"This work is unlike any other, in its range of rich, conjuring imagery and its dexterity, its smart voice. Carroll-Hackett doesn’t spare us—but doesn’t save us—she draws a blueprint of power and class with her unflinching pivot: matter-of-fact and tender." —Jan Beatty
Otis Nebula is now accepting submissions of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, video, and hybrid forms. To get a sense of what we’re looking for, please read an issue, available for free online.
Dreamt I sat by a river, stacking stones, gray pebbles, that I built into a small curved wall, then dismantled, piece by piece, the stones smooth and slick in my hands.
Rocks act as the memory for our planet. By examining their elemental makeup and physical structure, scientists can understand the history of the earth. The fossil records left in rock formations literally describe our planet’s journey through time. Seen in this light, even the stones and pebbles we find in our backyards are pieces of the ancient past and the secrets of how we came to be in this vast universe.
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”– T.E. Lawrence
It’s my oldest son’s birthday today. I never could have know, twenty-eight years ago, that I wasn’t just having a baby: I was meeting one of my best ever friends.
Make art about adult children. Or about best friends.
With my oldest son J, early 1989
9/21/2016
Make art about lighting a candle for someone you Love.
9/22/2016
Been thinking all day about living in other times. I would have made a terrible Victorian woman 🙂
Make art imagining yourself in another time, another era.
Many nations with atrocities in their past—Germany, Rwanda, South Africa—prominently recognize their painful history with memorials, museums, and monuments. This kind of trutful recognition, acknowledgement, helps with healing.
We have yet to do that in the United States. As Jessica Leber writes in the linked article below, “Even today, the nation is largely silent about one of its historical periods of shame: the thousands of lynchings that terrorized southern blacks right up until the Civil Rights era.”
We can do this, y’all. We can be brave enough to face our own nightmares. We have to, if we are, as a nation, going to heal and come together.
“The Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama organization led by civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, has, for the last few years, been working to place historical markers at lynching sites all around the country. At TED’s conference this week, the group showed a sneak preview of plans for a new national memorial to the victims of lynching that they hope to break ground on some time this year in Montgomery, Alabama.
“In America, we’re not free. We are burdened by a history of racial inequality and injustice. It compromises us. It constrains us,” says Stevenson. “We have to create a new relationship with this history.”
Make art about facing, acknowledging, being accountable for, hard truths about the past.
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