WEEKLY WRITING ROUND-UP: NOVEMBER 9, 2017

While, like many people, I strive for resistance beyond partisan-politics, I couldn’t help but be excited by some of the election results earlier this week. You may have heard that Angela Jenkins is a Black transwoman who was just elected to office in Minneapolis– but did you know she is also a poet? Check out this interview in which she discusses her relationship with art.

Aside from the polls, this week I spent time reading the following pieces.

Poetry

Mother Internet, a multimedia piece by Elizabeth Baber: “In “Mother Internet: Blessed Virgin: Coming of Age” Elizabeth Babertraces the various representations of Mary (Mother of Jesus) across the internet in both digital and physical landscapes. Baber asks, ‘Is the internet materal? If so, is she a good mother?'”

How It Happened. by Robin Sinclair in Yes, Poetry’s #MeToo series: “How it happened / best friend’s father spooned behind me like a lover –/ called me darling”

Poems by Natasha Kochicheril Moni: “If there is a door / named after someone // you have yet to meet / remember to unlatch the windows.”

Fiction

Banya by Daniela Czarny: “Now, they are directed to drink water with citrusy granules rimmed around the glass like margarita salt. They are told to avail themselves of the Specialty Dry Steam Rooms, which are really just a series of regular steam rooms with walls made of different, allegedly healing elements.”

Essays

Let’s Start Talking about Decolonising Love by Sara C. Motta: “To rebuild other worlds – to decolonise our lives, bodies and spirits – we need to recreate, recognise and centre in our politics ways of coexisting and supporting each other, and recognising each other as people with complex emotional strategies of survival and flourishing, and with deep wisdoms which come from our experiences of multiple traumas.”

The American Fact by Grant Miller: “Despite strict segregation in the area, Pace said white girls used to drive into the black side of town by his high school and start “dancing and stuff.” When white males from the area found out, they threatened to lynch Pace. So he lied about his age and joined the military at 17 years old.”

Womb Geography by Monique Quintana: “His chatter is mixed up with the strawberry taste of the licorice rope that you’re chewing from and the cola that burns like a hole in your throat. When you tell him what school you go to, he asks you what a Chicana like you is doing go to a school like that, and you don’t know what he really means until years later, but all you can do is say, I live out there.”

Stephanie Kaylor in based in upstate New York and is currently a MA student in Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought at European Graduate School. She holds a MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University at Albany and is Managing Editor for Five:2:One Magazine and Reviews Editor for Glass: A Journal of Poetry.