Is Art a Survival Technique?

As of today, June 5th, through July 6th 2025, we are opening submissions for our first Creative Nonfiction NFT. If you haven’t been following our NFT journey, check out our last several newsletters. Then send us something:

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.

David Olimpio
Publisher

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