From Rui Carvalho, invitation to submit to poetry anthology on director Manoel de Oliveira

Announcement from Rui Carvalho, who is curating an anthology of poetry about movie director Manoel de Oliveira and seeks submissions.

How to honor a great movie director

Manoel de Oliveira is the oldest movie director still working! He is 106 years old and continues to produce one movie per year! One of his best movies was “Abraham’s Valley”, moody and beautiful, but we could mention many others. He is also an example of positive thinking and an example to all of us. It is to honor this example of work and quality at work that we invite you to write a small poem, about him or his movies, in your own language, and send it to us.

Please visit the following websites to know more about Manoel de Oliveira and his work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manoel_de_Oliveira and

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0210701/bio and

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1020999/Manoel-de-Oliveira

We will select 106 poems and produce an e-book of poetry that will be available for windows (laptop) and windows phone (smartphone)!

Please hurry up! The submission of poetry for this contest starts 1st January 2015 and ends 31st January 2015!

Results will be available 15 February at: http://talesforlove.blogs.sapo.pt

Please send one or two poems, with message’s subject “Poem to Manoel de Oliveira”, to:

(e-mail of the partner) and ruiprcar@gmail.com

Together with:

Name; Country; e-mail contact;

We expect to publish the book until 31 February!

Enjoy 2015! All best!

 

Invitation to submit to anthology concerning people of color and mental illness

Writer Dior Vargas is putting together an anthology and set of monologues and invites submissions to dior.vargas@gmail.com No pay for contributors but the chance to share your story and become part of a worthy project.

  • Anthology of POC & Mental Illness: I am requesting submissions so I can edit an anthology of essays, poems, etc of people of color and their experience with mental illness. *I am actively accepting submissions to this project.*
  • POC & Mental Illness Monologues: I will be conducting interviews and I am going to write a vagina monologues but for POC and mental illness. If I can get funding, I hope to conduct all of these in person in different states. *Later in the year*

Please contact me if you’re interested in participating and please share: http://diorvargas.com/updates/new-projects-coming-up-in-2015

Synchronized Chaos December 2014: New Leaves, Ancient Forest

Welcome, readers, to December’s issue of Synchronized Chaos International Magazine. This month we look at the ‘ancient forests’, the large systems and forces which shape life and history.

Most of what affects our world started long before our lives began, and will likely continue for millennia afterwards. We see this with Dr. Matt Fillingim’s lecture on Martian magnetic fields, atmosphere and climate at the Chabot Space and Science Center (Oakland, California) described in review here by Cristina Deptula.

Dr. Immanual Joseph’s novel Brahma’s Maze, reviewed by Bruce Roberts, casts a man’s quest for revenge after losing his family to murderers as a mythical contest of good and evil, a tale as old as time. Ryan Hodge’s new Play/Write column deals with the heroic quest within video games, how players choose their values and attributes and the kind of characters they will become within a world designed by the game’s creators. Hodge suggests that this dynamic more closely resembles real life, as we have more control over our actions than our circumstances.

Elizabeth Hughes’ monthly Book Periscope column reviews novels that draw upon age-old themes: family secrets, self-discovery, friendship and loyalty. A final title, Dr. Loretta Breuning’s I, Mammal, explores the neuroscience and brain chemistry common to humans and other mammals that helps to explain what we commonly refer to as ‘human nature.’ Ayokunle Adeleye exposes government repression of journalists within his home country of Nigeria, a social injustice which, although all too common in the past and present, is hopefully not an intractable part of human society. And Gary Berg illustrates the long shadow of historical oppression in his piece where a continent still grapples with the Holocaust.

Some contributors speculate in their pieces about issues of life, time, memory and history. Dave Douglas describes a weekend that passes more quickly than he intends, showing how our experience of time, and other aspects of life, can be subjective. Harmony Wicker highlights the tension between storytelling, public images and reality, highlighting the pressure on people in the public eye to enact in real life the narrative viewers expect from a story. Lino Sanchez questions whether historical memories are crucial for our identity or simply a hindrance in his fable about the last elderly Americans on a spacecraft to a new home. Charlene Spretnak, in her book The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art, here reviewed by Kahlil Crawford, asserts that the finest, truest art draws us out of ourselves into a larger perspective.

One surreal piece, unpublished as the author is pursuing publication elsewhere, illustrates how uncomfortable we get with stasis, with someone not changing or not taking action of some sort. Much has been said on the natural human fear of change, yet there is also often concern or judgement for those who seem too sedentary or unproductive. Great spiritual traditions teach that life has intrinsic value regardless of how much someone works or produces, and we live with this psychological tension as we navigate life.

To some degree, change, growth and rebirth are a part of life. Plants and animals reproduce, the earth rotates anew around the sun every year, and the rain falls, allowing new leaves to bud on old and barren trees. Several of our contributors’ pieces seem like new leaves, going forward with life regardless of the past.

Anna Geiger brings out the awkwardness and hope of young crushes in her poetry, in a piece as rich and detailed as her other works that describe the claustrophobia of grief and the grime and dirt of poverty. She illustrates here that while life is full of loss and ugliness, it is also full of renewal and innocence. B. Diehl also writes in the voice of an adolescent or young adult, discussing young love, self-discovery and the desire to add one’s idealistic voice to critique society’s powerful. Creating serious poems with attention to craft that deal with these topics makes the statement that this material and this stage of life is a worthy topic for writing and consideration.

Halima bint Ayuba comments in a stylized piece on the process of making ceramics. She urges creators of pots and bowls to sculpt wings and feathers into the clay, providing lightness and balance to the solid material. Her other pieces comment on the fragility of relationships, how easy it is for people to simply miss each other, and on the complex and full life that goes on within darkness.

Clara Hsu’s new poetry collection The First to Escape, as reviewed by Christopher Bernard, explores themes of renewal, youth and deep love through a gentle, unassuming voice. G.K. Brannen celebrates the beauty of a vintage muscle car and the creative process of restoring such a vehicle. Deborah Guzzi’s poetry evokes San Francisco’s landscape of colorful Victorian painted lady houses and the pain of lost love and childlessness, and also contains a poetic meditation on sowing of seeds and children.

Luis Romero, in his motivational book You Are the Opportunity You Were Waiting For: The Philosophy of Success in 21 Timeless Principles, takes old ideas and recombines and recasts them into new thoughts. For example, self-analysis shouldn’t become an excuse to sit around and do nothing useful, and guilt itself has no moral value unless it motivates specific positive behavior change. He combines thoughts on personal behavior with advice for national and fiscal policy, thus creating a consistent worldview that can be applied at smaller and larger scales.

Ayokunle Adeleye also deals with another ‘new leaf’ in his second essay, which outlines his gripes with the cell phone plans and service available within Nigeria. He shows that he can pontificate just as well about personal issues and day to day thoughts as he can advocate for larger positions such as freedom of speech and the press.

In the end, both small scale, ordinary issues and large cultural and physical dynamics are important, because both play vital roles in our lives. And we encourage you to revel in the craft and poetry of this issue, along with contemplating the philosophical insights of our contributors.

 

Tree with snow on branches and pink blossoms

From Miss Ginny on Pinterest

 

Announcement from our partner Rui Carvalho: 

Rui Carvalho's App Service Logo

*** If you are a writer or a poet and dream of showing your work to the world, then we believe we have the best of opportunities to share with you.
For a small donation you can have your book presented as an e-book app for Windows Phone, Windows, Android or Kindle.
Details are the following:
Windows Phone, Windows, Android or Kindle with up to 40 poems – (donation 40 USD)
Rui M. Publisher ISBN – (donation 10 USD)
Annual maintenance – (donation 10 USD per year)
Revision of the text – (donation 50 USD)

Another donation can be for song lyrics (any type of music): 

Donation 20 USD;

Part of the funds will go to Rui Carvalho and enable him to continue the work he does creating apps for health care nonprofits and the remaining will go to Synchronized Chaos Magazine.  

Please use the following e–mail: 

ruiprcar@gmail.com

Also, we would like to kindly ask you to inform us if you desire an iPhone or iPad app.

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!!!!!

***

Christopher Bernard reviews Clara Hsu’s The First to Escape

Clara Hsu

LATE BLOSSOMS

A review by Christopher Bernard

Clara Hsu

Clara Hsu

The First to Escape
Poems by Clara Hsu
The Poetry Hotel Press
134 pp, $18.00

“It is always better, the ‘other world’
where each motion is a still frame,
perfectly all right to linger in.”
—Cafe Delirium

These lines may stand as a motto for the eloquent collection they encapsulate. We are not here the first, nor are we likely to be the last, to escape into the “other world” embodied in Clara Hsu’s poems, where we too can linger, perfectly right in the ever-widening senses of the term. Poems like these are enchantments to spirit us away, partly to help us escape the bitterly real world but above all to give us distance where we can see more clearly that world from which we have, from which we must, escape if we are to breathe, to live. Hsu’s poems are both entrance and egress, a welcoming and a bon voyage, a palpable breath of the morning air crossing our way across the white page, embers of candle ash in the snow.

“Begin with sadness that permeates
since the feverish hands cooled
Looking beyond
it must have been the wind”
—Wandering Night

Often the reader will find here a deep joy, sometimes delicately, sometimes wildly sensual; sometimes homey, domestic, calm; sometimes hard, with the earthy candor of genuine love, the deep affection that spurns euphemism. But sadness, the exhaustions of love and the instability of even the most modest happiness, also has its rights, to say nothing of its sacraments.

There is the questing for the self, that elusive necessity of being:

“the dreamer
doesn’t know it is she who commands
the dream to appear. It is she who has
been wishing. It is she whose wish takes
form tapping code into the great
unknown. It is her words….”
—Wandering Night

Continue reading

Short prose from G.K. Brannen

Scarred Flesh

Grease is everywhere:

on the chassis, on the floor,

the broken drive-line lying at an awkward angle beneath the tranny.

Split skin on the knuckles grease is everywhere.

Dirt, grim, and an endless stream of cuss words all come into play when a rebuild is ordered on a Dodge Super-Bee Hemi; the muscle car: big, bad, and fast as hell. The big Hurst V-Gate In-line 2: a High Pistol Grip speed shifter for a perfect hookup.

PURE RAW POWER

It’s a bastard to stitch together: lotsa scarred flesh, lotsa greasy-grim lotsa cuss’n. All power goes to the ground; the four/eleven positive traction rear-end is outa the hole like greased lightning – the G-force incredible. You fire this puppy up and you’re atop a gated two-year old at Church-Hill Downs.

All you have to do is hang on for five point 7 seconds.

PURE RAW POWER

dig … dig hard;

You’re outa control.

Elizabeth Hughes’ Book Periscope

dontlookbackcover

Rita D’Orazio’s Don’t Look Back is a story that will make you laugh and make you cry. You instantly like and feel for Katerina, she has so much personality and is such an emotionally strong girl, which she needs in her dysfunctional family. Katerina is the youngest of three. Her sister, Simona and her brother Tony are in their teens. Katerina idolizes her Papa and is very close to her Aunt Adrianna, who sounds like someone you would really want to know. Her mother has frequent mood swings, and Katerina is the target when they happen. Simona falls in love with the boy who lives upstairs, but since the family is not Italian, her mother has a meltdown and kicks the family out.

The mother introduces Simona to Mario in hopes that they will get married. The priest and Mario’s father says things will go very well for their family if Simona marries Mario, who is gay. Then Katerina and her mother have to fly to Italy due to a death in the family and everyone says that Katerina looks like she is Cosmo Balducci’s daughter. She asks her mother who that is and her mother claims not to know him. When Katerina and her Papa go to California to see Simona, her father goes to see his cousin. That is when things turn really bad. Buy Don’t Look Back and find out what secrets are hidden in the family closet. This is a great story that will keep you on the edge of your seat page after page. I highly recommend this book! Happy reading!!

Don’t Look Back is available on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Look-Back-Rita-DOrazio-ebook/dp/B00AAOD8ZA/

 

katerinacover

Katerina is the sequel to Don’t Look Back by Rita D’Orazio. This book will captivate your interest until the very last page. It opens with Katerina and her grown daughter Valentina at the 50th anniversary concert of her beloved, favorite band, the Beach Boys. Then she goes on to tell the years leading up the this moment. She finds out her Papa is not her biological father. Her mother does not want anything to do with her as if it were her fault. She and her Papa move to the apartment above theirs in the house they own. Her sister Simona goes to California to be with Barry after she recovers from trying to commit suicide and the miscarriage she has.

Katerina meets Stefano, the boy she knew from Italy, at an architecture convention in Las Vegas. She and Stefano get together and develop a relationship together. She becomes pregnant with Valentina and they get married. They have many years of happiness, then Stefano is diagnosed with testicular cancer. There are many things that are not brought to Katerina’s attention until after her husband has passed. Then secrets are revealed. Buy Katerina today and find out all the twists and turns that come her way. It will make you laugh and cry, and also cry tears of happiness. What a beautiful love story! I am sure you will enjoy this book as much as I have. Happy reading!

Katerina is available on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Katerina-Rita-DOrazio/dp/1600479227/

The Adventures of Bruten and Tommy: The Secret of the Portals

secretofportals

What a fun story Brant Waldeck’s The Secret of the Portals is! It is the absolute perfect gift for kids ages 7 and up. The story is about two friends, Bruten and Tommy and Tommy’s Uncle Ron. Uncle Ron has been telling them stories of world’s in different dimensions for years. Then one day Uncle Ron has Branford a talking squirrel take Bruten and Tommy to the portals to see what kind of treasures they may contain. Uncle Ron has ulterior motives for what they may find in the world’s. Branford has lived with Uncle Ron for many years but came from Squirrel World, where all of the Squirrels talk just like humans. This would be a great book for kids to get lost in their imagination in Squirrel World, Minitopia, Stone World and more. Buy this today and sit with your child while you read this delightful story together. It has adventures and fun in every page. I absolutely adore this book. Happy reading!!

The Secret of the Portals is available online here: http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Portals-Adventures-Bruten-Tommy/dp/1480030562/

 I, Mammal: Why your Brain Links Status and Happiness

imammal

Dr. Loretta Breuning’s popular science work I, Mammal is a very interesting and well researched book on how the brain links status with happiness and how the feel good chemicals in the brain play a part in it. The more status a person has achieved the more feel good chemicals are released and the happier the person is. The book compares the brains of humans and their happiness with the brains of other mammals and their happiness and survival. This book is perfect for someone who is interested in how our very complex brain works. Happy reading!

I, Mammal is available online here: http://www.amazon.com/Mammal-Brain-Links-Status-Happiness/dp/1941959008/

 

Poetry from Deborah Guzzi

Between the Stingers

Trust, like a pitiless whore-master, grins

as between the sheets and at my breasts, he suckles.

Though Cupid lauds’ the joy, I feel only stings.

The manic moon shivers to shriek-like violins

as trusting seed is split and son-less my knees buckle–

mother-less street urchin blanched, impatient, sin.

In sympathy the sun pales night’s mood swings

seeking to caress and hold with a fractured chuckle–

love’s exhausted, and misspent, ripening lingers;

the dying day and I, cry of might-have-beens.

My ivory hands are icy white, my bleeding knuckles

trust like a pitiless whore-master grins

though Cupid lauds’ the joy, I feel only stings.

Continue reading