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.
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
On the Other Side My father gave me one thing in this life: a brown-skinned Rainbow Brite doll. When I was a kid sometimes I would get jealous of the doll and pull out her black yarn hair in chunkfuls. Even a silly doll had more life to her hair than me. Still, I feel … Continue reading
Simone I’ve never tricked with a guy from a group home. I was compelled to press palms with the house manager, a beefy black dude decked out in Adidas, and he insisted that I articulate my promise to return Darren sober and unharmed by midnight. We get high before leaving the subdivision. The bedbugs and … Continue reading
Chain of Rocks “I swear I saw a sign for Chicago,” Ma said, holding the battered Esso map on her lap. “Sun’s going down fast,” said Pa, for the fifth time in twenty minutes. Then, for the first time, “Don’t know where we are.” The wooden spokes of the old Hudson vibrated on the rough … Continue reading
That You Were Meant for Great Things Today Margaret from Ascertain Awareness calls about helping her do all-natural teeth whitening at the LA County Fair. She says. “I’ll train you and you can make some money.” I tell her I’ll consider. I’m busy working on my Aunt May costume for the Spider-Man convention in … Continue reading
For issue 8, each editor selected their pieces based off of particular, meaningful themes. We’ve decided to publish these works as a folio in their specific genre so readers can feel how they interact and create a dialogue with each other. Get ready to read dangerously. Fiction:Abundance Guest Editor: Ryka Aoki 米. This … Continue reading
The James Franco Review 