Cerise Press (www.cerisepress.com), an international online journal
based in the United States and France, builds cross-cultural bridges by
featuring artists and writers in English and translations, with an
emphasis on French and Francophone works. Co-founded by Sally Molini,
Karen Rigby, and Fiona Sze-Lorrain in 2009, Cerise Press hopes to serve
as a gathering force where imagination, insight, and conversation
express the evolving and shifting forms of human experience.
Each issue features poetry, translations, essays, fiction, photography,
art, interviews, and reviews. Previous authors have included Pablo
Medina, Yusef Komunyakaa, Eleanor Wilner, Mahmoud Darwish (translated by
Fady Joudah), Tahar Bekri (translated by Marilyn Hacker), Nathaniel
Tarn, Tess Gallagher, Quan Barry, Sandra Beasley, and many others.
The journal is open year-round to submissions in fiction, poetry,
translations, photography, and art.
For essays, interviews, and reviews, please query first. We are
currently reading for upcoming issues.
Happy Ada Lovelace Day! We as an online magazine are joining in with the international effort to acknowledge women’s contributions to math, science, and technology fields every March 24th. This is my personal blogpost as editor-in-chief – please comment with mentions of women you admire, and/or write your own blogposts.
For more information, and to sign up to read others’ blogposts, please visit http://findingada.com
I dedicate this post to Dr. Marilyn Winkelby, Stanford epidemiologist seeking to look at the big picture in terms of how diseases and chronic health conditions differently affect various socioeconomic and cultural groups. She’s looking at the biology and medical science, but also looking at what the lab findings mean for actual people.
Also, Dr. Winkelby launched an initiative to interest and help empower and educate more young people about going into health science careers and studying biology and chemistry while in high school. She’s working to ensure the future of these fields while advancing them herself.
I would also like to mention Kenya’s Dr. Wangari Maathai, botanist, ecologist, and author as well as the mother of Kenya’s Greenbelt movement, which works to plant trees for erosion control in rural farm areas. She’s brought about concrete results all over Kenya and other parts of the world, in ways backed up with scientific evidence, and in ways which immediately, directly benefit ordinary people growing food for their families as well as address the long-term concerns for the natural environment.
Dr. Maathai’s book, Unbowed, is an inspiration and I would recommend it to anyone reading this. Here’s the website for her Greenbelt movement: http://www.wangarimaathai.com/
Also, Dr. Dawn Sumner of my own alma mater, UC Davis, is a geologist looking at the Martian soil for evidence of past and present water and possible life. I had the privilege of interviewing her for a feature story I put together on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers and she was very articulate and well-informed. She also came to speak at a public lecture put on by the Explorit Science Center, helping to educate others about geological research.
Dr. Sumner just finished a research expedition to Antarctica to observe conditions in dry lakebeds and the bacteria which thrive in those environments, in hopes that the project will shed light on possible geologic conditions in which life may exist in similar environments on other planets or in our Earth’s early days.
She blogged throughout her experience, detailing not just her research but the daily living conditions and procedures involved in maintaining camp in such a harsh and unique environment. She’s very personable and an engaging writer…you may read her posts here: http://dawninantarctica.blogspot.com/
Also, I acknowledge the female researchers, staff and volunteers at our own Chabot Space and Science Center!
Happy Ada Lovelace Day! Wishing everyone the best as we celebrate and honor the progress being made in many fields.
Welcome to April’s issue of Synchronized Chaos! Happy Easter and Purim and Earth Day, wishing you all well.
This month we’re exploring Transliteration – the process of translating languages using different alphabets in a way that preserves as much as possible the spelling, look, and feel of the original language.
Painter Chiyo Miyashita credits the traditional Japanese poetic forms of haiku and tanka as inspirations for her images. Haiku and tanka are short and highly structured poems, with strict syllable counts per line. Her ‘Wandering Fox’ series presents space and visual images arranged in a structured way, conveying the feel and rhythm of a compact poem.
Our other visual artist, mosaic and furniture builder Cheryl Gallagher, also renders complex natural and other images into the hard, static media of concrete or glass. Her style relies on capturing contrasts of light and dark, warm and cool colors to represent the initial visual impression one receives from viewing a poppy on a brilliant blue spring day, or the precariously balanced boxes representing pharmaceutical distribution in poor areas of Africa.
Emerging author Kate Raphael also ‘maps’ the Israeli-Palestinian conflict out through the personal and professional lives of two women detectives, who must put aside personality differences and cultural resentments in order to solve a murder together. Through her novel, Raphael transliterates large societal issues into a story which stays specific and local, grounded in people’s actual lives, rather than abstracting the nature of the conflict into another context or simply making a broad, general statement for peace.
Reaching back into history, and into the current-day realities of her faith, author Cynthia Lamanna describes the experience of eyewitnesses to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In many Christian traditions, Jesus was physically ‘transliterated,’ returning to Earth in a human body soon after His death and capable of talking, walking, and sharing a meal with his friends. His resurrected body was literally similar to what it was before His death, not just a metaphor or spiritual vision which reminded people of whom they’d known before. Yet, he’d changed the world forever in the time he’d been gone, overcoming the power of human wrongdoing and death through his sacrifice.
The musicians we spotlight, guitarist/composer Bruno Ricci and singer/songwriter Shanna Gilfix, have also changed over the year we’ve followed their careers. Each of their music contains elements of the raw, hopeful energy with which they began singing and performing, yet reflects more complex harmonies and emotions.
We invite you to listen to the new music samples while reading and looking through our other offerings. Through this issue, our contributors demonstrate how one’s work and life may change over time, but how that change does not have to mean eliminating the beauty or the history or the essence of the past.
Everyone – remember the musicians from California we featured last spring? We would like to catch up with Bruno Ricci and Shanna Gilfix, both of whom are still performing and composing there.
Shanna Gilfix now works with a new songwriting partner, Jeff Sterzer, and has relocated to southern California near San Juan Capistrano. Newly rechristened as ‘Shanna’s Daydream,’ her largish band sports smiley, enthusiastic photos on their new Facebook fan page, which you may find here, along with some new music: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Shanna-Gilfix/72167204800 Gilfix and Sterzer have recruited several new SoCal folks for backup instruments and vocals, and pay tribute to their efforts on the fanpage.
Group members still describe their style as ‘acoustic soul,’ although fans who attended their latest show comment on how some newer songs sounded like American blues music. They’re still performing many of their classic ballads, such as “It Took Losing You” – and hopefully, old favorites which speak to the need to acknowledge and accept various stages of life, such as ‘Questions Never Lie.
They’re seeking the perfect producer to come and sign them – which hopefully will happen very soon.
Bruno Ricci and his band also offer up new guitar tunes for our listening pleasure, and still perform in Saratoga at the Blue Rock Shoot, a laid-back community cafe. Ricci took some time off while traveling out of the USA on business related to his day-job, but is now back to the South SF Bay Area and to the music!
