Good Things Are Coming!
This month, in lieu of a normal issue of Synchronized Chaos Magazine, we share some of the pieces that writers are presenting at the offsite event that Synchronized Chaos Magazine is co-hosting during the Association of Writing Programs’ annual conference.
Several Synchronized Chaos contributors are reading in this event, the Partnered Reading with the Broader Community, held at 6pm at the OpenHaus coworking space (5020 Martin Luther King Blvd) on Friday March 29th. These include Scott Thomas Outlar, J. Dorroh, Leticia Garcia Bradford, and Doug Hawley.
This is a partnered reading where publishing and book marketing professionals create work in response to, and inspired by, pieces from emerging authors. The readers have paired up and created together over the past couple months and each pair will read on stage at the OpenHaus. Idea is to connect more experienced authors with up and coming writers and promote creativity and mentorship.
This is a chance for professionals to read and consider, then engage with, work from the greater writing community. We welcomed and actively recruited all sorts of guest readers, including people from the POC, neurodiverse, LGBT, disabled, homeless and low-income and other marginalized communities to participate in this event.
Also, Bonnie Greene, Melissa Moon, Lisa Loving and others will come and read some pieces by, and about, writer and artist Tony LeTigre, who regularly wrote for Synchronized Chaos and edited a few issues in 2016, and sadly passed away in a traffic accident January 19th: https://www.marinij.com/2019/01/22/greenbrae-mans-circle-stunned-by-freeway-cycling-death/
Here’s the Facebook event page for the evening of readings, RSVP is appreciated but not required: https://www.facebook.com/events/344609806131726/
We aren’t able to share all of the work because some people have elected to pursue publication in outlets that don’t accept work previously published elsewhere. If that’s you, and your work is published here, please immediately comment or email us at synchchaos@gmail.com and we’ll remove your piece.
Claire Bateman and Sione Aeschliman explore spiders in various creepy crawly and elegant ways. Doug Hawley writes of an intergalactic space force and alien squids, and again of newts,to which Cati Porter responds through an erasure poem, where she takes his story and removes much of the language so that the remaining words form a new and different piece in themselves.
J. Dorroh, high school science teacher, dives into his true passion, swimming. Sybilla Nash speculates on what Tupac Shakur could have done had he not died young, while Scott Parker reflects upon the experience of reviewing his high school students’ poems inspired by Tupac after his death.
Sean Cearley contributes a concrete poem, words suggested by and superimposed onto images. Each phrase sounds as if it could be part of a larger piece. J. Dorroh writes a piece that explores the limits of human thought and endurance.
Rebecca Smolen and Leticia Garcia Bradford reflect on how the love, accomplishment, creativity and other delicious berries they seek are often just out of reach, while Robert Egan grapples with the limits of human and official capability to respond to floodwaters.
Vannessa McClelland dives into a troubled but creative mind. Gina Stella D’Assunta explores the challenge of navigating life as a vibrant bon vivant with unpredictable and painful chronic illness, and Cati Porter reinterprets Gina’s spoken word piece as a poem where punctuation and line breaks illustrate the physical limitations of a disabled body.
Edward Morris regales us with a glittering tour-de-force Old English prose piece., and Elyana Ren creates another tale inspired by Morris and Dickens. Dorothy Place lends her pen to the tale of determined, yet tragicomic, unemployed Solomon, hoping to win back his wife and his income with his modest imagination.
Scott Thomas Outlar crafts poetry and prose inspired by Heath Brougher’s unique form and style.
Huda Al-Marashi (First Comes Marriage) and Marivi Soliven (The Mango Bride) explore love, family, and the immigrant experience. Shahe Mankerian writes poetically, formally of love, echoing the sentiments of Huda’s book.
Jasmin Johnson contributes a meditative story on figuring out how to process death and grief, mourning and thus valuing the lives of loved ones marginalized by mainstream society.
In another poem she draws upon the experience of baptism, symbolically ending one’s self-directed life and being resurrected as a new person in a new life guided by God, as a kind of parallel to Mindy Ohringer’s piece about the writer’s journey. In Mindy’s short story, an aspiring writer learns to follow the leadings of their unique pieces rather than writing whatever seems literary to their audience. Mindy also contributes a thoughtful response to another of Jasmin’s poems.
We hope you enjoy the work that’s published here, and we look forward to continuing to host events in the future. Our regular editions of Synchronized Chaos Magazine return May 1st with a combined April/May issue.
