by Editors
On The Issues Magazine on YouTube
On The Issues Magazine is on YouTube! See our page for all the videos we’ve posted on the site including our first original video essay, on Audra Fordin, female car mechanic. The video was produced by Ann Farmer.
We want to know what you think. Go to the page, watch our videos and leave comments. Or share the videos on Twitter, Facebook or your website or blog. We also want to know what videos you like. Send us links through YouTube or by writing to [email protected].
The Poet’s Eye: Poetry at OTI
Poetry is a major component of On The Issues Magazine’s coverage of progressive, feminist issues. Please join us in welcoming Sarah Browning, OTI’s new poetry co-editor. Browning is director of Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness and DC Poets Against the War. Read her bio here. Browning has put out a call for submissions, read the guidelines and email her at [email protected].
Speaking of poetry, have you ever been to a poetry slam? Lauren Zuniga has, many times. At one slam, an older man told her to use her “womanly grace” and “leave the exploding for the boys.” Instead, Zuniga wrote “Girl: Exploded,” a provocative piece that explains just why she (as well as other women) shouldn’t contain themselves.
Zuniga tells the story in The Cafe and makes the case for women only poetry slams.
Watch “Girl: Exploded.“
Remembering Jill Johnston
Cultural critic Jill Johnston, best known for spearheading the lesbian separatist movement of the early 1970s, died on Saturday. Johnston was a long standing Village Voice critic and author, and was also a contributor to the print version of On The Issues Magazine. Johnston was very interested in performance art and the avant-garde, and she wrote and performed a celebratory piece after she married her partner, Ingrid Nyeboe, in Denmark in 1993.
OTI published the text from “Deep Tapioca”:
The world, alas, is real; I, alas, am Johnston. I am somebody else’s weird friend. I don’t know what’s going to happen until the next thing happens. Now we are standing beside two musicians in tuxedos or tails playing classical Danish folk music. Now we are dancing for exactly ten seconds. Now we are staring at a table full of something called Fluxfood which is erotically shaped. A watermelon cut in half, one half with a heart cut out of it filled with maybe whipped cream, the other half a cunt. Now we are posing for pictures with the family and I’m being crushed; I can’t get my body into it, only my head peering through shoulders and between other heads.
Continue reading Deep Tapioca.
Next Issue: “The Conning of the Feminists”
OTI editors are hard at work planning the Fall edition, “The Conning of the Feminists.” If you have a story idea, send a detailed pitch letter to [email protected].
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