HOLY MOTHER OF OCEANS™ last Friday’s Solidarity Hour was life-giving. We were all vibrating from the intensity of the week, and coming together to make art was pure joy. Thank you to all of you who brought your gorgeous energy to this event. For those of you who weren’t able to join us live, the recording is available now.
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Thank you, thank you, thank you.
We’ll be back with Issue 3 at the end of the month.
Welcome to Issue 2! If you’re new here, in September 2020, Khôra entered the global literary village on the back of a glittery wave. Thank you for the spectacularly supportive welcome. We love you, too.
Everyone we know is vibrating with ten thousand emotions—fluctuating between doom-scrolling, activism, carefully moderated H-O-P-E, and preemptive despair. We hope that this month’s issue will fill you with writing and works of art that reach some of the places that need tending.
Let’s jump in.
We’re thrilled to share that this month’s featured writer is the brilliant, brave-hearted Megan Stielstra. Megan is a beloved award-winning essayist and the author of three collections: The Wrong Way To Save Your Life, Once I Was Cool, and Everyone Remain Calm. She is currently a 2020 Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas…and that’s where Megan will be calling in from when she joins us as a reader for our Khôra Launch Party & Solidarity Hour on November 6 at 4pm PT / 7pm ET.
If you’re a subscriber, you’ll receive a Zoom link on the morning of the event. Save the date. We can’t wait to see you!
When you subscribe to Khôra for free, you’ll receive issue highlights straight to your inbox. Subscribers will also receive extra goodies like access to our Zoom happy hour, occasional speaker series, subscriber-only posts, virtual care packages, and more to come. We want to reiterate our philosophy that no one will be turned away due to lack of funds. If you are able to pay for a subscription, we love you, and you help to build access for others. If you’re not able to pay for a subscription, we love you, and welcome to the revolution.
In the meantime, if you’re excited about Khôra, please share us with a friend.
In every issue of Khôra, we feature the work of a curated team of four writers and four artists. This team will change every four months. In addition, we feature the work of one groundbreaking writer and one visual artist.
“The lockdown started eight months ago but a hundred years have passed since then or maybe just snap your fingers. I’m forty-five years old in my mother’s basement in Michigan and thirty-three years old giving birth in a blizzard in Chicago and thirty-one years old getting married on a beach at sunset and twenty-eight years old falling in love and twenty-two years old falling in love…”
Meet Khôra, a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with groundbreaking author Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing. Plato described khôra as a “formless interval, alike to a non-being,” and in that spirit, Khôra is committed to writers and artists who explore the creative by and through an ever-evolving and expansive lens. We are honored to showcase the work of polyphonic, multi-genre writers and artists.
Every month, Khôra will publish new work from a curated team of writers and artists. When you subscribe for free, you’ll receive issue highlights straight to your inbox (no one will be turned away due to lack of funds). Subscribers will also receive extra goodies like access to our Zoom happy hour, occasional speaker series, subscriber-only posts, virtual care packages, and more to come. The extras might take a month or so to get going… and in the meantime, we think you’ll love what you read!
In every issue of Khôra, we will feature the work of a curated team of four writers and four artists. This team will change every four months. In addition, we feature the work of one groundbreaking writer and one visual artist.
Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen is the featured writer for Khôra’s inaugural issue. She is the author of Ghost Of, which was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Omnidawn Open Contest in 2018. Among her many awards, Diana was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. Her exquisite piece, Tug, is made of both visual and written texts, and is on display as a gallery of four images.
On April 3, 2020, sailors chanted “Crozier, Crozier!” after Navy Captain Brett E. Crozier was fired for his email to Navy leaders, detailing the service’s failures in dealing with a coronavirus outbreak on the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt.
Here is Captain Crozier walking away from his ship while sailors chant his name after he was relieved from duty for blowing the whistle on a coronavirus contamination aboard the USS Roosevelt.
“Strijdom, you have tampered with the women, You have struck a rock.”
– South African Women’s March, August 1956
In South Africa, pass laws were a form of internal passport system designed to segregate the population, severely limiting the movements of not only black African citizens by requiring them to carry pass books when outside their homelands or designated areas. In the 1950s, the primary catalysts of the anti-pass protests were thousands of African women, many of whom had never been involved in demonstrations. In 1956, thousands of South African women of all races marched to Pretoria to stand in support of black South African women, singing to the Prime Minister: “”Strijdom, you have tampered with the women, You have struck a rock.”
Today marks the 36th anniversary of the unsolved murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. As a Social Democrat, Palme didn’t hire bodyguards or armored cars; he felt that it was important not to create distance between himself and the people of Sweden. On Friday night, February 28, 1986, Palme and his wife Lisbet were walking home from dinner in Stockholm when an unidentified gunman fired a single round in the Prime Minister’s back.
Since then, Olof Palme’s grave in central Stockholm has become a place of homage. To many Swedes, Palme was more than a politician, he was a hero who was responsible for creating Sweden’s healthy welfare system, among other leftwing policies that also made him despised by the right.
To this day, Palme’s grave is marked by red roses, a symbol of Social Democracy.
The latest installment of my column, Turning Purple, is up this week at The Rumpus. “Blood Feast” is centered around my time canvassing in Trump country and the roots of my activism. Check out the photos on Instagram.
“In every story I read to my class, the villains were my student’s uncle, who recognized me at a club, kissing a girl. At parent-teacher conferences the next week, the girl’s parents glared at me with their arms folded, finally shouting what are you teaching our daughter, without saying what they knew. I shook next to the principal, certain that I was about to be outed, arrested or fired. When that didn’t happen, I decided it was time for my third graders to learn about activism. I wanted to find out what mattered to eight-year-olds.”
A FINAL NOTE: On Tuesday night, the efforts of volunteers around the country paid off at the polls. If you’re looking for a therapeutic and easy way to get involved in the 2020 election, write to Postcards to Voters to join the party. #PostcardstoVoters
Why the Trump Impeachment Inquiry Is the Only Option “After all, Americans have seen this playbook before. During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump called on Russia to find emails he hoped would embarrass Hillary Clinton: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he bellowed then at a campaign news conference in Florida. Mr. Mueller subsequently showed that Russian agents tried to hack into Mrs. Clinton’s personal servers that same day … that Mr. Trump was not dissuaded by the response to Mr. Mueller’s findings from seeking political aid from another foreign source suggests he has learned nothing except that he is free to try anything — that a president may use the office as he chooses to promote his re-election.”
Today is National Voter Registration Day. How much do you know about voting and elections? Take CNN’s quiz. Another easy thing you can do today to help is to share the link to this page on usa.gov.
A note on the image for Method 45: On August 19, Iceland held a demonstrative funeral for Okjökull, a 700-year-old glacier. Okjökull lost its status as a glacier in 2014, and is now a small patch of ice atop a volcano.
Today, as sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg leads and inspires the world in a climate strike, there’s a disturbing new report that shows darker proof of her bravery. In July, Global Witness released a report that showed that in 2018, more than three people a weekdied defending their land or our environment:
In 2018 Guatemala recorded the sharpest rise in murders, which jumped more than fivefold to make it the deadliest country per capita.
The Philippines had the highest number of killings of any country this year, with at least 30 defenders murdered.
Mining was the worst sector, causing 43 deaths, though deaths related to conflicts over water sources also surged. Attacks driven by agribusiness, logging and hydropower continued too.
Private security groups, state forces and contract killers – sometimes working together – are all suspected of carrying out killings.
On Tuesday, the activist group Extinction Rebellion staged a demonstrative funeral to mark the end of Fashion Week in London. According to CNN, Bel Jacobs, a former fashion editor who now belongs to Extinction Rebellion, told CNN that Tuesday’s protest was organized to “lay to rest the toxic system that is destroying us all, and to mourn those who have already lost their lives and those still to lose their lives to the effects of climate change.”
Today’s Student Strike is Method 62 of Gene Sharp’s 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action. Since beginning this project a year ago, every time it’s time to do a new post, I’ve never had to look far – these methods are being used every single day, all around the world.
The estimated number in New York is over 250’000! They closed the park because there were too many people… I’m speaking soon at Battery Park. #ClimateStrikepic.twitter.com/YOD80SxHaa
“For way too long, the politicians and the people in power have gotten away with not doing anything at all to fight the climate crisis and the ecological crisis. But we will make sure that they will not get away with it any longer.”
– Greta Thunberg
A note on the image for Method 45: On August 19, Iceland held a demonstrative funeral for Okjökull, a 700-year-old glacier. Okjökull lost its status as a glacier in 2014, and is now a small patch of ice atop a volcano.
LEIGH HOPKINS 