Vol. 4 Issue 16: Selfie

Vol. 4 Issue 16 New York London Hong Kong Philippines

RUP ERT

‘20

SELFIE

new reader magazine December 2021 | Vol. 4 Issue 16 COVER IMAGE

Genea Rupert CREATIVE STAFF Managing Editor

: Rosalie Abatayo

Feature Editor/ Editorial Assistant Writers and Production Staff

: Jazie Pilones : Sarah Eroy, Regie Vocales, Genea Rupert, Neen Arcilla, Yanya Cortes-Tingzon,

Layout Artist

: Ronel Borres

Publicists

: Tresh Eñerez, Kota Yamada

Researchers

: Rosielyn Herrera, Marjon Gonato, John Paul Vailoces, Ma. Fe Tabura

CONTRIBUTORS

Abigail Bures, Sarah Munoz, Bill Arnott, Vrinda Nair, Dani Zhila, Connor Beeman, Reed Venrick, Anam Tariq, Chase Chasteen, Sarah Cipullo, David Sebesta, KJ Hannah Greenberg, Kayla Branstetter

MARKETING AND ADVERTISING

Laurence Anthony laurence.anthony@newreadermagazine.com

SUBSCRIPTIONS

subscription@newreadermagazine.com www.newreadermagazine.com Phone: 1 800 734 7871 Fax: (914) 265 1215 Write to us: 100 Church St. Suite 800 New York, NY 10007 ISSN 2688-8181

Natalia Sinelnik

All Rights Reserved

NRMedia

EDITOR’S NOTE Pose. Click. Pose. Click.

Treading down the winding road, I often sink deep into my world—the heaving emotions spin like a reel. Inside this bubble of thought is the only place where everything is under my control; the place where I can say when the raindrops fall, or when the sun shines bright, and when and how I nail the day. A scene forms in my head, and I decide at which angle I would click the shutter and the dialogues that spill out of my lips, your lips. I steer the wheel.

There go my daydreams again—my alternate universe—my “selfie.”

Fantasizing creates an escape route from reality, yet I don’t really stray too far from it. The world I create inside my mind still has the streets like those I walk in every morning. It has the same people. I live the same lifestyle. Different, yet the same.

Reading through the submissions that arrived in my inbox for this quarter, I witnessed the nexus between reality and the worlds we create through our art: from Kayla Branstetter’s art and the journey to finding her voice, Bill Arnott’s travels and self-reflections, to overcoming a crisis in the pandemic illustrated in Chase Chasteen’s piece, to KJ Hannah Greenberg’s depiction of the pressing issue of collective sanitation privileges in her flash fiction entry.

I won’t keep you waiting. Dear Readers, join us as we dive into our little and see how much of ourselves is tethered to the massive “real” world in the background.

Ross

Contents Feature

Poetry

Fiction/Non-fiction

08 Bill Arnott’s Beat: Crafting Arts

30 Falling in love and falling apart

58 The Rusted Rite

I live in a place where...

You’re Attuned

BILL ARNOTT

12 Abigail Bures: The blossoming of a writer

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ROSALIE ABATAYO

Kayla Branstetter SARAH ANN

VRINDA NAIR

38 Spilled Milk

Waiting for the Ball to Drop

Passing Through

74 Dear Martha

SARAH CIPULLO

76 A Cigarette Siren

DAVID SEBESTA

80 Conversations Between Two Introverts

22 Bill Arnott: A reflection of self in our crafts

46 The State of Current Affairs

Can I call myself a poet?

86 Public Potties

24 Selfie with Sarah: Passion, Poetry, and the Value of Introspection

A Final Drop

DANI ZHILA

54 river//Dupont//excess

JAZIE PILONES

REGIE VOCALES

Writer’s Corner

SARAH MUNOZ

CHASE CHASTEEN

today

CONNOR BEEMAN

88 A journey to (self)love

62 In the Field of Watermelon Truth

JAZIE PILONES

92 That Smells Like Body Positivity Spirit

SARAH EROY

94 And Yet

Let me take a selfie

The other side of the photo

NEEN ARCILLA

REED VENRICK

66 Down

From the Casement

A Tale of Two Unherds

ANAM TARIQ

ABIGAIL BURES

KJ HANNAH GREENBERG

Art 84 Untitled

Tresh Le 115 Caste

Kayla Branstetter

New Reader Media 100 NRM Blogs 111 To-Read-List

Featured

A Book Barn

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Bookstores

Adventure Books and More

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Contributor’s Corner

gorodenkoff

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Bill Arnott’s Beat

Bill Arnott’s Beat:

Crafting Arts Go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.

Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something. — Kurt Vonnegut I was reading Vonnegut. For no other reason than to say I was reading Vonnegut, thinking it would make me sound erudite. And wanting an opportunity to say “erudite.” First time I heard the word it was used as part of an introduction. A guy describing himself. As erudite. I assumed it meant asshole.

The other reason I was reading Vonnegut was because I figured Kurt couldn’t be all bad, having been cited so often and more importantly that he’d made a cameo appearance playing himself in a Rodney Dangerfield movie—hired by Rodney’s wealthy character to write a college book report, on Vonnegut. Vonnegut wrote the paper. And got a B. Now, three decades and two lifetimes later, I’ve taken Vonnegut’s words to heart, not Rodney’s college paper but Kurt’s quote regarding the arts—not solely to make a living but for the joy and significance of creation. Something from nothing. Alchemy. Even the rubbish. The inherent majesty of manifestation: poetry, painting, writing, and song. Effort and reward. The rumpled foolscap in a bin. The polished, published hardback, bookended on a shelf. Library stacks and album sleeves, digital recordings and paperless chapbooks—every innovation, interpretation, and collaboration grasped from the ether, atmosphere and mental space, thought-bubbledrifting-clouds where pictures, words, and eighth-notes merge converge and find their way to fingers, keyboards, fretboards, staffs and paper—tangibility now birthed then berthed to lifebuoys, hawsers, docks that stretch beyond the sea in fathomless depths of pure potentiality.

This, I understand, had tasted, shared. And longed to savour any, every time the motivation, muse and inspiration rear, arise, reveal themselves and beckon, welcome us to where we still don’t fully understand. And yet we know this space, that place, is beautifully, frighteningly, mindbogglingly real. The trip, unscheduled, to which you simply have to hold your ticket—destination blank—and saunter, wait, next to those tracks and platform landings, terminals and transit stands. Hail all you like, your ride, our ride, will simply come along and pick us up when fates and Norns and crystal balls align, those instances and instants in between the second hands, firsthand experience and nanoseconds serendipitous.

A moment between moments cast in time.

And Kurt, despite your faults and foibles, rest in peace. The words you shared, you share, remain—this art the greatest legacy of all.

*** Bill Arnott is the award-winning author of Gone Viking: A Travel Saga, Gone Viking II: Beyond Boundaries, and the #1 bestseller, Bill Arnott’s Beat: Road Stories & Writers’ Tips. For his expeditions Bill’s been granted a Fellowship at London’s Royal Geographical Society. When not trekking the globe with a small pack, journal, and laughably outdated camera phone, Bill can be found on Canada’s west coast, making music and friends. @billarnott_aps

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Literary Work

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Poetry

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Literary Work Corner Contributor’s

The Blossoming of a Writer Abigail Bures:

BY ROSALIE ABATAYO

Like a flower that blooms with a sweet fragrance as their season sets in, writers—and pretty much artists, in general— grow from a bud of potential and blossom into individuals whose world is so massive to contain in a four-cornered box.

The same goes with Abigail Bures, the youngest of this Issue’s contributors and our featured fiction writer. This Wisconsinite is the author of Conversations Between Two Introverts, an excerpt of which is one of the prized curations in this NRM Issue 16: “Selfie.”

“I began writing more seriously about two years ago, and haven’t stopped since. I love the chaos of it, and even more so, the moment when the chaos comes together and everything finally makes sense,” Abigail tells NRM.

“I actually came up with this idea as I was choosing my courses for the next school year because I wanted to take a psychology class. I also remember not having an accurate representation of a boy-girl friendship in anything I had read or watched, so I wanted to include that in this story,” Abigail shares.

With the help of a professor and six months later, Abigail completed the first and second drafts of her debut novel.

“During this time our school was through zoom, so I had plenty of time to daydream. I made a grid of post-it notes on my wall to map out the parts of this story and how they connected to each other. I found this process very beneficial, as it helped me organize my thoughts when I did sit down to write,” she says.

The conception of Conversations Between Two Introverts sprung to life out of the urge to write what you want to read, a helpful piece of advice that Abigail picked up from Instagram and Twitter. For Abigail, a narrative with a boy and a girl that doesn’t involve romance is one that could make her flip the pages.

Fiction tethered on reality

Sixteen-year-old Abigail attends a small town K-12 school where she spends her time with academic load, playing basketball, and being a stage manager for the school’s drama productions.

“A theme that I often express through writing is the idea of mental health topics. I want people to be more open to change and [to acknowledge] that something may be wrong,” Abigail says.

If you think the workload could deter the creative mind, it’s somehow the contrary for this budding writer.

Being a part of America’s youth herself, Abigail’s works largely reflect the perspective of young people.

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In her writings, Abigail has a knack for fiction, mainly because of the endless possibilities that her creative imagination can take her when working on them. But her works nevertheless continue to be grounded on reality.

Fiction Poetry

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Fiction

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Contributor’s Corner

Aside from long-form fiction, poetry is also a medium where Abigail finds her thoughts on mental health and youth woven into verses. Her poem, I am sorry, speaks from the perspective of a person who feels guilt for enjoying the things they do; while in Land of the Free, Abigail presents the certainty and conviction of the youth of the present day.

“I absolutely love the idea that I can take my inner thoughts and make them into reality through the words that I write,” Abigail says.

“In each piece of writing that I produce, there is a part of me that I write into the work. Even while the world I create is completely made up, or a piece of fantasy, there are still sprinklings of my own reality inside. I find that it is extremely important to keep at least small amounts of reality, or the audience will not be able to connect with the characters and therefore understand the reasoning behind their actions,” she adds.

For those who are passionate about writing and starting their writing journey, Abigail says, “Find a quiet space and begin writing privately. This alleviates the pressure that comes with announcing your passion to the whole world. Another helpful idea is to connect with other writers online.”

“There are many at different stages of their writing journey, and it’ll be easy to relate to others which makes the idea of writing and joining the rising community a lot more fun,” she adds.

Abigail: when the flower blooms Like a flower that blooms with the right amount of sunlight and water, Abigail has her source of beams of sunlight in her life, too—literally and figuratively.

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Abigail and her younger brother live with her parents on a fruit and vegetable farm. Being so, she’s out on the fields for three quarters of the year, with June as the busiest month and her most favorite.

When not writing, at school, or in the fields, she bonds with her grandmother living across the street, where they enjoy watching award shows, playing Taylor Swift vinyls, and talking over milk and cookies.

Indeed, Abigail’s family is among the sources of sunlight that allows her to grow into the artist that she wants to be.

“My family has always been super supportive of this possible career path for me. My parents have done research about possible college choices that would better my career, and my mom made a nice dinner when I first submitted a piece of mine (even though it hadn’t been accepted yet). My grandma is always very sure that I can do whatever I put my mind to, and she helps support me with kind words,” Abigail shares.

In exploring the world of literature, the likes of Ally Carter, Lois Lowry, and Kiera Cass are among Abigail’s inspirations.

“Recently, with a new generation of authors, I’ve picked up the books of Victoria Aveyard, Ali Hazelwood, and Chloe Gong, and I absolutely loved them! I am so inspired by their youth and commitment to their work, and I hope to be just like that someday,” says Abigail.

“Also, an honorable mention of my inspiration has to be Taylor Swift. I am a big fan of mysteries, so I enjoy analyzing her lyrics and finding parallels to different songs or music videos. I just find her work so beautiful and meaningful,” she adds.

Still fueled with fiction anchored to the real world, Abigail is now working on a piece that explored a narrative at the start of the pandemic where a savior appears to try and help stop its spread.

Fiction

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Contributor’s Corner

KAYLA BRANSTETTER: Her Art, Her piece, Our Voices

by Sarah Ann Eroy Silence is a practical tool in survival as youngins. But as we grow old, we make it our mission to get our ideas, opinions, and voices out there for others to hear. We don’t have to yell at the top of our lungs as a way to get our thoughts across, but we can do it in ways we do best.

It may have started as an escape, but as time went on, Kayla Branstetter worked hard to develop her voice and creativity over the years.

“In 6th grade, my poem, ‘Mother’ was published in a national anthology. During this time, my mom was married to an emotionally and physically abusive man, and my form of survival was silence. I desired to be invisible and remain out of his sight,” Kayla shares with NRM. “I endured a toxic home environment, and suffered being bullied at school. My imagination, writing, and art served as my escape.

People, music, books, and my surroundings are my greatest inspirations,” Kayla adds.

As Madeleine Albright said, “It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent” And just like the former secretary of state, Kayla then begins her journey to get her voice heard, with no plans on stopping.

Who is Kyla Branstetter?

“I actually love this question because finding my voice and being proud of who I am was a struggle,” Kayla answers.

I decided to use the pain and experience for art and writing to raise awareness to not only domestic and child abuse, but to offer support for victims and survivors.”

Kayla Branstetter is an artist, writer, professor, and mother to two beautiful daughters. She possesses a passion for the arts, and as much as she enjoys creating them, her true love involves introducing art to her daughters and students.

“My daughters’ favorite pastime is painting on a blank canvas.

They mix colors and allow their imaginations to come to life. I teach writing and most students are intimidated with this craft, but when my students realize the power in finding their voices, it is like magic.” Kayla says.

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“My favorite writers and role models are strong women such as my mom, my stepmoms (I had a few), my sisters, Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Anita Diamant, Michelle Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Gloria Steinem.” Kayla shares.

For art, Kayla fell in love with the Abstract Expressionism Movement during graduate school.

“Because I related to the themes and ideas associated with this movement. Life does not make sense sometimes. My favorite artists are Jackson Pollock, William de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Pablo Picasso, Jacob Lawrence, and more contemporary artists like Judy Chicago and Jacob Burmood.”

Outside of engaging and advocating for the arts, Kayla talks about her love of travel: “I’ve visited several countries, tried a plethora of food, and met beautiful people, and these experiences serve as inspiration to my art and writing.”

Whether in creating art or writing, most of Kayla’s works revolve around nonfiction, touching true-to-life experiences and issues.

“I struggle with writing fiction, so the majority of my writing is nonfiction and I have an array of topics that have been published: my experience with surviving abuse, my miscarriage, witnessing a Jewish wedding during my trip to Israel, raising awareness to Native American history, my travels, my childhood, my daughters, and women’s rights.” She deduces.

“I am currently writing a nonfiction book and the only information I can give is the content centers on women. Most of my artwork is activism—immigration, women, and human rights as a [a] whole; however, my artwork is also inspired by nature and happiness. Art is whatever we want it to be, and the practice does not always require a serious, threatening, and sad connotation, but a joyful, auspicious, and fun tone.” Kayla shares.

CASTE In this issue of NRM, Kayla brings us one of her works, Caste, an art piece she created after witnessing the riots over the summer of 2020.

“I decided to read about the movement, and this led me to two influential books: Just Mercy and Caste. These books opened my eyes to the injustices minorities have and continue to face.”

Arts and CultureFiction | USA “I chose to have a white male in the center because for many centuries many white men have been at the top of the caste system, whereas minorities and women must continue to fight to have their voices heard,” she explains.

Kayla’s art has been involved with the Human Rights Festival in North Dakota for the past three years. She hopes to be part of the festival again for the 2022 season.

“Two years ago, our exhibit was next to the Salvador Dali exhibit and I could not believe I had a painting next to an influential artist like Dali.

“I am in this waiting period. Artists and writers must develop a lot of patience because it takes months to hear from these publications. I experienced the most success this year, and I am hoping for a more successful 2022. I am putting much of my painting on hold until I complete my book. However, it is a longterm goal of mine to have a solo exhibit for my painting.”

To you, aspiring artists and writers, Kayla says...

“Have patience, believe in yourself, and surround yourself with a support system. You will receive more rejections than acceptance letters, but the rejection letters are proof you are trying. Be your biggest advocate. You must actively seek those opportunities and make connections. NETWORK! NETWORK! NETWORK! Finally, immerse yourself in your craft and BE PERSISTENT. The most successful people failed and failed often, but their persistence made them successful.” Kayla advises.

Kayla will continue to cultivate her art and be the voice for the silenced and the NRM team wishes her the best of luck in all her endeavors.

On dreams, imaginations, and an artist’s life in a pandemic “I am a writer and artist, so I live in my dreams and imaginations.

To create a story or a piece of art demands imagination to bring this idea to life. I use imagination to produce my art and writing, but I rely on my dreams to showcase my art and writing.”

As with most people in the world, COVID brought much uncertainty and anxiety into Kayla’s life.

“I was teaching when I received the email we were shutting down.

I expected the news, but digesting the decision and the events occurring around the world proved overwhelming,” she recalls.

Kayla went from being a working mom with a predictable routine to being a working stay-at-home mom with a four-year-old and seven-month-old (at the time). Though taken aback by the change, Kayla is grateful for the silver lining that came with it.

“As stressful as this time was, I am grateful for the extended time with my children. I witnessed my youngest daughter learning how to crawl and walk, and if it were not for COVID, I may have missed those important milestones,” she says.

“I didn’t have the time to paint or write. Instead, I read books in hopes to make sense of not only the COVID situation but the political and social climate surfacing the country. I read several books, but The Innocent Man, Caste, and Just Mercy challenged my thinking the most and forced me to view the country’s history and judicial system through new lenses.

COVID forced me to take a step back and selfreflect on who I want to be as a writer and artist.”

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Contributor’s Corner

Bill Arnott:

A REFLECTION OF SELF IN OUR CRAFTS

by Jazie Pilones

As I write this, I am surrounded by the extremities of silence filling the space of the two-story house I rent cheaply. Silence fills every corner, every room, even the tiny hollows left by broken tile grouts, and I squat here in my living room alone with my three precious cats that mean the world to me. A lot has happened this week, and I find myself and my brain cells scattershot all over the place, which is way out of character for me. I am on the verge of giving up on life that I begin to ask myself, what exactly is my purpose? Where am I supposed to go? Where exactly is life taking me?

Right now, I wish I had the resources to travel to places I’ve never been to, or to destinations I wish I’d gone to so I could spend some time alone, find inner peace if I could, and try to navigate myself to a path I want to take. But right now, there are bigger things to face; the pandemic is far from over yet, and projects are waiting to be finished.

Speaking of self, travel, and purpose, there’s a special human bean who has consistently shared with us his travels and the insights he took with him from each trip, Bill Arnott.

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Bill Arnott is a creative and award-winning author known for his Gone Viking series and NRM’s resident contributor for Bill Arnott’s Beat. If you’ve been following us for a while, you’d surely have read one of Bill Arnott’s Beat, which guarantees there’s no regret knowing and learning more from our friend from the Great White North, who he is and his perception of life.

Bill, the hodophile.

Growing up in his small British Columbia hometown, young Bill was already drawn to adventure when he had his first bus ride and enjoyed watching the driver, the wheel, and other dashboard instruments that made him feel like he’s on a spaceship. To him, the movement, the perspectives, the whole experience shaped his view of the world that are evident in his writings.

Bill started writing in his journal where he’d keep his thoughts about his travels, memories that he’d like to come back to at some point in his life to reminisce and relearn. He hadn’t thought about writing for the masses, and it wasn’t until he shared his journey to his friends, where he received good feedback that he decided to write more about them so others might enjoy it as well. By the time he was receiving awards, he felt an obligation to share his best works with the world.

We all understand that getting to know, loving, trusting, and being true to oneself are hard to come by, and it takes a lifetime to master. Part of it is letting go of things and people that don’t help you grow or don’t bring the best out of you, so you can nurture yourself.

Leaving behind these baggage helped Bill find himself, his artistic path, and the community that helped him become the person he is today, whose works we dearly love.

Arts and Culture | Canada Fiction “Being creative requires sincerity, which isn’t always easy.

Simple, yes, but not easy. It requires getting to know yourself and mustering the courage to perhaps share some intimate personal facets. More often than not, it gives others the courage to do the same, which I think makes us all a bit better,” he shares.

Being part and surrounded by creative people in his newfound community is something he considers a rich place where everyone shares a lot in common, and growth and learning is constant and never-ending, and where students and peers become his friends and mentors.

“I believe every creative individual (which all of us are) is an inspiration and role model simply by being creative, challenging themselves to improve their craft and if they so choose, to share it. Even when someone’s art isn’t publicly shared, the activity itself is empowering, and I believe that inherent strength is perpetuated by way of heightened empathy and open-mindedness,” he adds.

“I write what I believe to be genuinely engaging, or entertaining, or thought-provoking. As a result, it’s not only sincere but the work is much better. And like any art, it finds its audience,” he said after learning from experience when he used to write in a way not to offend people and wanting to be liked which resulted in uninteresting outputs.

Bill, the songwriter Apart from globetrotting and writing about his travels and scribbling verses of poetry, Bill also finds love in music, writing songs, and recording them.

With his guitar, Bill has recorded six acoustic indie folk music: Anything, Wouldn’t Change A Thing, Beautiful Cliché, … and the bassman plays, Three Blind Mice, and I Beg To Differ. All these tracks are on Bill’s album, Studio 6.

You can listen to these tracks and to Bill’s spoken word pieces via Soundcloud.

COVID-19, the pause, and moving forward.

It’s been two years since COVID-19 changed everything, and the world keeps fighting this crisis as new variants continue to emerge. When asked about the insights and things he began to value since the pandemic, Bills says he came to appreciate the significance of personal interactions.

Most of us probably take personal interactions for granted, but it was not until it was almost taken away from us that we begin to value it and realize how much of our lives revolve around connecting with people, may it be in person or virtual.

“I’d love to see us hang onto those elements of patience, kindness and empathy the majority of us displayed a bit more of as we struggled through the pandemic. Giving people space without question or letting cars merge without honking.

That sort of thing. And the fact that wherever you stand with respect to things like vaccination, recognizing the all-important fact it’s more about others than you,” he adds on what people should start living up to this day forward.

When asked what would be his message for individuals who are lost and confused, here’s what Bill has got to say: “We’re all, for the most part, doing our best, striving, more often than not, for a little improvement. I like to say, ‘we all had a starting line.’ Some of us enjoy greater privilege or have different odds stacked against us. But we all had a starting line, that place we begin from. Not that it’s a race. Just a journey, one with highs and lows. And yes, I remember harsh times and nasty parts. But my recollection of the beautiful bits is more vivid and plentiful. By choice, and ongoing perspective.

[This] perhaps is why I write about it, all of it, and share it through my Gone Viking books and presentations. While something I work to remind myself of is that we’re all part of this community, and none of us are ever alone,” Bill shares.

Bill Arnott may have found his purpose in writing and sharing about all his experiences and helping others understand life, themselves and others. I, on the other hand, have a lifetime to find myself and my purpose. I’m not sure if I’m on the right track, but I guess part of life is losing oneself in order to find what you really are. I’m sure I’m getting there. As Bill said, it’s not a race, just a journey with highs and lows.

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Poetry

Selfie with Sarah:

PASSION, POETRY, AND THE VALUE OF INTROSPECTION

by Regie Vocales

Several wonders of the world can bring forth inspirations to a person—from external influences like nature, relationships, or living spaces to everyday details like food, people, art, and travel, to name a few. But some prefer not to stray away from individuality, manifesting themselves through self-portraits, autobiographies, and even exploring the human psyche like memories and emotions and unlocking their passion and potential.

Even your own self can be an inspiration. Consequentially, the art reflects the artist. But somehow, others find it difficult to portray themselves because some see it as vanity, while others have yet to come to terms with their true self, how they think, and what they look like.

Living in this fast-paced world, self-awareness was once oftentimes overlooked. But this shifted when introspection and self-discovery were amplified during the pandemic when everywhere is on lockdown and everyone is forced to stay indoors. People are discovering things they have not tried, and things they have always wanted to do but had no time before.

For someone who has tread the road of introspection and self-discovery pre-pandemic, teacher and poet Sarah Muñoz shares with NRM how she discovered herself and her passion.

“When I was a little girl, I was captivated by the rhythm and rhyme of children’s stories and nursery rhymes read to me by my mother with such great enthusiasm,” Sarah says.

She began playing with words and creating her own puns at just three years old.

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Contributor’s Corner

In her early years, Sarah already acknowledged the power of words. She read product labels and how words were used as tools for marketing. In ninth grade, she took inspiration from Shakespeare and began writing poetry.

Born and raised in Roanoke, Virginia, surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains, Sarah took a creative writing degree at Roanoke College and became an active poet. But everything really clicked when she saw her professor’s works.

“I had to finish my master’s degree and get my teaching licensure as (quickly) as possible while already teaching full-time. And just when I finally established myself in the teaching world and things seemed to get less hectic, my husband and I decided to start a family of our own...”

“I remember seeing my professor’s published works and being awestruck. I knew that I was meant to be a writer, too.”

But even with adversities, Sarah regained her footing and found her balance once again.

Enthusiasm and passion are the main drives of Sarah to continue writing despite her work’s demand for her time and building a family with her high-school sweetheart.

“As a mother of two young children and a teacher, I have to carve out every spare minute I can get for my passion of writing. If I get an idea for a poem, I write it down as quick as possible in the Notes app on my phone and come back around to it when I find a quiet space of time,” Sarah says.

With the pandemic setting up limitations everywhere, Sarah took it as an opportunity and sparked her passion for writing again.

“It was the retreat I needed. It caused me to slow down and gave me the physical and mental space to reconnect with a version of myself that got buried under the pressures of work and motherhood.”

This also taught her the importance of making time to write.

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Some moments have not been favorable, too. Sarah opens up about the time she had to have her creative energy rerouted to survival mode.

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“(I) found the energy to reach for the pen. And, God willing, I plan to never put it down.”

As a poet, Sarah sees poetry as a cathartic power for both the poet and the reader, and she is one of those writers who draw inspiration from within themselves. “I like to write topics that are personal to me, but relatable at the same time. The poem Waiting for the Ball to Drop is one of the most personal poems I’ve written. It is a subject that has been repressed in my subconscious for years and that needed to be released through writing.” On the topic of introspection, she reveals she often draws on memories from the past and the observations from the present, which are often linked to her imagining future scenarios.

“I reflect on myself a lot… I feel like the past, present, and future are threaded together and you can go any direction you want through introspective writing.”

Reflection and self-evaluation are important because they “give writers an opportunity to understand their own psychology and their own human nature,” says Sarah. For her, poetry helps one dissect emotions on a particular life event or experience, looking at the pieces that form the whole. “Poetry enables one to ponder reality. Oftentimes, we learn a lot about ourselves and how we feel about different subjects by what ends up on the page.”

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Additionally, Sarah says self-reflection comes naturally to her when writing poetry, and that she admires modern-day and classical authors whose works can be described as selfreflective. “For instance, I’m currently reading Goldenrod by Maggie Smith, and I always circle back to the works of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. So, for now, I can definitely say that self-reflection is what attracts me both as a writer and a reader.”

Human experiences and psychology are other themes Sarah wants to explore other than introspection. She had discovered prompts from the Instagram poetry community to be most helpful in the creative process, crediting them for catapulting her back to the creative mindset and her posting on her IG account @ponderpoet.sarah.

“As I evolve as a writer, I plan to explore other themes of the human experience. I think it’s important to step outside of comfort zones and see the world through different lenses. That’s how we grow.”

Read on Sarah’s poems imprinted on this issue, Spilled Milk, Waiting for the Ball to Drop, and Passing Through, and experience for yourself the psychological processes of introspection, journeying through times in the past, present, and future, and confronting one’s existence.

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Falling in love and falling apart VRINDA NAIR

Never knew this mind will fall into a spiral sense of being A true sensation of the unknown seeping into my soul and wobbles like drops of water cunningly escapes the route Yes... it bothers, never-mind – it stays on forever I did hold the light lamp for you Caressing every sense of words that came out…

Held my sensitivities tightly together and tied it with my insecurities which was prescribed by you Even then, nothing solaced…

We were meant to untie those invisible roots I knew from the inception – this will detach those latches Engraving the only remembrance of the time back then Persisting with the lamp on the distinct side of the tunnel Discovering something relatively rustier which happens to be my remains of abandoned sentiments about you…

PinkCat

Vrinda Nair is an aspiring scientist and is currently doing her Ph.D. in Physics at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She is a published author of three books which include two poetry books: It’s a carnal world (physical book), Abuzz (Kindle eBook), and one self-help book: Motivate your genes (Kindle eBook). Vrinda also holds a record in writing a poem in alphabetical order from the India Book of Records. She writes on diverse themes on her blog and designs many art forms.

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I live in a place where...

VRINDA NAIR

I live in a place where, serenity is lost in the outskirts of space I live in a place where, spears are picked up instead of compassion I live in a place where, hunger evolves casually I live in a place where, tariff is put up on the departed I live in a place where, exertions don’t meet convenience I live in a place where, desire is evaluated without invitation I live in a place where, grave restlessly chimes of solitude I live in a place where, conventional wisdom doesn’t reset I live in a place where, illustrating a pragmatic conclusion is far seen

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You’re Attuned VRINDA NAIR

You looked at my tenderness, shifting focus was not your pretension.

But you did it for me.

Something with a wing goes dying in me.

Mounting on top like a spider, a strange shadow appeared before me.

I don’t want to run away from you.

Clinging you so tightly with my inner self.

Filling my soul which was in melancholy.

But it rained, making me weak, numbed my senses.

You became standstill, I discovered those clouds forming bursting colours.

My sanity shouts -- Mine!

Everything is sweet on those two folds Hunting down those depths -- which you left for me.

In deep solitude, night fell asleep.

It was hours of fondness, sparkled with blazing yearnings.

It felt like unending, wanderers darting each other.

Mining distance and emerging through them.

You urging not to lament with a winsome smile.

I became enamoured, long before.

Seizing my words that escaped from fantasy.

Cohering millions of slivers which left behind.

Harmony of chords that you played in rhythms, only for me.

I know your predilection, but stills it’s bewildering and that’s your niche, caused me mirth.

Nothing lasts... Right!

Arrives the time, for departure.

A left feeling of hope, merging in destiny again.

Here I go... with a mournful goodbye.

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SPILLED MILK Sarah Munoz Don’t cry over spilled milk.

Instead, watch it spread over the table And trickle down like rain, and then Watch it run its course between The tiles on the kitchen floor Like rivers branching out, Or better yet, like the Big Bang— The way the universe began From a single point, and with a burst Matter spilled outward Spreading galaxies.

Sarah Munoz is a mother, a poet, and a public school teacher from Virginia. Within the past year, Sarah’s poetry has been published in Blood Moon Poetry‘s Issue 2: [in] Bloom, and in their printed anthology, The Faces of Womanhood. She has a forthcoming publication in Train River Poetry’s Covid-19 anthology.

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WAITING FOR THE BALL TO DROP Sarah Munoz It’s August and still I’m waiting for the ball to drop Like it does during the last 10 seconds of December— Releasing the past, welcoming the rest of life.

When I was 6 years old, my father left my mother Right in front of me.

His brown Samsonite suitcase was Already packed, the metal hinges clicked shut.

He was just waiting for the final argument, The cue from my mother: Get Out! It’s been over 30 years since then and I’ve grown Tired of the visits to see my father. I’m exhausted From enduring his mistress-turned-wife, The one he left my mother for, And listening to hate-spun tales And his alterations of the past.

I’ve had to stomach that for too long.

And even after 3 strokes, he’s still here Plaguing me like this never-ending pandemic, And I still visit Because I feel it’s my duty.

And all I can do is wait for the ball to drop For the angel to give him his cue.

For closure.

For the Rest.

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PASSING THROUGH Sarah Munoz Did you know that as we speak, people are dying and being born?

My daughter always Spills existential thoughts To the glass above The passenger side window seal On our drives home.

Why am I alive? Why am I here?

She knows these are things I can’t answer, So she addresses the thin glass separating her From whatever’s out there.

Sometimes I think I’m just dreaming, she says, Leaving fingerprints on the sky.

I wish I had more truths to offer my daughter On these drives home.

But I’m just a portal.

I’m the place she passes through. deepgreen

And one day I’ll be a memory.

I’ll be a dream.

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THE CURRENT STATE OF AFFAIRS Dani Zhila Life in the New Gilded AgeA gilded cage It’s beautiful to see trapped inside, unsure if we want to be free.

Buffeted on all sides by disbelief as much as by lies, gaslit by this post-truth era, where so many believe their truth has set them free.

The Robber Barons of Yore would be impressed by their current contemporaries: Corporations made corporal;

Buybacks and bailouts; Individuals made infinitesimal while propped up by pretend power.

The profiteers have provided the panem et circenses, filled with glee that the distractions have succeeded in giving us the pretense of being free.

Locked in as we are now, filled with reverie, I hope we find the key, so we can truly be free.

Dani Zhila is a second-year medical student and poet. Her previous publications are in scientific research in such areas as decision-making in advanced cancer care and intimate partner violence. When she is not studying (which is rare these days), Dani is reading, writing, watching baseball, or playing with her dogs.

manuta

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CAN I CALL MYSELF A POET? Dani Zhila I always thought poetry came in a moment Poof: inspiration.

Birthed from an ephemeral spark, in its entirety.

Eureka.

It’s not. At least not for me.

Not usually.

Imagine more like the serendipitous spelling of words in alphabet soup: A fragment here.

Another there.

Piecing together a phrase or an image as if it were effortlessly contrived, Hoping for significance, settling for coherence.

Try, try again.

I continuously strive.

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A FINAL DROP Dani Zhila drip. drip. drip. drop

by drop, My bucket fills.

On a good day, I have enough -And can help water the previously parched earth filled with idea after idea that dripped into the bucket.

I can wash away the mess of yesterday.

On a bad day, all I hear are the drips through my roof, hoping the bucket catches them all.

It cannot.

My bucket overflows, flooding my life, with what I cannot control.

As I have known all along, the dose makes the poison.

Just one drop can upset the balance, Leaving me longing for one perfect drop.

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river // Dupont // excess CONNOR BEEMAN

I am crossing the river, the only river that matters− the one that means border, that means distance. the one that can only be bridged with aching resolute steel.

I am driving myself across it. this is a new habit, an uncomfortable skin, and I risk only a few glances down towards the murk, that rolling mighty thing.

upstream only reluctantly, like there’s a grudge to be held for all that’s been done. there is a factory, all sprawl and steam.

it’s Dupont, on a street that bears the same name, a highway exit dedicated only to its cause.

I have never known what they make there, not truly, only that it is somehow necessary. that everything is somehow worthy.

it is the same as it has always been. brown and steady, powerful in its own unnoticed way. night is falling − so the river eats the sun. it bleeds it out. orange, green, slick tan smeared by silt. it allows the barges, the coal and the chemicals,

but I do know that I boil my water sometimes – just to be safe. and I do know that the river is trying to tell me something – that this water’s silence is no accident, but I drive on. as always, I drive on.

Connor Beeman is an emerging writer and recent graduate of Ohio University with a dual degree in Creative Writing and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. His work currently focuses on queerness, post-industrial space, and the self and identity. Previous publications include Black Fox Literary Magazine, The Oakland Arts Review, and Ohio University’s own Sphere.

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grandfailure

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today, CONNOR BEEMAN

I fell into myself again.

one yellowed card, ink green, calls Akron ‘the city of opportunity.’

I blame the grey-coated sky, the steel girder clouds, or the way this city gets under my skin in the little ways, like water in the cracks of a street, freezing into ice to wreak havoc on asphalt.

I am trying to be better, to be fairer, but I did it anyways – I gave over to that smog-cloud mind, to that nothing-quite-right body. in a bid to feel right, I struck out on my own, drove over-cautiously without a plan, and found myself in a dusty shop looking at old postcards, found myself searching my city once more. love, how is it that the places we know best can sometimes make themselves unrecognizable? because there it is – that same water – bluer than I’ve ever known, but the same buildings, always the same towers,

it paints downtown in bright, hope-stained colors. trees everywhere, green. buildings white and gleaming. another shows the Cuyahoga carving its gorge, and the then-new High Level Bridge, all arches and concrete and pride.

I think of a mentor, far away now, who told me that our shared city’s name meant ‘high place’ in Greek, that we were meant to be a city on the hill. high place. crooked river. a city nestled in the crest of a broken jaw, unaware of how fickle opportunity could be. sometimes it feels like this past can’t be true, that some part of it must have been an illusion, but here we are – living in its remains.

I know that building, that bridge, that street. they are dirtier now. they do not gleam.

I think of what that mentor said last fall – reading poems like this.

glancing up at me – unimpressed by my interest – from fading cardstock in the back of the stacks.

I had to dig for my city, had to get my hands dirty to find my home, but what I find is so different from what I know.

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‘name it,’ he’d said then, ‘stop being afraid to name this place.’

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grandfailure

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Nithid

THE RUSTED RITE Chase Chasteen

Dreary gray, mid-mourning light diffused onto the dying phoenix, feathers flustered, falling up from the eight-hundred thread count ashy percale. California promised to bestow sunlight but instead eclipsed it behind plumes of smoke, hiding from its disdain for the life it immolated below. Tiny orange pills visited with more frequency now, punching, with cumulatively less effect, the turbulent hands - wildfires themselves enraged with conviction lost - unable to punch back. Eager ears would first see the brightness abound as the benzos rattled, like the last few Tic-Tacs, a fervent desire to escape their plastic prison.

The once sprawling resort, my charge to manage, succumbed to her viral fate and devolved into a sad, lonely kingdom and I into her proud, narcissistic prince. With then unspoken vows of vanity and greed, I consumed whatever light still radiated from her desert.

“Everyone wants this.” I gestured outwardly, gaze fixed with bloodshot eyes at the river-stone fireplace illuminating the corner of the five-star, twelve-hundred square foot hotel suite I alone would occupy for another eight months.

Rivers rushed tumultuously through the ten floodgates adding depth to the oversized, fiberglass jacuzzi tub, my chasm of comfort, where I would hourly spend before marking the next X

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on the calendar. Credits rolled and, with an indifferent shrug at the shriveled ending to yet another pay-per-view film, I drained the warmth.

With just enough strength to twist off the ridged cap to my eye drops, my shaky hands reached for the brand new iPhone Pro, battery fully charged to my retired mother’s credit card. Its digital shutter sounded the three times necessary to capture the perfect bathroom lighting my cheekbones and Instagram followers deserved. Half-naked, I bared all yet borne naught - loaning out my dignity for the fleeting euphoria rendered by each tiny red heart pumping through the pixels and into my veins the fix necessary to continue this relentless routine.

Having no patrons scheduled to visit for the near future, I shed my woolen livery and traded it for a uniform of black synthetic sweats and a baseball hat. Commuting through the empty parking lot toward the temperamental espresso machine in the kitchen, I spotted Wilson, the long-revered, iconic soul of the property, steady hand extended as I approached.

“Hey, buddy!” I shouted from across the cracked asphalt.

“What’s new?”

After a purposeful slap onto his copper-forged palm, I fakesmiled and continued on, wiping off onto my athleisure suit

Non-Fiction Poetry

his proud footnotes of personal struggle that he was willing to part with, inked in the same hue as my envy toward what he represented.

Banshees wailed as I frothed away - barista, too, adorned my business card in the wake of furloughing everyone on my team, sans Wilson. The disappearing co-workers who once lined the doorway to my office now queued in my mind the loud memory of their silencing. Forever joining me for a midday latte, their faces begged that I vent the empathy trapped in its chemical confines.

“How did I get here?” I cried, balancing myself on the heavy chains securing the doors from more formidable intruders.

Vivid images of previous guests resurfaced into the mind that had long fought them off with swords brandished by an ever protective ego: “I’m disconnecting the call now, sir,” Kim said with tasteful disgust before fulfilling her promise. “That asshole was masturbating to my directions from the airport!” The impervious perv climaxed, breathing labored, to the sound of my first mentor’s cracked voice. His moment of sick anonymity briefly foreshadowed Kim’s long-awaited exit from hospitality, her compulsory stand to renounce the worst of humanity before inevitably merging with it.

The abandoned fetus circling the shower’s drain, the teenage boy with nowhere else to go looking from exalted windows and, with tempered pain, asking downwardly, “What if?” The sex worker, left-leg lifted onto the public restroom vanity, preparing herself with our pomegranate-scented salt scrub for the evening ahead, the meth aficionado impersonating a SCOTUS justice, the paranoid defenestrating refugee running from me: a renowned CIA operative, the entitled platinumelite member throwing presidential invitations at my very pregnant front desk colleague with the hope of soliciting sex, Amenhotep protecting the elevators garbed in the hotel’s finest single-ply: all paying ghosts, summoned as projections of the worst in me, spirits I invited in, with whom I hid from community behind my own paper-thin veil.

As I made my way upstairs to the room after another lonely days’ work, overhead lights ascended my way home, shining in unison only confusion for the man under their raise; three shadows theirs, none of them mine. When the bottom hit my soul, I forgot how to climb up on my own; but, with a defiant grasp onto the unevenly textured handrail - worn by the neglect of the disbanded fraternity who had long maintained its strength - I remembered again.

Chase Chasteen is a hotel manager in Napa, CA. He relocated from his previous post in Texas at the onset of the pandemic only to face the most challenging time in his career due to the effects of COVID-19 in the hospitality industry. He has since gone through a rough patch and writes to tell his story of overcoming adversities.

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IN THE FIELD OF WATERMELON TRUTH Reed Venrick

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things

Reed Venrick usually writes about nature but occasionally picks up the pen to add philosophy into the mix.

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How extreme, David Hume to say that cause and effect is only a human illusion—even his startling statement: the sun may not rise tomorrow, as most of us tonight assume, nor the moon may not rearrange its’ changing shape, as we expect.

I said, of course, cause and effect exists. Do we not experience it every waking day? How can you, Hume, believe nothing can be learned from experience or even inductive scientific observation?

But as you have pointed out: The reliability of induction lies in the belief that the future will always resemble the past.

But, listen, I insist, wait, wait, I have my proofs. Like when twilight gets dark, don’t the stars light their candles? And after a heavy rain, will the grass not grow here in central Florida? After days without shaving, does not my beard grow longer? And is it not true when a watermelon vine blossoms in June, melons soon will curve round to emulate August’ filling moon?

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TWO Like a child, as a teen, I believed that the taste of every watermelon would be always the juicy same, and sometimes such was so, those rotunding melons getting riper, rounder, fuller on rainy season days.

Surely, then, a watermelon would always be a watermelon, as I’d first known to expect for its juicy, rotunding form—tasty and succulent, quenching the thirst and hunger of a growing teenager in those halcyon days of summer, as we rolled our bicycles around, looking for the adventure and mischief that summer days nights are bound to produce, Pinching melons from patches, planted in those steamy days down the middles of orange groves, more than once ducking the birdshot from the shotguns that peppered the surrounding leaves.

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But then, finding myself Inside a university room, Hume shocked me when I read and heard his “No, there’s no cause and effect.”

How cynical to think that the next melon I would eat would not have that delicious sweet taste of red juicy flesh?

But buying at farmer’s markets and grocery stores brought melancholy wisdom. Shopping at Publix, buying at Trader Joes, thumping rinds at Sprouts, even stopping on the side of the road to see the load brought across the border from Mexico. True, sometimes the taste I bit into was the delicious taste to anticipate.

But sometimes the taste was not what I expected—not at all.

So the cause and effect of my watermelon expectations came to an halt like an oblong ball rolling up against a wall.

My summers of eating bad watermelons were harsh reminders, depressing as Hume not believing in the efficacy of experience, nor did he take the process of induction seriously Since he said it was based on a fallacy. But Hume had the point of his feathered pen to grind, which seemed extreme even to the plaids of his Scottish day. But isn’t that what philosophy is made of?

Taking ideas to max and extreme?

That what appears to us as necessary connections between objects and ideas such as the next watermelon’s taste is just habit of expectation.

So I had to admit one July summer’s day when the watermelon I tasted was as insipid as a paper napkin—picked too and green to the gills.I had to admit Hume’s empiricist philosophy had its’ slice of truth.

Perhaps it was also true, as some doubters contend that the sun will not rise tomorrow, especially if they meet their maker overnight.

No, it’s true: cause and effect cannot ultimately exist in the field of watermelon truth.

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DOWN Anam Tariq

A descent. Cloak of invisibility well wrapt in, dropped in on February’s mild, rosy air a grim silhouette, leading her to her fated lair. #

# # Shells are all a cynic discerns, superficial performances, descries all not yearns. #

# # Blasted underground, blasted above.

They turtle-shelled; no fireflies neither butterflies flaky connections in the sky. Recline before a flashing tile while the ebbing white cliffs get back at the root of this upsetting. # # # Now the Euphrates seventeen hundred miles of water going down apace as unseen creatures behind a wall strive. Months/events in unison with Quicksilver, Wanda’s mantle by this poet’s side, existing in a bubble of mine. # # # Tides test immunity; by the Providence’s grace guarded, else mortals vulnerable always.

Anam Tariq did her M.A. in English from Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Aligarh, India. Alongside being a poet, she aspires to have a career in the academic field and is currently teaching English part-time.

She loves to write poems on themes of personal and global concern. Her poems have appeared in three consecutive Women’s College Magazines (at AMU), poetry anthologies Going Off the Grid and India Without A Mask: The Poetics & Politics Of The Pandemic, INKochi Cultural eMagazine and on Live Wire. Her poems are forthcoming in The Punch Magazine. When Anam is not prompting her imagination for verse, she is using it to envisage a world out of the contemporary novels that she loves to read!

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FROM THE CASEMENT Anam Tariq

Many a time verse letters from this casement bear scribblings of obsessions, of cloudy climes and sun-kissed orchards, of wildernesses and tempestuous deeps, of histories indelible and arduous times.

But shows what this frame to a poet’s eye?

of parked cars and the two houses leaves.

Below the blue-black firmament glistens over everything the milky street light, Ashoka trees appear lambent just as powdered women in brocade ghararas and necklaces glitter under a marriage lawn’s floodlights.

A room, a casement, a muse, a hope.

From the ajar pane flow in hawkers’ calls of saccharine fruits and veggies, a beggar’s shrieking pleas; kids towards late afternoons conversing about the seemingly lasting new-normal learning.

Haunted the street two neighbourhood white boys of mixed origin whose whereabouts the memory compels to wonder.

From the angle I choose to observe some things fit in it. A bungalow two-storeyed faces me. A wide rectangular terrace, rises behind which another on another storey. Shades of virescent and cream plaster its face while the gleaming day star has drained the patterned overhang extending from the terrace railings of its distemper.

A little patch of green the house boasts (before its small veranda) where two lofty Ashoka trees stir in the breeze.

Another bosky residence to my right faces us both. By me christened ‘forest house’, a mountain cottage’s likeness. Profuse climbers of Bougainvillea producing rosy and icy bunches, the ancient walls festooned, before they gave in to a tempest’s havoc. Lavender and pink hues the wall wears now, making a new out of the old while rise anew the climbers with a human’s resistance.

The sky like in paintings fills the remnant frame, discrete ambiences to the scene it gives as discrete bulbs to a room.

A pearly-grey, sunless sky gives many a wanderings while picturesque patches of gold, the sun towards its setting course, on the bodies

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What else does it show? Could The Lakes or the White Cliffs present themselves in it?

But the pearly, sunless weather takes on a ride of its own to a remote highland where, in a knee-length tunic off-white and brown I perhaps stand with a ‘taking all in’ eye beneath a hazy dome; or to where under the Millennium Wheel’s eye stand intricately carved edifices in wide streets thronged by multitudes in coats and jackets, gloves and mufflers often from countries new. Mind travels more freely over the expanse while the body is fettered to a room.

The sensibilities of the Poets present on the other side of the frame stimulate to visit that of which I have only limned from their observations and searched images on my screen.

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knysh ksenya

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A TALE OF TWO UN-HERDS Anam Tariq

Most modern moments, most sordid ones; intellect enhanced, imbecility even more.

Dawn of ambition, dusk of doom; phantasm of infinity ahead, quantity of less than one in hand. # #

# The bank of the only lake amongst the hills (conifers covered) - the predators reigned.

The lax herder’s golden-black grazers; a typical situation. He down the hill engaged, few parched gold-black woolly denizens to the feigned silence of the lake drawn. The herder returning to behold them recumbent.

Every night’s brume abetting further slump, courtesy of the coyotes. Compelled to install insulation,

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impeding a long line of animosity but who knows what ace up their sleeves may dismantle his jenga of measures for the victimized! # #

# Naive, unguarded surviving beside the woods, across the lea woollybacks, settlers in all glory.

Nagged when came nigh rambling hunter quadrupeds, back to what they had inhabited.

Bulky in number, a blatant besiege to claim what property used to be.

The originating saga glided; among another set, the kin of the settlers, the call to offer succour echoed beyond the woodland to arrest not defer a gross foul play.

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Dear Martha, SARAH CIPULLO

I don’t really like this language of yours, but I have a soft spot for you, and each time we talk, it’s as if once the conversation is over I’m coming back to Italian with my arms covered with notes about beautiful words you say I will never remember. It doesn’t matter if I close my eyes, focus on them, or stay silent in a still room full of darkness.

In my memory, I’m unable to retain the words that naturally bloom in your bones. You are so inside your language that you’re very exact when you use it to move around me or to stay away from me. You are always at the right distance and I really feel like you measure it sharply with the phrases you choose, each time abandoning inches and feet.

On the contrary, I am so clumsy while I try to express myself in a language that gives me no authority and makes me sound like an uneducated person with half Italian and half somewhere-from-the-North-of-Great-Britain accent. When I speak English I feel like a piece of wood shaped with an axe. Tina showed me great things that can be done with a chainsaw (besides, chainsaw carving is so American), but I’m sure there exist tools that allow greater precision and would not deprive me of my identity in such a way. They would not return a blurred image of myself to anyone I speak with. It’s so frustrating.

The moment I cross the line that separates Italian from English and I enter your world, I have the same body, I’m standing on the same legs, my eyes are still greyish blue, my right arm is still damaged and it still slightly changes the location of my shoulder blade. But it’s not me anymore.

It’s someone else, coming from afar. And sometimes she’s incomprehensible, most of all when it’s 6 p.m. and I’m so tired after a whole day spent computing syntax in your language.

After 6 p.m. the only English I can perform is Drunk English, as you well know.

During my mid-year performance review, Kate told me that I should learn to be short and sweet. At first, I wool-gathered about those words, while I was assimilating what they meant.

Then I tried to explain to her that I wasn’t sure it was really me not being short and sweet. I believed it was probably my English that was not short and sweet. Each time I want to tell someone something, the phrases I have run in circles inside my head. I start to run after them while building each sentence and sometimes, while I’m looking for verbs and nouns I cannot find, I pile word on word, taking time. It’s like mining work and mining work is always tiring. Oxygen is scarce, but I dig. I dig well and deep and at times I dig more than I should, other times I still dig too little. Often, words are just not inside me and I get testy.

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melitas

Sarah Cipullo was born in Brindisi, Italy. She lived in Milan, Siena and Edinburgh and is currently based in Turin. She has a degree in Cognitive Science and Language, designs cars by sending emails and normally writes in Italian. In her free time she mainly reads, writes and plays chess. She doesn’t believe in borders.

Non-Fiction Poetry Recently I decided to improve (or at least I’m trying to).

I bought a Kindle and this happened for two reasons. First, my parents told me that there’s no more space for my books in their home. I already owned an e-reader while I was a student at university. I was always changing apartments, cities, and countries. I couldn’t afford to buy books and move them with me. But when I got to Turin, though I always had the instinct to leave, I felt the need to learn and stay. So, I decided to abandon the instability of e-books and I started buying physical ones again. They had weight, they were like an anchor. If I was going to move once more there would have been a penalty to be paid. I have always placed my books discreetly on their shelves, but the restlessness that started thickening my veins when I was a student remained and it forced me to stay detached and careful.

Did I really want to stay in Turin? I wasn’t sure, and every time I went to my parents’ place in Puglia, I packed all the books I had read in my suitcase. And so, my fifteen-year-old room became a bookshop, but now it sounds like there’s no space anymore and the issue is, there’s no space in my apartment too. That place is honestly a mess. It looks like an archaeological site of too many civilizations that have been destroyed. Italy was locked down for a long time because of COVID. I didn’t have the chance to move my books for a year, for we could not get on a train and go to another region. Consequently, I now cannot allow myself to buy other volumes. It’s me or them in the little corner I have left.

The other reason that pushed me to buy my Kindle is that I can simply touch a screen while reading to easily consult a dictionary. Simple words I can understand appear on screen explaining to me the meaning of more complex ones.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world, Wittgenstein wrote.

How small mine is. There is only room for a modest park with the broken arches of collapsed aqueducts. So Italian, uh.

I will never master English, I’m well aware of that. I’m just asking for asylum in your language to find a place where I can be known and seen, which is basically what one desires when in love. To be known. To be seen.

You cannot imagine how stupid I feel right now when I write “in love.” I wouldn’t use these words if I was writing in Italian.

There’s too much intensity in them. They speak of a feeling that needs to have the time to settle. The bones, the organs, the tissues, the skin, they all need to know. And flesh needs to meet flesh for it to be real. This has never happened to us, but the language I’m using right now, it’s not mine. It turns me into an ape, so definitive and elementary in her approximate being. It’s without any grace that I’m making myself vulnerable to you and I can read through all these words I’m writing so little that I’m almost anaesthetized to my own feelings.

Dear Martha, I perfectly know I will not achieve anything by writing this letter I will not send. And I also perfectly know that beyond you, English is a powerful tool to use, that me learning and improving it in the past was not about you at all.

But today, in this moment, it’s as if you are everything that makes sense in all this wading among alien words; as if you are the only final destination of this journey. I apologise for my groundless feelings. They still are unprepared to see reason and reject the giant body of water between our continents.

There’s such a distance in this ocean and too much room in it for desire.

The first thing I thought about you when we started working together was that you had a sexy voice. And that was really it, nothing more. At that time, I was completely absorbed by a girl I met before the second wave of COVID who, at some point down the road, told me that I couldn’t even make it in her rankings. We were not in the same place back then. She lives in the North, I was stuck in the South, and turns of events kept us apart for a long time. She fell in love with someone else. Someone that had a body, a presence, that already was with her in Milan. After she was gone for a while, you and I had a talk. It’s funny because we were talking about language and while we were chatting I suddenly felt a connection and I realized how comforting it was to share thoughts with you.

Intimacy between us happened underground, as a hushed agreement, while I was not thinking about it. I didn’t plan it and it didn’t occur in the same way again, but from that moment on, you started living within the walls of my mind. I imagined it was probably just me and I tried to defend myself. I avoided getting in touch with you unless it was really needed and I remember, I managed to do it for three weeks. Clearly, it didn’t work out and at the very end. I’m sitting here, writing in a language of which I am no daughter, feeling like a freak.

I saw you have full lips, indigenous eyes, and your face has features from both the old and the new world. In your blood, there’s the past and the future of everything, Martha.

Your face can be stiff at times, but when you smile you’re so beautiful. You’re professional, sometimes formal, always kind.

But I cannot smell you, nor observe how you move. I don’t even know what day you were born or if you have legs. I can only see your torso when we have meetings with the camera on. I know nothing about the real you. If you were to leave the company at any moment I would not know how to contact you. And even if I knew, I’m not sure I could, I’m not sure I would have the right to.

So I’m a fool writing these things I’m feeling and they are like cornerstones of a new religion. For they are groundless, blind, and wild. Still, they exist and reverberate like a glow among the ribs of my thorax. They hit them with such energy as if it was generated by an immense turbine.

I keep telling myself this is a COVID thing, but I dread that desire will stay, that I’ll crumble under its weight and I’ll end up tasting you in my mouth, hidden in the groove of a damn English diphthong.

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A CIGARETTE SIREN David Sebesta

Billy tipped the day’s first smoke. He thought he probably ought to get going if he wanted to be on time for school; however, school was a distant, abstract concept, and the morning was gorgeous. Most of the leaves in the park had turned yellow, and now they were shining in the sun’s feeble rays. The sky was a light blue, and Billy thought, yellow and blue, those had to be royal colors. The contrast between them!

His breath steamed in the cool air as he put his second cigarette between his lips. He caressed its filter with the tip of his tongue, the way he’d caress a lover’s lips. He flicked on his lighter and inhaled gently. God, the contrast between the flame and the sky.

The smoke tasted sublime.

He remembered a Rolling Stones song, “Heaven,” and swayed to its remembered rhythms as his respiratory system danced its danse macabre with the cigarette. # The problem was that no one really got him. He had some smoking buddies and knew some cool people at school, but no one really got him. Smoking at a prodigious age, he was destined to hang out with older folks who invariably considered him a child. # He hadn’t thought he cared about the health effects. He’d once heard a story about an old woman who was still smoking at eighty. When her grandkids tried to get her to stop, she threw their bullshit right back at them: “I’ve only one life. I won’t waste it not smoking.”

But then Paul told him in PE class that he didn’t “run so fast no more,” and suddenly Billy was worried, and then Becky told him he stank—so he decided to quit.

His smoking buddies took it quite badly. Sometimes he wondered whether not smoking was worth alienating them, but more often he simply craved a cigarette.

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# The train station was a decrepit affair, and Billy hated it. Its yellow plaster was peeling, and there were pigeons everywhere—but it was the only station in town, and he had to get home from school somehow.

One day there was a girl smoking by a graffitied wall. She was wearing black jeans and a leather jacket. Her hair was jet black, and her face sported several silver piercings, the same silver as the zippers on her jacket. She looked like a modern Siren, and maybe that was what she was—he was enchanted by the way she held her cigarette, like an extension of herself.

And oh, the smell!

“You want one?” she asked him.

“I…I shouldn’t,” he said. He tried being proud of how long he hadn’t smoked, but he was tired. Not smoking was like walking a tightrope, and he was tired.

“Really, who should?” the girl asked with a crooked smile.

“I was going to start again about a thousand times this week.”

“What stopped you?”

He shrugged. “I thought I did. But now it seems more like it was my delusions.”

“What delusions?”

“I thought I was this whole new person, you see.”

“I get that too, sometimes.” She looked at the sky, which was the slate gray of winter now. “Like I want to be a whole new person.” She smiled. “Except then I want to run away, and I end up realizing I’d just bring my problems with me.”

“Clean slates are a lie,” Billy agreed.

“Then filthy yours,” she said and handed him the smoke.

He took it, and—oh God—it felt so good, so right.

David Sebesta is currently studying high school in the Czech Republic, where he also happens to live. Besides reading and writing, he likes listening to music, going on walks, or hanging out with his friends— however, when they are unavailable, he also likes to hang out with his two cats.

Fiction

Munimara

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Conversations Between Two Introverts ABIGAIL BURES

A “

ndrea!” Ethan was running through the hall towards my locker. The poor Freshmen have to jump out of the way to avoid being hit. “Hey, do you wanna go to the Elkwhile Bluffs after school today? We can just do our interview there, cause it’s Thursday, so it’s perfect!”

It is so not perfect. After what felt like an incredibly long day of school, I just want to go home and lie in bed for the next three hours. Must be in the air or something.

Shutting my locker door, I turned and laughed at Ethan’s breathlessness as he hunched over, trying to avoid a side cramp.

“Yes, I suppose I can find time in my busy after school schedule,” I say with full sarcasm intended. “What’s up with the lack of air?

You take one day off from soccer practice and all of the sudden it’s like you’ve never played a sport in your life?”

“We get the day off from practice, not morning workouts. It was leg day.” I guess that makes sense. That was always the day Marcus and Damien complained to me about the most. To be fair though, Ethan did run down the entire hallway.

“So….I’ll meet you at your locker after school?”

“Sounds good.” Ethan was still bent over, hands on his knees.

I chose to walk away first. I don’t think my competition is very capable at the moment.

Katya Kovarzh

Unsurprisingly, I beat Ethan to his locker. I did not, however, make it there before a certain Stacey Walker. If Stacey was a Billboard she would advertise the basic brunette girl stereotype.

She is pretty. Light brown hair, blue eyes, tall, and she managed to look good in just about every fashion trend our school went through. I haven’t talked to her much, maybe once Freshman year when she was on the welcoming committee and was obligated to show me around the school. She seemed nice then, but I’m not sure it stayed that way. New kids are welcomed with open arms the first few days at a small school where everyone has known each other since kindergarten. Then after a little bit of time they just fade into the background. At least, in my experience.

“Oh, hey Andrea!”

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Literary Work “Hi Stacey.” So far so good, right?

“Whatcha doing at Ethan’s locker?” She continued quickly, not giving me a chance to answer. “Not that you can’t be here, just curious. I just have some notes from the Spanish class he missed the other day. I’m not trying to get between you and your man.” She winked at me. I, Andrea Jackson, was just winked at by one of the most popular girls in school. What has the world come to?

“My man?”

“Oh yeah, you guys are working on that project together for a whole semester, and diving into some really deep stuff. You can’t come out of that without a good mutual understanding of each other. Last year, when I was in Mr. Beron’s psychology class, I did this project with my now boyfriend Brock. I guess I just believe that the connection we formed through the project will be there forever. I read about a study Harvard did like that. There’s these proclaimed 36 questions that can get two people to fall in love. I personally think you should incorporate that into your interviews, but it’s not my place to say. However, if you do happen to accidentally,” she made air quotes around ‘accidentally’, “can I please be invited to your wedding?” While Stacey does have a good point about this project and the level of vulnerability it requires, I was a little hesitant about the wedding idea.

“I don’t think we are gonna do the whole love thing, but I guess I wouldn’t mind being friends with him.” I say with mild hesitancy. I’m not sure I want to be even friends with Ethan Wallace.

“You ladies wouldn’t happen to be talking about me behind my back, would you?”

“Wallace, perfect timing.” I laced with sarcasm and turned to see a gigantic smirk on his face. Oh do I hate when people are smug towards me.

“Awe, it’s so cute that you call him by his last name.”

Stacey took her little moment of awe before clearing her throat and beginning. “Ethan, I made copies of my notes from our Spanish class you missed Monday cause of—” Stacey cut off looking at me and then back at Ethan, “you missed Monday.”

I glanced between the two in confusion, waiting for one to possibly fill me in, but Stacey just said goodbye and Ethan wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“So, are you ready for Elkwhile Bluffs? I heard it’s a pretty easy trail.” I tried to lighten the mood up a bit. I wasn’t completely enthusiastic about a hike, and I’m a little surprised Ethan wanted to do this after the dreadful leg day.

“Yeah the trail’s nice. You haven’t been before?”

“Well my parents work a lot and hiking really isn’t my grandma’s forte, so…” I trailed off. Ethan began laughing.

“No kidding! Really? My grandma hikes everywhere. She tried to climb Mount Everest, but claims the air towards the top was too thin for her.”

“Isn’t that kind of the point? Don’t hikers have to take up oxygen tanks?”

Ethan looks at me a little stunned, “Yes,” he chuckles, “I was joking Jackson. Both my grandmas are dead, and when they were alive, all I remember them doing was knitting and

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making these patterned rugs.” He pauses for a moment with a scared look of remembrance on his face, probably thinking back to the years of rug and sweater presents. Then he nudges me with his elbow and speaks up again. “You know, friends tease each other, right?”

“Oh, shut up.”

“So,” a pause, “do you do a lot of active stuff?” I am leaning forward with my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath.

“You know I play soccer.” Ethan said with a hint of questioning.

“Yeah, I know, I just—” another pause, “I run sometimes.” I’m not sure if I am just trying to gain back some dignity or distract myself from my much higher than normal heart rate.

“Do you?” Ethan looks back at me with a sneaky smile, one that knows I hardly run. But he drops it.

“Maybe let’s take a break.” I nod. Thankfully he had gotten my plea for help.

Once we both sit down on some big rocks near the trail, I get the chance to look around. We have made it almost all the way up, and the view is just amazing. It isn’t quite prime sunset time, because we had driven straight here right after school, but the clouds are still turning pink and purple, and we can see for what felt like miles.

“So, you and Blaire have become pretty close over the past week.” And Ethan just had to go and ruin the beauty by talking.

Oh the joys of partaking in an interviewing project about your personality. I’m just out here truly living the life.

“She’s nice. And funny. And similar to me.”

“But she’s outgoing, like an extrovert.” Oh this boy thinks he’s being slick, slipping the word ‘extrovert’ in there.

“You cannot classify someone based on their personality by only using extrovert or introvert. That’s like saying there’s only two flavors of ice cream, chocolate and vanilla, but they make up every other flavor of ice cream. So yes, Blaire’s an extrovert, but she is very similar to me personality-wise. We just lead different lives Wallace. I personally think that Mr. Beron is trying to get your class to understand that there are layers to every person, and, with time and conversation, you can begin to figure them out.”

“Will I ever be able to figure you out, Andrea?”

I snort in surprise. “Not if I can help it.” I didn’t think he would have the guts to ask me this question.

“Why not? What are you so afraid of?”

“It’s not that I’m afraid—I’m careful. And you just made a Frozen reference.”

He laughed a little at my joke, but quickly became serious again. “So what, pushing people away is going to keep them from hurting you?”

“Now you’re beginning to understand me.” I give him a big grin that does not feel genuine.

We resort to silence for a while, just watching the clouds and trees below, the good mood ruined. Nobody passes on the trail behind us and even I’m starting to question whether or not it’s safe out here this late.

Then, Ethan says, “My brother, Tristan, used to take me

Fiction out here in the summer to run to prepare for the fall soccer season.” I freeze. These types of situations terrify me. I never know what to say.

“You guys must have been close for being three years apart in age.”

“Yeah. He would include me in just about anything he did.

Even when his friends would come over to play video games or watch TV or something, he’d always make sure to invite Luke as well as his brother, so that he could play with me.” Ethan lights up talking about his brother. He starts using his hands to talk and sits up a little straighter.

“He was really nice.”

Ethan turns to face me quickly with surprise. “Wait, you knew him?”

“Well, not really. He was part of the welcoming committee when I first came to the school. He showed me around for the first week I was here, to make sure I didn’t get lost and end up late for class.”

“Oh.” Ethan clears his throat, and I can tell a big question is coming. It’s the one he’s been waiting to ask me. It’s the reason he chose me for his interviewee in the first place. “Why did you stay back in class that day—the day of the protest?”

“Well,” I paused, not wanting to say the wrong thing and make Ethan upset, but also needing to tell him what I really believe for the purpose of this assignment and my morals. “I think a true protest is something you participate in when you believe that what you are fighting for is right. While there are certainly beliefs that spark protests I don’t want to go to, that day felt morally wrong for me to attend. So I didn’t.”

Ethan nodded in understanding. “Thanks.”

We stay silent for a longer period of time. Eventually, I get bored, so I pull out my phone. Two missed calls and a text from my mom popped up in my notifications bar. My mom hardly ever calls me around this time because she is almost always at work by now.

“Hey Ethan? I think we need to go. My mom said I have to get home.”

“Ok, yeah.” He looks like he wants to ask, but I keep my eyes down and hurry to get up from the bench. “You might wanna tell her it will still be around 45 minutes though, with the hike and drive.” That could be a big problem.

I try to get Ethan to hurry the entire trip back, and even though he seems to be going quicker for my benefit, it still doesn’t seem fast enough. I can’t help but wonder what’s wrong at home. I bet it’s Grandma Angie. I hope it’s not that, but what else could it be? God, please don’t let it be her.

We sit out on the porch in the rocking chairs Mom bought last summer. Grandma Angie made us two cups of sweet tea. The breeze is light, but still there, coaxing two of the neighborhood kids on bikes down the road that passes just in front of our house.

“You’re growing up so nicely, Andrea.” Grandma smiled warmly at me.

“Thanks Grandma.” We both look back out into the street to see a group of younger kids ride past on skateboards. When one of the youngest boys trips and falls a bit, an older girl picks him up and spends about five minutes teaching the boy how to fall properly without beating himself up too much while the other kids wait and shout encouragement. Try to land on your shoulder or back, keep your limbs loose, and always try to wear protective equipment (the last one is seen as optional to almost everyone).

We have all received one of those lessons at some point in our younger years.

A good few minutes after the kids have rode off, we have finished our tea and Grandma Angie turns towards me, “Andrea, dear, I have something to tell you,” She paused and looks to me to confirm I am listening, then tilts her head back down again, “The cancer is back.”

I know realistically the whole neighborhood did not just go silent at that comment, but it sure feels like it. I hold my breath, wanting to keep it together for the moment so I don’t worry my Grandma. A couple silent tears are already spilling through.

I wipe them away, trying to be discreet about it, and draw in a quiet breath. “I know—I mean, I guessed. You and Mom and Dad aren’t the best at keeping secrets from me.” The past couple weeks Grandma Angie wouldn’t be home after school here and there, and I knew that her appointments last time were always scheduled around three o’clock in the afternoon. I figured something was wrong.

She sighed. “No, I guess we aren’t.” She took a moment to sift back through memories, trying to decide one that would fit the situation and lighten the mood. It is a trick I am well acquainted with.

“Like the time when your Dad bought a puppy for you and just kept it in the basement not remembering you had your piano practice there that night.” Grandma tries to work up a laugh but ends up silent again. She looks back out into the street that is now slightly more busy due to the six o’clock rush hour. Even though we live in a residential neighborhood, many people end up driving through here at the same time. While having a nine to five life sounds constricting and scary, the constancy of it would be comforting. I think I would be okay with someone else laying out the rest of my life for me.

Grandma Angie and I watch the cars continue to pass by for another half hour. We don’t mention the cancer or the tears in both of our eyes. I know Grandma was scared and that scared me as well. How could someone who has lived as long as she has not have made peace with the fact she may die soon? My Grandma has always been religious too. What does it take to not be afraid of the unknown? I know tomorrow she would likely have to move back to the hospital. At least for tonight we can sit together and watch the sun set over Savanna.

Abigail Bures grew up on a small farm in rural Wisconsin. Sixteen-yearold Abigail is in her junior year in high school. She hopes to someday become a published author of fiction novels.

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Kaentian Street

PUBLIC POTTIES KJ Hannah Greenberg

“Arjun! No!” The squatting man looked up from his early morning emptying of his digestive system. His wife, his mother, his sister, and five other women from their village were watching him defecate on the jute. He had thought that at this hour of the day, women were too busy tending babies and making breakfast to interfere with men’s activities.

An unidentifiable voice continued the tirade by shouting at him, Stop! Stop right now!”

Arjun didn’t know whether to pull up his pajamas and ruin their fabric or to continue to void in front of the women. As it were, those females ordinarily identifiable as “family” or as

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“belonging to friends” were banging pots and pans, waking not only barbets and quails, but also all of the other local birds and all of the other local inhabitants. The women had already unintentionally flushed a peacock.

“Go away. I need privacy.”

His second older sister responded. “No! No more privacy!

Privacy leads to rape. Field toilets bring diarrhea, too. Plus, Izna died when that snake bit her. There would have been no snake to bite her if she and the rest of us had bathrooms.”

“Five minutes. Let me finish. Then we’ll talk.”

“Arjun,” implored his mother, “Sai needs a wife. Have pity for your brother. Buy us a toilet.”

“Bring us plumbing,” yelled his sister, Pooja.

“I’ll call a meeting of the elders at the full moon.”

“Not good enough, Husband. Our daughter, Omala, dropped out of school yesterday. She said it was too hard to be there without a bathroom during her monthlies. The pipes need to reach not only our homes, but also both of our public buildings.”

With tight lips, Arjun replied, “how could we possibly pay for such wonders?”

Taahira, a crone, who was also Arjun’s maternal aunt, extended her hand. The scroll she offered Arjun contained many columns of figures. “We can sell the land on which we currently grow coffee. That sale will bring us more money than those scrawny bushes ever did.”

“I’ll talk to the elders during the meeting. I doubt Shaurya will agree to it”

Others of the women, too, began shrieking.

Amidst the commotion, Arjun finished his business, pulled up his pants and faced his harassers. “Bring me water. Bring me porridge.”

Hastily, he washed his right hand. Thereafter, he prayed and then slowly ate his breakfast. Village leadership had its advantages.

Leadership had its disadvantages, as well. While he washed, prayed, and ate, the female chorus carried on. His neighbor’s wife, Nabitha, taunted, “you have a cell phone. My husband has Wi-Fi. Yet, none of us have toilets.”

Nabitha’s nearly grown daughter continued, “I don’t want to keep dealing with my monthly bleeding in the millet. It’s not healthy, for any of us, for me to do that.”

Arjun’s elder brother’s mother-in-law addended, “I supposed you were manly. I supposed wrong” Arjun rose. He could hit the matron with impunity, but his brother’s wife would probably leave his brother if he did.

Instead, Arjun glared first at the matron and then at each of the rest of his tormentors. He looked each of them in the eye.

Then he noticed their hands. Some women clenched sticks. Others grasped sizable stones.

Shy Pia, Shaurya’s wife, spoke up. “He’ll agree. He wants to see our children married. He’ll agree to everything you suggest. You’ll agree to everything we suggest.”

During the weeks that followed, the elders were accosted by the village’s women every time that they used the fields to urinate or to defecate. The women divided themselves into teams; at least one team was always watching the countryside. Not only were the tribal heads constantly hounded, but there were also no more rapes.

After the full moon meeting, the village sold its coffee acreage and bought toilets. Subsequently, there were abundant weddings - nearby communities wanted their scions to marry into Arjun’s “advanced” settlement. Sadly, Arjun did not attend most of those festivities.

It was not the women’s makeshift weapons or the menfolk’s manifest anger that killed him. Rather, Arjun died when the cheaply constructed privy seat, upon which he was perched, broke in half and he fell into the pit below it.

The elders had agreed to bring private stalls to the community after Arjun had promised each of them a substantial bribe. As village head, he had pocketed the remainder of the profit. Thus, the village’s homes, school, and church had received outhouses, but not running water.

Accordingly, the women’s would-be champion expired on the mound of excrement piled under his latrine.

“You’d never.”

“Only because I forbade it,” answered his wife. “We don’t just want plumbing. We want access to it, and we want it at the school and at the church, too.”

KJ Hannah Greenberg is a published author of several books and served as editor in multiple literary journals.

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PinkCat

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Features Fiction

A JOURNEY TO (SELF LOVE

by Jazie Pilones “

Y

ou cannot love others until you love yourself first.” I couldn’t count how many times people have told me this, but to me, it’s not something that I believe in or follow. Somehow, I just find it depriving oneself of loving others just cause they haven’t loved themselves yet.

What is “self-love”? Really…? These are exactly the words my friends or other people I know often ask each other. Nobody could give a sure answer but to them, if it’s something that benefits them, internally or externally, then it’s probably it.

I didn’t know what self-love meant or if it even existed.

I was in my 20s when I first encountered it through my college professor, who I used to hate because I found her to be a really difficult person, though she later turned out to be a good friend, mentor, and even a second mother to me up to this day. Who would’ve thought? I remember sharing with her about not being able to give my best in anything I do because I doubt myself too much. She told me things that helped me see my value and believe in who I am. Her wise words and advice surely guided me in my path to self-love.

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It has been four years since I first learned and practiced it but those four years weren’t enough to master it. Like learning a foreign language or trying a new skill, mastering self-love needs one to invest in him/herself as much time, effort, and money as you would spend on your French classes or as much conviction as to give up your rest day to improve your archery form. Yourself is your best investment, and self-love will take a lifetime to master.

For all those who are still struggling with themselves, there are simple practices that have helped me love myself more and become a better person to my friends, family, and others every single day. Check them out and you can try them for yourself, too!

Accepting that you’re human and you’re not perfect.

Growing up a perfectionist, I’m not easily pleased with what I do and I often beat myself up when I think I haven’t done enough academically or in something else. Pressure is also a factor especially when your family expects a lot from you and often compares you to others.

The world is big and you’ll meet others who are smarter and more talented than you. The best thing you could do for yourself is to accept reality and learn best from capable individuals where you can improve your skills.

Be kind to yourself. It is important that you understand yourself and accept your weaknesses while also acknowledging your strengths. Understand yourself like how you understand the people around you, especially your loved ones. And by knowing your weaknesses, you’d learn more about your limits, and by acknowledging your strengths, you learn more about what you’re truly capable of and keep on improving on them.

Learn to forgive yourself. This isn’t always easy to do because we’re so used to being hard on ourselves that we forget we need this too. We’re human and we’re not perfect therefore it’s normal to make mistakes. Mistakes are part of

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our existence and they’re for us to take knowledge from, not something to punish ourselves with.

Forgive yourself for the mistakes in the past that have burdened you. Forgive those times when you’ve made bad decisions for yourself. These are things we no longer have power over and what we have now are our present and our future. Learn from those experiences, and look at them from a brighter side because they were necessary for us to grow.

Embrace and love your flaws. I meant the flaws in our bodies that we like to cover up and hide because we’re ashamed of them. Perfect beauty and body standards have been set high by the media and cosmetics. We try to attain perfect and unattainable beauty and compare ourselves to models and see our imperfections as disgusting. We tend to forget that our flaws are exactly what makes us beautiful and we shouldn’t be ashamed of them. What the media brings to us about perfect beauty isn’t real.

Love your body. Love your size. Love your color. Love those imperfect curves. Love your stretch marks. Love your scars. Don’t let anybody tell you what perfect beauty is.

Be true to yourself. Cate Blanchett once said, “We have not to be frightened of going into dangerous impolite places and people not liking what we do or not liking what we say.”

We must stop trying to be somebody else just so we can have the praise and other people’s attention. Let us not do something to please others and seek their approval. We don’t need them. Instead, let us do something that makes us happy, something true to who we are. Do something to please ourselves and not anybody else’s. Let us not be afraid to express what we are and do what we want just because.

Anywhere we go or whatever we do, there will always be criticisms, but it’s not their opinions about us that matter, it’s about being true to who we are and being able to project that to others.

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Choose to be happy. A cheerful AGT contestant who was given a 2% chance of survival brought hope to the world after sharing what she’s been through and when she said, “You can’t wait until life isn’t hard anymore before you decide to be happy.”

I grew up earning the things and outcomes I want to have, and I’ve lived most of my life believing that everything is earned, even my happiness. If it wasn’t for what Nightbirde said, I wouldn’t have a change in perspective when it comes to my happiness. Not everything in life needs to be earned, and happiness is something we choose for ourselves because we’re all entitled to it.

Live a healthy life. Self-care is as important as self-love.

Our body is our temple and ourselves is our best investment.

Exercise and eat and drink food that nourishes both your body and mind.

Surround yourself with the right people. We grow according to the people we surround ourselves with every day.

So, find people who help you grow, those who love, support, and encourage you. Those who believe in you and in what you can do. Those who uplift your spirits. Those who don’t compare you to others and trample you. Pick your community wisely and do not be afraid to get rid of toxic family and friends.

Spend time alone. Whenever I feel bad after fighting with my family, I’d always spend my time in my happy place, a fish pond. A place where I feel myself. Where I don’t have to fight my demons. Where the air isn’t suffocating. Where there is peace.

We often run out of energy from socializing with families and friends or experiencing burnout and stress from work.

Spend time with yourself. Alone. Away from the city, if you want to. Go camping in the mountains or lie on your hammock by the shore. Get away from distractions. No TV. No phone.

No internet. Think about all the good things in your life,

everything that you’re grateful for. Find your happy place where you can be your authentic self, happy and at peace.

Or you can spend your time with yourself by doing something creative. Explore the inner artist in you. Or step outside of your comfort zone and try something new and crazy that challenges you. Express yourself in whichever way you like.

Live with purpose. Know what you want to do with your life. Find a goal, a purpose, and make decisions that will support your goals. You don’t have to take big steps in order to get to where you want to be or what you want to have. Take small, careful steps towards your life’s goal. Find meaning in what you do and enjoy every moment of every step. Learn from them as much as you can.

Do not be afraid if you think you are running out of time and you still haven’t found your purpose yet. It is not a race.

Live life according to your own pace.

Invest in skills and knowledge. There are so many interesting things and activities around the world. Find something that interests you and learn it. You can read about it, join seminars or training, attend class or look it up on YouTube. There are plenty of ways to learn new things, so give it a try. This will allow you to give something to yourself that can be beneficial in the years to come. It’s okay to try something new and different in your life, there’s no shame in that, but not trying would be.

As we keep growing as a person, self-love will evolve too. Therefore, we must be open to change and continue to understand ourselves, others, and all that surrounds us. Take this reminder for me, will you? Always remember that you are your best investment, so keep on working on yourself. I wish you all the best and know that you are loved.

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Features Fiction

That Smells Like Body Positivity Spirit

By Sarah Eroy Oh, how great the world would be if everyone would mind their business! Will there ever be a time when no one would dictate how you should act or look.

We are exposed to the media’s unrealistic beauty standards at such a young age, which results in self-loathing. But 2022 is a few days shy and people are finally breaking free from the media’s standards, hurray for that!

Body positivity promotes acceptance of all body types. Big, small, tall, or short, one is beautiful in their ways. What should one do, to exude the body positivity energy?

Tick all the boxes on your road to loving and accepting yourself—wholeheartedly, just like what you deserve.

Negativity??? *scoffs* that is sooo last year!

Easier said than done? Yeah, it is. But once you wire your brain to think more on the bright side (cliche...I know!) everything will fall into place. It can take a lot of time and energy to be friends with ol’ Mr. Negativity, and you don’t have to do it all right away. It will always start with being positive about yourself. Positive affirmations always help. Do that, and in no time, YOU will master the art of positivity.

Confidence is KEY! Once you get the positivity working, you gotta show it to the world. As Queen Beyonce said, “If you got it, flaunt it!

Hold your head up high and do not second guess yourself!

The goal is to be healthy, not skinny!!!

Being skinny doesn’t always equate to being in great shape, as being on the plus size side does not always mean otherwise. The endgame should always be, being healthy. Big or small, it will not matter if one is sick. Now get up, do whatever you want, be whoever you want to be, just remember...BE HEALTHY. Cut yourself some slack!

Come on, don’t be too hard on yourself. Please give yourself a breather cause you deserve it. Again, compliment yourself even when accomplishing something small. Hey, it may be a small matter to others, but to you, that accomplishment is something huge! Stop gaslighting yourself into thinking that you don’t matter, that your achievements mean nothing, cause they do...you do matter!

Love yourself!

What screams body positivity than showing more love for yourself. Self-acceptance plays a role in loving oneself.

Once you accept that you are beautiful, loving one’s skin won’t seem that hard anymore. Understand that beauty is not about the 36-24-36 standards, most of which social media platforms are overusing and exploiting in the most toxic ways, but about being comfortable in one’s skin.

Again, easier said than done, but practice self-love, and soon it won’t seem like a challenge.

Live a healthier life by exuding body positivity energy! Do all of these, and see how brighter life will become after.

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Writer’s Corner

And yet

BY NEEN ARCILLA

We take a snapshot Of our own image Sublime, yet unreal We smile, and yet gloomy We act out bliss, yet grim The dreary reality Of this pretentious world Allowed us to make A brand new version of truth And yet, only in our mind We look for a box And confine ourselves in it A new prison system Of character and truth A perfect life made by a frame And yet... and yet.. a broken frame

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Features

Let me take a selfie

BY NEEN ARCILLA

Days of wines and roses Dancing and singing rejoices But first, let me take a selfie!

Long drives and beer nights Moonlights and grands sights But first, let me take a selfie!

On bad days and bad dreams When starlights don’t gleam Still, let me take my selfie And when I feel better When the worst of storms weather I will take my selfie

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The other side of the photo

BY NEEN ARCILLA

Detached to the physicality of it Yet intertwined with the thoughts in mind Judgment, chaos, anxious Smile harder, dear Put some make-up on Fix the hair and twirl it a little Pout the lips, that red lustrous lips Eyebrows should be on fleek Face should have rosy cheek That smile, your perfect smile That’s where it all depends A photo, a single snapshot Grand, pleasing, show stopping You took a few didn’t you?

Tell them you just woke up Say you have no filters on Tweak it a little, edit it!

Lie, lie, lie Make them believe That what is beautiful is man made

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Poetry Blogs

7 Cliche-Free Character Development Spins

BY NEW READER MEDIA

No one, literally no one, ever escapes the magnet of falling in love with that hero or heroine—and even that villain, sometimes—from the pages of your favorite titles. At one point, you can’t deny that you cried, laughed, or got frustrated with that character.

And when your turn to write the next Edward Cullen, Dolores Umbridge, or Joker comes, it is upon you to carve a solid character development to flesh the next threedimensional iconic characters that bookworms will either fall in love with or hate to the core.

In this treat, we bring you character development tips in writing your iconic characters—protagonists and antagonists—to life.

Here are ideas on how to develop characters in your story:

1. Paint a picture of your character.

2. Give the character a strong backstory.

3. Reveal the character’s motivations and goals.

4. Balance their traits, nothing too perfect.

5. Give them the right skill and/or powers.

6. Drop the stereotypes.

7. Give your character a distinct voice.

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Paint a picture of your character When you read the name Harry Potter, you picture a thin bespectacled boy with jet black hair and bright green eyes.

Being able to visualize how your characters would look like if they were real would help them leave marks on the readers’ minds.

Mind, however, that incorporating flashbacks is not a universal way of showing backstories for all characters in all books. Although there are details about a character that will not make it to the pages, still maintain notes of what they are and where they are from. It will guide you on how to progress your characters into the story.

Reveal the character’s motivations and goals

Write about the character’s physical appearances such as the color of their hair, eyes, and skin, and their height and built.

You can include their distinguishing features such as Harry’s lightning bolt scar, Hermione’s prominent front teeth, or Ron’s freckled face. Also include their mannerisms when they’re sad, excited, angry, or happy.

These features will make the characters more relatable to the readers. Sometimes, readers even picture themselves as look-alikes of the characters in the books that they are reading.

An effective character development shows the goals of the character and the motivations behind his or her actions. Take Leo Valdez of the Percy Jackson series. His perseverance in the mission to defeat the giants is fueled by his heartbreak in the death of his mother at the hands of the primordial deity Gaia.

If you’re thinking about prospects of your book making it to the big screen in the future, paint a clear picture of your characters.

An effective spin in your character development also includes giving your readers access to the inner thoughts and feelings of the character. Let the readers see through the character’s inner conflict, motivations, opinions, and personality. The character’s internal monologue is also a neat way to establish information about the happenings in the book through the writer’s perspective.

Give the character a strong backstory

Balance their traits, nothing too perfect

A peek into the past of your characters may be all it takes to make your readers love, understand, or hate them even more.

Drop the cliche of making the protagonist too good to be true or the villain too evil. You can give the good a tinge of misdemeanor and the evil a pint of “values” or an extent of morality.

Giving your characters a strong backstory may explain their personality. Their history will give the readers hints on what choices would the characters make in the later parts of the book or when they face pressing conflicts. Backstories also change the readers’ perspective of a character. Remember how a drift to the pensieve made Severus Snape “the bravest man” Harry ever knew.

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A too-perfect protagonist makes the narrative boring.

Allow the character to lose his or her temper when faced with hard or frustrating circumstances in the story; let him or her make mistakes like how any normal person would.

An imperfect protagonist is more relatable and likable than a purely upright one.

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Antagonists are also not just plain evil. No matter how twisted, they still maintain some values—the most common of which is loyalty. In the Harry Potter book series, Lord Voldemort showed how he chastised and tortured those who have abandoned him but showed his delight over the Lestranges who were imprisoned in Azkaban when they tried to look for him after his downfall in 1981.

Give your characters the right skill/power In most stories, the goal of the protagonist is to overpower or topple the rule of the antagonist. While there is the desire to see the hero succeed, it is undoubtedly lame to just let him do it. No reader hero is celebrated for slaying an ant, really!

Realistically, everyone sounds different from another. That is precisely how we know when a letter or text message sent to us was not really written by the sender. There is something in the way we speak that gives our identity away.

This is still true for the characters in your book. The characters’ voice echoes loudly with the common words or phrases they use or their humor. Think of Joey Tribbiani and you can literally hear him ask, “How you doin’?”

Now that you’ve got this quick guide on how to write your characters, grab your pen and paper (or anything you can write on) and start scribbling the names you’d want to be in your debut or next book. For more tips like this, visit newreadermedia.com!

What makes a story more interesting is when the hero faces an insurmountable challenge that would almost break them in the process. The main character, while possessing innate skills and motivations, must go through the process of improving himself and collecting skills, equipment, and allies in order to make the win worth the wait.

Drop the Stereotypes Using lazy stereotypes such as “the damsel in distress” or “strong muscular man” may at worst be offensive for your readers. You can be archetypal—that is, the use of patterns such as the common behavior of similar characters, without needing to be stereotypical—which shows when you write a preconceived belief about a certain character based on his or her gender, age, or ethnicity.

Have you heard of Clarisse La Rue? She’s a female demigod from the Ares Cabin in Camp Half-Blood in the Percy Jackson series. Instead of being a female that stereotypically needs saving, Clarisse’s strong and hot-tempered character is written in the archetype of her father, Ares, the God of War.

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Media Corner

Agnali

The Entertainer:

The Sad Story Behind America’s First Pop Star

BY NEW READER MEDIA

To begin with, America’s first pop star died a penniless man, buried in an unmarked grave, and with a series of unfinished and unrealized compositions.

The second born of six children, Scott Joplin was introduced to music because of his parents: Giles Joplin, a former North Carolina slave, and Florence Givens, an AfricanAmerican freewoman from Kentucky. Giles Joplin used to play the violin at plantation parties while Florence is a skilled banjo player.

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At the age of 7, Scott Joplin learned the basics of music from his parents and was allowed to play the piano while his mother did the house chores. Scott was obsessed with the piano, playing it every afternoon.

His prowess in playing the piano was further developed upon meeting German-American music teacher Julius Weiss.

Weiss became a big factor in Scott Joplin’s life, having taught

Blogs Scott Joplin did not slow down and managed to compose three other ragtime music pieces: The Ragtime Dance, March Majestic, and his most famous tune and also, the first music piece to gain worldwide fame, The Entertainer.

The immortality of “The Entertainer” is undeniable. These days, “The Entertainer” is usually associated with ice cream trucks and even silent films.

Scott Joplin was undeniably gaining a reputation and it won’t be long he grasps on another ambition: to make an opera.

But Scott Joplin’s life was never the same after the financial failure during the tour of A Guest of Honor, his first opera, showing early signs of syphilis, and the death of his wife, Freddie Alexander, ten weeks after their marriage. him for free after knowing of Joplins’ financial difficulties. He fell in love with Scott’s perseverance and passion for music. The two became lifelong friends until Weiss’s death.

When his father left for another woman in his teenage years, Scott worked as a railroad laborer and performed at a number of local events. Not long after, Scott left for Texarkana to pursue a career in music but it wasn’t until when he moved to Missouri in 1894 that things began to change for the great Scott Joplin.

Though the ragtime music did not originate from Scott Joplin himself, it was his theatrical play around the melody and syncopation that differentiates him away from the usual ragtime music that was already played around Minstrel Shows, a racist entertainment during the era of slavery and post-Civil war in America.

After being exposed to ragtime music in the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, Scott Joplin knew just what to do to innovate what was once a piece of simple dance music. Working parttime as a piano teacher while performing in Missouri shows, Scott Joplin published his own music in 1895; and in 1899, he scored his first successful ragtime composition called “Maple Leaf Rag”.

Maple Leaf Rag was no sleeper hit. In its first six months, it sold a hundred thousand copies and soon sold over a million copies making Scott the first musician to do so. Maple Leaf Rag influenced ragtime music, having been recognized as one of Joplin’s most copied compositions which would become the model for ragtime tunes to come.

His failed attempt at getting a producer in New York to produce his next opus in 1907 and upon making ends meet with his second opera, Treemonisha, led to his deterioration and soon after his confinement and death because of Syphilitic Dementia on the 1st of April, 1917 in Manhattan State Hospital.

His second wife Lottie Stokes, whom he married in 1909, composed one last music with her husband in 1914 under the name Scott Joplin Music Company called Magnetic Rag. Though unnoticed, like Scott’s second opera, the composition (in fact, all of his compositions) received posthumous appreciation in the 1970s when the 1974 film The Sting used his music, was released, and won the Best Picture award at the Oscars.

Scott Joplin’s grave was finally marked at St. Michael’s Cemetery in East Elmhurst after 57 years.

His music resurfaced once again and by the late ’70s.

Treemonisha, his second opera, was produced in full and he was awarded posthumously the Pulitzer Prize. In 1976, his rented home in St. Louis was recognized as a National Historic Landmark; and in 2002, Joplin’s own recorded performances in the 1900s is included in the National Recording Preservation Board in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry, forever cementing his legacy in music and recognizing Scott Joplin as America’s first pop star.

Though It was believed that his contract with John Stillwell Stark, his music publisher, only allowed him 1% of the royalty,

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Poetry Blogs

Stories of the Storytellers

Who are the European writers behind their byline?

BY NEW READER MEDIA

What was the first book you’ve read? Or the first play you’ve watched?

Most of the responses one could get would be Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, or if you go for more modern, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.

The names of European writers and playwrights never miss being mentioned in conversations like this—and for good reasons. From the classical period until contemporary times, European influence is highly cognizable in writers’ and playwrights’ storytelling styles in their respective mediums.

But while many seem to be familiar with the long list of European writers and their works, don’t you get curious about their backstories, interests, and life behind their bylines?

Surely, you are now and that is why NRM has prepared this to look deeper into the persons behind their pennames.

Homer (circa 750 BC) If you are into classical figures, you couldn’t have missed Homer— the man believed and known to be the author of the Illiad and Odyssey. While he is regarded as one of the most influential writers, with his epics becoming the basis of Greek education at the time, the identity of Homer remains hazy.

Details of his birth, the years he walked this earth (if he ever did), how he looked, and what was his life like are nothing but guesses and probabilities put forward by scholars based on his works. He is believed to have been born around 750 BC, predating the birth of the calendar itself. Oftentimes, Homer is depicted as a blind man with curly hairs, as shown in busts and statues built in his honor. This image of Homer is based solely on the character of Demodokos, a poet in The Odyssey.

Mysterious!

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe did not need to find a job, at least for the first half of his life, being born to a wealthy parentage in the wealthy commercial and financial center, Frankfurt. He was the eldest of seven children and developed a rather intense affection for his sister, Cornelia, the only one among his siblings to survive into adulthood; and had a lovehate relationship with his younger brother, who died at age 6, and this relationship is believed to be one that affected his later development.

His energies showed no decline even when his age was advancing. After marrying off his son and resigning the directorship of the Weimar Theatre in 1817, he completed more literary works until the dusk period of his life and even took a new scientific interest in meteorology. His last heartache came when he, in his 70s, proposed marriage to 19-year-old Ulrike in 1823, which the latter refused. He returned to Weimar where he continued to write, producing the Trilogy of Passion in 1827. He passed on from a heart attack while sitting on his armchair in the spring of March 1832, months after he sealed the manuscript for the part two of Faust.

Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame are just two of Victor Hugo’s works that survived time, still being read by enthusiasts close to two centuries since they were first published. Hugo is regarded as one of the most influential figures in the romantic movement in France.

Aristotle, to writing poetry. Dante purportedly wrote Vita Nuova (The New Life) between 1292 to 1294 in commemoration of Beatrice’s death.

Dante has been educated in grammar, language, and philosophy and was took an apprenticeship with Brunetto Latini. Dante’s most noted work was The Divine Comedy.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) Literally, who doesn’t know William Shakespeare? From poetry to plays, Shakespeare’s works command respect and recognition. His most popular work, arguably, was Romeo and Juliet. Could he have been a romantic man besides being an author with a knack for moving his readers’ emotions? Most likely, yes.

Shakespeare married at age 18, which was way below the acceptable marrying age in his time. His wife, Anne Hathaway, was 26 during their marriage and was already expecting their first child at the time of the wedding. They have three children throughout their marriage.

Shakespeare’s works include 38 plays, 2 narrative poems, 154 sonnets, and other types of poetry. Although you might grow up watching Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, none of his original manuscripts have survived today and the ones available are all thanks to actors from Shakespeare’s theater company who collected the pieces for post-humous publication.

Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)

He was born to parents with incompatible political beliefs, his military man father being a loyalist to successive governments and his mother being a royalist. He graduated from the law faculty in Paris and memories of his life as a poor student later purportedly became the inspiration for Marius in Les Misérables.

Dante (1265-1321) Born as Durante Alighieri in 1265, Dante grew up among Florentine aristocracy. His parents died in his childhood but not before he has been arranged to be married to Gemma di Manetto Donati and he did, in 1285 although he was, and remained, in love with another girl, Beatrice Portinari who died in 1290. Dante channeled his grief over her death by committing himself to study the works of Boethius, Cicero, and

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Joining this roster of European writers that shaped the history of literature is Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, most popularly known for his work Don Quixote.

Unlike his contemporaries, he did not attend university although supposedly studied under the Jesuits for some time and was an avid reader of books.

Miguel de Cervantes was a soldier for the Spanish Crown and was involved in the battle with Turks of the Ottoman Empire then occupying Cyprus. Cervantes, however, would return home to a country with very high inflation and struggle to gain employment, taking him a quarter-century before he scored success with Don Quixote in 1604.

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Albert Camus (1913-1960)

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

Famous for his absurdist works, Albert Camus is a Noble Prize for Literature winner in 1957, his noted works included The Stranger and The Plague. A champion of individual rights, Camus was among the few journalists to condemn the use of the atomic bomb in Japan during the second world war.

Charles Dickens had a rather bitter start as a child. After his father was imprisoned for bad debt, he was withdrawn from school and sent to work in a factory under horrible conditions for three years. The appalling experience never left him and seemed to have been immortalized in his novels David Copperfield and Great Expectations.

Camus was born to a family with little money in 1913 and lost his father, a soldier, to World War I. A bright student, Camus attended the University of Algiers and obtained his undergraduate and graduate studies in Philosophy in 1936. He was married twice and divorced both times in his younger years.

The Victorian author started as a journalist covering the parliament before publishing a long list of novels, including The Tale of Two Cities; edited weekly periodicals, wrote books and plays, and performed before Queen Victoria in 1851.

The Brontë Sisters (1816-1855)

Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924)

There can’t be too many artists in a family.

If you think of Frances Hodgson Burnett, then you’d probably think of The Secret Garden.

Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë are sisters born in Thornton, Yorkshire to an Anglican clergyman father. Accounts of their life say all the Brontë children started to write at a young age owing to them being left alone at home often. The sisters had each used pseudonyms: Currer for Charlotte, Ellis for Emily, and Acton for Anne, and went on to publish novels that would be known as classics in today’s time.

Like Charles Dickens, Burnett endured a difficult childhood that started from the passing of her father, Edwin Hodgson.

They had to move from one house to another, each one becoming far less like their old house in St. Luke’s Terrace and the fascinating gardens until they end up in a log cabin outside of Knoxville, Tennessee.

Some of their published works include Jane Eyre by Charlotte, Agnes Grey by Anne, and Withering Heights

by Emily. All of the Brontë sisters, as well as their brother Branwell, died of tuberculosis.

They continued to financially struggle while in Tennessee until Frances tried her chance to earn money from writing by sending stories to magazines. Later, she would become the highest-paid female writer in America at age 18.

Jane Austen (1775-1817) If you’re a writer who is frustrated to find a publisher, do not fret. Even Jane Austen’s priced Sense and Sensibility took a while before finding its way to the printing press.

Jane Austen was born as the seventh of eight children of a close-knit Hampshire family. Much like the heroines in her works, Jane shared a loving alliance with her sister Cassandra.

Both refused to wed for the sake of marriage and instead went to support their mother since their father’s death in 1805.

According to the British Library, the comedy, wit, satire, and romance in Austen’s works reflect her social and geographical background in Hampshire, Bath, and Dorset.

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To-Read-List New Reader Media, a creative marketing firm working in partnership with New Reader Magazine, takes on the challenge of bookmarking emerging voices in the indie publishing world. Presented in no particular order, here’s New Reader Media’s reading list for this quarter of 2021!

The Artifice of a Lady MILTON H. MARQUIS When the Berlin Wall fell, a beautiful young lady turned away from her family and fled to the west with hopes of a better life. She studied numerous languages and prepared herself for the feat, but when reality confronts her, she faces a demon she has not prepared for. .

A narrative of innocence turning to sin, fueled by adrenaline for survival.

Will there be redemption for her?

Uriah’s Big Day ELAINE DACH Seven-year-old Uriah’s most anticipated trip to the beach turns into every parent’s horror: Uriah goes missing! He finds himself fatigued, hungry and injured.

A true story of a day in a boy’s life who was lost and found, written by his mother as she immortalizes his memory.

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Meggie’s Day at the Fair CATHERINE GLOVER The road to justice and the civil rights movement has been a long and Spend a wonderful day with Meggie and her farm animal friends as she unlocks her first summer adventure at the County Fair. Jampacked and filled with surprises, this book is an exciting read for toddlers and your animal-lover kids!

Metamorphyx: Embracing Life Experience, Life Change, and Life Purpose THOMAS SCHULER What is your life purpose and who defines it?

Take a deep breath and embark in the journey of embracing life experience, its harsh realities and inevitable changes, and discovering your life purpose with Tom Schuler’s Metamorphyx—a no holding back account of life’s battles that shape one’s character, renew faith, and direct one to a resilient life purpose..

The Program: TRILOGY OF THE PROJECT & THE HUNT MANUEL PELAEZ After a successful covert operations that ended four rogue CIA operatives, FBI agents embark on a new assignment n brutal Afghanistan, where the program will be tested beyond anyone could foresee.

Joined by strategists and experts, and armed with groundbreaking technologies, will their success continue?

THE BOND MANUEL PELAEZ A coming of age narrative fit for all ages, The Bond tells the story of a young boy, Jeremy, who tries to get into the California spotlight, his frustrations, and the solace he finds in the company of his Blue Throat Triggerfish, Finn.

Don’t miss on their adventures under the sea as Finn helps Jeremy find where he truly belongs.

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Buffalo Gals Volume 1 BOB ROHAN From the 90s bestselling comic feature comes 300 pages of chairflipping fun in the small world of ranch owners, Bess and Connie, as they share mayhem and the mundane with the... Buffalo Gals!

Perfect for 90s comic nerds, enjoy this hilarious treat in its first book compilation!

The Eikons of God: Soul vs. Spirit: Which One Is the Real You? STEVEN D. ALSTON An intriguing story of self-exploration: Steven D. Alston confronts the readers with a crucial existential question that will implore one’s curiosity. This thought-provoking, must-read book is one to feed your mind.

The Miami Brigade NICK FATTOR A fictional recounting of the ill-fated Bay of Pigs Invasion in the Cold War, this book is as gripping as it is astonishing. Perfect for war and history buffs everywhere.

Motherhood: A Journey Into Your Own Heart TANJA HEINTZ Motherhood indeed takes one on a unique journey of faith and love.

Youschka Charlotte discusses her path in facing her fear, doubts, and worries through the gift of motherhood and the love for her children.

Witness how her faith in Jesus Christ and the guidance of the Holy Spirit directed her to confront raw emotions, pain, and chaos deep in her heart, enabling a life that is less pulled back by the weight of old baggage for her children.

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Embracing Me TYMESIA POPE BUTCHER Realize your true worth by looking though the lens of the Father and embracing all that He has created you to be.

Written for persons going through spiritual identity crisis, this book will empower you to seek your “Kingdom-Identity” and purpose.

Terralepus KATHLEEN M. HAMILTON Seemingly different characters intertwine with each other in this dazzling tale set in the cosmos. Get ready for an intergalactic adventure like no other!

The Program: TRILOGY OF THE PROJECT & THE HUNT MANUEL PELAEZ After a successful covert operations that ended four rogue CIA operatives, FBI agents embark on a new assignment n brutal Afghanistan, where the program will be tested beyond anyone could foresee.

Joined by strategists and experts, and armed with groundbreaking technologies, will their success continue?

THE BOND MANUEL PELAEZ A coming of age narrative fit for all ages, The Bond tells the story of a young boy, Jeremy, who tries to get into the California spotlight, his frustrations, and the solace he finds in the company of his Blue Throat Triggerfish, Finn.

Don’t miss on their adventures under the sea as Finn helps Jeremy find where he truly belongs.

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new reader magazine Helping you connect with your audience online and beyond.

CASTE

by Kayla Branstetter After witnessing the riots over the 2020 summer, I decided to read about the movement, and this led me to two influential books: Just Mercy and Caste. These books opened my eyes to the injustices minorities have and continue to face. I chose to have a white male in the center because for many centuries many white men have been at the top of the caste system, whereas minorities and women must continue to fight to have their voices heard.

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