Arts Calling Jaime Alejandro Cruz

Weekly Shoutout: New Poetry Collection from Daniel Damiano (AC5), published by Bottlecap Press!

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Hi there,

Today I am so excited to be arts calling writer/producer Amanda ReCupido! (linktr.ee/amandarecupido)

About our guest:

Amanda ReCupido is an author, book reviewer, playwright, storyteller and podcaster whose work has appeared in various humor and literary publications, as well as been recognized in several screenwriting competitions. Follow her online @amandarecupido.

All links here: linktr.ee/amandarecupido

Thanks for this wonderful conversation, Amanda! All the best!

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Arts Calling is produced by Jaime Alejandro (cruzfolio.com).

HOW TO SUPPORT ARTS CALLING: PLEASE CONSIDER LEAVING A REVIEW, OR SHARING THIS EPISODE WITH A FRIEND! YOUR SUPPORT TRULY MAKES A DIFFERENCE, AND I CAN'T THANK YOU ENOUGH FOR TAKING THE TIME TO LISTEN.

Much love,

j

Weekly Shoutout: Fragile: An Anthology featuring David Scott Hay (AC114)!

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Hi there,

Today I am so excited to be arts calling author Heather Bartel! (heatherelizabethbartel.com)

About our guest:

Heather Bartel is the author of the essay collection Exit the Body (Split/Lip Press, 2024). Her writing has appeared recently in FENCE, Birdcoat Quarterly, Leavings, Grimoire, and Heavy Feather Review. She is founder and co-editor of the literary journal and community The Champagne Room. 

Heather lives, writes, and dances in Columbia, Missouri

https://www.heatherelizabethbartel.com/

Thanks for this wonderful conversation, Heather! All the best!

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EXIT THE BODY, now available from Split/Lip Press!

https://www.splitlippress.com/exit-the-body

In Exit the Body, Heather Bartel makes an offering-as-essay-collection, if a collection of essays can include a tarot reading, a one-act starring dead and dreamed women, conversations with Sylvia Plath through a mirror, and letters to a living ghost.

Like journeying through the hallways of a haunted house, Bartel moves through a narrative landscape that shape-shifts, engaging in conversation with the women who haunt her to ask the question at the core of Exit the Body: what to do with an obsession with the mirror when the person in the mirror is either the only person you can trust or the one who is trying to kill you.

A dance with illusion and choice, Exit the Body is a meditation on the mind and its place within the body: what escapes, what ruptures, what is created, what echoes, and where we find ourselves on the other side.

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Arts Calling is produced by Jaime Alejandro (cruzfolio.com).

HOW TO SUPPORT ARTS CALLING: PLEASE CONSIDER LEAVING A REVIEW, OR SHARING THIS EPISODE WITH A FRIEND! YOUR SUPPORT TRULY MAKES A DIFFERENCE, AND I CAN'T THANK YOU ENOUGH FOR TAKING THE TIME TO LISTEN.

Much love,

j

Weekly Shoutout: Listen to the latest episode of MyBadPoetry Podcast!

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*Just a heads up: this episode includes strong language at times.

Hi there,

Today I am so excited to be arts calling author and game designer Shaine Greenwood!
(shainegreenwood.com)

About our guest:

Shaine Greenwood is a Washington State-based author and game designer. His heart is buried in writing outlandish science fiction, gripping dystopian tales, and the occasional slice of literary fiction. He loves satire and social commentary (who doesn’t?) but believes that the foundational elements of a story shouldn’t be sacrificed to convey a deeper message—any story worth its merit must be entertaining at face value while reaching for complexity. When Shaine isn’t taking in the beautiful Washington landscape on a hike or backpacking trip with his lifelong partner, he can be found designing or playing board games with friends and family or tending to his mushroom cultivation hobby—mostly shiitake, lion’s mane, and portobello. Mycelium are one of the most fascinating and diverse living things on Earth, aside from humans. Aside from this collection of short stories, Shaine has written a collection of existentialist poems titled Fires Under the Great Neural Sky. You can find more information about his works, including his art, on his websites:

•Writing and art:  shainegreenwood.com
•Board games: https://otherworld.games

Thanks for this wonderful conversation, Shaine! All the best!

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TRANSFIGURATION, now available here: https://books2read.com/u/bp1nnl

An alien from Area 51, a manufactured human, a human infused with the power of the sun, death on the terrifying and beautiful edge of space. These fourteen stories take us to the precipice of change, from the physical, mental, and spiritual to the larger and more nebulous moral and societal changes that transfigure us in myriad ways. The winds of change often arrive unexpectedly and with an unpredictable gusto. Throughout our lives, our bodies, minds, and souls evolve in a variety of ways. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Regardless, one certainty about change remains: We can’t control how or when it arrives on our doorstep. 

This collection contains stories of people coming to terms with their mortality and the transition to death. Some meet their fates calmly and are pleasantly surprised, as is the case in Zero Percent—where misfortune falls Khana Lewis, leaving her drifting alone in space—and Ride or Die—where an alien rights activist husband and wife embark on a mission to rescue extraterrestrials from Area 51. Others gasp at their last breaths with fear or regret, like in Progeny—where a scientist throws her accomplished career away to illegally manufacture an evolution of humanity. 

There are also stories of societal flux and the aftermath of such in Holographic Forefathers—where scientists work to make AI versions of the founding fathers to save the nation—and Patriot—which depicts a hyper-capitalistic globe from the perspectives of those loyal to the almighty dollar and those fighting to overcome it. Others, like Walt Whitman and The Sun and the Shepard, explore the warping of the body and mind into something new and how these changes affect the ever-shifting nature of relationships.

How will these characters be redefined under the weight of change? How will they become transfigured? How might you, if in their shoes?

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Arts Calling is produced by Jaime Alejandro (cruzfolio.com).

HOW TO SUPPORT ARTS CALLING: PLEASE CONSIDER LEAVING A REVIEW, OR SHARING THIS EPISODE WITH A FRIEND! YOUR SUPPORT TRULY MAKES A DIFFERENCE, AND I CAN'T THANK YOU ENOUGH FOR TAKING THE TIME TO LISTEN.

Much love,

j

Weekly Shoutout: Jim Clayton's latest album, LOOK OUT!

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Hi there,

Today I am so excited to be arts calling author Merrill J. Gerber!

About our guest:
Merrill Joan Gerber has written thirty books, including The Kingdom of Brooklyn, winner of the Ribalow Award from Hadassah Magazine, and King of the World, winner of the Pushcart Editors’ Book Award. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, the Sewanee Review, the Atlantic, Mademoiselle, and Redbook, and her essays in the American Scholar, Salmagundi, and Commentary. She has won an O. Henry Award, a Best American Essays award, and a Wallace Stegner fiction fellowship to Stanford University. She retired in 2020 after teaching writing at the California Institute of Technology for thirty-two years. Her literary archive is now at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book Library.

Thanks for this wonderful conversation, Merrill! All the best!

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REVELATION AT THE FOOD BANK, now available from Sagging Meniscus Press!

https://www.saggingmeniscus.com/catalog/revelation_at_the_food_bank/

ABOUT REVELATION AT THE FOOD BANK:
These powerful essays share critical moments of a writer’s life: scenes from sixty years of passionate married love; suicides faced and suicide contemplated; trauma at the DMV; a night lost searching for a harpsichord in the mountains of Florence, Italy; the tale of a beloved cousin whose plane is shot down by Japanese Zeros; and a precious friendship between two women writers derailed by the poisons of religion and politics. In the titular essay (included in Best American Essays 2023) a food bank, assuaging the pandemic’s terrors with gifts of food and prayers, becomes a portal for intimate confidences entrusted to us by a voice of unspoiled authenticity and perennial vigor.

NOTICES:

“Often hilarious, deeply moving and warmly engaging, Merrill Joan Gerber’s collection of memoirist essays is delightful reading. ‘I have a lot to say from my own mouth’—so Gerber confides in her readers with admirable candor and enviable chutzpah. There is much here that is unnervingly intimate—close-ups of a very long marriage, painful memories of a brother-in-law who was abusive to his family before taking his own life, the disappointments as well as the rewards of an intense friendship with a famous woman writer embittered by religion and politics—all of it narrated in Merrill Joan Gerber’s distinctive voice.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, author of Zero-Sum

“Written from her deepest truths, these intimate essays can be heartbreaking, maybe because we see ourselves in each of them. But they are told with such humor, such delicacy, that we close the book sighing, Yes, this is life! And this is why Merrill Joan Gerber has been one of my favorites for decades.”
—Judy Blume, author of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

“Uncommonly candid, honest, emotionally precise; irresistibly scrappy, edgy, visceral. Sentence by sentence, one of the best collections of personal essays I’ve read in years.”
—Robert Atwan, Series Editor, The Best American Essays

" ‘Revelation at the Food Bank’, the essay that anchors Merrill Joan Gerber’s collection, gives voice to the widespread rage of the covid and post-covid era. If Gerber’s anger is universal, her expression of it is wholly her own—brutally honest, transgressive and at times hilarious. The subsequent ten pieces, including a contentious exchange with Cynthia Ozick on the subject of Jewish identity, present in kaleidoscopic form the complexity of her art.”
—Joan Givner, author of Playing Sarah Bernhardt

“Merrill Gerber’s new collection of essays adds up to a rich record of twentieth-century literary life, largely epistolary, in a period when epistles were epistles, not faxes, emails, texts or DMs. Closer to the present, she addresses the way we live now with a fine blend of pathos and wit, an exact intuition for the telling and well-timed detail, and all the freshness she must have had w

Weekly Shoutout: Listen to SPACEWALKERS FFEEATCOPO this instant!

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Hi there,

Today I am so excited to be arts calling poet MJ Gomez!

About our guest: MJ Gomez is the author of Love Letters from a Burning Planet (Variant Literature, 2023). His poems are featured in Surging Tide, the Dawn Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, the Selkie, and others. You can find him on Twitter @bluejayverses

Thanks for this wonderful conversation, MJ! All the best!

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LOVE LETTERS FROM A BURNING PLANET, now available from Variant Lit!

https://variantlit.com/product/love-letters/

PRAISE FOR LOVE LETTERS FROM A BURNING PLANET:

In his scintillating debut, MJ Gomez weighs love against grief, grief against god, and asks: which governs what? Replete with sensuous pauses and lush imagery, Love Letters _unravels pointedly and fearlessly, the way you would at 2 a.m. on a Wednesday, wine-drunk and unable to shake the rumor of a world you once built for someone.
—Letitia Jiju, poet and editor for _Psaltery & Lyre

From its initial holy invocation of the poet’s name through the course of its burning and urgent trajectory, Love Letters from a Burning Planet sees MJ Gomez detail the intricate inner workings of a “palace of flame” in what can only be described as a triumphant debut. Poignant and deliberate at every turn, Gomez circles the body in an act of poetic ceremony, executed with heart-rending care. At its core, Love Letters reminds us: “[the] truth is we are all immortal except for our bodies.”
—NAT RAUM, author of the abyss is staring back

MJ Gomez’s love letters from a burning planet crackles with language that sings and singes. “What should become of Man?” Gomez asks, and through self-portraits and studies, love letters and invocations, deftly answers: “a man is a song.” This is a radiant collection of poems that orbits devotion in all its pleasures and pains. Here are poems that bend light to make music. Here is a voice unafraid to speak in a world aflame.
—Sarah Ghazal Ali, author of Theophanies

Electric, grand, and merciful. With blunt precision, Love Letters from a Burning Planet by MJ Gomez interrogates our human devotions to each other, and to the world. His debut reckons with the expanse of passion, of intimacy, and of love: “Magic doesn’t need to be real. / This body is enough, I swear.” Every poem brings new landscapes of memory to contend with these facts, overflowing with the worldly case of our own dissatisfactions and hopeless desires. Every poem traverses faith: religious, interpersonal, and individual. Gomez writes a universe beautiful and so, so human. “I send to you a flame / like a bullet / repenting.”
—Daniel Liu, author of COMRADE

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Arts Calling is produced by Jaime Alejandro (cruzfolio.com).

HOW TO SUPPORT ARTS CALLING: PLEASE CONSIDER LEAVING A REVIEW, OR SHARING THIS EPISODE WITH A FRIEND! YOUR SUPPORT TRULY MAKES A DIFFERENCE, AND I CAN'T THANK YOU ENOUGH FOR TAKING THE TIME TO LISTEN.

Much love,

j

Weekly Shoutout: Friend of the show Alvaro Saar Rios on The Scene Podcast, give it a listen!

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Hi there,

Today I am so excited to be arts calling author Effy Redman! (www.effyredman.com)

About our guest: Effy Redman's writing investigates the intersection of disability and identity. She has work published in The New York Times, Vice, Ravishly, Chronogram, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Iron Horse Literary Review, among other places. She holds an MFA in Memoir from CUNY: Hunter College, where she received an Honorable Mention for the Helen Gray Cone Fellowship, and a BA in Literature/Drama from Bennington College, where she was an Ellen Knowles Harcourt Scholar and a Bennington Scholar. effyredman.com.

Twitter: @effyredman
Facebook: Effy Redman
Instagram: @effyredman38

Thanks for this wonderful conversation, Effy! All the best!

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SAVING FACE, now available from Vine Leaves Press!

https://www.vineleavespress.com/saving-face-by-effy-redman.html

ABOUT SAVING FACE:
What's in a smile? Or the absent smile? Saving Face is Effy Redman's thought-provoking answer.
Born with a rare condition of facial paralysis called Moebius Syndrome, Redman's grit and eye for beauty help her survive childhood bullying and adolescent doldrums. Her physical transformation at age thirteen via plastic surgery eviscerates her concept of image, just in time for her and her family to immigrate from hardscrabble Manchester, England to America's disorientingly scenic upstate New York. Not until diagnosis in young adulthood with bipolar disorder does Redman come out of the closet as a lesbian, finally claiming her most inherent identity. Saving Face is a searing personal tribute to anybody who has ever felt like an outsider. This memoir honors the grace of a face that stands out in a crowd, defying societal beauty norms. Disability meets transcendence, suffering becomes hope, and the individual expands into community. The inability to smile, in Redman’s book, lights a window onto the human capacity for redemption.

★★★★★ “This author goes where no other might dare.” Catherine Filloux, award-winning playwright

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Arts Calling is produced by Jaime Alejandro (cruzfolio.com).

HOW TO SUPPORT ARTS CALLING: PLEASE CONSIDER LEAVING A REVIEW, OR SHARING THIS EPISODE WITH A FRIEND! YOUR SUPPORT TRULY MAKES A DIFFERENCE, AND I CAN'T THANK YOU ENOUGH FOR TAKING THE TIME TO LISTEN.

Much love,

j