Issue 17: Mandarins | Umbilical | Breaking News
"history often erases those who were secondary to the white narrative..."
Welcome to Khôra, a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing. Visit our Archive to read previous issues.
In Issue 17, we’re back with a new team of curated writers and artists, and we’re so excited for you to meet them!
First, if you missed our last post, there is now an open invitation to enter the collaborative waters of Khôra:
Writers, read about Khôra’s 500 Words here.
NEW! Artists, send your artwork to Khôra's Images here.
Many thanks to all of you who have sent us work. Your words/images will always remain active in Khôra's ocean, and you won’t ever receive a notice of rejection from us. We know this process is not perfect — we’re rethinking and searching, and wish to stay open to the possibility that at any point, your work will be a fit for a curated issue or team collaboration.
Issue 17’s Featured Artist, Rosie Brand is an interdisciplinary artist living on Tongva Land in Los Angeles, CA. She builds sculptural worlds with ceramics, drawing, painting and writing. As an educator, Brand teaches ceramic handbuilding to adults at a local clay studio. Brand facilitates a monthly meeting for a cohort of five artists called Worm School. The group holds conversations that explore intersections between clay, ecology, gardening and craft practices. Born in the UK, Brand earned a BA in Illustration with honors from Brighton University, UK in 2013. She is currently in training to become a certified California naturalist.
Brand says of her work:
My work spins a cognitive web of interdimensional poetics. It is a practice of sculptural world building that stems out of my healing process after the death of my mother in 2019. In the aftermath of this loss, I seek to root myself in the living world around me, exploring the local landscape, slowly learning the names of the plants I see. I record my sense of these places with drawings. I forage for plant-forms, for the negative space between leaf and branch, for the elusive light-creatures living in the shade of a canopy. I’m looking for presence, looking to the sentience of the more-than-human…
Read Folk.
Issue 17’s Featured Writer Deborah Kay Kelly was raised in Minneapolis, a fourth generation on Positively 4th Street. Deborah lived many years in Chicago, and is home in Colorado. Her poems are found, four with award recognition, in several journals based in the US and Europe. She has led and written widely on behalf of non-profit organizations at work in the US and Mexico. Deborah has been published in Isele Quarterly, Asymptote, Thalia Magazine, Alternating Currents , Northern Colorado Writers Anthology, Fourth River Review, Stonecoast Review, The Bombay Gin, and The Art of Fungi Magazine. Several others have appeared in columns by Art Goodtimes in The Telluride Watch.
From The Ledge, for Khôra:
II.
There is much yelling, a president’s pursed beak of a chicken
and a twist of tin ribbon in a critical region
of brain.He calls for the messianic aestheticians, for a world exfoliated, depilated,
a white egg.We smell its smolder…
Read The Ledge.
Meet the members of our newest curated team!
Writers:
Amra Brooks
Amanda Johnston
Shin Yu Pai
Lindsay Quintanilla
Artists:
Shin Yu Pai
Sui Park
Erica Svec
Mandy Cano Villalobos
You can read highlights from our curated team below, or just head on over to Issue 17.
If you love what you’re seeing, please subscribe, share, tweet, retweet, and post, and Khôra will be back next month.
Galactic love,
Leigh
Leigh Hopkins
and the Khôra/Corporeal squad
Issue 17 Highlights
Mandarins by Shin Yu Pai | Photographs courtesy of the author.
history often erases those
who were secondaryto the white narrative
which explains whythe gun battery at the remote
Washington harbor defenseoutpost is named after
a long dead Texas Ranger…
Read Mandarins.
Umbilical by Amra Brooks | Artwork by Sui Park
We are all packed into a small brown and white room and my eyes keep closing when I try to open them. I am flat on my back under the white sheet. No cancer. I make the doctor say it twice as I come to. I can hear one of the nurses saying that their hand is covered in bodily fluid from a patient. “Wash it! You don’t want to get C. Diff!” another says. There are too many people talking. Sam, who has a button that says “Don’t worry I watched a video on YouTube,” brings me ginger ale…
Read Umbilical.
Breaking News by Amanda Johnston | Artwork by Erica Svec
did you hear? mama’s numbers hit
and the lights stayed on another day
the cold stayed away another night
peaches’ baby slid into today
healthy, juicy, and fat
and the insurance company
paid the bill in full…
Read Breaking News.
Hermanas by Lindsay Quintanilla | Artwork by Mandy Cano Villalobos
It had been eight years since she last saw her sister Manuela, eight years since she stepped onto her childhood soil. The day Mamá died, Carina was picking out the red onions from Mrs. Steven’s Burrata salad in Beverly Hills. She answered the phone through a whisper when she saw the number. She wondered if the wire transfer she sent on Monday went through. When Manuela told her the news, she forgot how to stand. Her arms went numb. The only sound in the room was from the record player playing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake for the twentieth time…
Read Hermanas.
Khôra will be back next month!
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