LUNE 01: DISEASE by Lune Journal

A JOURNAL OF LITERARY MISRULE LUNE 01 DISEASE

SUMMER 2018 ANNA BACKMAN ROGERS STEVE ELY KATE FELD DAVID GREAVES FRANCIS HASELDEN PAULA KNIGHT JANE NORRIS LISA MARGREET PAYNE ELIZABETH REEDER ADAM STEINER

CONTENTS JENN ASHWORTH Introduction………………………………………….2 ANNA BACKMAN ROGERS Misery-Go-Rounds……………………..4 STEVE ELY the jack & the serpent in the garden……………………5 KATE FELD Star dust………………………………………………………7 DAVID GREAVES Four Iterations of Bent Cops……………...…….9 FRANCIS HASELDEN Disease…………………………………….17 PAULA KNIGHT What if?.................................................................18 JANE NORRIS Writing Around the Outside………………………..….21 LISA MARGREET PAYNE Self-ish………………………………...….23 ELIZABETH REEDER Microbursts…………………………………....30 ADAM STEINER Lost Notations of E. A. Boxer………………....…...31 CONTRIBUTORS…………………………………………………...36 CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS………………………………………...38

Introduction JENN ASHWORTH In her personal essay, ‘Self-ish’ Lisa Margreet Payne explores the edges of self, memory and medicine through the lens of an autoimmune disease diagnosis: ‘As the disease progresses it changes the landscape of the body, and what was Other becomes Self. You are the same, but not the same. You are Self-ish.’ Her words apply equally to the writings and artworks gathered here – each of them, in their own way, most gloriously not quite themselves.

Anna Backman Rogers’ ‘Misery-Go-Rounds’ invokes the discipline met out to those who are unwell, her poem a dizzying litany of commands from the healthy to the sick, who are to enter the ‘circle of care and spurious safe space’ whether they want/are able to, or not. Steve Ely joins the ultra personal – venereal disease – to the historical and the political – in two poems that explore the power structures involved in the transmission of illness. Kate Feld locates disease both in memory and time, where the dull ache and ‘medically significant strain of yearning’ we’ve been taught to call nostalgia emerges from the boundaries of the self and seems to infect the landscape itself: ‘But that hurting is only the visible portion. Most is over the horizon in me, too big to see all of and this ache is the sky.’

For Elizabeth Reeder the sick body becomes an uncanny landscape – a land both known and unknown: ‘you can feel but can’t see the broken horizon-lines that puncture the peaceful coast of your neck.’ Francis Haselden creates a text that slides between registers and allows for gaps, silences and odd omissions. The page becomes a body no longer itself – also interested in the things that we can’t see. ‘A disease is always secret, despite the blatant clues, the sick skin and the fainting.’

Many of the pieces delight in disrupting and sickening the uneasy landscape of form or language itself. David Greaves melds essay and fiction and the confusion and disorientation of his narrator spreads across the text, overflows its edges and eventually includes the reader. ‘It was difficult not to get a sense of the layering, the construction of it all, lines parallel or intersecting in 3D space, running together,’ his narrator says. We too get a sense of it all – the dislocation, the patterning, the breaking and connection of this state of dis-ease. Adam Steiner presents the ‘found texts’ of a lost diary, through which we glimpse unsettling fragments of a fractured mind.

Many of these pieces are interested in what it is to be a writer or artist who is sick, or who becomes sick, or who works with or alongside or within a sickened community. Is the persistent urge towards creativity itself – a compulsion to bring the secrets of the subjective world into the light – to disrupt that boundary between self and other – a kind of illness too? Jane Norris explores the discomfort and lack of ease involved in writing in relation to the academy and the ways in which this can be both an act of

healing and one of deconstruction. And Paula Knight, through a piece that is both image, text and memoir, asks the most uneasy question about sickness and writing of all.

One might, after reading these pieces, come to the conclusion that to be well and to read well – or to believe the delusion of an unfragmented, inviolate and sufficient body and self and text – is the real pathology.

JA – Summer 2018

Misery-Go-Rounds ANNA BACKMAN ROGERS

under the hypnosis of nameless bottle blonde with Bette Davis brow who seeks to unlatch and unloose under the observation of Petronella and her bag of pills for punctured pustules, ruptured hearts and leaky gut under the guidance of King’s Corner Surgery, summoned upstairs at bing bong o’clock to whatever’s left to try under the tutelage of Gunilla who is in league with John Bowlby and always asks pointedly after The Father under the scientific gaze of Dr X who’s waiting for an admission of what she already thinks she knows under the studied concern of Anne, a trainee, who is eager to ask you to disarticulate and un-name your feelings under the cultivated empathy of Deirdre who wants you to sit with your grief for just a wee while longer under the rigorous watch of the emergency team who any minute now will place the call for that shot under the surveillance of the medical team who slide you off the plane and onto a smooth cold gurney under the inspection of Max, whose job it is not to care about causes, but to wield prophylactic warning with glee under the batshit of Rhonda who believes in crystals, godawful scented candles and daily flips her tarot pack under the microscope of Linda who wants to find out why you scratch and cut and pick and pop under the scrutiny of the clinic who wants you to share in this circle of care and spurious safe space under the sympathetic eye of Dr Jeroen who diagnoses a sore spot in your soul and recommends bed rest under the magnification of the optician who trawls the secret knowledge of your retina and finds precisely nothing under the grope of the gynaecologist who always forgets to ask if you mind his clumsy errant fat fingers under the probe of the dentist who ascertains the very real fact of rot and offers bionic tooth with price tag under the crack of the chiropractor who suspects you have always been misaligned and flung out of space under the grip of the masseuse who speaks of tension and contortion and reiki healing and mumbo jumbo self-love under the examination of the herbalist, Suzanne, who has likely invented some new words and curious labels under the snip of the hairdresser who has a bevy of prestigious products to assist this forlorn crown of mourning under the assiduous monitor of Nurse, history’s cartographer of vital signs and body mass – no licker of wounds under the narrative of the psychiatrist who asks you if your sex life is normal (and not once looks you in the eye) under the grimace of your female boss who is no ally but in cahoots with the salaried suits and boots under the dream of the boy who insists you be everything that bursts with light until you simply do not.

the jack STEVE ELY he gave me his mind he gave me his body but he gave it to anybody

a round of applause for jack he lost his cherry at platos retreat giving as good as he got and then some hot stuff they all were bruce lance julian kok hung the desk clerk loved them hero boys gleetings to you all but the excessive venery irritated dick no good will come of it that was straight up the end turned nasty penicillin salvarsan freddies mercury in vain hot piss rectal chancres kaposis sarcoma promiscuous arsekoitai left us all fucked those of us remaining retreated into germ free monogamy and beat ourselves off to memories of the mat room a twenny four seven mongolian cluster fuck jesus just thinking about it i can feel my cock burning

the serpent in the garden STEVE ELY as the serpent is abominable terrifying and horrible so is this disease diaz de isla

round one old world vs new although the savages didnt know they were new according to their elders theyd been there for eighty four thousand years or maybe ten they seemed unsure anyhow we had muskets horses gods holy inquisition they had loin cloths and gibberish so we seized the moment deployed nomenaclature wardogs and cannon law a fusillade of fevered humours measles cowpox mumps tb it freed up some real estate but screwed us for slaves hispaniola we called it verily an eden on earth but for the serpent they were dark but comely and we went into them pustules erupted all over our bodies our hamptons oozed yellow pus our bones cracked and throbbed ulcers gnawing to the marrow but nevertheless we girded our loins and pulled ourselves together we loaded our ships and sailed home to glory septumless buboed hair dropping sarcoptic dogs but you should see the other guy

Star dust KATE FELD Interior of a mid-century sedan 1. The camera moves around the car showing pieces of three passengers and a man with long hair and a cowboy hat behind the wheel. Late afternoon sun prisms through the windows. Outside: a black and white highway, the outskirts of an American city. A low vibration as the engine downshifts ‒ the car enters a construction zone. The picture becomes grainy, whited-out. Ghost trucks, highway cones, figures appear and recede above the broad edge of the hood, which is gently bumping like a ship at sea. The first two notes of “Stardust” 2 shimmer out of the radio. A mirage between stations bleeding up from the hot road ahead. A song already dissolving when it hits the air.

Patti says, “Oh man, this is… this is Stardust.” She sings along.

Sing goddess the song about a song about love, the one we heard that day as the door swung open on its hinge. In specific conditions it makes in a hole in time, a doorless way because she came up the street and came in as the song came on she came to me.

Hereafter star dust gets into everything.

It begins in this arrangement with two notes. Two dark heads descending, then again, into twinkling lights from the distant village of harp arpeggios along string section silver.

It is transmitted via the order of kiss bearing the presentiment of its death; a kiss dancing on its own grave.

It develops moderately, in common time. It is derived from Νόστος high Homerian homecoming + ἄλγος an ache which is also a god. Nostalgia, a medically significant strain of yearning first documented in Swiss soldiers.

1 Patti Smith: Dream of Life (1988) dir. Steven Sebring 2 Carmichel, Hoagy and Mitchell Parish, ‘Star dust’ c 1927, performed by Nat King Cole as ‘Stardust’ on Love is the Thing,

arr. Gordon Jenkins, Capitol Records 1957

It presents as a dull ache seated in the chest. But that hurting is only the visible portion. Most is over the horizon in me, too big to see all of and this ache is the sky.

An ode to the moment when the elation of new love is colonised by anticipated sadness should be sung in a manner both carefree and resigned. Like this.

In each time, at each instance, with each act of translation, reproduction, transfer from one format to another the content or material degrades, leaves behind a residue or gives it up (but where does it go?) and each time it passes through the doorway into another form something particular to this time, translator, format, medium enters the content or material in the space newly vacated.

I think that is meaning entering the frame (but whose?)

Nat King Cole wears his ache so lightly, a white rose in his buttonhole.

Before the song ended we lost reception. The scene broke up and we are riding with Patti on Stardust in perpetuity, making a stately crossing between then and now. That-me-then exchanging conspiratorials with this-me-now as we navigate the weather areas of the song, navigate the form of her under my when that was long ago. Now my constellation is. The memory of loveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s refrain (verse) because you wandered down a lane and

far away

Leaving me a song

that

a song, that will not that will no

t d

i e

Four Iterations of Bent Cops DAVID GREAVES

1. High/Low

which was after I’d been living here for a while so really I probably shouldn’t have found it so shocking; I guess it’s not enough to know, though, is it? I mean, even before, yeah, I could have recited statistics with the best of them, or at least the middling, but knowing is a felt thing, and seen: it has a colour and the colours I knew here were sometime light blues, sometime ambers, some rose, sometime fractures of heavy clay brown, but they were all patterns forming in a wider grey. 1 The church-stones repurposed arch and all into a pub named Something & Crown on the corner of the street where I’d hop off the bus of an evening, not walk past but always see on the bus’s approach, weathering like a series of inscriptions. Grass of the park the pub’s back gave onto on which a downpour seems to manifest every time I set foot inside 2, (and yet I go out anyway, not for a smoke although I do smoke when I’m out there but to keep from having to pretend not to notice the other patrons staring at what’s become of my face. Not my face, the face they see, those I think are different 3) sodden and flattened, lying downed around the base of the netless and chipped-paint goalposts at either end which were the only embellishment – no climbing frame, no slide – in the whole space between the row of trees across from me beneath which ran a series of three wood-and-iron benches now gloved in rain and the cluster of buildings flanking the gated and scuffed entrance adjacent. Clark Street, the street where I’d worked, with the road itself untended and rising uneven in places to almost meet the lip of the pavement so it would spill over whenever there was heavy rain, and the walk down it always in shade of the high-rises looming each side, one concrete and one glass, which always had me feeling so cheated 4, like that at

1 D: “it’s by forming it. heat and the instant omnidirectional as grip in both hands and press your thumbs; this, we’re taught by forming, this folds it through. contact is injection and the protolith which is. upwards, form” 2 C: “so a guy walks into a bar and, yeah, haha, okay. No I get it I know.” 3 A: “Positioned, then, as passing through the doors: B.” 4 C: “Of course I know, but it actually happened, right, this is how it actually went down, because I was there. See I’m just like on the search for a quiet place to drink and I meander my way to this hole and it looks shaded enough to suit me and

least should let some light through. All grey, and not like a blanket, nor a canvas, and not undifferentiated – there were texture, shading, degrees of translucence – but more a tendency in all other colours to subsume themselves. Or to be subsumed, instead. That’s largely gone now. Vestiges linger, maybe, hard to fully uproot, but it’s been superseded. Now: the air above street level – this is clearer, in all senses. Special in a way. Might be an exaggeration to say it gets you high but leaning there with my face in the wind and an arm against the glass it was difficult not to get a sense of the layering 5, the construction of it all, lines parallel or intersecting in 3D space, running together. There is a process; it’s impossible not to know this, breathing this air and seeing the span below. Function is harder to parse, emergent as it is, but the sense of a system was irresistible. 6 Only I think the medication was likely feeding in there because something in it all felt stuck. Small grit. Might have been the birds wheeling across from me, or the shuffling of cars’ roofs, anything, I’m not sure, but it caught in my sight, something hard, something small and hard. These kinds of ghost sensations aren’t uncommon, even without my lingering dose; you’ve felt at times like there was something on you, maybe after glimpsing then losing track of a spider, for example. It’s not there, it just feels as though it is. Phantom. My arm still when it’s cold, and equally my ribs. Or when there’s moisture in the air. Is that phantom, if it’s only in response to some stimulus? Ghosts I would say are perpetual. An engine idling in between its use while the driver and passengers attend an errand. 7 Anyway the colour I get from it all now – irrespective of layer, it’s the same when I’m on the street as up here – is black then blue and white split with red.

then this clown comes in and it’s like well fuck the whole thing’s just, ah, just turned into the setup for a hackneyed bloody. Son of a. A punchline.” 5 D: “horizontal or, as will or shear. this is important this one. or shear the rift – slate beneath, an example. take this as. & tremors. take” 6 C: “So down he sits at the bar, clears his throat, and fixes the bartender with this, god this look of such seriousness. See he’s got a story. He tells the bartender straight up, mate I’ve no money but how about I tell you a story and afterwards you decide whether or not it was worth a drink. And it’s not a busy night so the bartender shrugs and says whatever buddy, go ahead.” 7 A: “That he is B is the case prior and subsequent to his passing through the doors. (These are glass, polarised to cut down glare, they stand at an imposing ninety degrees to the floor.)”

2. Frictions Impeding

be a unique event, surely, because so many of the materials accumulating will be at least partly synthetic, which is to say acutely modern, so handily cutting out a large chunk of time on the planet, and then the specific combination’s going to be down to so many things and I’d love to get right in there with a microscope, unpick all the strands accreted into the thin and damp and caked and stringy black coating and the foam that rises round it, and then maybe once you know what they all are you can figure out where they come from, start to theorise a why, but most people don’t spend that long staring at gutters. It gets me some odd looks 8 and it’s a tough one to explain like for example to the woman the other day with her two kids hurried them past when she saw I was all but motionless, absorbed by the grating. The accumulation 9 on it. Then she caught a glimpse of my face and straight away to her kids “come on come on don’t mess about now come on let’s go” double time. And I don’t for a second blame her, I’d avoid me. But my point is 10 how could you predict this combination of things? Who could ever plan for it? What’s there, spit and rain and oil and piss and pigeon shit and toothpaste and beer and disintegrated cigarette butts and blood and cum and hair, so much loose hair, dogs and men, and pollen and plastic and paper and skin and what else. All plucked from its rush into dark water, dark subterranean water 11, then left to impede and skim instances from the further rush of those to come. The grating shines like chitin and also like the bust face of a body on a tiled floor, and also again like the tiles on the floor, which have been cleaned not long previous, and will be soon after as well; dirt keeps in between them, however, always some you can never quite get at. To be a brother is in many ways a terrible thing; she’d tell me, don’t be lost in these weeds, don’t forget, will you. 12 But we’re among

A: “It will still, even, be the case after he passes through the doors again, later, upon leaving the building subsequent to the meeting he’s come to attend. C will also be at the meeting; they’ll talk at cross purposes for the most part, but there will be a certain baffled respect.”8 9 D: “this seriously this one is a serious we’re reminded to avoid certain kilns for certain was depressed, was suffering from, was in a state of” 10 C: “And up he starts, this guy, our boy, he starts in with this story he’s got, this romantic little piece about a man who fell in love. I should say, a man of violence who became, or tried to, I spose, a man in love. I go back to my drinking. Or I try to but I can’t so well because like I mentioned he’s cleared his throat, our man of tales, he’s pitching this one right to the back of the room, guess he’s hoping for an audience vote at the end on him getting that drink or no.” 11 D: “in this instance the ideation tells and this is exactly so formed, upwards, see the banding the gleams the transform” 12 C: “He’s telling this story, his story, about the rupture of a man and how he fell in love with the wrong woman, although of course any woman’d be the wrong one for him to fall in love with, is the implication. Actually he’s telling it wrong. He’s

millions. The dirt you can never quite get rid: it’s like it’s striving, learned your methods, even it’s the same dirt following always a little way away and underfoot somewhere it’s not possible to reach. Exists automatically in response; a nondescript balancing. Some dirt then foundational. 13 Elsewhere, what seems to coalesce. I’ll hang in the gutter watching the swirl below, so brief, and the selection here fortifying as it grows. They are like cabling; a knot of segmented steel cables with an unclear function, these lash

got them backwards. It’s her was the one knew all there was to of blood and edges and last breaths. But whatever, never mind, you can tell where it goes, you know how it goes.” 13 A: “B keeps to the rush of things; C considers himself somewhat apart from it, although neither one has ever fully understood exactly what the other means when they discuss this, if they discuss this, which they don’t.”

3. Finish Him

What would have made the park better is a small stream, or even a pond, with a wooden bridge over it. A gravel path. A sweating glasshouse full of tropical plants, butterflies, terrapins, koi. More land, acres of land, a hill in it and a cluster of trees at the top occluding a building barely more than four walls and a steepled roof, minor cathedral, whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inside: what gets put. Instead what this park had was something small and hard digging into the skin of my cheek, which I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t realise for some time as I floated wrapped in thick cloth, outside, sheltered, far till I noticed the light from cellphones and then a voice and then the tide ebbed and it was pissing it down all over I was soaked and people were taking pictures and someoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d come forward to ask if I was okay, was the question.

4. Senseless, Without Motive, A Mystery

tracks 14 with weeds grown over between and how graffiti goes all weird and stretched and floating in the dark, no lights this far out, amazed I haven’t tripped. Don’t forget the leg not as bad as the arm or the ribs or the face but also not well. Breath stuck barbed in I tell me I can hear a train I can see a train I can’t, actually I can just it’s not on this track; evidence. It’s always required, 15 I’m told again and again; I want to wave an arm and say, look! but then straight away harpy: it’s automatic, if seldom articulated. I told her I wouldn’t get lost I promised but here we are. The tracks out ahead, feels like they’re ringing with the rhythm of the train off somewhere to the side, and there was a rhythm as well to how my bones splintered and gave. 16 But unfortunately at the time I didn’t have the presence of mind and since I haven’t been able to remember clearly enough that I could hand on heart 17 say I’d figured it out. It was propulsive, though; hard not to get locked into it. 18 At least after I’d detached. My body elsewhere, worked on, I was slack in broad currents, wind-caught pollen. Past a certain point you permit. Or I did. But it isn’t submission, it isn’t, 19 because you remain without, untouchable, 20 no more these curled and knotted limbs than the long wake you leave in the world, the creases on pages, nail trimmings, overheard words 21 strangers will catch and dwell on where you’ll never know as they pass

A: “For C it’s desires, acting much like a tide. For B it’s less carnal; experience, blister-fast, key to this to keep from by accident regarding what’s behind.” 15 D: “worked and folded; we’re serious, check and see, the earth’s at work. now I’d we’d say. importantly and to the importance” 16 A: “D is always incomprehensible; C has taken to drinking during their meetings and coming up with stories in his head to pass the time. It’s unclear whether D’s noticed, or would care if he had.” 17 C: “You see when he fell in love, or when he told himself he had, what he actually did was this: to step inside the mouth of a creature, ravenous, colossal. Or he was already inside it, and he stepped on the wrong spot, like a bird between a crocodile’s teeth. Or else perhaps the mouth is inverted. It’s, instead of round him, the inside of each his blood vessels. Passion exerts so. Anyway.” 18 D: “of the family. what’s to be dug is put to use, and we’ve, these are their own rift the great grey press. banding in like” 19 C: “Like I said you know where this goes. So did I, better than you, most likely, and for certain better than him, this dilettante, this idiot so determined to push it and he doesn’t even know the colour of its waking eye, and to be honest I’m not much in the mood to hear it again, I’m just here to have a drink, right, I get enough of this day by I mean to be a steward is a terrible fucking thing so up I get and out we go and would you look he’s shattered out in a white gown with tubes for his fluids and machines for his breathing which to be honest I think counts as I’ve done him a favour, I mean better that than he learn quite what he was dealing with. Mouths!” 20 A: “The doors are almost never totally still, there’s such a flow and it’s so clear to see from inside what with the managed light. Essentially, these are inevitable.” 21 D: “we remember. to the family: my (wherein) gold and condolence, mewing, backwards flapping cunt you’ll place quartz as it does between your eyes, we’re the channel, the shear, ours igneous and pyrophore at once then put me to rest in the work of it all I’ll we’ll work like matter to (ward) sleep”

you all blank and stumbling and becalmed, the discard of skin cells into dust in your room collecting on the heavy locked case beneath the bed22, its black so gloss it looks oiled, like the dust should stick in its surface, but it doesn’t. 23

22 C: “Don’t fuck with passions of the marrow, boys, we’re a rush of red protein, we’re semi-mineral, we’re practically magnetic.” 23 A: “They repeat. I don’t meet but they know what I expect from them. The body bound up tight, honey in its mouth.”

5. Fish In A Barrel 24

busy haven’t you. Said like “so what do you think.” “I think. it can’t be fun being my sister. but – thankyou.” Or later I’m in an alcove out of the rain now watch the movement of things on the street, not watch things, watch the movement. She’s “standing I’m swallowed by a single parched eye. no, I’ll say, that’s not me” not. The blur, the speed of things, the rush and so be channelled. No; stay. Consider: she’s “it’s something in the sea. no… but it’s what might rise.” “body of coral. body mismatched but. mismatched therefore” taking rain as an e.g. what’s watched. What I’m watching: the blur. Without this then what. Is there without this. “then we swim through its living blood. we shuffle: split this. we bring iron and air. blood alive in the sea. we pull it apart” and embedded in this, piercing it, blurred with it so then caught even as it severs and pulps the motion, who sees what but a bullet. “and you remember who it was?” “with the pictures. no I. yes, they got arrested right. afterwards, they got put in a box, for the pictures.” “tell me what you want to do.” As with coral, there’s no one, and yet “it’s easier described. I mean from when it started,” it rises, serpentine, a corner of air.

24 B: “It’s like this: as though the widened and ravenous – however, and when taking into account under the aforementioned by which I mean a meanwhile streaming in several bright and yet if we consider the full & final which is to say think of it as (but, of course, that’s not to compare the, besides this being in large part constituted by an ultimately futile and devouring and yet it goes without saying at least in terms of – although having said that! – when are we (and by we let’s naturally remember) over and equally severed yet again [hypothetically speaking] and in need of still aren’t we all that is to say when it comes CHURNING down to it: a shining and veined wall”

Francis Haselden Immunity has never been considered so essential for a human society as it is today. The refugee crisis that invades the media, the liberal discourse of tolerance that accepts the other as the other, the rise of the far-right in love with its national identity, the injunction to possess healthy bodies, free of sickness and death, and the entrenchment of academic discourse in the ethereal world of ideas, are cases that exemplify the current need for immunity. As a consequence, the possibility of the foundation of a community fades away. Community is etymologically derived from the Latin munus, meaning ‘gift’. A community is thus what is given, and therefore what is lost. One loses what one gives and enters a relation of dependence that in turn causes the sense of lack of autonomy. As Roberto Esposito writes in Immunitas, the munus leaves the person in a state of radical openness as he engages in ‘a common relationship that is necessarily one of reciprocity, [which] tends to confuse the boundaries between what is proper to each individual and what belongs to everybody and nobody’. The munus dissolves the illusion of self-sufficiency that characterises the immune individual; it opens the doors to the potential instability that will rock the individual. It has started to grow in him. Coming from the outside, it has inserted itself in his clean body, a body made out of logical connectors and citations from philosophers. She had brought with her the disease that is slowly transforming his body. Her touch has a strange consistence: it is both exterior to him and inside him. She is by his side, never leaving his thoughts, and her warm breath is running along his face as if it were trying to find somewhere into which it could seep and overwhelm his closed mind. He cannot yet accept the fact of her presence as something that is not himself. He still believes that she is a mere projection of his fantasy. He still thinks that she would not exist if he turned his gaze in another direction. But he has lost weight. The fact is that the symptoms are there. They are becoming increasingly predominant as they expand over his skin, as they sink into his organs, both covering and infiltrating his interior, burning his blood. And the door is now open. The cold is coming in. I know that you slept with other people before. Who were they? You will never give me a true answer, will you. I do not really care if I am ill or not. My obsessive research into my symptoms always leads me to the secret you are keeping from me. A disease is always a secret, despite the blatant clues, the sick skin and the fainting. A disease is always a secret because suddenly the body is invaded by the other, but that person remains undisclosed, objective, she is not I. I cannot seize you. My entire body feels the lack of you as you lie to me. The secret that you keep creates the separation, and the more I interpret your silence, the quieter it becomes. Your hold gets stronger as I throw my body about to seize you and to control you. You are no longer a fantasy. You exist. The solipsism is falling apart. And I am hitting against a wall of names made out of those possible infectious lovers: Antoine, Pierre, Thomas. Are the names what you are hiding from me? Is it the disease that you are hiding from me? There must be signs out there of the secret. What about their tattoos and their long hair? Did their faces look as gaunt as mine? A secret is something that cannot be told. If the other carries a secret deep inside, then the secret bears the mark of pure otherness. Saying that the other is otherness means that they lie outside the world of the self – he who uses reason and defeats the self’s never-ending attempt to grasp at the secretive void. The words turn around the secret as it secretes its silence throughout the text.

writing around the outside JANE NORRIS What is it to write in the outside, on the wild plains, unprotected, out beyond the walled garden of the Academy. What is it to write outside the Citadel that assays language and hallmarks meaning, appraising and amplifying the professional voice. To write not from the inside-out proclaiming truth or, from the outside-in addressing the seat of power. But to write around the outside, far from the ramparts of published academia. What is the pitch or tone that will carry across those plains, the understanding that will echo against the rocks and move the grass. Who or what is that writing for, if the castle owns the words and the drawbridge is up. Isabel Stengers touches on the fear of being an outcast, when writing to reclaim the animism of the plains. A thinker as an outcast from philosophy, being cast out, perhaps outside into the wilderness. Where she would be a philosopher not thought of. Being an outcast is the role of the scapegoat, not the sacrificial beast that is killed within the city in plain sight, but the other. The other one that carries the taboos and anxieties far away from the metropolis. Allowing it to sleep well at night. But what of the scapegoat in Holman Hunt’s painting, hanging like a collected stamp in The Lady Lever Gallery near Liverpool, a stamp that has traveled from abroad, a far-off place, that has travelled back in, as a currency image from the outside. The currency being that of a receipt, announcing that the current bill has been paid, that the status quo is preserved, and this dead trophy animal is nailed on the wall. To the wall of the Citadel. But what if this is a ruse, a trick by the outside. Is it sending fake postcards home? A card from the outpost. Wish you were here the weather is fine, for January. A reverse Trojan goat, a scapegoat on a postcard, posting the card trick back. What if the scapegoat didn’t work, if the sins were not expunged and the fine city was not finally washed clean. What if it was a delusion, ‘another fine mess ‘Stanley’ I presume’, except no one is laughing out there - at the cities presumptions. What if the wilderness was tired of cast off outcasts, what if it refused to be fine about being a dumping ground for the citadel’s refuse. Instead, what if it is a notice of a fine, a fine for tipping, a fine for the fine citadel. A notice that there is still owing, owed. The Citadel could pay the fine with a blanket order, a blanket purchase agreement or a call-off order to call off the debt. A purchase order which allows multiple delivery dates over history. Blanket orders are used when there is a recurring need for expendable goods, or expendable people for that matter. The Citadel has ordered purchase, has taken delivery over history, but not paid the people, hence the fine. There has been a blanket refusal to own up to the fine over history. 21

Writing around the outside, is a form of stitching, a blanket stitch that works at right angles to the edge, that works the edge of the citadel while it writes a line. Writing is a thread that returns and repeats, repeating to return to an edge. It is an overlocking stitch that locks over the edges, holding them together to stop the fraying. The stitching is a different medium that writes a line, on the blanket refusal of the citadel. A thread, that pierces the blanket and moves along the blanket near the edge. The blanket says it’s the threads job to stop the fraying. The blanket needs the action of the other to hold its edges together, a blanket cannot stitch a blanket. It demands the other make it into a blanket. The stitching around the edge of the blanket is often in a contrasting colour, red thread around the edges of a white wool blanket. Red the sign of danger to alert the blanket to its boundaries, it’s limitations, by the presence of something around the outside. Fred Moten writes on blackness and nonperformance, the refusal of freedom, the freedom to refuse the great outside as defined by white legal conscience. The freedom to opt for the non-freedom of the city. Of being black and killed like a scapegoat in plain sight. The freedom not to be free. To be a piece of the outside making holes in the fabric of the city. The citadel is searching for something to reinforce its edges, its blanket polices and fine language are fraying. There are gaps inside the citadel. Fred Moten, a scapegoat’s scapegoat, is running amok with language from within the Citadel. Those of us on the outside watch warily, wearing the watch, forming a watch, keeping a watch out throughout the night – in the plains around the outside. Blankets are protection, for those within the city with disease, for those un-eased, without ease, as opposed to those who have been eased out. A privileged diss to those who are out. Out and about, unprotected. Writing about the ease of dissing is a message, a message not a massage that massages the truth. Writing a message from the outside, is a thread stitched in. The message is separate from the teller, even a medium message is in a separate medium. The medium is not the message (unless you own the medium Mr. Macluan.) To message is to call, to call out from outside. To callout in-justice, all non-justice that is within the citadel, to out the flaws in the blanket policies. This is to pierce the fabric of the citadel. Some in the citadel would call this a stitch up. Stitching up the edges of the holes with writing, perhaps darning some holes, perhaps not. Perhaps darn well making the holes even bigger to be seen from outside. Perhaps writing around the outside is the sound of stitching ever bigger holes into the fabric of the citadel. Perhaps when the blanket wears thin, and it is of no use, all that will remain will be the writing around the outside. 22

Self-ish LISA MARGREET PAYNE

I want to give you a piece of my mind but I won’t give it to you because it is the only part of me I have left. Avant Gauze, Christine Friedlander

Sitting here, I shuffle and reshuffle the same twenty-six letters, trying to make new combinations to elicit emotion, thought and response in the reader. I’ve been playing with hyphens, turning Selfish into Self-ish, Selfless into Self-less. According to the Oxford Dictionary, Self is: ‘A person’s essential being that distinguishes them from others, especially considered as the object of introspection or reflexive action.’ The definition of Self- is a combining form meaning: ‘Of or directed towards oneself or itself.’ I look up how many words begin with Self-. There isn’t a definite answer, but there is a Wiktionary page devoted to it. The wiki page goes from self-absorbed to self-worth. I count how many Self- words it has listed: three hundred and fourteen. Or rather, to be precise, it has three hundred and twenty-seven because someone has included words which aren’t hyphenised, such as selfconsistant and selfsufficient, so I don’t count those. They should really be removed from this category, seeing as it’s ‘English Words Prefixed with Self-’. Of course, it’s a wiki page, editable by anyone with the time and inclination, and therefore not to be taken as definitive. The list of newly added Self- words ranges from self-defilement to self-catering. The hyperlinks change from blue to purple where I’ve followed them to look up a meaning: self-blood, self-kill, selfnarrative, self-suck.

In autoimmune disease, the body becomes confused between what is Self and what is Other. As the disease progresses it changes the landscape of the body, and what was Other becomes Self. You are the same, but not the same. You are Self-ish.

And I am selfish. I can’t think beyond my own sphere of self. I’ve become self-centered, but this is an act of self-care. What lies between self-centeredness and self-care is perception. The hyphen in self-ish turns it from something negative into a description of a liminal self. Self-care isn’t in the Wiktionary list of Self- words.

I’m trying to write about this experience that has taken all I know about myself and shattered it. Some things it has thrown into stark relief: you are mentally strong, you have a good sense of humour. Other things have come back to karmically bite me on the arse. For example, I used to be dismissive about chronic fatigue having grown up in the age of ‘yuppie flu’. Now I suffer from chronic fatigue as a side effect of my illness. If I exert myself beyond my carefully self-prescribed routine I suffer from ‘post-exertion malaise’, a real thing which involves a sore throat, extreme tiredness and aching limbs, amongst other symptoms. I’m always having to make complicated energy calculations. If I do x, will I have enough energy to do y? Do I want y more than I want x? No wonder I’m tired.

When writing about it, I’m often advised to: ‘Take out the “I”.’ But what if the I is all I have left? I is the core, the essence of me. ‘I’m much changed,’ I texted to a friend before she visited me, shortly after coming out of hospital, ‘but still the same.’ Much changed, but still the same. Self-ish.

Before she arrived, I applied red lipstick for the first time in two years and felt more me than I’d done since the beginning of my illness. How much of me is my outward appearance, and how much is this inner core? I wrapped them so tightly together while I was growing up. Now my illness has ripped them apart, and I’m having to start all over again. This illness turned my limbs into floppy, paralysed things, removed my sense of smell, collapsed my nose, thinned my hair, stockpiled fat in all the places you’d

never want it, and rounded my face to resemble the full moon—of which there have been twenty-four since the disease reached its zenith. But this kernel of me-ness has crystalised; it’s solid. When I was a teenager my mother told me something which was sad, profound and true. It’s remained with me ever since, sometimes a comfort, sometimes like a thing from your worst nightmares. ‘You reach a point in your life when you stop ageing inside,’ she told me, ‘and then you just watch yourself growing older.’

I felt myself coalesce into the me, the I that I recognise as intrinsic, when I was about thirty. I always wanted to be thirty, even when I was eighteen I used to think that being a ‘thirty-year-old woman’ sounded cool. Whenever I needed to do something professional or mature I used to channel my ‘inner thirty-year-old’. As I’ve got older the place markers have shifted, first to my ‘inner forty-year-old’, and now my ‘inner fifty-year-old’. My inner fifty-year-old is kick-ass. She looks back to when she was ill and disabled and loves that younger self. I’m not there yet though, I’m still trying to work out how to love the now-me and not some projected future-me. Inside-me is fine, we’re at peace. It’s the outside-me, my body, that I’m struggling with.

I is stamped all over this piece, the upright pronoun; straight, and tall. Who called it “the upright pronoun”? I can’t find the reference, but it’s seared into my brain like a quote, not an invention. Google hasn’t provided the answer to this one. I feel let down. Remove the ‘I’. Feel let down. Disappointed, or a command.

There was a time when I didn’t know about things like Self and Other in an academic sense, with a capital letter. I remember coming across them for the first time during my undergraduate degree, which

I did as a mature-student during my thirties. This notion of Othering came from there, and with it, the capital lettered Self. I heard the idea of gender as a social construct, something which is performative, at the same time. I remember a conversation with my then-husband in which he called me an essentialist for speaking my mind about views I’d no idea had an academic context; I thought it was just biology. The module on postmodernism and Judith Butler schooled me in these things soon after. ‘Women are Other,’ I realised. And the first tingling of my feminist awakening began. Lots of other Others also appeared in my consciousness for the first time, and what they were Othered against, started to take form.

I became disabled and was Othered again. I could no longer stride into a room in my high heeled shoes, red lipsticked lips and perfect wing-tipped cat eye-liner; all dyed-blonde hair, blunt-cut Betty Paige fringe and Attitude. I couldn’t walk. My hands lacked the manual dexterity to perform many essential tasks, let alone non-essential ones like applying make-up. I was in a wheelchair, with splints holding my wrists at an angle which gave me a modicum of movement in a few of my fingers. I had no touch-sensation in my extremities. But if I burnt my fingers, I blistered. If I stubbed my toe, I bruised. There was a constant burning pain as the nerves were destroyed. First weekly, then fortnightly chemotherapy stopped my immune system from killing me. I developed a superpower: my wheelchair made me invisible. ‘Could you tell me where the shoe laces are please?’ I asked a shop assistant. ‘Of course, Sir,’ she replied to the person pushing my wheelchair, looking over my head. ‘Just take the second aisle on the left, next to the cleaning products.’ Don’t make eye contact or you might catch disabledness. This happened on more than one occasion.

My disability was ‘acquired’; like a pension plan or other financial asset. Acquired disability has its own category of disability, I heard on a podcast recently. I can’t hear the word ‘acquired’ without adding ‘immune deficiency syndrome’ afterwards; a hangover from growing up in the eighties.

AIDS. Of course, having my kind of autoimmune disease is almost the exact opposite of AIDS, in that my immune system is so over-efficient that it needs to be suppressed with toxic drugs. I’m required to have my blood tested every month to make sure that the drugs aren’t poisoning me; not more than the therapeutic amount anyway. Perhaps they could take some of this too strong immune system and infuse it into the person with the weakened one. I made a variant of this joke to my older sister in our never-ending WhatsApp chat when she was suffering with a cold. ‘I’m not feeling very well’ she typed, ‘like I’m not ill yet, but it’s in the post. All I can do is lie on the sofa and watch GLOW on Netflix. Maybe my body will fight it off.’ ‘I’ll give you some of my super strong immune system,’ I replied. ‘That’ll get rid of it.’ ‘Thanks. Think it might be too strong for me though.’ ‘I’ll make it into a homeopathic dose.’ ‘Lol.’

I had a happy childhood, going against the popular trend of unhappy ones. I remember it fondly. Our house was made from three cottages that my father, together with his father, converted into one house. My father, an ex-racing driver turned engineer, had his garage behind our house, and his mother, my Granny, lived in a flat above it. My paternal grandfather died when I was too young to properly remember him. My maternal grandparents lived only a few miles away. A few years after my younger sister was born, my father added an extension onto the house. This formed the boundaries of my safe little world. We were very literal in our names; the extension was always ‘The Extension’ when referring to the downstairs room, although it’s purpose was to serve as a dining room. The upstairs part of the extension became bedrooms for myself and my younger sister. Downstairs were the kitchen, the utility room and The Other Room. The Other Room was a combined dining room (before The Extension), the main living area, and Round-the-Corner. It was decorated in true seventies style, with orange carpet and curtains, and textured peach wallpaper which

looked like a brain. Its puffy surface was perfect for little girl nails to pierce and peel off. Not through malice, but curiosity; much to our parents’ consternation. A small hatch lead to the kitchen from The Other Room. Our parents kept the door to the kitchen locked at night to prevent early morning raids on the larder. But we discovered how to open the hatch and climb into the locked kitchen. We’d turn the stools upside down and pretend that we were at the gym. A strange game for young girls; I can only imagine the late seventies and early eighties fitness craze, aided by the likes of the Green Goddess and Mad Lizzie, played a part in this. Round-the-Corner was a small study area which had a swivel chair, that my sisters and I called ‘the round-and-round chair’. One of our favourite games was to sit in the chair while the other one spun it around, announcing in a nasal voice: ‘The train is now leaving platform five. Mind the doors, please. Mind the doors!’ Once it gathered enough speed, the sister pushing the chair would jump on, and together we’d watch the world spin around in dizzying circles. The main living area had a big leather sofa that we hid behind when the daleks on Doctor Who became too scary. The dining room area had a piano, on which we’d play our performance piece Thunder and Lightning while our Shitz Tzu, Charlie, howled along. The Other Room was where everything happened. It took me many years before I realised that other people just called it the Lounge, or Living Room. In my mind The Other Room, or rather ‘The Otherroom’ all run together into one word, was its name.

Back to the essay. End strong. Erm. Write what you know. What I know? I’m looking at the essays I’ve written so far. I’m trying to rebuild my identity, parse a story from the disparate strands I’ve been left with. I’ve found a thread. The thread that keeps pulling through them all. The Other Room.

Or rather: my sisters. My family. Much changed, but still the same.

microburst elizabeth k reeder what you do not remember somehow resides here in this room where you’ve been taken, your swollen legs are red-angry like a sky in storm at dusk with silvercoated bandages over their weeping and you can feel but can’t see the broken horizon-lines that puncture the peaceful coast of your neck and folds of skin hang down and then retreat with the thanksgiving days and with the meds they give you, and your hands are skinny for all that, veins popping over the bones, over the knobs of arthritis or gout (they don’t know which), and in sleep you raise your head on the inhale as if to make room in your busy chest for air and your chin falls down when you’re empty and the floor is where you were found a few days ago, taken by a fast shock which sent you not to your knees but flat onto your back, your heart so slow, face so swollen that for more than a few seconds she thought you were dead and through the yellow of your eyes you do not always recognize us and mom has to sign the form, we have to trust you’ll not die here on the table, and trust that you might die if we don’t sign, and the level of doctor-nurse activity says it all, this could be it, this is it and after three days in ICU they you move to CCC and the shirt you wear over your gown gives you just enough decency to barter with a realtor over the details of the weirdly demanding offer of someone wanting to buy the house you’ve lived in for thirty-two years and it’s home to some, a reluctant sale if it goes through, but stairs are stairs (you want mom to be safe too) and your legs are your legs and now your burning feet aren’t even eager to take you someplace slowly and you’re not afraid of the point of departure but traveling there is nothing but painful, recalling how you’re losing your forty acres all the blinds up in the house when you and mom usually keep them down and in this autumn night when I look up, my brother beside me, the house ablaze with lights, your den looks Rockwell-esque, like poetry, and the number crunching business of heading a family takes on the timbre and rhythm of elegy, a dirge the light, the warm light hitting off the wood of your office shelves, the organizational logic of which you always protested you had despite the splayed piles of papers, the piles on piles, the very breath of to-do the room held and you exhaled and the papers flew into place via my hands but it was faster than I’d imagined and you didn’t diminish with it despite a fiction-prediction but I’m not sure the move won’t kill you or that mom’s reaction to the move won’t kill us both she worries, repeats phrases, the action like rubbing oose between fingers or sunburned skin peeled and worried between fingertips and sand in an oyster pearl pearl please let it be a pearl and the irritation will be worth it, for the words she says, the same words the same words same order a loop a loop she’s knitting knitting her face like a dropped stitch and loop loop, I don’t want to sell my house, I don’t want to sell, I don’t want to sell and it is a forced move but it’s not me or dad or anyone but this life which doesn’t play by the rules or respect the timetables you have in your head and you’ve had your share of injustices and they loop, loop in your head, out your lips and it’s tiring to listen to back in august the streets are flooded, the power is out, and the wind explodes drops of rain into horizontal needles which pierce trees which give up their limbs and it’s just a moment of extreme force within an ongoing storm it’s an albatross, I yell during the microburst, no electricity, no lights, and the door hits dad’s leg and here’s the sudden jolt back into illness butted against death as the EMTs come and track rainwater and storm-mud through your house, borrowing a flashlight because the lights are out and they carry him out to the ambulance and we’re imprisoned in the dark house together and it’s crowded with your worry this house is a fucking albatross, I repeat and you get angry and it’s a Parkinson’s anger, different, I can’t explain it but I know it, know that it’s altered, exaggerated from what has always been here and you’re a top that’s been spinning just fine for years and then it slows wobble wobble wobble and I’m watching and you still feel the spinning and it has always worked before and why not now, why not now, my logic has always worked before,

and why not now and why and why not the breaks between the words aren’t steady aren’t empty they’re filled with the gears of your brain getting stuck, jerking forward I’ve always been able why not now because all has changed and anyone can see it, strangers see it, how we’re all in crisis, how it’s a mess, and they see us emergency off-kilter, at risk the storm is steady with sure gusts as if his falls don’t say it clearly enough: the first one in February 07, the broken foot, and then the one in April he hid that I’m still not supposed to know about which now seems minor, and the next one in May, a break as well, a wrist, and then the next one out of bed in a storm in the August heat and bruised ribs (and maybe the hip, opening up the landscape to November’s hemotoma) and the next in November which led him to be lying for hours on the cold floor with infection speed of light speed of poisoned blood through him, through his heart unable even on a good day to do its job, and the cold and the bugs in his blood made it thick and the cheering section was asleep and his heart has its own tenacity and kept on beating, his body heating up his legs so angry, so angry, and his eyes yellow with mucus and sometimes he didn’t know who I was, who he was, and it’s the worst I’ve seen him people see him as a frail old man and so in the ER when he says he feels worse than when he came in I tell the doc, the young capable doctor, that dad never complains and they need to pay attention because he never complains, he never even tells us things we need to know, although he’s getting a bit better and yet the whole thing is getting more subtle as if running away from his decisions not to face it and it’s running and he can’t give chase, he can’t on some days even give a glance and we’re playing a game on ice and we’re trying to rub the ice before him to make the surface smooth, fast enough or slow enough to hit its mark we’re frantic and deep down this leads to a leaden slowness and when I’m staring into space near the end of the first week of his hospitalization in November my mom says that my stare is just like Parkinson’s and she laughs and I don’t know her at all and in her head it must be a wild landscape uniquely hers and confusing and I’m pretty sure a compass wouldn’t work in there because she could convince herself of almost any change of direction or definition, if it suited her, and she’s moving better but is exhausted with real reason of course and it’s too much for all of us and even at a distance my brother and sister are all torn up, and mom says, my brother will be devastated when he dies and she’s right . . . three days away isn’t long or enough and the first night back I’m desperate for a drink, to lose just a minute, to lose myself for just a minute and I gulp down the red wine you bought, a thick bordeaux, cold like winter and warming too, it’s this bottle we drink out of tall glasses because we can’t be bothered to handwash the wine goblets I knock it back like you see them glug whisky in the movies and it hits me all at once after dinner at the end of a day when my mom could only be described as completely batty, affected, exhausted, and no wonder and there’s all these reasons but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m at the end of my tether necessarily, a desired half-cut and me wanting to stop stop to not have to handle her, not have to talk smoothly and calmly and always reasoning when reason has left her, especially today when she’s crazy, loopy, and off subject or always back on that same subject back and back she’s the curl of hair you twist and twist till it pops out, find it again, twist twist and each time it’s too much even when we know more, even when more is familiar, it’s too much and when she doesn’t let up on her loop, when she tells me I’ve not been there enough I crack, and then my brother is here and hasn’t yet found a way to talk to her and he snaps too, and is working as hard as he can and it’s a one-way street because she can’t see his efforts or that she has to work too, on many of the same issues, and so it’s hitting his head against a brick wall or sticking his fingers through the weak weave of her knitting loop loop worry worry and you can’t quite tune her out, it’s the pitch of the thing, the ring of truth but it’s distorted and you can’t ignore it, white noise, every white noise has its own pitch you can test it, someone has, and she’s the droning of a ceiling fan, the struggled clicking of the heat when it can’t quite turn itself on

Lost Notations of E. A. Boxer ADAM STEINER

CONTRIBUTORS ANNA BACKMAN ROGERS is a Senior Lecturer in Feminism and Visual Culture at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. She is the author of American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis-Image and Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure. She is currently working on a poetry anthology entitled Silver Screen/Dead Time about the female body in popular culture and a book on Simone de Beauvoir and Film entitled A Cinema of Ambiguity. She is the co-founder and editor in chief of MAI: A JOURNAL OF FEMINISM AND VISUAL CULTURE.

KATE FELD writes work that slides between fiction, poetry and lyric essay. Her writing has appeared in journals and anthologies including Hotel, The Stinging Fly, minor literature[s], Entropy and The Lonely Crowd and is forthcoming from The Letters Page. She runs creative nonfiction journal and reading series The Real Story and lectures in Journalism at Salford University. She is a native of Vermont now living in Manchester, UK and at @katefeld

STEVE ELY has published several collections of poetry, most recently Incendium Amoris, Bloody, Proud & Murderous Men, Adulterers & Enemies of God, Zi-Zi Taah Taah Taah: The Song of the Willow Tit and Jubilate Messi. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Huddersfield.

DAVID GREAVES is a writer based in York, England interested in the intersections of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and performance. His writing has appeared in Valve, the Verge anthology and Noble/Gas Quarterly, and his prose-poetry pamphlet, Hinged, was released by the New Fire Tree Press in 2011. FRANCIS HASLEDEN reads philosophy in Paris at the Ă&#x2030;cole normale supĂŠrieure. His main interests are German idealism, Marx, and phenomenology. His profound distaste for science and logics, that have created a world of alienating abstraction, has lead him to reconsider the way philosophy should speak. PAULA KNIGHT is an author, illustrator, and comics creator. Her first graphic memoir, The Facts of Life, was published by Myriad Editions in 2017. She has also illustrated numerous children's books, written three picture books and self-published comics: Spooky Womb (2012) and X-Utero (2013). Many of her comics have been licensed to academic journals and books, and, most recently, her work appears in The Inking Woman (Myriad, 2018). Paula is particularly interested in creative ways to make invisible illness visible, and she is currently exploring new

ways of working within her health limitations. She is on Instagram: @paulajkstudio and twitter: @Paula_JKnight JANE NORRIS is a design theorist interested in the narratives formed in our relationships with materials and objects. She is currently writing about outside-of-enlightenment ways of designing and making: How Materials Think… Her piece ‘A View from the Throne’ was published in the last issue of Dirty Furniture. She has just finished research in the Critical Writing dept. of the Royal College of Art. She works as an Associate Professor at Richmond University the American in London. LISA MARGREET PAYNE has been an aromatherapist, roller-girl, DJ, singer, designer, craft tutor, and organic farmer. But she’s always been a writer. She wrote her first short story when she was twelve, featuring “Martian Kemp”. No, not an early attempt at cross-genre Spandau Ballet alien fan fiction, just bad spelling. Since then she’s written numerous short stories, articles and essays; and her spelling has greatly improved. Lisa is currently working on a memoir about her diagnosis with a rare autoimmune disease and subsequent disability, whilst studying for her Masters degree in Creative Writing. For more information visit her website.

ELIZABETH REEDER, originally from Chicago, lives in Scotland and is the author of two critically acclaimed novels Ramshackle and Fremont. Ramshackle was shortlisted for the Saltire First Book of the Year. Her stories and experimental essays are widely published and broadcast and often explore questions of cartography, identity, ambiguity, family and memory. One Year, a digital chapbook of her lyric essays, is published by Essay Press (2016). Digressions: On Essaying in the UK - curated interviews with publishers, editors and writers on the experimental essay, is a critical companion to One Year and was published in 2016, also by Essay Press. Recently she has been writing about fire, archives and whisky. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. She is on twitter @ekreeder

ADAM STEINER’S poetry and fiction appear in Low Light Magazine, L’Ephemere Review, The Arsonist, Glove zine, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Bohemyth, I Am Not A Silent Poet, Rockland Lit, Proletarian Poetry, The Next Review, and Fractured Nuance zine. Adam produced the Disappear Here project: a series of 27 x poetry films about Coventry ring road. His first novel, Politics of The Asylum, a modernist take on NHS decline, is out now. He tweets @BurndtOutWard

LUNE 02: DISLOCATION For LUNE 02 (Nov 2018) we are looking for submissions on the theme

DISLOCATION.

particular we welcome work that deals

with

question

place,

displacement, space, spacing and location, especially in relation to writing and reading themselves. The very acts of writing and reading involve a dislocation of the self and its supposed autonomy and integrity. We are interested in material that deals with questions of place and space, but also with that of language itself. We want work that engages with language, genre, subjectivity, that brings into question the ability of writing to represent the world at all, or even to fully make sense, pieces that do not fall easily into normal categories, such as memoir, fiction, or poetry, but subvert them, or play with the boundaries between them.

• For text submissions: 5000 words max, including footnotes and references if applicable. • Photography, collage: welcome • Please include a 100-word bio, including any links, and a medium-res headshot you’re happy to have published on our website and used in our social media.

Submissions and enquiries to thelunejournal@gmail.com by 15th September 2018.

Lune 02:DISLOCATION to be published November 2018