Türkan Ergör, Sociologist, Philosopher, Writer, Poet, Art Photography Model. Türkan Ergör was born 19 March 1975 in the city of Çanakkale, Türkiye. She was selected International “Best Poet 2020”. She was selected International “Best Poet, Author/Writer 2021”. She was selected International “Best Poet, Writer/Author 2022”. She was awarded the FIRST PRIZE FOR THE OUTSTANDING AUTHOR IN 2022. She was awarded the 2023 “Zheng Nian Cup” “National Literary First Prize” by Beijing Awareness Literature Museum. She was awarded the “Certificate of Honor and Appreciation” and “Crimean Badge” by İSMAİL GASPRİNSKİY SCIENCE AND ART ACADEMY. She was awarded the “14k Gold Pen Award” by ESCRITORES SIN FRONTERAS ORGANIZACIÓN INTERNACIONAL.
«The future begins today», and this wisdom carries a deep meaning. The goals a person sets today determine the results they achieve tomorrow. I am also one of the young people who have set a great goal for their future. I have recently successfully completed the 9th grade at School No.16 “ JASORAT” in Kasbi district, Kashkadarya region, and I am stepping forward into the 10th grade with confidence. During this important period of my life, I have started thinking more seriously about my future and the path I want to follow. I believe that every person has a moment or an encounter that changes the way they see life. I experienced such a moment as well.
A foreign teacher who came to our school to teach us became one of the main reasons why my interest in studying abroad grew stronger. This teacher not only shared knowledge about their subject but also introduced us to their country’s education system, culture, traditions and way of thinking. Through their lessons, I realized that the true purpose of education is not only to receive good grades, but also to learn how to think independently, explore new ideas, create innovations, and become connected with the world. From that moment, studying abroad became one of my greatest dreams and goals.
The people who have given me the greatest support on this journey are my parents. When I shared my dream of studying abroad with them, they welcomed my idea, believe in me, and encouraged me to work hard. I deeply understand that the trust and support of parents are among the greatest sources of strength for a child. Their prayers and encouragement motivate me to move forward toward my goals every day.
Today, studying abroad is not only an opportunity for the children of wealthy families, as some people may think. If a person has a thirst for knowledge, dedication, and determination, may universities around the world can open their doors to them. Various scholarships, grants and international education programs are helping thousands of young people achieve their dreams. However, to take advantage of these opportunities, it is necessary to improve English exams such as IELTS and SAT, study school subjects deeply, and continuously work on personal development.
There are many advantages to studying abroad. First of all, students have the opportunity to study with modern laboratories, experienced professors, and advanced educational methods. They can combine theoretical knowledge with practical experience. By studying together with students from different countries, they can discover new cultures, lifestyles, and prespectives. This experience broadens their worldview, helps them enhance foreign language skills, and allows them to build international friendships.
Another important benefit of studying abroad is that it prepares a person for independent life. Managing time effectively, taking responsibility, solves issues freely, and adapting to different environments are valuable qualities that develop through such experiences. These skills become a strong foundation for future success.
Many people think that entering a foreign university is extremely difficult. However, the hardest step is often the first one – starting!. Reading one page of a book today, learning a new English word, or solving one mathematical problems may seem like a small achievement. But these small steps can lead you towards the world’s most prestigious universities in the future. Great achievements always begin with small actions.
I am also following this path today. I am sorting out improving my English skills and preparing to achieve international certificates such as IELTS, SAT, and other qualifications. I know that many challenges are waiting ahead, but I believe that every challenges will bring me closer to my goal. I am not working only for myself, but also to justify my family’s trust, appreciate the efforts of my teachers, and contribute to the development of my homeland in the future.
Dear friends and fellow students! If you also dream of studying abroad, do not postpone your dreams. Start working from TODAY. Learn languages, read books, participate in competitions, and never stop searching for new knowledge. Believe in yourself despite nobody do not believe to you. Because success do not come overnight, but daily efforts always bring results.
As the saying goes, «Knowledge is the greatest wealth that elevates a person». Dreams become reality only in the hands of those who believe in them and continue working toward them. I want to be one of those people. I strongly believe that my efforts today will become the foundation of my achievements tomorrow, and one day I will study at one of the world’s leading universities and use the knowledge and experience I gain to make a contribution to the progress of my homeland.
Travis Park is a poet from Indiana whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modern Haiku, Presence, Ribbons, Wales Haiku Journal, Leaf Journal, Haikuniverse, and elsewhere.
Hades
From 4 AM on,
We’d sweat, underpaid,
in an understaffed
bakery.
He was the bread guy.
I made the pastries.
To pass time,
we’d talk
about bosses,
who were anything but
banter on news
between passing utensils.
Reaching a ten-pound whisk
across the table
he said,
“Here’s a whip for your icining.”
Until then, he had been
describing coverage
of an earthquake
“Down in Hades.”
We spoke in yells.
Tiled walls shook
with eighty-quart mixers.
The stereo crackled,
“…She fuck me like she Haitian…”
What odds?
I said I wonder
what Haitian women fuck like.
He lied that maybe he’d tell me
after his family
trip to Dominican, smiling,
“It’s right next door.”
Since I quit,
he works the big whip
The bosses made him
the pastry guy.
Cowboy Kindred
He was standing outside the liquor store, looking lost
in time. A nod to a bygone era that left, like a
one-night stand he thought was the one
but snuck off sometime before morning.
The shaking head and agape mouth sold me.
He looked to be in his mid-fifties
in cowboy boots, ripped jeans, a tank top,
and aviators, with long bleached curls
beneath a straw Corona hat.
His steroidal arms, tanned and hairy up the bicep,
bore tattoos I can’t remember. He had a 1980s
pro-wrestler-like quality, like Dog the Bounty Hunter,
in the clothes of Kenny Chesney.
As I approached the entrance, an electric CUV
whirred past us. Though there were others,
he looked at me, someone to whom he sensed
he could speak. He said:
“I remember when cars sounded like cars.
These fucking things sound like spaceships.”
To drive the point home, he trilled his lips,
bbbrrrrr, then waved both arms in defeat.
I laughed. He shook his head humorlessly.
I wonder if he’s composing a poem now
about a hard-luck case whose expression
read lost, like a guy who’d missed his stop,
avoiding sincerity in a liquor store parking lot.
Song of Domesticity
My neighbour’s window plays
the clatter of stacked plates,
an accordion of forks
chiming into place.
I don’t know if it’s music
preceding a quiet evening
or silence that succeeds
the absence of ketchup.
It’s thirty degrees.
If the dog in the driveway’s
chain could reach the shade
of my neighbour’s lifted pickup
he could sleep with the filthy,
silhouetted women, who flap
beneath Browning bumper stickers,
never breathing a word.
Peg Ride
For my last dance with ego,
I’ll wish not to be dispatched
to the back of a Chrysler
mini-van hearse, ferried by some
Charon in budget coattails
listening to car salesmen—
when he breaks from humming
along to exhausted CanCon
that predates and outlasts me,
while dreaming of a used Chevy—
unmindful of the dead guy’s
peg ride to oblivion.
16
I’ve committed to her body
as an archaeologist commits to a crypt
crawling through his fantasy
eyes rounded, fascinated by the study
or as an old-world tribesman’s tattooed face
marks idolatry, obsession,
a commitment to her sovereignty;
like the letters on my cheek.
I’ve heard colleagues’ repudiations—
bitter, lonesome men, cynical
as their tropes are predictable:
One pussy; the ol’ ball ‘n’ chain…
I once penetrated her with a bottle of Spumante
that tasted sweeter than any Champagne
that same year we had sex on the train
passing scenic blurs in New Brunswick or Quebec
Those short, counting years tarnished dark
as Petite Sirah. I savour her scent,
swirl, our long finish. I’d quaff
a chalice of her plasma, both hands cupped.
Now, for the first time, I feel doubt—
or grief for my dead self—
hearing sometime this year,
she wants to break our old record.
My Bones
What I felt in my bones
is dead.
Praise my fickle bones!
With a turnover rate
of ten years.
Farewell to certainties
I’ll soon forget.
Make way, old bones!
En garde!
I sense a new revelation.
When I reached out to Sacks & Co., the publicity firm representing Philip Glass, I expected a simple professional interaction—either an interview or a polite decline. What arrived instead was a message from Krista Williams whose phrasing carried the unmistakable signature of a Glassian motif: a short, categorical phrase repeated with such structural finality that it resembled a musical cell rather than a piece of administrative communication. The refusal was not framed as temporal or conditional. It was delivered as a pure statement of closure, a cadence without resolution, a door shut with the kind of procedural certainty Glass often assigns to his arpeggiated figures.
“Mr. Glass is not doing interviews.” Period. No caveat. No wiggle-room.
As someone who has spent decades in Glass’s broader ecosystem—through long‑standing Vedanta Society involvement, through writing shaped by the avant‑garde lineage he helped define, through editorial and publishing work that often intersects with minimalist aesthetics—I recognized the pattern immediately. The initial refusal wasn’t simply a refusal; it was a phrase. It had contour. It had rhythmic insistence. It had the timbre of a line repeated until its meaning becomes structural rather than semantic. She had both gatekept me out of interviewing him as well as indicated in clear, unmistakable terms that he is not doing interviews. You don’t require a terminal degree in English to recognize the finality of that sentence. But I do, and it closes the gate permanently; not just for me, for everyone.
I responded with a dry, musicologically framed note acknowledging the decision and pointing out that the redundancy in the phrasing functioned as a kind of meta‑commentary on Glass’s own aesthetic. The exchange had already begun to behave like a piece of music: a motif introduced, repeated, and left to resonate.
A few minutes later, Williams replied with a clarification, which directly contradicted her previous statement:
“On background, I meant to say he’s not taking on any interviews currently as it’s not possible with his schedule.”
She then explained that she had not meant to imply permanent unavailability or a “welded‑shut door.”
The contradiction embedded in this new communication between the two messages was not merely semantic; it was musicological. The first message was a closed cadence. The second was an unexpected modulation. The first established a harmonic boundary; the second destabilized it. In Glass’s vocabulary, this was the shift from motif to variation, the subtle alteration that changes the meaning of the phrase without changing its shape.
The irony was that the correction reinforced the joke. The literalism of the reply—the insistence on clarifying a metaphor—demonstrated the very gatekeeping logic the original message had inadvertently performed.
The exchange had become an interview not with Glass, but with the structure surrounding him. The PR apparatus had become the performer; the email thread, the score.
Legacy‑artist PR, when functioning well, behaves like chamber music: each participant aware of the others, each gesture calibrated to the ensemble, each phrase shaped by context. It requires ecosystem awareness. It requires knowing who is inside the lineage, who has long‑standing engagement with the artist’s work, and who operates in adjacent cultural spaces. It requires recognizing that not all correspondents are equal—some are part of the world the artist came from.
In this case, the categorical refusal structurally shut the door on someone already inside the circle, not outside it. That is the professional misstep, and it is not personal. It is simply a failure of musical listening.
Williams did not recognize that she was speaking to a published author, editor, and publisher; someone who runs a magazine and a small press; someone whose work has long intersected with the avant‑garde; someone whose Vedanta Society involvement places him in the same philosophical lineage Glass embraced; someone who writes in the structural vocabulary Glass helped establish. This is not ego. It is ensemble awareness—the basic competency of legacy‑artist PR.
The paradox is that a PR firm representing Philip Glass inadvertently created negative PR for itself by mishandling a lineage‑adjacent correspondent. The exchange illustrates how gatekeeping can become performative: a ritual guarding of a door that may not need guarding, executed without awareness of who is standing on the other side. The representative’s repetition became a minimalist motif. Her correction became a variation. Her literalism became the punchline. The entire exchange became a Glass piece.
None of this is written in hostility. Williams apologized twice, and there was no escalation. But the exchange, taken as a whole, reveals something important about how legacy‑artist PR functions—and how it sometimes fails. Gatekeeping is not inherently wrong. But gatekeeping without context becomes a structural joke. And in this case, the joke was Glassian.
Philip Glass, born in 1937, is one of the most influential composers of the modern era, known for his pioneering work in minimalism, his collaborations across genres, and his lifelong engagement with Eastern philosophy, particularly through the Vedanta Society. His music is built on repetition, micro‑variation, and procedural architecture—structures that have shaped generations of artists.
Alex S. Johnson, the author of this piece, is a writer, editor, and publisher whose work spans fiction, poetry, cultural commentary, and avant‑garde analysis. As founder of Nocturnicorn Books and Darkest Wine Media, he has published numerous writers and produced work deeply informed by minimalist aesthetics, structural analysis, and the cultural ecosystems surrounding artists like Glass. His long‑standing involvement with the Vedanta Society and decades‑long engagement with Glass’s work place him firmly within the composer’s extended artistic lineage.
Sacks & Co., the publicity firm at the center of this exchange, is a respected boutique PR agency specializing in music, film, and cultural figures. Known for representing major legacy artists, the firm handles media relations, publicity campaigns, and artist communications. Their role is to manage access, shape narratives, and maintain the delicate balance between availability and mystique that surrounds artists of Glass’s stature.
