Issue 36 Summer Special Edition: Gut Feeling | Seth Lorinczi
"Sometimes I wondered if I’d made a mistake leaving behind my friends in the punk scene, the music that gave my life meaning. Amidst the whirl of San Francisco’s flashy bars and art openings..."
Welcome to KHÔRA, a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing. Visit our Archive to read previous issues. Scroll down if you’d like your work to be considered for future issues.
Issue 36: Special Edition
Do you have more in your inbox than you can read in a day? Us too. In this Issue 36 Special Edition, we’ll send you one piece at a time rather than the entire issue all at once. If you’d like to be considered for future publications, scroll down to learn more about KHÔRA’s 500 Words and KHÔRA’s Images.
Today’s essay is by Seth Lorinczi. Seth’s writing appears in The Guardian, DoubleBlind, Narratively, and other print anthologies and periodicals. He’s also the author of Death Trip: A Post-Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir (Spiral Path Collective, 2024), a book about coming to grips with ancestral trauma through psychedelic therapy. In addition, he was a co-founder of “Judaism & The Psychedelic Renaissance,” a first-of-its-kind live event in Portland.
The artwork for Seth’s piece is by Ruby Ray. Ruby is an American photographer, well known for her photography of the early punk, post-punk and industrial movements in California in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She began her photography career in 1977, when her photographs began appearing in Search & Destroy.
Check out the full Issue 36 Special Edition, and if you missed our previous issues, visit our Archive.
Gut Feeling by Seth Lorinczi | Artwork by Ruby Ray
In the 90’s I worked in an office in SoMa, San Francisco’s hip industrial zone. It wasn’t so hip back then: sun-bleached warehouses and body shops, the no-go zone beneath Highway 101. My employer was an online city guide, one of a thousand plucky startups staking their claim to the information superhighway. “In five years, the print weeklies will all be toast,” the editor-in-chief crowed. Twenty-five years later they’re still around, but the online guide’s been downgraded to a digital phonebook.
I liked my job—I wrote about the city’s restaurant scene—but outside work, it was hard to locate myself. I’d left my home in Washington, D.C. to clean up my act, get a real job, make something of myself. Still, an old feeling of separateness haunted me. Sometimes I wondered if I’d made a mistake leaving behind my friends in the punk scene, the music that gave my life meaning. Amidst the whirl of San Francisco’s flashy bars and art openings and deejayed house parties, I wasn’t sure if there was a place for me. Maybe not anywhere….
Read Gut Feeling.
Issue 36 Highlights
Issue 36 Special Edition: Strawberry Lipgloss
Issue 36 Special Edition: Lost in Midtown
Issue 36 Special Edition: Olympia Billiards
Issue 36 Special Edition: Gut Feeling
Issue 36 Special Edition: Mother-In-Law
Issue 36 Special Edition: Please Leave A Message
Artists and Writers
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Writers, read about KHÔRA’s 500 Words here.
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Team-based, collaborative, and curated, KHÔRA is a form that is continually opening. We invite you to join us in sustaining it together. We don't believe in rejections. KHÔRA’s 500 Words is about considering how multiple voices can be heard; how frameworks, traditions, and projects can inform each other; and how new perspectives emerge from collaboration and openness. If you are a visual artist or interested in sharing your artwork or images, ready about KHÔRA’s Images here.
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Once you send 500 Words, your work will remain in our inclusive and expansive space. You can send 500 Words more than once—there’s no limit to how many times you can send us new work; just no repeats, please. KHÔRA doesn’t publish previously published work, but feel free to share any 500 words you want as a sample (published or unpublished).
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With galactic gratitude,
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/KHÔRA squad