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? Continue reading
White power is a body without a soul. Black subjugation is soul that cannot possess its rightful body. Continue reading
Dear Sir, When I was nineteen, I told my creative writing professor what I wanted to write about in my next short story: the Halloween party where my friends and I were groped by anonymous hands in a very large crowd. Continue reading
This is my fight: to be nothing, to be everything, to listen. Continue reading
There is nothing safe about being a writer. There is nothing safe about being an artist. Our art can only be as safe as we are, which is to say, never. Continue reading
A teacher once admonished me: Just write the damn story!
Why doesn’t this comfort me?
Continue reading
A Muslim who does not practice or believe is generally regarded as safe. It is in the act of prayer that I become potentially dangerous. Continue reading
Do not engage. Do not dispute. Do not contend. Do not alert the world that you too have a body that needs to breathe. Continue reading
This film in question is Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and its aesthetic failures seem to be a direct result of its ethical failures. Continue reading
After reading my story, people often ask me if I see the nature of my characters’ problems as deeply related to our own in the here and now. The answer is a resounding yes. And in fact I see my story, like so much of visionary fiction, as a future anthropology. Continue reading
The James Franco Review 