an excerpt from The Gush by SJ Fowler
Ash and Stardust, a monthly column by energy worker and artist/writer DHIYANAH HASSAN explores the intersections of tarot with healing and creativity. You can read the rest of the series here.
For October, I came up with a personalized tarot-inspired inktober challenge that I named after this column, #ashytober. I drew a card for each day and then illustrated my response to that card. The result is a series of digital art illustrations that gave life and ambience to the vibrant things that pulsate vividly beyond the surface of my days. Save for a couple of lags, I spent my October making art that I had no chance to plan for since each day’s prompt only happened when I pulled a card from the deck. I documented the work and shared some insight about the process for each piece on my Instagram (they’ll also be up on my website once that’s back out of its hiatus).
The ways in which I work has changed. Instead of squeezing effort to make things, I’m more focused on allowing things to happen. There’s so much that wants to come through me, so much that’s getting ready that wants me to be gentle with it.
Working on #ashytober after months of light sketchbook work allowed me the space to let the different parts of my work – my art, my training as a healer, my words, my aspirations – find their own ways to integrate and merge. I also found out that working intuitively was a great way to allow old strategies of art-making to adapt to where I’m at now.
Like how with each piece of #ashytober, I was building – finding – a fantastical world that housed its own cosmic cartography with strange landscapes, multiple suns and moons in the sky, and characters living diverse lifestyles.
Building up a cosmology for magical worlds – like building up the narrative behind the theory behind the symbology of a series – is something I’ve grown so accustomed to in my work as an artist. Except that I used to pressure myself to the point of paralysis that not much of this work gets to see the light of day. And so it was really delightful – like unwrapping candy to find a surprise toy packed inside with it – to see an entire universe of characters and narratives being spun out so spontaneously with each piece.
Air cooled life-forms by Rob Miller
About the series //
Work produced for the Grey Planet series reflects the incalculable absurdity of a global economy fundamentally at odds with our shared ecology – the [im]material flows of commerce, a fiction of progress constructed from pure exceptionalism. We the first of the last men trade more than futures; these transactions create a terminal velocity in which we attempt to live a myth not yet even imagined. We are faced then with a new and inescapable reality, in which the world-wide blindness of our impact is matched only by the eco-anxiousness of the few. Willingness alone simply produces an artifice of meaning and self-indulgent virtue signalling – conflicted anxieties of which I am equally guilty.
Continue reading “Air cooled life-forms: Rob Miller”
SJ Fowler was interviewed by Matthew Blunderfield for Episode 12 of the Scaffold Podcast. In this interview Steven talks about many things, but of particular relevance to my guest editorship are his thoughts on the avant-garde, and future-facing poetry. I hope you may find this interview useful. With thanks to the Scaffold Podcast, Matthew Blunderfield & SJ Fowler.
“After trying for a couple of years to write smooth poems about wild animals or foxes or whatever poets do in the countryside I realised actually I can’t control anything, I’m going to die, and that language, before that death, will not comfort me […] The first note of understanding language before you re-displace it as an art form is to understand that it will always fail to communicate what you want to communicate.”
(image: your own double-entry by SJ Fowler)
Burning House Press are excited to welcome PAUL HAWKINS as our NOVEMBER guest editor! As of today Paul will take over editorship of Burning House Press online for the full month of November.
Submissions for Paul are open from today – 1st November and will remain open until 23rd November.
Paul’s Theme for the month is as follows
FACING UP TO THE FUTURE
Paul has introduced his theme for your guidance:
Facing up to the future
Please submit work of a future-facing, avant-garde nature that is singly or a combination of form(s): poetry, prose, visual artworks, collage, sound, photography, musical scores, architectural design, forms, maps, film, sketches, plans, short stories in which context dominates content.
for e.g.
the poetry of: space-junk, fake news, black ops, artificial intelligence,
the visual taste of global-warming, #metoo, rising-tides
the musical scent of Brexit, Trump, The Cloud
the sound map of: gentrification, water-shortage, anarchism
ENCOURAGED: work that is collaborative, radical, experimental, intersectional, across form(s) & across discipline(s).
Continue reading “NOVEMBER 2018 Guest Editor Is PAUL HAWKINS!!! Theme: FACING UP TO THE FUTURE”
GENDER & REVOLUTION EDITION – SELECTED/CURATED/PRESENTED BY OCTOBER 2018 GUEST EDITORS SHE SPEAKS UK
Aaand that’s a wrap! Burning House Press would like to thank October’s Guest Editors SHE SPEAKS UK for selecting, curating and presenting an INCREDIBLE array of writing and art on the theme/s GENDER & REVOLUTION – and for all of the endeavour and hard work that has gone into managing the month – THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING, EMERCIANA, AOIFE, & JO!!!
Massive thank you also goes to everyone who contributed to the theme/s and all who continue to send BHP your writing and art – we are so happy and grateful that you entrust us with your work, thank you!!! xX
Here it is, the full GENDER & REVOLUTION EDITION – every selection in one place for you to read/peruse – enjoy!!! xX Continue reading “GENDER & REVOLUTION EDITION – SELECTED/CURATED/PRESENTED BY OCTOBER 2018 GUEST EDITORS SHE SPEAKS UK”
Between your [social] legs
Sometime in the past, B was born..
B breathes, welcoming the air external to the host person.
A: ‘What is between your legs, little one?’
B cries.
A: ‘Congratulations, it’s a.. >insert binary pronoun here< .’
B cries, again.
A: ‘What are you going to call >insert corresponding binary pronoun, here< ?’
Sometime later, after B has spent years experiencing on earth..
B: ‘I still breathe, and cry. The questioning human at my birth got the pronoun wrong. It was a mistake to think that my anatomy somehow directly corresponded to a distinctive set of social behaviours. Or, knowingly or unknowingly, any attempts to make that the case. Other determining factors which continue to make me me, were quite underestimated, overlooked or ignorantly bypassed. As were possibility and actuality.’
B Pauses.
B: ‘Yes, I have something between my legs, and person/human/homo sapien is my name’
A: ‘What is between your.. social.. legs, big one?’
B: ‘A variety of focal points for questioning. And I may not be one, but many. And why the assumption of ‘I’, anyway? But that’s for another time.’
A jar of paint-thick blood and mire
To wet an oxen’s head
A finger blackened by the fire
And pressed against the red.
A mask of white upon the fool
Who stares up from the feast
A couple fleeing with their mule
But cannot move the beast.
girls are silver
I was taught that
girls are silver smiles to be polished
laughter the sound of a fingerflickedagainst
a trophy ringing with emptiness.
I knew that I wasn’t
silver knew I was drinking from the depth
of starving wells knew that girls
like me
would
ReVerse Butcher is a multi-disciplinary artist with focuses in making unique artist’s books, collages, visual art, writing & performance. She will use any medium necessary to engage and subvert reality until it is less dull and oppressive. When she grows up she wants to be a well-read recluse. She currently lives in Melbourne, Australia.
I want to be a Monstrous Woman
To speak out of turn
To take up space
To scandalise tabloid newspapers
I want to question authority
To win more fights than I lose
To take my fair share
And allow you to take yours too
I want never to apologise for myself again
Yellow Flower
Are you a girl
or a boy?
my nephew would ask me,
puzzled.
I’d smile and try not to answer
for as long as I could.
But he was so persistent, so
needy for reassurance.
My nephew is secure in his boyhood;
no questions, no blurriness
in his mind. He, him,
boy things, boy clothes
and books.
But me? An enigma, Continue reading “Poem, Writing & Art by Alix Hyde”
Sam Kaner is a visual artist and writer based in Nottingham, UK. Her work is rooted in the personal experience of social and political navigation as a depressed trans woman of colour.
Her work is documented on her website, www.samkaner.com, and on her Instagram account, @skamglamart.
Shapeshifter
I exist somewhere between `
a match and a flame,
a tear and the sea,
a handful of clay and a sculpted vase.
No other being determines or
influences which form I take,
which direction I follow,
which air I choose to breathe into my lungs.
Those who fear my state of being
fear the unknown,
the unsubscribed,
the undeclared.
And that which causes their unease is my strength.
disrobing
gender is the seam of ill-fitting pants
that, no matter how they are altered,
continue to give me a painful wedgie.
it is a pair of support tights,
that I’m required to wear beneath a skirt,
which gives me a miserable yeast infection.
the only relief is to remove the constraints
of gender entirely and allow myself
to breathe freely…
droplets of revolution
ideas require darkness and a steady drizzle to germinate. letters and syllables mingle. seeping layer by layer into the ground. entwine and thrive deep in the earth. forming stories which push their way up. they present themselves without shame. basking in sunlight. continuing to grow. shouting the brightness of their names. for as long as we tend to them…
rainseed I feed words to the cloud
The way we communicate, specifically with stories, is part of what makes us human. It’s how we know about our past, how we investigate and work through our present, and how we can contribute to the future. By writing our own narratives, we take control instead of allowing them to be written for us. As with growing plants, timing is important in the process of culminating and sharing our stories. This process is a way we can work through conflict and maintain the power of our identities—our resolution for revolution.
Robin Anna Smith (she/her) is a non-binary, disabled writer and visual artist, currently residing in Wilmington, Delaware. She primarily writes about personal experiences with trauma, loss, disability, mental health, and gender identity. She is a regular contributor at Rhythm & Bones Lit. Her work appears or is forthcoming in a variety of online and print journals internationally, and in Unsealing Our Secrets: A Short Poem Anthology About Sexual Abuse and You Are Not Your Rape Anthology.
More of her work can be found at her website robinannasmith.com and Twitter @robinannasmith.
Good golly miss Molly
Did you marry a man with a miner’s lamp and
No brolly?
Didn’t you know that the marriage bed came sprinkled with
Soot? Did he blind you
With a title, then tempt you with a butty?
How long did you keep that aspidistra flying?
Through the childbirth and the child death
And the end of the piano music
Pink is pretty and bravery blue (or so we’ve been told)
forgetting that once upon a time
Victorians held the opposite view-
so when will we stop
teaching young children
that pink, make up, Barbie dolls and dresses are for girls
whilst boys have blue, guns and action heroes?
When will it end?
Women raised to believe they need saving,
their short skirts sexualised from infancy,
infants expected to be raised by their mothers,
not fathers, these men taught to save everyone:
except for themselves.
Two sides, no in-between, began I don’t know when
No, no, you can’t confuse the ladies with the men
Each day the frame repeats
We’re told the story again
In silence and in actions, signs and words
These are the questions thou shalt not ask
These are the persons thou shalt not see
And these commandments are all we need
It’s dangerous
Beyond the gender lines
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 