the
b’k
bitchin’ kitsch
7 Iss. 11 Nov 2016 Vol.
The Talent
Cover: “Earhugger” by Chad Fisher. Shola Balogun 14 Sissy Buckles 4-5 Bob Carlton 24-25 Dennis Caswell 17 Giada Cattaneo 23 Natalie Crick 26 E.A. Feliu 16 David Felix 15 Richard Horton 8-11 Jennifer McCain 3 Joanna Michaels 20-21 BZ Niditch 22 Tommy Paley 12-13 Simon Perchik 28 Emma Ruppert 18 Emily Rose Schanowski 7, 27 Olivier Schopfer 19, 30 Thom Young 6
Jennifer McCain | Inter- | Poetry You are just like all the others. My White Savior so full of that alpha that you cannot fathom the alpha that I’ve become. Satisfied to keep me compliant like the people before me. like the ones before you. I see what you do when your fetish has teeth. Barks back. I become your scapegoat. My sex. My melanin. Become your rally cry. Your progressivity disappears. Your declarations become conditions and I become something to be contained and controlled and silenced. like the ones before me.
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Sissy Buckles | coin free | Poetry
A tropical day, San Diego day. Christmas eve brings off-shore winds profit-traps and phony flocked bitter trees harried buyers clutching last minute hidden delights to be boxed-wrapped-taped-beribboned. The Old Town bedlamite giggling under breath and scratching his crotch, bench lonely, harmlessly soaks up rays in the tiled Spanish courtyard painting caves in his head, coin free he shambles down the road a directionless suspect idling along occasionally swatting some invisible devil who drifted too close yelling in tongues to hung gallows souls, cattle rustlers and bank robbers, gunslingers who conquered the Wild West now caught in the Old Whaley House spooking sightseers for kicks. Strange keepers let him wander under sun existing on complimentary coffee
from Taco Bell across the street followed by his weird disciple and only friend the black & white Jellicle cat rolling eyes, her matted hair torn out in patches from hard fought alley battles, mud-caked, lower lip swinging free from pink gum wind wiggling snaggle toothy dribbling empty belly relying on leftover scraps of the fat stuffed tourists gobbling synthetic tacos and styrofoam beans. Ancient daddyman flapping wrinkled shirtsleeves, faceless sixth sensed character wearing a deep street tan, looking savage as Lear on the heath keeping festered visions to himself, the tempest trapped tight inside his mind. Then the downcast eyes lift for a moment to hold mine in lucid gleam, now stealing my thoughts? I want to give him something, it’s a birthday after all — he seems to know.
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Thom Young | War | Poetry
they made war on the lunch break listening to the last waltz of the American dream and planted flowers in the dull cities just to see them die pretty little things bitter little things mad little things ladies with murder in their eyes a world full of hate and petro souls at last.
Emily Rose Schanowski
Emily Rose Schanowski | Levitating | Watercolor and ink on paper 7
Richard Horton | Future Resonance | Fiction One day in 1968 at a Berkeley rally, Tamara Brand turned her news camera on an interesting looking shirtless 76-year-old man, with long white hair. He was well-muscled but looked gentle, almost mystical. She thought he could be a shaman of some kind, because of his sun darkened skin and shaman beads. She later discovered he was Jack Drigger, professor of modern art at Berkeley. Here are some things she found out about him before deciding, unwisely, to marry him. In 1964 a California court had awarded Julia Hopner Drigger custody of her three children after she divorced professor Jack Drigger on the grounds of infidelity, drug use and neglect. Jack had to explain this to Tamara before she would sleep with him the first time. Passing her the bong, he explained that the divorce had forced him to confront his demons through group therapy and meditation. Holding the enormous toke she’d just taken, she considered her options, and decided on marriage. But she did continue her research, and discovered that, in 1960, community college teacher Jack Norgaard Drigger’s name was removed from a blacklist of suspected Communist moles outed at Columbia U. in the ‘50s. With his well known friendships with big name cubist and surrealist artists of the 1920’s, Jack was immediately hired to teach modern art at Berkeley U. He abandoned his disfunctional family in Miami and traveled to CA where, after his divorce from Esmerelda Ramos Drigger, he married Julia Hopner, a student in his first year class at Berkeley. Further back than that, in 1953, Jack had taken a sabatical from Columbia University where he had been teaching modern art, and had gone to Europe to work on the set of Square Shadow, an art film being shot in Frankfurt, Germany, starring Jack Palance and Shelley Winters, and based on Drigger’s book of the same name. One day while talking to Palance and eating a sandwich at the actors’ cantina, he received a letter from the U.S. State Dept. The letter said his visa had been revoked. Forced to return to NY, he was subpoenaed to testify before HUAC, where he took the 5th. Shortly after that, Columbia U. experienced a financial crisis which forced them to let Jack go, despite tenure. This precipitated an argument with John Rushton, Jack’s father-in-law, a Columbia regent. Jack’s wife, Astrid, took her father’s side, and Jack stormed out of the penthouse apartment and boarded a bus to Miami, where, after his divorce from Astrid Rushton Drigger, he married Esmerelda Ramos and settled down teaching English-As-A-ForeignLanguage to Cuban Americans. Five years before that, in 1948, Jack Drigger was in Europe, at Pablo Picasso’s villa reconnecting with Pablo and some of the old crowd who were having a kind of leftist old home week there. The famous artists assured him that the Communists were now seeking a constructive and realistic partnership with the West. Ilya Ehrenberg was at the villa, and remarked to Jack, “Oh, that mistaken identity thing in Spain in ‘38? Forget that! A hug and a vodka for you, comrade! That operative wouldn’t have shot you anyway.”
Later on, at loose ends after doing a little work with UNESCO in Greece, Jack returned to the U.S. and got caught up in Henry Wallace’s Progressive run for the White House. Jack gave one of the speeches at the Madison Square Garden rally, in his old OSS uniform, and while doing that, he happened to catch the eye of a wealthy deb, Astrid Rushton, daughter of a Columbia U. regent. Soon it was wedding bells, moonlight in Vermont, then off with the uniform and on with a professor outfit as John Rushton pulled strings. Six years before all this, in 1942, OSS operative Lt. Jack Drigger walked into the office of his CO and reported that he was late getting back from his assignment because of engine trouble. The officer laughed. Everyone knew Jack was an expert mechanic. The assumption was that he had probably spent the night with a girlfriend. In reality he was late because he had found and liquidated Nazi agent Rudi Hasser, whom he had reason to believe had staged writer Stefan Zweig’s suicide in Petropolis, Brazil. It’s now clear that the Zweigs had no help committing suicide, but Rudi Hasser with his resume of brutalities assuredly deserved a little assistance leaving this earth. Going back three more years, to 1938, Jack crawled out of his grounded but miraculously intact bomber on a mountainside near Teruel, Spain, having bombed an Italian fascist airstrip and strafed a Nationalist supply convoy. Loyalist peasants risked their lives getting the wounded fighter off the mountain and into hiding where he recovered. Someone told him a Comintern agent was coming to liquidate him for the Stockholm affair two years previously. Jack had recovered enough by then to to hop on a captured Italian Vespa motorcycle and take a night journey to the French border. This Stockholm affair, now that was an interesting incident. In1936. Jack was in Moscow representing the French surrealist artists in an attempt to organize a Franco-Russian surrealist exhibit, when he was approached by a fugitive Russian cubo-futurist whom he helped to escape to Stockholm, Sweden. Just at that moment there was too much racket with the start-up of the Spanish Civil War for the Comintern to respond right away, and Jack quickly became a high profile loyalist hero anyway. But later maybe. Da? In 1934, the Comintern and everyone else in Russia had thought very highly of Jack, with his daring rescues in Hitler’s Germany, often dressed in a stolen SS outfit. Jack’s German was crisp and convincing, though larded with words more suited for reviewing art exhibits than giving orders. It was no surprise when he received a gilded invitation to the First Meeting of the All Russian Union of Soviet Writers to take place in Moscow in August. In Moscow he received the highest priced dinner and the cleanest hotel room.
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His conference speech in favor of artistic openness and tolerance toward the cubists was politely applauded by frowning Party men. After a particularly stupendous restaurant feast that night, he found a little pamphlet cleverly wrapped inside his napkin, a miniature edition of Pushkin’s play, “Feast In Time Of Famine.” Now what do you suppose that could mean, eh? Let’s go back, though, to a time before so many famines. In 1928, with modernist art trending in NY, Jack Drigger got his industrialist dad in Minneapolis to convince friends at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to mount a diversified modernist exhibit by Jack’s cubist, futurist and surrealist friends. Jack’s essay in the exhibit catalog so clearly summarized the various theories of art his friends had revealed to him over wine in midnight cafes in Paris that it was referenced by Roger Fry and other scholars. But long before that, in 1921, Jack had felt a need to put aside his literary and artistic obsessions and experience the America he had fought for as a tank commander in WWI. He took a motorcycle trip across the Southwest with his old Harvard schoolmate Al Patterson. Both were expert mechanics, which saved their bacon more than once, as they explored out-of-the-way places, hobnobbed with cowpokes, and romanced sixshoot’n cowgirls too. Coming near Santa Fe, they pulled in at Jack’s Uncle Ed’s ranch, and had fun helping out with ranch work, though the 70 year old uncle and his wife outworked the two strapping former Harvard football champions. Way back before the war, though, in 1914, Jack had been considering a life as an academic, but all his friends were going to Paris so off he went, to think things over while having a grand time. His ideas about art were already adventuresome, so he went to exhibits other Americans shunned, where he met Picasso, Juan Gris, and the whole cubist crowd. Short dark Tom Benton, then a cubist living in Paris, was the one who theorized the most, especially after a few drinks, but the other cubo-futurists contradicted some of Tom’s ideas. Through the well-dressed but reticent Stefan Zweig, Jack met a set of left-leaning humanist French and Belgian writers. It was certainly lucky that Jack had studied French and German at Harvard. Yes, back in 1910, on the Harvard football team, Jack Drigger had been a leather helmeted hero. As for his academic enthusiasms they included German philosophy, Greek philology and French engineering. He read French literary and art journals, but found time to learn motorcar and motorcycle repair at a local garage. At the shooting club his marksmanship earned him a medal, not surprising for a young fellow who had grown up out West in Minneapolis. Walt Drigger, Jack’s dad, a furniture baron, was married to Sophie Norgaard, whose older brother Ed had a ranch outside Santa Fe New Mexico. Ed and his wife Edna (yes they got jokes about their names) were always writing to Walt telling him to let his boys come down and spend a summer getting all hardened up doing ranch work.
So in 1900, 8-year-old Jackie Drigger boarded the train to Santa Fe with his 18 year old cousin Attilia Norgaard, with whom he fell in love on the trip. 8 years old and in love, now that’s a hoot! At his uncle’s ranch he forgot about romance in the excitement of getting to wear a cowhand outfit, boots, and a big hat. He learned to ride a horse and shoot a 22 caliber rifle. The Indians who worked as ranch hands on the place took a liking to the kid and invited him to the camp they were staying in. A shirtless old man with long white hair came up and gave Jack an Indian necklace with a pendant that had some kind of ritualistic significance. He said the necklace once belonged to a shaman. Well you see, none of this stuff would have happened except that in 1892 a crap game was going on in heaven. The Aeons said art ceased being art when it physically manifested. The Archons said that was a load of crap, and that the Aeons were just afraid to exist. When they heard this, the Aeons said no they weren’t afraid. It was just that being was enough for them. Existence would be hell. Just look at how the Archons had turned out. Down on earth, in Minneapolis, Sophie Norgaard Drigger sat up in bed, went “Oh-oh!” and rang for the maid. Her water had broke. I want to trace Jack’s story back farther than this, but our rear ends might punch through into the zone of pure being, and the Aeons would come over and deconstruct us to the end of night. I don’t recommend going where the Aeons are, if the word “where” describes it.
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Tommy Paley | Time to Make it Snow | Prose He sat on the grass by the lake under the shade of the grand old oak tree spying on her swimming from his private vantage point, just marveling at how wet her hair was able to get and just laughing at how dry it would be later. She took the expression “if the shoe fits, wear it” literally exactly once a month just so the huge pile of shoes in her closet didn’t feel like a complete waste of money. He climbed a ladder to the roof of his house, hoisted himself up, and looked back down at the ground with disdain and pity. It was moments like this when he felt so proud and alone. She is often told that she looks like a woman half her age which makes her understandably happy as well as eager to meet this youthful woman whom she will either befriend, tear to shreds or both. He drinks water with a thirst befitting a much thirstier person or a less thirsty person who is aiming to fit in among all of the other very thirsty and cool people he is always surrounded by, which he is. She burst through the door, ran to the bookshelf and hurriedly re-organized her books by their chronological date of publication just in time for the arrival of her mother who only asked for one thing in return for years of thankless parenting; randomly assorted books and periodicals whenever she visited. “Take that mom!” she whispered devilishly under her breath as she heard her mom knocking at the door. He opened his closet and placed all of his shirts in a pile and then, taking exactly four large steps backward, he leapt on top of the shirts with a glee that could only come from leaping onto a large pile of shirts or finally being completely wart free. She was heading uptown on the bus surrounded by hippos, most likely hungry hungry ones, and she was just praying that they weren’t also going to the library, no matter how real or imaginary they or her trip to the library was. He sat in his car and observed the busy street around him – a couple walking their dog, the mail carrier distributing letters and flyers, a young woman going for a run, some kids making a lemonade stand and an older man watering flowers in his underwear. “Damn,” he thought as he looked around in wonderment “this is one amazing tuna salad sandwich.” She was sitting at her desk in the dark, her face illuminated by the moon in the window, as she faced a giant pile of premium white paper. She methodically picked up one sheet at a time and punched hole after hole after hole in them until all that was remaining was a massive mountain of white circles. With as much restraint as she could muster, she grabbed her glue stick, rose and walked slowly and menacingly towards the freshly painted black wall. “Time to make it snow” she whispered. He spent his days wantonly and dramatically cracking nuts and then, stopping, feeling guilty, and gluing them back together.
She sat at the piano and played slow, moving and emotional songs for hours until she just couldn’t take it any longer as she dropped her head and wept. Steadying herself, she stood, took a step back and then grabbed her trusty saw. No one, not even her beloved piano, could make her feel this way. He looked at the large, juicy apple on the counter with misplaced jealousy followed by vicious sadistic chopping with his invisible knife before turning to face himself in the mirror with the smug satisfaction of a job well done before settling down to enjoy yet another really great apple still filled with misplaced jealousy. She sat on the beach watching the waves crash at her feet enjoying this perfect moment of relaxation. A flock of seagulls announced their presence overhead. The waves continued. Her mind drifted. She wondered how different things would be if, instead of water, the waves were in fact made up of flocks of seagulls and she, for some reason, smelled strongly of fish. Or what if she was a seagull and the rest of the flock, all of a sudden, decided they no longer wished to fly with her for reasons they couldn’t completely articulate mostly because they were seagulls. Or if this beach and the waves and the seagulls were merely figments of her imagination or she of theirs. She sat on the beach watching the waves crash at her feet only feeling significantly less relaxed. He, after many months of menu planning and hiring staff, opened up his first restaurant to rave reviews such as “why does this place reek of fish?”, “you do know that this isn’t your restaurant, it’s my boat, right?”, “stop wildly waving that freshly caught snapper in my face while imitating my voice” and “fine, if I order the bouillabaisse, will you leave me and my boat alone?” She often stands outside on her deck on warm summer evenings, glass of wine in hand, just wishing she was more one dimensional in all senses of the term. He is often referred to as a human garbage can by his friends who are, in fact, garbage cans and aren’t, in his experience, the best judgers of character. And yet, it still hurts. She held her newborn baby on her lap the way a mother dolphin would hold a baby dolphin if it had arms and hands and a lap. Why she was always making things unnecessarily challenging and awkward and involving dolphins, she’d never know. He spent his afternoon enjoying the groves of cool jazz, sipping deliciously fruity cocktails, preparing delicate and dainty spinach and feta pastries as well as plotting the brutal and vengeful overthrow of his strata council. She stopped what she was doing each day exactly at four and ran home. No matter where she was, who she was with and what she was doing, she would abruptly stop, only to resume those activities at exactly 4:25. What happened in that 25 minute period each day and why it left her literally covered in glitter and soot and smelling of talcum powder and orange zest, she would take to her grave. It’s how she was raised.
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Shola Balogun | I Too Shall Anoint the stones | poetry It is said that a depressed man, Fleeing from his homeland, Lonely in the Eastern night, Gathered the stones on his path And made them his pillows, And seeing the ladder To the gate of heaven, He trembled at the mystery of God And anointed the stones. I am a depressed man too, Leaving behind my fathers’ walls Destitute in the African night. I keep the stones in my hand And count them along in every step. I see the barbed wire Rising on the high gates Of the despots and tremble At the misery of the helpless.
David Felix
David Felix | Bell Drift #2 | Visual Poem
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E. A. Feliu | Days We would Rather Know | poetry I pause, wondering if it’s really you. “For Betsey F-----, with every good wish.” Then a signature that looks like cow tits. Your name is crossed out on the title page, replaced by the peaks and valleys of a sine graph. It arrived on the heels of Laps, which I finished the night before, remembering things unspoken, though claimed. This has a favorite, “Back from the Word-Processing Course, I Say to my Old Typewriter,” first found in Norton. Earlier that afternoon, I bought an Olympia SM9 Deluxe. I love its gray West German grace, the oily glide of the carriage as I enter this line, hesitating to mention I spilled coffee on the book and now there are mud clouds on every page until Seasons and Transformations.
Dennis Caswell | My TED talk | poetry
My colleagues and I have learned that the true source of happiness is commanding an army of robots and telling people how wrong they are, but don’t be convinced until you’ve seen these bad-assed, big-data visualizations. In this one, the fiery explosions are my colleagues and I, and the bedlam of little gray dots, all frantically running in circles, is you. My colleagues and I were curious about how smart we really are, so we asked a hundred volunteers, “What would you give a TED talk on,” and they all said, “Oh god, we couldn’t give a TED talk,” except for one, who started raving about how badly we all need poetry, which, of course, confirmed our hypothesis. If I could teach you just one thing, it’s that I’m up here and you’re down there. My time is just about up, but yours will never come.
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Emma Ruppert | Jess: Hardened by Love | Poetry Jess: the non-slip Jess, the stretchmark shirt with gum in the pockets has seven kids that go loud ways, is polishing martini glasses with her feet on the rung, Jess: the chrome stool’s glare, eyebrows like the spectacled sun going down and her playful smack of gum that a tiger hails a ball with. “Kim, none of your peach crap, this chica wants a screwdriver,” Jess steers by the waist toward tables with the drinks, we stand with the traction of our shoes steeping on stools and try to keep our work shirts nice. She rocks on hours of her feet, Jess’ drink left at the bar, the burgundy of her firm hair. We skid in to close her spot, filling our breath with gum, the vodka hiding underneath, Jess, Jess unwrapped and Jess old, rocks the pressure from her feet after she drops the drinks off, has a seat, eyebrows like the setting sun and her shirt still clean.
Olivier Schopfer
Olivier Schopfer | Stand Up | Photograph
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JoAnna Michaels | Gold | Poetry
She’d wake from dreams of deserts and graffiti walls and he’d whisper, “I find strands of gold on my pillow.” She’d smile and stare at a slightly dusty ceiling. This was the beginning of morning. He held her so tightly, during their first meeting, he buried his face in a mess of curly hair. “You smell like home,” he gasped. “You smell like home.” And he wept. His home was mangled, rubble, dried blood pale faces with blue lips. His home was a prison within hers, mosaic walls, armed guards, families in cafes, chatting as though genocide were just another appetizer.
After months, quite suddenly, she was no longer his home. She was his warden, his oppressor. She held the guns toward young children who threw rocks, a reminder of occupation, the leftover debris from explosions — Finally, the strands of gold were pulled, slammed against an old Buick — mixed with tears from the Dead Sea. They were forced apart with walls created and endorsed by white judges.
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BZ Niditch | Jack Kerouac’s Hour | Poetry
Your language draws us into your personality to make us travel with you recollecting some of your stories shining in a recall of memory embraced in a diary reflected summarily in D’harma Bum faces disclosed vocally and directed from your country’s unlocked prose pieces of novel intimacy or in momentary poetic creation on the roads, beach and docks or on the city steps off Kerouac’s lost highway crossing by City Lights alley reaching for your writing chair in hollow coffee houses returning from the 1950’s cafes empowering words of scat melodies sing on spontaneously at the Red Drum memory where his sacks of grief fills up huge beer cups joined to share on Kerouac’s summoned hour as a sublime solo sax riffs over his chapter of notes
offering jazz’s relief at a changing scene as a Beat poet escapes to a new reality fully extends his unfolding brief in an encounter of pop art from Edward Ruscha now at the L.A.’s Hammer museum remains a guardian angel for him at the Sixties surreal season of a likely imparting correspondence offering an uneasy clearing line between two newly discovered talents recalling when Jack is clearing Frisco as his motorcycle handle falls off on the road between local cars nearing a departure of his taxing life and nature of his waxing ego not ready for the stars in heaven words transfer to the another body by Jack’s transmigrating soul from the century’s cultural dust still bites him as a visionary must to span forty seven candles to be created whole.
Giada Cattaneo
Giada Cattaneo | Painful | Mixed Media
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Bob Carlton | Larry Parrish is Why I’m alone | Fiction If you are not a fan of watching mediocre baseball played under a merciless blue sky in heat unforgiving and brutal, then a Sunday afternoon spent at Arlington Stadium in the summer of 1985 might serve as a definition of Hell. Two o’clock start times insured that the general admission metal bleacher seats in left field were, by game time, equally capable of frying an egg or searing human flesh. On the bright side, pardon the pun, the quality of the product on the field assured ease of movement and a surplus of personal space, the possibilities of solitude and escape or interaction and adventure open in equal measure. I had split off early on from the guys I had come with, and was sitting by myself, drinking beer and sprawling across several seats in the largely empty section. The game was still in the early innings and the Rangers, as usual, were already trailing. Thus, even at this normally non-crucial juncture, the fact that the Rangers had runners in scoring position as their clean-up hitter and best RBI man stepped to the plate freighted the moment with excitement and the potential for hometown joy, however fleeting. “Excuse me,” said the young lady who had seemed to materialize next to me from out of nowhere, so intent was my concentration on the battle shaping up some five hundred feet away. “My friend over there in the purple top thinks you’re cute. Want to come hang out with us?” I didn’t even look up. “After this,” I said, waving a hand toward the distant diamond. “We’re right in the middle of an at-bat.” “Okay,” she said, her voice a tone of amused confusion, and with that walked off. I glanced over to where the girls were standing a couple of sections away. There were three of them, pretty in the way all the teenage girls were who spent part of their summer vacation roaming the vast open stretches of the stadium in search of diversion and amusement. The one in the purple shirt was certainly cute, with a dark tan and long brown hair, though her white shorts revealed a somewhat skinny pair of legs. Still, in another pitch or two...
The at-bat dragged on for another half-dozen pitches and resulted in nothing more than yet another squandered scoring opportunity. I scanned the bleachers for the girls, spotting them a few times, but they had clearly moved on, continuously putting distance between themselves and me. So, perhaps watching mediocre baseball beneath a merciless blue sky in heat unforgiving and brutal on a Sunday afternoon at Arlington Stadium in the summer of 1985, all the while burdened with the bitter knowledge of loss and regret, might indeed serve as a definition of Hell.
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Natalie Crick | Sunday School | Poetry
Madeline loves it And sits as Mother would. The priest is like her Father Dressed all in grey, Palms fluttering with Paper clowns, Legs and arms spinning anti-clockwise Like the priest’s eyes slide From side to side. We are his for an hour But he cannot touch us, For we are jewels to be watched, And, one day taken. Nobody has ever held his hand But Grandmother, with rings like Little girl’s warnings. This is my house of God, Rain thundering as Unanswered questions. Their faces are taught and chilled with frost. He is the bee of androgyny Thrusting candelabras as tusks. This drone of activity, It is all too much for me. Faces dumb as naked dolls. He strips them, licking them with stars Like potential girlfriends Or meats to be weighed.
Emily Rose Schanowski
emily rose schanowski | upholstery | graphite on paper 27
Simon Perchik | Untitled | Poetry You leave a fist, its knock elsewhere and no one to let you in the way her name on the door has grown huge, fed hillsides and the grass too is covered with granite :her small room filled with season after season and each finger curled held back, asking how cold is it –it’s everywhere though your arms still open out and all these doors at once, let you stand in front listening to a procession –one pit filled with its echo and mourners empty handed, hungry, cramped.
History — The B’K
The Bitchin’ Kitsch (2010-present) or The B’K is a compzine edited and published by The TalbotHeindl Experience, LLC in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. The Bitchin’ Kitsch was created as a monthly zine for artists, poets, prose writers, or anyone else who had something to say. It was born out of a necessity to create an avenue for editor, Chris Talbot-Heindl, to remain artistic after school, with her subversive style, while continuing to live in Central Wisconsin. It exists for the purpose of open creativity and seeks to be an outlet for people who may not otherwise have an opportunity to show their work. Although the idea was created as a “what-if” brainstorm between the Talbot-Heindls’ whilst in bed and sort of groggy, it has since blossomed into a legitimate publication that has gone international Through the grace of the Internet, The B’K has had the opportunity to create a juried book and the opportunity to publish two juried chapbooks. Here’s to the past five years, and hopefully many, many more.
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Olivier Schopfer
Olivier Schopfer | Windows | Photograph