19. SOCIALITES

‘Socialites’ is a story that first appeared in matchbook, and which I adapted into a broadside for the Queer Communities in Print Portfolio organized by Corinne Teed and Jaime C. Knight for the 2014 SGCI Conference. The portfolio, which includes contributors such as Thea Gahr, Miriam Klein Stahl, Patrick Reed, Edie Fake, Dutes Miller & Stan Shellabarger, and many others, has since gone on to be featured on Printeresting and exhibited at Adobe Books Backroom Gallery in San Francisco and Airspace Gallery in Philadelphia.

When I wrote the story, I was imagining a Paris Hilton-type narrator. Remember her? She’s desperate for you to not forget:

In ‘Socialites’, this narrator takes an anachronistic trip to the Vatican, where she displays a humanoid sort of disconnect, as well as a naïve debauchery characteristic of the rich. 

I thought the Vatican would be an ideally vague sort of setting: an architectural posture of eternity, a symbol of dogma with seediness seeping from beneath, a historical tourist destination stripped of its bloodiest historical contexts. What sort of knowledge did the narrator find there that made her finally feel human, and that caused the laws of the physical world to behave in such startlingly different ways?

If you order The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales from the Brooklyn Arts Press website, not only will you get to read ‘Socialites’, if you’re one of the first 50 who order, you’ll get a free letterpress broadside of one of the book's stories. Get it HERE!

Printmaking as claiming space

Amze Emmons has posted a write-up over at Printeresting of the recent Queer Communities in Print portfolio exchange that was exhibited at Adobe Books Backroom Gallery in conjunction with the SGC International conference in San Francisco. Check out the photos! 

Participants included Felipe Baeza, Anima Metalica D.J., BOKA (April Katz and JoAnn Boehmer), Emmy Bright, Ian Cozzens, Jill Fitterer, Thea Gahr/Collectiva Cordyceps, Jennifer Hughes, Graham Kolbeins, Delia Kovac, Jaime Knight, Chucha Marquez, Dutes Miller & Stan Shellabarger, Heidi Ratanavanich & Eileen Shumate, Patrick Reed, Gavin Rouille, Nicholas Shick, Miriam Klein Stahl, Corinne Teed, Mary Tremonte, Lena Wolff, and Meg Turner. You can take a closer look at my piece, 'Socialites', here. 

'Socialites' featured at matchbook

Check out 'Socialites'—the short story I just featured on a letterpress broadside—over at matchbook, a journal dedicated to brief narrative.

New broadside for Queer Communities in Print

I letterpress printed a broadside for the Queer Communities in Print portfolio exchange at the upcoming 2014 SGC International Conference in San Francisco. A limited number are available for purchase at Big Cartel, and you can view the prints made by all the exchange participants at an exhibit starting March 20 at Adobe Books Backroom Gallery. 

'Socialites' is a short story that revolves around an anachronistic trip to the Vatican by the publicly rich. The piece captures their humanoid sort of disconnect, their simultaneous ignorance and omnipotence, and the naive way in which they're debauched. There is an aesthetic tension between Xerox and fine press (partly because of a bad lockup after a long night at the press!), and between a Futurist/Constructivist geometry and the medieval feel of colors like brown, red, black, and white. Collaged strips of found paper invoke light: sun-bleached cardstock, the gray haze of the photocopier bed, and rows of embossed circles like dressing-room vanity lights. 'Socialites' will also be featured in my short story collection forthcoming from Brooklyn Arts Press.