My friend and colleague Kimy Martinez runs Lit N’ Image – which always seeks literary fiction (2,000 or fewer words) or visual art submissions. Their Winter 2010 issue’s up, complete with writing from Tom Mahony, Jered Ward, and Kate Wyer, among many others. http://www.litnimage.com
Submissions LITnIMAGE retains one-time electronic publishing rights for all accepted art and literature. Published work will remain archived indefinitely, and all authors retain their copyrights.LIT — LITnIMAGE accepts traditional and innovative literary fiction (sorry, no genre fiction, poetry or non-fiction). Stories must be unpublished and fewer than 2,000 words (exceptions made only for the exceptional). Submit one story or up to three flash stories via email as an attachment (.doc or .rtf) to fiction@litnimage.com Include your last name and story title in the subject field. You may include a cover letter within the text of the email if you wish.
IMAGE — LITnIMAGE accepts painting, drawing, photography and sculpture submissions via email as JPEG files. Send as many as five files (file size of 1MB or less each suggested) to us by email to art@litnimage.com Please use file names that are your last name, followed by a dot (period) and the title of the work. For example, if Bob Smith submits a work titled River, the file name would be smith.river. All types of art will be considered, but provocative work that is outside of the mainstream is of special interest to us.
We will try to respond within four to six weeks (and often sooner). Simultaneous submissions are encouraged, but please let us know immediately if your story or artwork is accepted elsewhere. If we choose to publish your work, we will ask you for a short bio in MS Word and a headshot photo in JPEG format.
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!
Murder Under the Bridge, Mystery Set in Palestine, Debuts Online
Rania is the only female Palestinian police detective in the northern West Bank. She is also the mother of a young son, in a rural community where many feel that mothers should not have such demanding careers. Chloe is a Jewish American dyke with a video camera and a big attitude, anxious to right every wrong caused by the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The two women team up to track down the killer of Nadya, a trafficked Uzbek worker in one of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.Their search for truth takes them from checkpoints and prisons to brothels and beaches.
In 2004, I was living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, working with a women’s peace group.One night I was in a taxi with some friends and as we drove on a Palestinian dirt road passing under an Israeli superhighway, I told my friend, “This would be a great place for a mystery to begin.”On my next break, I started writing, creating characters and developing a story.
I’ve been an avid mystery reader for many years, and I especially like using them to learn about cultures or time periods I don’t know that much about.The genre is well-suited to exploring social issues in an engaging way.I was intrigued by the idea of using popular culture to help people understand a conflict that is portrayed in the media as complex and intractable.I wanted to show the lives behind the headlines.
The book has now been through four drafts, quite a number of people have helped me by reading it and giving feedback and suggestions, I had editing help from a wonderful editor and an agent who was interested in it for a while. I have gotten some very nice comments from publishers, but always with the inevitable “but” – not appropriate for our list, can’t adequately market it at this time …
A little while ago, I started thinking about the fact that a lot of the early detective novels were originally published in serial form.When I first moved to the San Francisco area, Armistead Maupin’s ‘Tales of the City’ was running as a daily newspaper column.I remember how I would look forward to it every day.The serial really lends itself to the mystery genre.You try to end each installment on a cliff-hanger of some kind.Publishing on the internet also allows me to augment the text with photos, maps and videos to enhance the reading experience.
Chapter 1 – Roadblock at Azzawiya Bridge
“Ya tik alaafia,” Captain Mustafa commanded Rania’s attention as soon as she entered the station.He used the greeting for someone who is working, so she tore her eyes from the coffee pot bubbling enticingly in the corner.
Every day, Rania told herself she would get up early enough to make an Arabic coffee before she left the house.But every morning when her alarm rang at half past five, she shut it off and did not get up until six.Then she was always rushing to reach the roadblock at Qarawat bani Hassan for the bus to Yasouf, where she would cross the roadblock and transfer to the other bus that would be waiting to take her to the small police headquarters at Salfit.
When she had first moved with her husband, Bassam, to his family’s compound in Mas’ha village, it had taken less than half an hour to reach Salfit.Since the Intifada, with the Israelis restricting Palestinian movement to a crawl, she often suggested they rent a little house in Salfit, for them and Khaled.But Bassam said he needed to keep a daily watch on his olive groves, adjacent to the Israeli settlement which was always trying to gobble up more land.She suspected he also did not want to sacrifice his place as the favored oldest son, center of his mother’s world, and let one of his brothers supplant him as head of the family.
Captain Mustafa cleared his throat.Suddenly self-conscious, Rania removed her head scarf.As soon as she did, the situation felt more comfortable.The men were still learning to accept her as a colleague.Traditionally, women were nurses, engineers and teachers, more recently a few were doctors.Women as police detectives was a new concept, which would take getting used to.Wearing the hijab made the men she worked with feel like they were talking to one of their sisters or cousins; taking it off made it possible for them to treat her like an equal.To her it was not important.Her belief in God, such as it was, did not rise or fall with her head covering.Growing up in Aida Camp, outside Bethlehem, few of the women she knew had worn it.Now she wore it diligently in the village and on the roads, where she might run into someone who knew Bassam and his family.In the city, and among men with whom she had a professional relationship, she took it off.Sometimes she told her friends, “I think more clearly without something between my brain and the sun,” but in fact, she felt the same, whether she was wearing it or not.
“There is a situation in Azzawiya,” said Captain Mustafa.
“What kind of situation?” asked Rania.
“One requiring great tact.”
Rania knew the captain well enough to take this as a warning, not a compliment.She was not known for her tact.There must be some other reason why he was sending her.
“A car is abandoned on top of the bridge,” Captain Mustafa said.Rania waited.An abandoned car on an Israeli road was not something the Palestinian police would normally concern themselves with.“The Yahud say that the car is stolen,” he continued.“The jesh have closed the road under the bridge and no one can pass on foot or by car.”
Rania understood now why she was being sent on this errand.If the Israeli army had closed the road between Mas’ha and Azzawiya, it would be necessary to find another way to approach, and she knew the land.She would also know many of the people who would be gathered on each side by now, waiting to see when they would be allowed to go.She would be able to tell at a glance if there was someone who did not belong there, whose actions should be scrutinized.A woman could surreptitiously gather information in such a situation, while a Palestinian man, even a policeman, who was moving around and asking questions would be perceived as a threat and treated as a suspect by the Israeli authorities.She tied the scarf around her hair again, grabbed her purse and removed a bag of supplies from her desk drawer.
“Tread lightly,” Captain Mustafa told her.
Rania didn’t bristle at the caution.It was his job to remind her of things she was likely to forget.On the other hand, she doubted his admonition would remain in her mind for more than thirty seconds once she left police headquarters.
She cast a longing look at the coffee pot on her way out.
Frank Gehry had an exhibition of cardboard furniture at LACMA in LA in 1972. There was a photo of the exhibit in the LA Times, along with an impossible to ignore need to see it. It wasn’t an understood or defined need. The furniture was 90 miles away in a borrowed car with a 17 year olds’ new driver’s license and friends that stared blankly at the suggestion. They would be glad to go for a concert, but for furniture? And the furniture was so worth it: cardboard that was far outside the realm of the conventional.
Concrete as an obsession: Concrete has no class connotations, is strong, organic, bold, immense, inorganic, polished, coarse, able to span bridges and to be shaped into tiny objects. Overpasses, sidewalks, buldings, furniture, sculpture, jewelry.
Nomadism: intentional and as a twig in a storm-tossed sea. Themes of restlessness, upheaval, disruption and also of adaptability and challenge. Change…the desire for fullness, new experiences, and an all-encompassing, overwhelming desire to bring physicality to an idea of a specific three-dimensional object. Design as the theme: clothing, flowers, furniture, sculpture, mosaics. An ongoing struggle between function and non. It’s critical to have function in this world of unnecessary junk and it’s an extreme feeling of freedom to create something that does not have to function. Minimalism ->Universality->
Childhood memories of meticulously drawing small details of tiny interlocking parts. It was so incredibly satisfying both to do it, and to see the results when they were finished. Each tiny part in its own perfect place on the path to mosaics. They’re solid and fragile, natural and artificial, a statement about the resiliency and the strength of the earth. Mosaics are so much color and light. They can tell a story that might need to be told, if only for the maker’s sanity. It can be a way of working out the frustrations, new thoughts and ideas that are bursting out of one’s skin. It’s the fitting together of the small pieces to find as close to the perfect whole as can be imagined in that particular time and place.
Pushing boundaries, experimentation leads to the discovery of bottomless pits and soaring light. Intimate knowledge redefines an inherent concept of freedom and drives life that has had to learn to appreciate every small miracle.
SHOWS/EXHIBITIONS
Annual Dia de los Muertos Group Show: Ventura, CA 1992-5
