Baltimore mimeographed copies of the poem on his church's letterhead in the 1950s. “The Desiderata” went viral, for its time. It brought in revenue from posters, tee shirts, mugs, keychains. Leonard Nimoy even recorded it on a spoken word album and called it “Spock Thoughts.” You can easily find it on Amazon, or hanging in a frame in your cousin’s kitchen.

When online words and images go viral, they take on a life of their own. Influencers (and nobodies) can assimilate, re-enact, share, and generally take advantage of other people’s creativity. And it’s legal. To oversimplify: it’s okay to use found or borrowed content as long as you add something, comment, re-interpret, or re-present it. No one polices this on the web. But can we at least offer the author or artist a credit? Please?

In her newsletter, Adventures in Journalism, author Sari Botton addresses a viral tweet that “got away.” Over two years later, other people still repost her writing on their social media without any attribution to the author. Botton: “While it was just a tossed-off thought, I’m pissed that other people are getting mileage and/or possibly pulling in cash—directly or indirectly—from my words when I am not. Each time I spot the quote on one platform or another, I find myself trying to imagine a way to reverse engineer the situation so that I have generated a cool $111,330 (or more!) for myself with those 24 words.”

At Atticus Review, we’re not reverse engineers. (We’d like to be. Who wouldn’t?) We are, however, using NFT technology to mint literary work and multimedia. While NFT publishing may never address the issue of getting paid for every viral tweet, we think it is a step in the right direction for artists receiving compensation for work. With blockchain publishing, we’re not really talking about copyright. We’re talking more about the digital manuscript as a first edition for the author who mints it. The key element is the author’s contractual connection, in perpetuity, to what is minted. The NFT smart contracts and the digital assets on the blockchain are evolving. We’re still deciding how Atticus is going to work with them.

We believe NFT publishing will tilt the focus back on the originators. Blockchain also has the potential to eliminate grabby billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Think of all the energy, creativity, and intelligence artists and writers pour onto Instagram, Tik Tok, X, Youtube, etc every day for FREE, or to earn a small percentage of what those platforms make (as long as they please the algorithms).

NFT and blockchain have more evolving to do before a crypto wallet can act as a digital resting place or forum. They do, however, currently offer potential for artists to strengthen the independent creative and financial control they exert over their digital output. That’s a thing we desire.

Thanks for reading.

Boo Trundle
Atticus Review

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Nominate a Poem

Past Work

On that note, rest assured: Atticus Review will not mint NFTs of previously published work without involving the author and getting explicit permission. Previously published Atticus Review WordPress posts will remain on the website. Future published work will also appear on the website, exactly like before.

The difference with new work is: it will also be offered as an NFT.

Negative Perceptions

Yes yes yes, we realize that some people associate NFTs with bro culture, scams, and environmental disaster. To us, it’s a powerful, emerging technology. We’re trying to learn it, keep up with it, and include the literary community. We expect a catalyst to come along someday that will spark mass adoption of the blockchain into daily digital experience. Atticus hopes to be there when it does.

The Elephant in the Room

Let’s address the environmental impact of the blockchain and the power consumption associated with it. We plan to mint the Atticus Review NFT’s on the Polygon network. Polygon is at the very low end of power consumption compared to other blockchain currencies and especially compared with Bitcoin. (Figure below)

While we’re making comparisons, let’s measure blockchain technology against the traditional finance infrastructure. Our worldwide financial system (trad-fi) consumes at least 32 million times more energy than the Polygon blockchain.

We realize there are huge differences in scale and usage between a cryptocurrency like Polygon and the traditional financial institutions. Still, we are betting that blockchain can lead to a more energy-efficient finance infrastructure than what we have now. The more people who adopt it, the more efficient it will become. Further reading on this topic in the links below.

Estimated Annual Power Consumption in Terrawatts:

Worldwide Banking System: between 258 TWh and 4,981 TWh
Bitcoin: between 120–170 TWh
Gold: 131 TWh
Ethereum: .01 TWh
Polygon: .0000075 TWh

If you missed last week’s newsletter, you have no idea what we’re going on about. Here’s a link, and an important reminder:

❝

The umbrella of ideas we’ve been celebrating here (NFTs, smart contracts, permanent ledgers) are referred to as Web3. Authors who want to go forward with Atticus are authors who are curious and/or drawn to this burgeoning digital framework.

Atticus Newsletter: Jan 9th, 2025

More Discussion

There’s wider explanation of our shift onto the blockchain over at Medium: Fugitive Words, the Atticus Extension.

We also loved Becky Tuch’s interesting take on her Substack, Lit Mag News. Thank you, Becky! If you haven’t subscribed to Becky’s Substack, we highly recommend you do!

And don’t forget our site and newsletter. Stay tuned for more on what we’re doing, including tutorials! You can find us on Instagram, YouTube, and Threads.

Thanks for reading. We’re glad you’re here.

David and Boo

Further Reading

If you’re falling in love with our new direction, or just want to fight:

Bitcoin, gold or traditional banking: It will surprise you to know which uses the most energy
https://www.cnbctv18.com/cryptocurrency/bitcoin-gold-traditional-banking-which-uses-most-energy-15117061.htm

Crypto Energy Consumption and Crypto Energy Explained
https://justenergy.com/blog/crypto-energy-consumption-crypto-energy/

The Bitcoin Network vs. World Banking Energy Consumption
https://paylesspower.com/blog/the-bitcoin-network-vs-world-banking-energy-consumption/

The Energy Debate: How Bitcoin Mining, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency Shape Our Carbon Future
https://carboncredits.com/the-energy-debate-how-bitcoin-mining-blockchain-and-cryptocurrency-shape-our-carbon-future/

On Bitcoin’s Energy Consumption
https://www.galaxy.com/insights/research/on-bitcoins-energy-consumption/

Atticus Review will continue to exist.

We will publish work that lasts and holds value.

We will do this by minting NFTs. 

We will become a literary marketplace. 

If you’re interested to know more, keep reading. Follow us. Reach out. 

Hi Everybody!

This is David Olimpio and Boo Trundle at Atticus Review. We have some exciting news. We are re-constituting the Atticus Review literary magazine as an NFT marketplace. This transition won’t happen overnight, but our goal is to slowly build a curated collection of NFTs—works for our readership to enjoy, admire, reread over and over again, and own. That’s right, own. Atticus readers will have the opportunity to purchase the poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and multimedia pieces that we publish as minted NFTs. We think NFTs can (and will) revolutionize the way digital creative arts and letters are exchanged, and that they can ultimately benefit the writer, the publisher, and the reader. 

Better Rights Management

With blockchain technology, writers have at their disposal a better way to preserve the rights to their work. That’s because, at its core, an NFT is simply a contract representing an asset. NFTs verify ownership. They represent that something is unique, irreplaceable (Non-Fungible), and also stamped in time.

NFTs aren’t just contracts, however. They’re smart contracts. An NFT can execute a series of rules when a sale happens. For instance, the NFT smart contract can send a certain percentage of a sale to one person (like the author), and another percentage of a sale to another person (like the publisher). It can do this automatically, with no corporate intermediaries (banks, third-party businesses like Amazon) taking a cut. 

Not only can these contracts do that on the first sale, but there can be additional rules in place to do that for any subsequent sale. So a poem, story, or essay NFT could be resold and that NFT’s royalties would be automatically distributed according to the terms of its contract.

How will this work on Atticus Review? Writing and artwork curated and minted by Atticus will debut on our website like it always has. From there, it can circulate freely across the internet and elsewhere for no charge. It could travel to Instagram, other websites, or to merchandise like t-shirts or cocktail napkins. Wherever. But the original digital manuscript, the NFT, remains a unique asset, and could potentially gain value as more and more copies circulate. 

Provenance, Authenticity, Sustainability

Another cool thing about minting pieces on the blockchain rather than simply publishing them on a website is that a digital literary NFT automatically establishes provenance, or a certificate of authenticity and authorship. In a world where AI is becoming an increasing threat to the creative work of human beings, NFTs create a record that says, this writing is original, this particular human wrote it, and when it was written, this is exactly what it said. 

Also, because it exists on a decentralized blockchain, the literary NFT will be permanent and won’t be able to be deleted by any third party. Even if Atticus Review were to stop operating someday, the work would still remain an asset on the blockchain.

Don’t worry if all of this seems overly technical right now. Writers will only have to submit a word file (or jpeg, pdf, etc) to Atticus Review, just like before. We will make the NFT. This is a good time to mention that we are planning to produce a series of tutorials to build and educate our own literary NFT community. We have been around for 14 years and our basic mission remains the same: 1) to provide a platform for awesome writing and 2) to serve writers. 

The umbrella of ideas we’ve been celebrating here (NFTs, smart contracts, permanent ledgers) are referred to as Web3. Authors who want to go forward with Atticus are probably going to be authors who are curious and/or drawn to this burgeoning digital framework. We know not all experience is digital, and that is a good thing. Atticus, however, is moving into Web3.

To bridge the gap between the traditional Atticus website and Atticus NFT, we will start with a series of poems, some of which may be ones we have already published. We’re opening our submittable to gather recommendations from our community, our cherished readers and writers. Is there a poem on Atticus Review, whether it is your own or somebody else’s, which you would like to see in our first batch of NFTs? Let us know.

Nominate a Poem

Thanks for reading. We’re glad you’re here.

David and Boo