Fiction
How It Is
Contributor
Bianca StoneBianca Stone is a poet and visual artist. Her books include Someone Else's Wedding Vows and The Mobius Strip Club of Grief. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Baffler and Poetry Magazine. Her newest collection, What is Otherwise Infinite, will be out in January 2022. She lives in Vermont.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Through the Uncertainty, Agnes Borinsky and the Working Group for a New Spirit Are Taking Inventory of Our Lives
By Daniel KraneNOV 2020 | Theater
How can we find assurance and community in our upside down world? It is an especially taxing effort for theater artists, whose work and livelihoods depend on collaboration and communion. Enter the Working Group for a New Spirit, playwright Agnes Borinsky’s free initiative that offers a virtual home for transient artists, seminars in how to take stock of our lives, and more. Daniel Krane dives into this effort—”a series of gatherings for clarity and direction in our messy moment of distance and collapse”—that the Bushwick Starr is hosting now through December 7.
Brooklyn 2020
By Steven TaylorDEC 20-JAN 21 | Poetry
Steven Taylor is a writer and musician living in Brooklyn. His latest works are Don’t Hide the Madness: William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg, from Three Rooms Press, and Songs of Innocence and of Experience, from Ace Records.
79. (Brooklyn Navy Yard, Columbia County)
NOV 2021 | The Miraculous
An artist in his mid-30s living in New York and working in a 300-square-foot studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, finds himself consumed by frustration and anger. Although he is having exhibitions, after the shows close his paintings inevitably return to his studio, unsold. He’s not sure he wants to go on being an artist. A psychiatrist he consults helps him to understand that his anger revolves around his feelings about race, class and entitlement. Eventually the psychiatrist recommends that he begin working with a physical trainer, who has him start boxing and working out with a punching bag. Around the same time the artist, who is half-Choctaw and half-Cherokee, has been meeting with traditional Native American artists who tell him how the practices of dancing, drumming and beading have saved their lives. These experiences lead him to make a breakthrough in his work. Instead of focusing on painting, he begins to adorn Everlast vinyl punching bags like those he has been using at the boxing gym in extravagant styles inspired by Native American beadwork, pop culture, and everyday life. Along with beads, he adds tassels, sequins, brass and steel studs, yarn, chains, and sundry items. Some of the bags feature beaded texts quoting everyone from Simone de Beauvoir to Public Enemy.
Informants
By Anna Gurton-WachterMAY 2020 | Poetry
Anna Gurton-Wachter is a writer, editor and archivist. Her first full length book, Utopia Pipe Dream Memory, was published in late 2019 by Ugly Duckling Presse. She is the author of six chapbooks with recent writing available or forthcoming from A Glimpse Of, Black Warrior Review, and Armstrong Literary Review. Anna is 1/3 of DoubleCross Press, a handmade poetry micro-press, and she puts people’s poems online at counterpoetry dot com. Anna lives in Brooklyn, NY, a few blocks from where she was born and raised. For more info visit annagw.com / @anna.as.metaphor
