...When I think of the creatives featured in this edition of I, Enheduanna, I think of how they, too, use their hands to bring comfort and beauty for all of us to witness. I think of Xhanthi delicately painting the eye makeup onto a tiny 3D printed cameo, of PeeMonster listening to the scratch of her graphite pencils as she brings her private world into our shared reality...
I like to imagine that a stroll through the mind of Australian-Indonesian mixed media artist Xhanthi would be like a trip into Wonderland if the Mad Hatter was Tim Burton and the Red Queen was Lisa Frank. Around every bend there’s another pastel dreamscape interspersed with playful touches of the macabre, every landscape overflowing with fun and surprises. While her work...
When Lyn Patterson writes poetry, her words are succinct. For me, they hit like the beats of a drum, each syllable the snap of a snare. Where the feeling calls for it...
For Georgie Brooke, receiving a stroke of luck in funding from their college to attend poetry sessions led by renowned poet Rachel Long proved life-changing: they were hooked. Long, a veteran of Apples and Snakes–England’s leading spoken word poetry organization–taught Brooke...
Reina Davis’ beautiful and bittersweet poem, Cuidado, contemplates the dual themes of grief and care, love and loss, in two languages and through two relationships. It highlights the multilingual and intergenerational nature of Davis’s lived experience. As the daughter of Spanish-speaking immigrants myself...
When I look at a piece of hand-shaped pottery by Pacific Northwest-based artist Beth Gordon of Cactus and Clay Ceramics, I see the shapes of the earth reflected in simplicity. Like the topography of natural wonders in places like Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks...
As the Covid-19 pandemic set in around her, Kiraz, a Turkey-born, Seattle-based software engineer, found herself escaping into books. She’d always been an avid reader, but like most of us book nerds, she phased in and out of periods of heavy and light reading, finding solace in the right book when the right mood hit...
Ekaterina Pavlova spent five years growing a client base as a wedding and popular commerce photographer before striking out to shoot in her own style. Her Souls photo project is haunting and uses accessible, inexpensive techniques to explore its deep themes. Now clients come to her for more vulnerable shoots exploring their “inner demons” rather than the polished unreality...
To tell the story of Rita Fürstenau as only an illustrator would leave out half the tale. For Rita, publishing and illustrating are integrally linked. At a time when independent publishing was a relatively new idea and the online communities dedicated to those pursuits didn’t exist, Rita took...
The thought that Sofía Morales next door was somehow responsible for the murder of her ex-girlfriend—it was unthinkable. That sweet girl? Bernice Leibermann laughed at the absurdity of it.
The cop shifted his weight on her plastic-wrapped sofa. It squeaked from the movement. “Are you sure you didn’t see anything suspicious on the night of...
