Created in 2023, At What Cost brings together writers and artists to explore a burning question or idea and provides the platform to respond as they wish. Serious but not self-serious, or at least funny in its agony, themes have ranged from architecture to anniversary in an attempt to acknowledge the toll our creative, personal, and political avoidance takes. At What Cost is in equal part a space for introspection and a call to action, inviting participants and the audience to explore the questions at hand within the context of their own lives and experiences.
“Constraints make things more interesting," I once saw on my neighbor's sweatshirt as he took out the trash. I find questions make the most interesting constraints, or at least the most generative. When asked, questions can generate stories about who we are, but beneath that, questions invite a deeper inquiry into which part of us responds, and why that makes all the difference.
At What Cost calls in the voices I'm most compelled by to speak to what we might need to ask most. A question serves to unify each reading and reader so we may witness something of their process and arrive somewhere together. It can be used to evoke a boundary, and by joining, you invite yourself to become conscious of those boundaries.
This project is an attempt to make light of the dark through artists whose material—stunningly, and remarkably—remind us that discomfort is the point.
Here, questions will feel as certain as statements, and will function in a way into the work of those we admire, or fear, or scarier yet, our own.
Life is a call and response. Conversation is a divine occupation, and its devotional quality is most effective in the conversation we carry with ourselves. Rilke said something like, “One's life is the answer to all of our questions,” and I believe the right question can clarify or soften our most sabotaging beliefs, if we can withstand the answer.
Jessica Scicchitano is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University, and considers Philadelphia home. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Sixth Finch and Prelude.
At What Cost is a white flag after an almost ten-year lapse in writing, and through honoring the work of those she admires, so begins the story of what has been in her way.
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