Nonfiction | Tarpaulin Sky Magazine
Nonfiction | Tarpaulin Sky Magazine
THINGS THAT ARE NOT FICTION | IMAGE: NOAH SATERSTROM
A Symphony Of The Mind
"We are all in transition, at every moment. Part of the artist-'shaman'-musician’s job is to help us through this endless series of transformations. To use our non-binary mindsets to help our materialist friends acclimate to the idea that 'the journey is home'."
Mark Baumer & Claire Donato: “Siblings Not Siblings”
"Our ultimate goal was to write a book. What crystallized instead is this email thread, composed less than a month before Mark left for his second cross-country walk...."
Remember To Breathe
"In the late 1990s I started having mini-meltdowns inside my head as I played: whether this or that was the right note to play next, whether everyone in the room hated the note I was playing now & thus perhaps hated me by extension."
from “Gender/Genre” by Erin Bertram
"On the door hangs a sign, sometimes plastic, sometimes bearing the smudges of printer ink, & often with a line drawn neatly down the middle: he? on the left, she? on the right, & me, standing straight, stiff as a board, standing upright between them."
In Memoriam: Tom Raworth, by Martin Corless-Smith
"I knew Tom for about 20 years. Or ten minutes. It’s odd to say knew, instead of know. I’ll say know. He was as open and opaque when I first met him at a reading in DC as when I last saw him at his flat in Hove. Like a pond of fish—an elegant electric-fast consciousness that withdrew if you delved too deep. It was as if he was saying, I’m right here, it’s all right here. What you get is what you see."
Piper J. Daniels, “Sirens”
An exceptional essay on demons, mental illness, self-harm, and suicide, which we're publishing just in time for Christmas. "If human life is an oath, then suicide for me was like an oath recited backwards, a protest against the physical body that gave entrance to that first strange and violent ghost and all that followed," writes Piper J. Daniels.
“I Cannot Resist the Terror”: Essay by Olivia Cronk
"Dizzy time-travel alienation self/ selves sadnessexhilaration. To walk 'the edge of the abyss.'” Olivia Cronk examines multiple selves, Scenes from a Marriage, The Double Life of Véronique, and books by Dionne Brand, Amanda Goldblatt, and Maria Negroni.
Mariko Nagai, excerpt from “Body of Empire”
"As soon as surviving women and children are ushered into civilian camps like scared sheep, trading of flesh starts: an extra bowl of food for a fuck..." -- from Mariko Nagai's Body of Empire, co-winner of the 2019 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards.
Yanara Friedland, excerpts from “Groundswell”
"I come from the border, Grenze, Grenzstreifen, nation, wall, barbed wire, west that is east that is a city and also a consciousness of rivers. I come from the swell, a city built on swamp. Whatever ground it is that grew me, the lines run firmly through it" — from Yanara Friendland's Groundswell, shortlisted for Tarpaulin Sky's 2019 Book Awards.
Kate Durbin, excerpt from “Hoarders”
"My name is Linda, and I love cooking rotting food" -- an excerpt from Kate Durbin's Hoarders, shortlisted for the 2019 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards.