Fiction
Tragic Strip
Contributor
T. MotleyT. Motley is a core contributor to Cartozia Tales, a fantasy mapjam comic for all ages: cartozia.com. He blogs at cartooniologist.blogspot.com and yourdailydoodle.tumblr.com
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
The Year of the Self
By CortezSEPT 2023 | Fiction
Cortez’s short story, The Year of the Self, centers on a protagonist struggling to recover from a breakup. It’s a familiar premise, but in this case, executed with a fresh vision and voice, as the story resists being driven by causality. Instead, it’s told in impressionistic fragments. We watch the narrator push through the mundanity of everyday life while trying to find ways to shirk the weight of her grief. As the story progresses, the narrator ascribes a kind of existential profundity to the most everyday misfortunes—whether she's stepping in dog shit or getting a yeast infection. The result is a story more wry and sparkling than melancholy.
A Word or Two on Art and Technology
By Charlotte KentMAY 2023 | Editor's Message
The words we bring to art intend, at best, to translate the perceptual realm into the linguistic, anchoring sensation through definition. But, as we all know, that often doesn’t occur. The well known essay, “International Art English” by Alix Rule and David Levine skewers that premise, as does Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word (1975) nearly forty years earlier, and a decade before that Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” resisted language’s simulacrum of art. So on, down the line. And yet, words also serve to support, promote, highlight, associate, and adore the art they describe.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s The Comeuppance Goes Where Only Fools Dare: The High School Reunion
By Paul David YoungJUNE 2023 | Theater
I have never felt the slightest inclination to go to a high school reunion, but apparently many people do in America, and thus a subgenre of film and theater has been created. The premise is that no matter how miserable high school was or how bad your relationships were, you will return to spend a few intoxicated hours with those special people from long ago. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s riff on this genre, The Comeuppance at Signature Theatre, showcases his ease with dialogue as he keeps the action going in a continuous gabfest, seamlessly and artfully directed by Eric Ting, at the pre-party leading up to the reunion.
Judah Schept’s Coal, Cages, Crisis
By Jarrod Shanahan and Abby CunniffSEPT 2022 | Field Notes
A crumbling strip of asphalt winds through the craggy countryside of eastern Kentucky, striated with power lines sagging in every direction. Wobbly pavement markings and errant skidmarks vanish at a hairpin bend buffered by low guard rails framing a rolling, sparsely tree-spotted expanse of hills. On one side of this road stands a roughly chiseled open coal seam, marking the remnants of a former mine. On the other, a bowed chain link fence capped in razor-wire announces the outer periphery of Otter Creek Correctional Facility. This remarkable image by photographer Jill Frank adorns the jacket of prison scholar Judah Schept’s Coal, Cages, Crisis (New York: NYU Press, 2022), confronting the reader with the book’s central preoccupations.
