Writer and photographer Michael Dickel has work in several print and online publications. He co-edited Voices Israel Volume 36 (2010), and was managing editor for arc-23 and -24. His most recent book, The Palm Reading after The Toad’s Garden, came out in 2016. Previous books are: War Surrounds Us, Midwest / Mid-East, and The World Behind It, Chaos… He has taught at colleges and universities in both Israel and the U.S.
– Michael Dickel…
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Books of humorous essays can be hit or miss. Too often, the collection lacks cohesion or the humor can feel cloying. Scaachi Koul’s debut, One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, is the rare collection in which none of the essays feel expendable. Rather, each one is well-crafted and thoroughly entertaining, balancing keen insight with effortless, acerbic wit.
Koul’s essays largely center around her identity and how it was shaped by her upbringing in Calgary as a child of Indian immigrants, the racism (both subtle and overt) she’s experienced growing up in a predominantly white neighborhood, and the sexism embedded in both Western and Indian cultures. Her experiences feeling like an outsider undoubtedly helped influence her perspective, which is uniquely her own.…
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Sarah-Jean Krahn is the Managing Editor of feminist writing journal S/tick and holds an MA in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory from McMaster University. Her writing appears in various anthologies and journals, including Berkeley Poetry Review and Feminist Studies, and she was recently nominated for a Pushcart.
Please describe your website and your duties as editor/writer.
I like to think of S/tick as an ever-growing creative collaborative community of feminist writers and artists. In keeping with our mission to publish things that are difficult to say or hard to find a home for, we strive to share as many feminist voices as possible by currently publishing 50%+ of the submissions we receive. To some degree, S/tick snags the poems and stories that have been relegated to an eternal time-out, castigated as too complain-y, too feminist, too real.…
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Behind every crazy woman is a man sitting very quietly, saying, “What? I’m not doing anything.”
At some point, you realize you aren’t waiting anymore for your life to start. Your life’s happening right now, and it’s pretty dull.
– Jade Sharma, Problems
There’s an unspoken yet ubiquitous set of expectations we have for women in an attempt to keep them palatable. They shouldn’t be “too loud” or “too much.” We praise them on their restraint. We associate femininity with being demure. Maya, the narrator of Jade Sharma’s Problems, has freed herself from the shackles of these notions, so much so that her behavior directly upends them: She’s a drug addict. She’s blunt about not loving her husband. She’s unapologetically unfaithful, sleeping with a much older man who doesn’t bother pretending to be interested in her.…
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Cristina Deptula is the executive editor of Synchronized Chaos Magazine. A former science and technology journalist, she enjoys discovering how people think and how the universe works. When not writing or editing, she loves to hike, read novels, and sip coffee.
Please describe your website and your duties as editor/writer.
Synchronized Chaos Magazine accepts submissions of writing and visual art of all genres from around the world. We then determine the theme for each month based on what we have received, tying all the submissions together into some sort of cohesive theme. While this has on occasion required some creativity, it has also brought our team together as we brainstorm and encouraged the contributors to come back to the site and read everyone else’s work.…
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Life carries us through various stages of maturity like a ship transporting passengers from one location to another. External situations and struggles shape the individual, unearthing truths and revelations about the self in relation to those situations and struggles. Sexuality and physical desire are just two of many other unearthed revelations that can make themselves known throughout our lives, dug up, as it were, as we traverse the overgrown path of life. With these two revelations, others can be planted and given a chance to grow. In Marguerite Duras’ novel The Lover, sexuality is used to illustrate the narrator’s journey into adulthood. This journey reveals the narrator’s complex passionate desires and illustrates how her external circumstances unearth deeper, hidden truths about herself and her family.…
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Born in Mexico and residing in New Hampshire, Leza Cantoral is the editor of CLASH Books and the author of Cartoons in the Suicide Forest, a wonderfully twisted, clever, and poignant short story collection that we, among many other outlets, enjoyed very much. In this second episode of Cover to Cover with . . . , Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum and Cantoral touch upon many topics, including her work and inspirations, the highs and lows of AWP (where they recorded this), Trump, bigotry, and of course, sex and drugs!
– Leza Cantoral…
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