—Artist Interviews—

—Short Form—

Tennessee and Space Invaders

Anonymous

I don't typically find the work of Haruki Murakami to be relatable. His writing is beautiful, certainly, and his complex plots are enrapturing, but magical realism tends to keep readers at arms' length. Reality stands on shaky legs in Murakami's world, and he freely blurs the line between dreams and waking—or even life and death. However, after finishing the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle last week on a long flight, I felt kinship with this mystical man for the first time.

Without probing too deeply into the plot, suffice to say that the main character, Toru Okada, mysteriously acquires a small blue mark on his face about halfway through the book, after magically transporting himself through a stone wall at the bottom of a dry well. Toru is also nicknamed “Mr. Wind-Up Bird” by an enigmatic young neighbor, which is a reference to a magpie, a bird that is only able to recognize itself in a mirror test when a mark is applied to its face. Toru is initially frightened by its appearance, and embarrassed, refusing to leave the house, but gradually comes to accept his new reality and show himself to the world. He later learns that other distant figures in the novel's unfolding drama—separated by both time and space—bore a similar mark that altered the course of their lives and allowed them to transcend worlds.

My mark is not on my face, nor is it blue. It is a scarlet splotch with uneven edges, shaped like a cross between the state of Tennessee and a Space Invader. It sits low on my neck, just to the left of my throat. It turns blood-red in the summer and fades to a quiet pink during colder months…

One More Revolution

Anonymous

I only possess things that hold history, specifically a history that I know intimately and played a role in creating. Yes, I do own certain kitchen appliances and pairs of jeans that lack a nostalgic backstory, but for the most part, as I look around this sparsely furnished room, I can recall where and when and why most of the eclectic objects within eyeshot have survived the many purges of my recent years. Trinkets and tokens, stones and statues, coasters, whiskey glasses, lamps, pillows and pictures... I live in a menagerie of memory.

I don't believe in having filler, despite the half-dozen unpacked boxes still stacked in the garage. This disdain for meaningless things is, I suppose, a natural symptom of being a writer. I have forgotten what those boxes contain, and have felt no urge to open even one at the behest of some desire for a tucked-away object in the past four months. Humans adapt to absence when things are kept out of sight. Having gone that long without opening them leads me to think I should blindly toss the boxes, make a harsh edit, like slicing out bad exposition from the start of a story, but as mentioned, they're out of sight and mind.

It is winter now, and my closet is rearranged, with the t-shirts demoted to the bottom shelf and the two-deep stacks of Henleys and sweaters elevated to eye level. The t-shirt on the top of the stack, just below my normal gaze, has been catching stray glances for weeks, and I've stubbornly refused to move it…

The Center of the Universe is a Coffee Stain

Hannah Skewes

You have made it exactly 43 minutes into your Wednesday morning before that bold wardrobe choice becomes a familiar lament.

White? Haven’t you learned?

The coffee stain is as inoffensive as a coffee stain can be on a cream-colored sweater plucked from the bottom drawer while you ran down the clock of your morning routine trying to figure out how to dress for Denver weather, another failure to add to the pile. You wipe the rest of the coffee off your chin like a toddler elbow deep in birthday cake. Like yourself in those photos in your mom’s closet that you always stare at for too long when you find them. Last time you visited, you held them up close to your face, looking for something only your toddler self can reveal to your three-decade-old self about happiness, about abandon, about not caring what others think even when they’re cooing in your face.

You did not find it…

—Poetry—

House Warming

Amelia Parenteau

Donec ac fringilla turpis. Nullam sit amet nisi condimentum erat iaculis auctor. Maecenas non leo laoreet, condimentum lorem nec, vulputate massa. Integer tempus, elit in laoreet posuere, lectus neque blandit dui, et placerat urna diam mattis orci. Nulla lectus ante, consequat et ex eget, feugiat tincidunt metus. Vivamus sit amet semper lacus, in mollis libero.

—Performance—

—Liminal—

Cheating off My Paper

Ben Renner

In middle school, I was smarter than I am now. 

This was before I ditched class to get high, or drunkenly climbed up the side of a sandy bluff in Discovery Park with a driftwood pole. It was before I passed out in the dorm hallway on the eve of an important math test. It was even before I gagged a little at 2:11 p.m., because that particular time of day happened to be the name of a popular malt liquor I drank and vomited back up numerous times. 

I was smarter back then, if smarter means having done fewer dumb things. But, in spite of receiving my middle school education from a Catholic K-through-eight soaked in guilt and warnings about premarital sex and masturbation, I wasn’t any more virtuous. I merely wanted friends…

The Power of Disturbance

Dor Haberer

Exactly two years ago, on Halloween night. my body’s normal functioning was interrupted with an hour and a half seizure. I had lost control of my nervous system and my hands and feet were crippled. I could not move them. My whole body was numb and my nervous system was completely shut. This had never happened to me before.

What the fuck was happening to my body? I reacted the only way I had learned how to— I resisted. Yet with every resistance, another episode of convulsions came and uncontrollable trembling. I kept on resisting and my body kept on convulsing. Why could I not stop this? My friend, a student of acupuncture was holding my head throughout this frightening experience and she kept on telling me to surrender. At first I ignored her advice, yet the longer the seizure went on, the more I realized that I, myself, was prolonging it. Finally, I let it takes it course and take over my body and not long after that, with some massaging and holding from my brother and his partner who showed up,  I was able to come out of it. 

Why am I starting with this story? To show you my own resistance to disturbance because of the fear of it, of something different happening to me, and the power of allowing it in. I have no doubt that what happened to me that night was a spiritual episode. This was my body asking me to pay attention to it, to tend to it after 3 years of traveling…

On Being a Good Person

Rebecca Hannigan

As a kid I was under the impression that people were the sum total of their actions. An athlete was a person who spent a majority of their hours doing “athletic” things (or, at least, wearing athletic clothes). A writer wrote. My mother mothered. This made sense. 

In some ways, this logic still holds up, but in others, of course, it doesn’t. I’m curious about how, as brain-heavy adults, we identify ourselves based on ideas more than actions. This is especially true in fundamentally ideological realms like religion or politics. Am I a Democrat on all 300-something days of the year when I’m not voting or joining the crowd for the occasional march or rally? Is a person who is born Jewish but has never looked at the Torah or said a single prayer still a Jew?

The answer, I suppose, is yes. These identities don’t necessarily require constant acts to validate them. 

However, there is an identity that I believe we deeply feel and idealize, but don’t always do enough to demonstrate. It’s an identity-as-idea that I vaguely hold in my head, and one that all of us, most likely, vaguely hold in our heads. This vaguely-held identity is the idea that I am a Good Person…

—Visual Art—

—Where I Slept Project—