“Resisting plot is a political act”
“There’s a risk in what these objects represent. There are people who would love to see this project disappear; people who want this to go away. I’m not paranoid, I’m just realistic that these objects need to be safeguarded. I hate to point that out, but it’s become a reality. If I hadn’t collected these items, no one would believe me.”
This is what artist Tom Kiefer told me about his body of work, “El Sueño Americano / The American Dream,” a photographic documentation of the personal belongings carried by migrants and asylum-seekers that were seized by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In 2019, I visited Tom Kiefer’s studio in Ajo, Arizona, and as we sat among the thousands of objects he has been documenting, I was reminded of something Lidia said during a workshop in Portland back in 2018: “Resisting plot is a political act.” Read about Tom’s work in Cynthia’s CD Collection.
In Issue 5, you’ll meet Jamar Nicholas, author of Leon, Protector of the Playground. Jamar is a cartoonist and graphic novelist who created Leon “for a new generation of kids who weren’t seeing themselves in the fiction they consumed.” As he wrote in (Black) Boy Wonder:
“as a child, I enjoyed Spider-Man, but I didn’t want to be a white guy sticking to the side of a building, I just wanted the sticky building.”
Congratulations to Jamar, who just signed a three-book deal with Scholastic to bring Leon the Extraordinary to the page.
I’m also thrilled to introduce the new team of four writers and four artists who are collaborating with us to create the next four issues of Khôra. If you love what you’re seeing, please share, repost, tweet, and retweet, and we’ll be back next month.
Hot tip: How do you make the ô in Khôra? Press and hold the option key and the letter i, release and click o.
Oceans of lôve,
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal Writing Squad
LEIGH HOPKINS 