Issue 12: <insert your name here> is in <uto|dysto>pia | Help the Shoots Grow, Pull Them | Vertical Slice
Welcome to Khôra, a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing. Visit our Archive to read previous issues. Thank you for the enthusiastic response to this magazine over the past year, and a BIG THANK YOU to our subscribers. Your donations help to pay our writers and artists, something that's incredibly important to us as a small magazine. A donation of just $5 a month means so much, and we're grateful.
Issue 12’s Featured Writer Aditya Shankar was born and raised in India. His poetry, flash fiction and translations are in journals and anthologies around the world. He has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize multiple times. His most recent book XXL (Dhauli Books, 2018) was shortlisted for the Yuva Puraskar (selected by Sahitya Akademi). Shankar’s other books are After Seeing (2006) and Party Poopers (2014).
Aditya is multi-disciplinary artist, and he created the image for <insert your name here> is in <uto|dysto>pia:
“Watch the mouth
Of the word of mouth
The urban wonderland
Lurks in the ordinary.
There is a flow
Even beneath this poem
That will someday drip into land.”
Featured Artist Lisa Solomon regularly utilizes repetition in her practice. She says of Senninbari [1000 stitch knot belt]:
“Senninbari were 1000-stitch belts that women would make for their husbands going off to war in WWII. Ideally 1000 women would gather and each one would put a French knot in a belt. They would work on many belts, collectively infusing each one with the luck they hoped would keep their loved ones safe.
As a half Japanese, half Jewish (Eastern European) Caucasian woman, hybridization is literally a part of my DNA, and shows itself often in my practice. Influenced by my paternal grandmother (who was continually making things with her hands), I often choose to incorporate crochet, embroidery, felt, pins, etc. in my work. The history and connotations of these materials intrinsically add to the work.”
In Issue 12, we’re back with the final pieces from our current collaborative team of curated writers Carol Fischbach, Ploi Pirapokin, Adam Swanson, and Sabrina Tom, and artists Helen G. Blake, Jen Fuller, Fay Ku, and Soumya Netrabile. It’s been such an honor to work with this group, and we’ll miss their collaboration.
If you love what you’re seeing, please subscribe, share, tweet, retweet, and post, and Khôra will be back next month.
Yours,
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/Khôra squad
Some ideas for well-being:
Embracing oneness with sea, soil, flowers, trees.
Plenty of outdoor time. Inside and outside spaces model fluidity.
Research. Learning. Together.
Art. Exploration. Dialectic.
Respect for debate.
Equal value of all ideas. If there is to be any difference in value it’s in the responsibility of adults to be as creative and higher thinking as children expect and deserve for them to be.
— from Book Two: The Letters by Sabrina Tom
Issue 12 Highlights
Book Two: The Letters by Sabrina Tom / Artwork by Helen G. Blake
“Dear Children,
What did you dream about last night?
How did you help today?
Why is that important to you?”
Read Book Two: The Letters.
His Feathered Grief by Adam Swanson / Artwork by Jen Fuller
“The first time I let a man hold my body was recent; a Florida-born man with a good job in New York City and a dead dad buried just a few months after mine. I could see the grief that lived beneath his face when we met, though it was a softer grief, a type I don’t think I’ve ever known.”
Read His Feathered Grief.
Help the Shoots Grow, Pull Them by Ploi Pirapokin / Artwork by Fay Ku
“I’d last seen Lily and Sprout naked almost half a year ago, wading into a stream on a summer day before our ice-cream parlor jobs began. Their butts were fuller, lapping the surface of the water as they lowered themselves in. Their torsos had shortened to accommodate wider hips, and thin long hairs trailed from their pubic bone, lining their belly buttons…”
Read Help the Shoots Grow, Pull Them.
Vertical Slice by Carol Fischbach / Artwork by Soumya Netrabile
“The cot creaked when I rolled over on my left side, faced the wall. I wanted the bland taste of an off-white wall. A taste of sleep, an umami of escape, rest I hadn’t had in almost three weeks…”
Read Vertical Slice.
Khôra will be back next month.
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