Zero is the only numeral with the ability to remain itself in solitude. Zero is defined by the ability to not change. All other numerals are relative to each other and depend on each other for existence. They always change and change together. Without each other, stripped of cohabitation, they have no meaning or personality. That’s why all numerals in solitude equals zero. The total amount of numerals aren’t gazillions but one and a half, generously measured. Continue reading “Footnote to silence”→
Ash and Stardust, a monthly column by artist and writer DHIYANAH HASSAN, explores the intersections of tarot with healing and creativity. These are personal essays and articles sharing experiences of growth as someone who has recently found a deep connection to tarot. You can read the rest of the pieces here. In the past month, I saw my childhood dream of having a conventionally successful art career – this dream that kept me alive through overwhelming traumas – die off. I made the decision to orphan myself from the biological family because they still couldn’t respect my boundaries. This country I’m in saw its first ever government change in the recent elections and despite the hope sizzling in the air, I still felt like it was trying to kick me out. Hope tends to follow change, it’s true, but so does apprehension.
These were the background noises weighing down on me for the past two weeks, as I worked through illness to meet deadlines, rummaging resources in search of plant-based remedies that could help alleviate all the gross ways stress had affected my body. I was thick in the overwhelm and it felt both familiar and foreign at the same time.
GIF snapshot of ocean waves, taken a day before the full moon
The thing about the 4 is, it’s always five minutes late. You tell yourself that, getting ready. You say: Mike, wait five minutes. But the thought of the bus passing makes every car outside sound like a bus, and besides: what if today is different? A new driver, a training bus, a holiday unaccounted. You leave early. Too early. No loitering at bus stop. No smoking. Caution. Watch your step. Have payment ready.
“More and more I forget what I need, and remember what I’d like to forget. And sometimes I keep talking, keep recalling, as a way of not saying what I feel.”
—Stephen Dunn, “Memory”
My fingers clink like ice as I sit, cliffside, listening to the slow wash of water against rock. Two Canada geese honk a route overhead, and I look out to Victoria, which lies across the narrow stretch of water from San Juan Island. Continue reading “A Necessary Silence by Jenne Knight”→
“Where you from?”
“Got me. We never stay anywhere long enough to be from there.”
“Must suck. Where you been?”
“First I remember was someplace cold. Then palm trees. We go wherever they send my dad.”
“Got any brothers or sisters?
“One.”
“One what?”
“Of each. On either side. They go, too.”
“Go where?” Continue reading “Genesis of a Writer: A Memoir by Deborah Hansen”→
Ash and Stardust, a monthly column by artist and writer DHIYANAH HASSAN, explores the intersections of tarot with healing and creativity. These are personal essays and articles sharing experiences of growth as someone who has recently found a deep connection to tarot. You can read the rest of the pieces here.
“To be strong does not mean to sprout muscles and flex. It means meeting one’s own numinosity without fleeing, actively living with the wild nature in one’s own way. It means to be able to learn, to be able to stand what we know. It means to stand and live.” – from Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Last year I designed a spread that was meant, according to my earlier notes, for days when you’re “intellectually and emotionally fucked up.” I named it the Chaos Spread. Here’s how you use it:
Fragment I
The story of a screech: it rose as the last bus of the evening crossed the borders of the city to the motorway. All seventeen of us on the top deck turned our heads. Oh yes, it was perfunctory (because on a double-decker you cannot really see what’s going on behind you on the road, even less so in the dark), but the gesture had already captivated me – the meaning, the intention. By the time all heads were turned, it was clear that we had all misjudged the nature of the screech (pitch dropping, frequency decreasing as it unwrapped). This could never come from a human throat, but rather from the strained brakes of a vehicle. Continue reading “Three Fragments On The Portative Organ* by Eva Ferry”→
“I seek a place that can never be destroyed, one that is pure, and that fadeth not away, and is laid up in heaven, and safe there, to be given, at the time appointed, to them that seek it with all their heart.”
– John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
Our pilgrimage almost came to an end under the wheels of a 10-ton truck on the D650 from Istanbul to Eskişehir, on a summer night made darker by no highway illumination and no towns for miles around. The four-lane highway was flanked on one side by dry, empty country and on the other by two-hundred-feet-tall black crags, out of which the silhouettes of pine trees leered, high up. Continue reading “Phrygians In The Rigging by Caroline Stockford”→
Jo Tinsley is the founder and editor of Ernest Journal– “an independent magazine for the curious and adventurous”. She is also the co-author of two books, The Odditorium: The tricksters, eccentrics, deviants and inventors whose obsessions changed the world and The Mysterium: Unexplained and extraordinary stories for a post-Nessie generation, and editor of Waterfront, a magazine celebrating a connection with water for the Canal & River Trust. Somehow, she also finds time to work as a freelance writer and curator. Continue reading “Jo Tinsley: In Conversation with C.C. O’Hanlon”→
For months before going to Alaska, I thought about how six hours of daylight would feel. In California, I’d lay in bed and imagine the darkness as a hand closing around my throat. Continue reading “A Believing Place by Nina Foushee”→
This city, this big sprawling dream of a city, mighty and misunderstood Los Angeles, is often defined in terms of tired cliches and sweeping generalizations. Soul-less and a-historical L.A., they say. A city where nobody walks, they lie. A far-reaching enigma going on for miles and miles, they all nod and agree, baffled. Continue reading “L.A. Lust by Yanina Spizzirri”→
I pull up outside the Gadsden Hotel around 10.15am after driving down State Highway 191 from an overnight stay in Willcox. The road follows the line of the Dragoon Mountains, where, in the 1860s, the Chiricahua Apache leader Cochise took refuge with two hundred of his people and for ten years waged a guerrilla war against the US army Continue reading “Who’d Pick A Fight With Lee Marvin? by David Dragon”→
When I was nine, I dreamed of going to Mars. I dreamed of being swept away to fantastical lands. I dreamed of joining David at Groosham Grange, and travelling with Sarah in her quest to the Goblin City. I’m still a dreamer, but I no longer dream of escape. The ordinary and the fantastical inhabit the same world. There are ghosts, vampires, goblins, cyborgs, and aliens round every corner, lurking down every close. There are mermaids and krakens in the ocean, dragons in the sky. Continue reading “Dreaming St. Conan’s Kirk by Ever Dundas”→
“A frontier region… the resort of brigands and bandits”
– Sir Clifford Darby, from The Medieval Fenland
Two summers ago I walked coast to coast across England and Wales, from Great Yarmouth in Norfolk to Aberystwyth on the Welsh coast. The idea was to etch a furrow in the map along a route that traced familiar haunts and places of personal significance. My aim was to rekindle the memory of places I once knew in East Anglia and the Midlands; join up the dots, to connect all the places along the way with a line made by walking – a pagan pilgrimage, if you like, a personal songline. Continue reading “The Tyranny of the Horizon by Laurence Mitchell”→
There’s a five-mile block in the northernmost part of Prenzlauer Berg that I haunted during my last weeks in Berlin. Within this five-mile block, I allowed myself to fade in and out of memories – I let past and present mingle surreptitiously. I chose it in the exact breath it chose me. Even knowing what writing my memoirs would mean, I had no idea the gravity, but each time I got too lost or too overwhelmed, one man was there to encourage me forward. Continue reading “On Becoming A Storyteller: A Berlin Memoir by Jessica Ciccarelli”→
“…I miss the possibility of Buenos Aires. And by missing its possibility I can miss my own hometown without the uncomfortable bits, without all the impossibilities, the proximities, the complexities and familiarities. The parts that can hurt.”
Fernando Sdrigotti is a writer, editor and occasional translator. Born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1977, he was expelled by the economic crash of 2001. He lived in Dublin and Paris before settling in London in the early noughties. Continue reading “Fernando Sdrigotti: In Conversation with C.C. O’Hanlon”→
I started work on The Catskills Dream series after creating the first collage – The Catskills Visitor.
I’d visited New York several times but on one visit, I became intrigued by an area well to the north of it, known as the Catskills. I didn’t go there but I began to research it: stories of the old Borscht Belt, the summer circuit for Jewish entertainers, abandoned hotels and motels, retired lives, old secrets, broken promises. Continue reading “The Catskills Dream by Anna Louise Simpson”→
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 