Month: July 2016

Other voices, (4) good reads

005 cropRegret, Resignation Day First Class Literature
flash fiction by Steven Ray Smith

Read it here

Falling in Love with Bahia & Brazil: On Negritude, Saudade, & Surrender Words Without Borders
by Naomi Jackson

[Excerpt] Determined to keep my hot foot off Brazilian soil, I cut short conversations with friends who traveled to Brazil and caught Luso-fever. I thought that the Caribbean, West Africa, and South Africa, where I’d traveled in search of blackness that both reflected and diverged from my own in ways that were instructive, affirming, provocative, and occasionally downright maddening, were enough.

Read the article here

Conversations with Contributors: Brian Tierney (Issue 11, Poetry)  Adroit Journal

[Excerpt]  I…was pretty far down the path of prose and literary studies graduate-level work when I realized I wanted to be writing poetry more seriously…poetry was the most natural way of exercising my humanity.

I wanted the “I” to be recognizably me, and so, be able to hold the weight of authentic experience, but also be capable of multiplicity and difference, of expansion and contraction, of observation and experience that could mean something to someone else.

Read the article here

Translating Southeast Asia  Moving Worlds
Editorial by Shirley Chew

[Excerpt]  With Moving Worlds acquiring a second home in Singapore in 2011, ‘region’ which had meant Yorkshire when the journal was based solely in Leeds, now includes Southeast Asia…places of historical and cultural antiquity and modern nation-states astir with the often aggressive business of progress and  development.

Against the turmoil of public events, this issue explores some invigorating examples of crosscultural creativity in the region.

Read the article here.

 

Where do we go from here?

Dark Landscape treated, crop bis

My neighborhood is ordinarily a fairly social place. When the weather is warm, kids play soccer and basketball or ride bikes and Razors, calling to each other as they race past. You hear music coming from homes and passing cars. There are greetings, conversations, and laughter.

We’re from different parts of the globe. Some of us are poor, none of us is wealthy. There are newish cars and long work hours, barbecues on weekends, groans and cheers when a local team has a game televised.

After the back-to-back killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, my neighborhood fell silent. No one played music, kids stayed indoors, there weren’t any conversations or greetings. The only sound that broke the quiet was a woman weeping one night, sporadically, from dark until I went to sleep. It felt like an illness traveling through every home.

It went on for over a week. Then the sniper fire in Dallas happened and added its own sickening dimension. And the police killings in Baton Rouge. And the shooting of Charles Kinsey in Miami.

It’s a list that probably will not end soon. And, really, it can’t end soon enough. Where do we go from here? All I’m sure of is it’s going to take cool heads and calm hearts. I’m also pretty sure the solution isn’t high octane rhetoric and hair-trigger distrust for anyone who doesn’t resemble us. That’s how we got here, it’s not the road out.

When we’re on that threatened-frightened-angry continuum, what we do is hammer whoever we don’t know or don’t like into the shape of our fear. We need to step back and take a breath. We have to do better than that.