Parallel Stress by Karrie Higgins & Alan Murdock, director of photography & audio engineering assistant CW: ableism, sexual abuse My Parallel Stress series began as a response to Dennis Oppenheim’s iconic 1970 performance by the same title. He stretched his body in plank position between two unfinished concrete walls, held it for ten minutes, and documented the position of … Continue reading
i never knew /who i could be til i died for the thousandth time. /til i erased every word i wrote and killed the pen. Continue reading
This is not cool but I’ll confess it: Sometimes, staring down these blank pages in my black skin, I’ve struggled to get loose, to get free. Because not only is my inner critic hovering from the first word, but so is an entire audience. Continue reading
But representation is the crux of the problem. When a hearing person plays or writes a deaf story, chances are a deaf person isn’t represented at all—the hearing person’s conception of deafness is. Continue reading
i’m quiet in this poem/ consumed/
bullet by bullet, by what’s left/
of us. of what’s to come./
but who’s to say? the night/
is wide. arduous. doesn’t budge./
even for me. Continue reading
Sometimes the name and the body stop serving one another. It has been ineffective to always have to explain what this journal wasn’t (about JF, for instance) before we could say what we were. It is far too easy to distract oneself with the symptom instead of the problems rooted in the system at play. Continue reading
untitled a handwritten sympathy card, delivered to her front door. her slender hands are flaky because the sadness has aged her, not the years. the phrase “she will never be the same” is crude, but she has no desire to break the surface. she’d rather take a knife to her own brain, creating bite-sized pieces of the torment, especially for us to taste. … Continue reading
Have you ever not been listened to? Here, take a moment and remember a specific instance. Where did you feel it in your body? Continue reading
Starting on September 15th we’ll be releasing a special issue of The James Franco Review: Art You Engaged/Are you engaged? Writers, editors, and artists around the country explored what it meant for them to be politically or consciously engaged in their work and to also examine literature’s relationship to safety. Every time I read … Continue reading
Reading nonfiction for September and is Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, who also has an essay in The James Franco Review Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo was the 2013 Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange poetry winner and a 2015 writer-in-residence at Ragdale Foundation. She has work published in Acentos Review, The American Poetry Review, CALYX, Los Angeles Review, Lumen Magazine, … Continue reading
The James Franco Review 