What is our responsibility as artists to reinvent or reimagine our world, our selves, our work in order to dismantle current systems and conventions and tastes that are at best, dated and stifling, and at worst a threat to real, lived lives? What role does re-imagination play in freedom?
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.
Dear James, I wrote this all in cat memes cuz I didn’t want anything to get missed.
You must create what you think must be said, what you think should be done… Perhaps the best art takes on the world in some way, destroys it & recreates it, draws reader and writer alike closer to the complexity of the globe or even of that planet’s place in a far vaster universe of which we are specks on a pale blue dot, a dot near-invisible on the map of the cosmos. Continue reading
It was my feeling of safety which got me incarcerated. I made the assumption that I would be okay; I didn’t read up on the legal system, didn’t bother to pay for a lawyer. I hid from my situation until it consumed me. I can’t make that mistake again. Continue reading
Later, I will understand his protest as personal: he doesn’t want to be the white guy who wrote a great book that won’t be read by people like me because of who he is. Continue reading
“It’s just a book,” I said, exasperated. “Why do you have to read so much into it?” Continue reading
My freshman year of college, I had the privilege of being the straight-laced black theatre queen housed in a four man suite… Continue reading
I remember, once in a writing workshop, a white student wrote a story with a black protagonist. But, the protagonist could’ve been purple or green and the story would’ve been the same. The protagonist’s race was decorative; somebody wanted to spice up the bedroom!
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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
Our fiction editor for September and October is Gabrielle Bellot. Gabrielle, who has also written under J. Bellot, holds an MFA from Florida State University, where she is currently a PhD Candidate in fiction. She has contributed work to Guernica, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, Small Axe’s sx salon, The SouthEast Review, and other journals. She grew up in the … Continue reading
Our poetry editor for September and October is Oliver de la Paz, the author of four books: Names Above Houses (SIU Press 2000), Furious Lullaby (SIU Press 2008), Requiem for the Orchard (U. Akron Press 2010), and Post Subject: A Fable (U. Akron Press 2014). With Stacey Lynn Brown he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: … Continue reading
The James Franco Review 