Events Archives

Click here for more information on The Berlin Writing Prize 2022

ENTER BY AUGUST 15TH TO WIN A THREE-WEEK WRITING RESIDENCY IN BERLIN

SAND is delighted to be partnering with The Reader Berlin and The Circus Hotel to present The Berlin Writing Prize 2022 for fiction and creative nonfiction.

The theme for this year’s international Berlin Writing Prize is “Escape,” in all its many forms.

The winner will receive a three-week residency at the Circus Hotel in Berlin from 2 to 22 January 2023, including their very own apartment, plus a month’s breakfast vouchers for the Circus Hostel, and up to €100 in travel costs toward their travel to Berlin.

The winning writer and the two runners up will get a 30-minute private publishing Q&A with literary agent Jenny Hewson, and they will be featured on the SAND website. This feature will include publication of their winning entry, an interview, or both, depending on the author’s preference.

In addition to the above, two runners up will receive two nights in a double room of their own at The Circus Hotel over January’s competition prize-giving event, and a travel budget to a maximum of €100 each to cover their journey to Berlin.

A further seven shortlisted writers will win goodie bags, plus invitations to our prize-giving event on January 2023.

SUBMIT TO THE BERLIN WRITING PRIZE

Enter original, unpublished prose fiction and creative nonfiction up to 3,000 words on the “Escape” theme.
The entry fee is €10.
The closing date is midnight (Berlin time) August 15, 2022.
The longlist will be announced in September 2022. Winners will be announced in October.
Prize Giving Event: January 2023 (date tbc)

To read the complete contest rules, to read about the judges, and to enter the contest, click here. We look forward to seeing your best work!

The Berlin Writing Prize 2022 Read More »

Click here for more information on the SAND 24 launch

A midsummer night at Hallesches Haus to celebrate the launch of SAND 24!

Much of the art, poetry and prose of SAND 24 is about different ways of coming undone; in states of crisis, but also in dreams, alternative realities, and states of euphoria. Unravelling invites a return to and revision of the past, as borders between time, space, reality, and fantasy become slippery and permeable.

Join us at Hallesches Haus on June 23, 2022, to celebrate the release of SAND 24. Reserve your launch tickets here.

SAND 24 LAUNCH | Programme

Doors & drinks from 7:30PM
Readings & more from 8:30PM

Live prose and poetry readings from SAND’s Berlin-based contributors:

SYLEE GORE published the chapbook ‘Even Still’ with Sampson Low in 2021, and she was jointly awarded the Lord Alfred Douglas Memorial Prize in 2020. She is currently Poetry Editor at the Oxford Review of Books.

AMBIKA THOMPSON has been published in several international publications including Electric Literature, Riddle Fence, Crab Fat Magazine, Fanzine, Joyland, and The Fiddlehead, is the recipient of a Research and Creation grant from the Canada Council for the Arts (2021), has an MFA in creative writing from Guelph University (Canada) where she/they studied with Dionne Brand and Heather O’Neill, and runs creative writing workshops online and in Berlin.

OLYA KOTOVA studied sociology and philosophy in Moscow and Berlin. She is engaged in postdigital art and political documentary and is currently creating an interdisciplinary journal with photography, quasi-academic essayism, advertisements for Berlin’s best cheap drinks, short stories, and poetry by her friends.

CHLOE FIROUZIAN is an artist based in Berlin.

LAURA LYNES is a British-Hungarian writer, currently undertaking an MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford. Her writing can be found in publications including Lighthouse Journal, erotoplasty, and Litro Magazine.

Tickets

Venue capacity is limited, so book your ticket early to avoid disappointment.

Select the bundle SAND 24 + launch ticket deal at the checkout for an exclusive advance discount (30% off!) Just show your bundle ticket at the magazine table on the night and we’ll give you your copy to take home.

There are currently no coronavirus-related mask-, test-, or vaccination rules in place in Berlin for events of this nature. Nevertheless, we encourage you to test before you come and to stay home if you have any kind of cold or flu symptoms.

Header image artwork by Henry Hu henry hu. (henryhhu.com) / Flyer design by Siena Powers

SAND 24 Launch Invitation Read More »

At our in-person SAND 23 launch back in November, we invited guests to contribute to our anonymous coping mechanisms wall, in line with SAND 23’s theme, coping.

To mark the virtual launch of SAND 23 on Sunday 13 February, we’re inviting you to take part in a mini writing contest. Pick one of these coping mechanisms as your prompt and write us a poem or piece of flash in 23 words or less.

The winner will receive a free SAND issue of their choice and we’ll feature a selection of our favourite entries online.

Send your entry to [email protected] by midnight Berlin time on 13 February!

The coping mechanisms

reading sci-fi – books & baths – shania twain – riding the ringbahn – riesling – erotic watercolours – egg content – sugary beverages and doom scrolling – pombears – blasting joni mitchell & singing along even louder – watching bbc election results coverage from the 1990s – cleaning the windows – filling things with spaghetti in photoshop – tarot cards & wine & cats – erotic fan fiction – chocolate for everything (sugar free) – cocooning day & night – improvising artistically – praying 5 times a day – food & basketball – playing pokemon on my phone at 200% speed (because i have no time to lose) – friends dinners/masturbating (not at the same time, of course) – curating playlists and/or listening to the same song on repeat – sex – play loud metal and rock music & sports – bathtub & a glass of wine… Or two – sushi sushi sushi – dancing solo salsa in my apartment with music at full volume – baking, eating, art projects, getting pissed off, crying it out, then apologising, watching sad movies

Coping Mechanisms Poetry Contest Read More »

After a year of digital pandemic launches, we were finally able to gather our Berlin family together for a real, live, in-person launch on 5 Nov 2021 at Prachtwerk in Berlin.

We enjoyed readings and presentations from creative nonfiction writer Nikitta Adjirakor, poet Winifred Wong, fiction writer Gurmeet Singh, artist Tabitha Swanson, and poet/flash fiction writer Lizzy Yarwood. Their work can be found in the latest issues of SAND.

We were excited to see some of our favorite SAND team alums and past contributors in the audience along with other known and new faces. This was extra special on a night when SAND announced an exciting transition: Outgoing Editor in Chief, Jake Schneider, handed over the reins to our new Editor in Chief, Ashley Moore.

Thank you to those of you who made it and who support us through reading, submitting, and being part of our creative community. We hope you enjoy the photos of the night below. All photography by Marlon Schipper.

SAND 23 Launch Read More »

SAND Winter Webinar Series

We’re excited to announce our winter webinars series, featuring three prose webinars with SAND’s Editor in Chief and former Fiction Editor Ashley Moore and Creative Nonfiction Editor Melissa Richer.

Best Beginnings: Keep Editors Reading With Compelling First Pages | 14 Nov 2021

Editors and agents make critical decisions about you and your prose based on the first page of your work. Some even decide whether to decline your work or keep reading based on the first page alone. So how do you write compelling first pages that grab and maintain editors’ interest?

During this webinar, Ashley and Melissa will discuss the craft of writing first pages, including common mistakes they see in the submissions pile, and do a live evaluation of attendees’ first pages to demonstrate how craft works and how editors read.

Breaking the Rules: Writing Prose Outside the Traditional Norms | 12 Dec 2021

If we’re writing in English, we’ve all heard many of the same “rules” about storytelling: Stories should be plot-driven. Stories should be character-driven. Conflict drives plot. Maybe we’ve even noticed that our own writing is following these “rules,” even though we’re dying to break them.

What if we could tell the story of a failed relationship through photographs? Or use a postpartum depression questionnaire to structure the first chapter of our novel? What if we could drop a modern-day character into a historical situation and let them run wild? What if we could retell the Bible’s biggest moments through the lens of a failed family holiday?

This webinar aims to get writers excited about the many ways their writing can break the rules, subvert norms, and have something important to say.

Keeping Your New Year’s Writing Resolutions | 5 Jan 2022

It’s the end of 2021. Another year of writing. And not just that: Another year of writing during a pandemic that’s often isolated us from the people and experiences that inspire us to tell stories.

We’ve made so many promises to ourselves about our writing, and we’re going to keep them in the new year.

We can find inspiration and focus on our writing in ways we’ve never quite managed before. This webinar will be a kickstart to motivate and inspire our writing practices in 2022.

Details

All of our webinars are held on Crowdcast, so you can attend live or watch the recording afterwards if the time of the live webinar doesn’t work for you. We believe in accessibility, so we make all of our webinars available on a sliding scale. By purchasing entry to our webinars, you are directly supporting hard-working writers and artists. All of the proceeds from these webinars go directly to paying the authors, poets, and artists that we publish in SAND, and we greatly appreciate your support.

SAND Winter Webinar Series Read More »

isch will nich däutsch rigtich schrayben / müssen

–Keça Filankes

i don wanna hafta rite jerman / korrektly

–Didem Uca’s translation

ay down wannna half too rayt propper / Jermen

–Jon Cho-Polizzi’s translation

Full poem and both translations here

The poem “Two Çayspoons of Şekir” by Bîşeng Ergin, alias Keça Filankes, explores ways in which language can both divide and unite a family, as a daughter becomes her mother’s linguistic and practical go-between amongst German, Kurdish, and Turkish. Crossed wires – language barriers, misunderstandings, and half-translations – intertwine with cherished family ties, the intimacy of pregnancy and the priceless heirloom of a mother tongue. Filankes shows us a space in between: the realm of the cultural intermediary.

It is only fitting that her German poem was the subject of a translation slam, a lively, interactive event that breaks the language barrier and exposes the inner workings of the translation process by giving the intermediaries a chance to speak for themselves. On International Translation Day 2021, the two translators, Jon Cho-Polizzi and Didem Uca, arrived with their independently completed English translations of the poem and each read their own versions before describing and discussing their choices as well as cultural and linguistic aspects of the original. During the reading and conversation moderated by David Gramling, the audience joined the discussion in the chat, and the event concluded with a live Q&A with the participants and SAND’s own Jake Schneider, who co-curated the event.

A collaboration between ALTA and SAND, sponsored by Wunderbar Together, and affiliated with the Tucson Humanities Festival at the University of Arizona in the US. The German poem in question originally appeared in the sold-out “Sprache” (language) issue of the journal Literarische Diverse.

Als mir meine Mutter ihren Körper lieh, / hatte sie 2 Herzen in sich, / teilte diese auf und gab mir eine Seele / und eine Sprache. / Noch bevor ich sprechen konnte, hatte / ich eine Muttersprache: / die Sprache meiner Mutter.

–Keça Filankes

When my mother lent me her body, / she had 2 hearts inside, / split them apart and gave me a soul and a language. / Even before I could speak, I had / a mother tongue: / the language of my mother.

–Didem Uca’s translation

When my mother lent me her body / she had 2 hearts inside of her / she divided these and gave me one spirit / and one tongue. / Before I could ever speak, I / had a mother tongue: / the tongue of my mother.

–Jon Cho-Polizzi’s translation

Full poem and both translations here

Participants and Poet

Didem Uca (translator) is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Emory University. Her research focuses on post/migrant cultural production, with recent and forthcoming articles and translations in Seminar, TRANSIT, Monatshefte, and Die Unterrichtspraxis. She is co-editor of Jahrbuch Türkisch-Deutsche Studien and serves in leadership roles in WiG, DDGC, and the MLA.

Jon Cho-Polizzi (translator) is an educator and freelance literary translator. He studied Literature, History, and Translation Studies in Santa Cruz and Heidelberg, before receiving his PhD in German and Medieval Studies at UC Berkeley with a dissertation titled “A Different (German) Village: Writing Place through Migration.” He lives and works between Northern California and Berlin.

David Gramling (moderator) is a literary translator from Turkish and German. He is Professor of German Studies and Head of the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia. His books include The Invention of Monolingualism, The Invention of Multilingualism, and Linguistic. He is also the Translations Section editor for Transgender Studies Quarterly.

Bîşeng Ergin alias Keça Filankes (poet) holds degrees in International Relations/Peace and Conflict Studies, Sociology, and Political Science from Goethe University Frankfurt. Her parents fled from Turkey when she was a baby, and today as a Kurdish woman, political educator, and social justice activist, she dedicates her political life to fighting against discrimination, fascism, and war in solidarity with refugees and migrants. She writes poems and performs spoken word as part of Literally Peace, a transcultural German and Syrian collective.

Jake Schneider (co-curator) is a translator, literary organizer, and editor-in-chief of SAND. An NEA fellowship recipient, he has translated poetry, scholarship, and exhibitions from German, especially on Jewish and queer themes. He has also put on events around “untranslatability,” ekphrastic poetry, and collaborative text, and is now focusing on minoritized/non-national language literatures. He lives in Berlin.

Organizers, Sponsors, and Affiliated Festival

The American Literary Translators Association
Initiator, co-curator, and co-organizer as part of the ALTA44 annual conference

SAND
Co-curator and co-organizer

Wunderbar Together
Sponsor

Tucson Humanities Festival at the University of Arizona

Affiliated Festival

Original Publication

Keça Filankes’s poem was originally published in German under the title “Zwei Çaylöffel Şekir” in the “Sprache” (Language) issue of the journal Literarische Diverse.

Founded by Yasemin Altınay (she/her) in 2019, Literarische Diverse Verlag publishes magazines and books that promote equity in literature and defend the tradition of self-empowerment. The project puts Germany’s colorful realities on paper – forever legible, forever part of the whole – and gives preference to BIPoC and LGBTIQ* voices.

German-English Translation Slam Read More »

Sunday 23 May 2021

Our Poetic Vision virtual event series explored the intersections between poetry, visual art, film, and the sciences. In the opening webinar, available as a replay, four interdisciplinary poets shared insights from their practice and presented writing invitations. In this concluding Intermingled Visions reading on 23 May 2021, co-hosted by Singapore’s Sing Lit Station, 12 poets from around the world read poems written using these prompts, including both participants in the annual Singapore Poetry Writing Month (SingPoWriMo) and Crista Siglin’s Poetry As_A Lens workshop.

Artwork by Crista Siglin

Readers

Erika Kielsgard

teaches English literature and creative writing for The City University of New York (CUNY) and is an alumna of Brooklyn College’s MFA Program, where she serves as an editor-at-large of The Brooklyn Review. Her poems have found generous homes in Bone Bouquet, Cordella Magazine, The Penn Review, and others; most recently, you can find her fiction in Maudlin House and hear her read for The Brooklyn Rail’’s New Social Environment #226: Radical Poetry Reading.

Twitter @orchidnymph.

On Poetic Process

My ideas about engaging with art and science are symbiotic if not amalgamate, prioritizing care: first, to amend anthropocentric perceptions of "life" in the interest of liberating aesthetic and subjective finitude, and second, that this interest sustainably supports a diverse engagement with imagination, meaning, and expression in both human and non-human life-worlds. SAND's series inspired my process and helped to clarify these experiences and reflections of care on the page. (Thank you Crista, everyone in Session A [of the Poetry As_A Lens workshop], Kanika, Jess, Federico, and Janée!)

The Flower Mantises She Cares For

Hymenopus coronatus. Native to the forests of Southeast Asia, these flower mantises resemble Phalaenopsis orchids, adopting the colorations, shapes, and movements of these species. These appearances modify as the nymphs progress in their life cycle, mirroring the flora of their environment.

Image by Erika Kielsgard

Nora Nadjarian

is a Cyprus-based poet and short story writer whose work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies around the world. Her poetry was included in Being Human (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), Capitals (Bloomsbury, 2017), and, most recently, in the Live Canon Anthology 2020.

Web noranadjarian.com ❋ Twitter @NoraNadj

On Poetic Process

Ekphrasis in the Greek sense of the word is essential to the way I work as a poet. Description becomes expression and vice versa. I also love approaching a work of art at a random tangent to arrive at a really unexpected place.

Kate Segriff

is a Canadian writer, filmmaker, and visual artist. Her work has appeared in Prism International, Prairie Fire, and Storm Cellar magazines, among others. Her feminist short films have been selected for over 50 film festivals worldwide.

On Poetic Process

For me, the visual and written word are part of a continuum. I believe my writing is improved by envisioning, and sometimes literally sketching, the images in my head and transforming those tangible artscapes into words. Likewise, I am inspired by the art of others and when I am considering an art piece that touches me it is as if I can hear it speaking, telling me its story in words.

Artistic Influences for Reading

Ayilisha Manthira

is an arts organiser who was the executive producer and co-host of the Solliladanga podcast series on Singapore Tamil literature. She received the NAC Golden Point Award’s second prize for Tamil poetry in 2019. Her poem “Seithigalin Saaram” was featured in the Cordite Poetry Review’s 2020 Singapore poetry anthology.

On Poetic Process

I was inspired to write this poem after reading a New York Times article in 2019 documenting the instance of an artist in Hong Kong standing in the middle of a protest and painting everything he was witnessing on a canvas. The artist said that he was creating that piece of art because of being aware that the Chinese government was heavily censoring the media, and that his painting would be a way for him to record history and more likely escape the government’s hands to reach the next generations. My poem was an imagination of how the canvas would have witnessed the protests, what (coming from the protests) would have gotten mixed in the paint used and have become a part of the painting, and also “history”. Thus, it was not a piece of art that I was looking at, but rather the act of an artist painting on a canvas in the middle of ongoing protests that made me write the poem.

Perry Dino, 53, an artist who captures protests with oil on canvas, even through tear gas: "People can take thousands of photos at a protest, but I only create one painting. Photos can be deleted but to destroy my paintings, you will have to burn them." https://t.co/Hn29Fhas57 pic.twitter.com/qTlIFWEo1z
— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 28, 2019

Lune Loh

is a trans lesbian writer. She is also a core member of /S@BER, a Singaporean writing collective, and is currently an undergraduate at the National University of Singapore.

On Poetic Process

Some of my own poetics are influenced via an attention to the formal structure of other artistic modes, whether it is music or visual art. I do not write so much about science as I do write in an interrogation of science, where it takes “Nature” as given and for granted. I will be reading an ekphrasis of Manet's "Olympia" (1856), which explores such themes.

Lune Loh. Image courtesy of the poet

"Olympia" by Edouard Manet, 1865. (Public domain)

Ang Shuang

Ang Shuang’s work has been published by the Asian-American Writers’ Workshop, The Rumpus, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She graduated with an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is now working on her debut collection and her rescue dog.

On Poetic Process

My poems are often mood-driven, which means I tend to get inspired by art, film, or music. For this particular piece, I was inspired by the artwork “Judith with the Head of Holofernes” by Lucas Cranach the Elder.

Ang Shuang. Photo courtesy of poet

Judith with the Head of Holofernes by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Kunsthistorisches Museum. (Public domain.)

Gita Ralleigh

is a writer and medical doctor with work in Bellevue Literary Review, Wasafiri, and Magma Poetry. She teaches creative writing to medical students and has an MSc in the medical humanities. Her poetry collection A Terrible Thing is published by Bad Betty Press.

On Poetic Process

I find ekphrastic writing to be a wonderful entry point when teaching and was particularly interested in the idea that poetry inspired by film could be considered ekphrasis. Inspired by Janée [Baugher]'s prompt on gender in art/film, I tried to interrogate the 'girl warrior' trope in films such as the Hunger Games and how it extends to the portrayal of activists such as X Gonzalez.

Winifred Wong

is a Singaporean writer based in Berlin. Her work has been published in SOFTBLOW, Yahoo!, and Esplanade Theatres. Her EP things i’m afraid to tell you is available on all streaming platforms. Her debut short play Alexa will be screened at the Kreuzberger HofFestSpiele later this year.

On Poetic Process

I am inspired and intrigued by art hidden in plain sight, especially around Berlin where people are unapologetically themselves, and I love that I can filter it through the web of my subconscious and make it mine.

Links

Read two of her poems posted on SingPoWriMo Facebook page:

Read the poem “A Gift for You” by Eileen Myles, which informed “house/home.”

Artistic Influences for Reading

"Der Schreitende Mensch" by Rüdiger Preisler, 1991. Image by Susanne Kähler, 2006, CC-BY-4.0

"A Gift for You" by Eileen Myles

Dr. Patricia Falkenburg

is a molecular biologist, a poet writing in German and English, and a visual artist. Born in 1961 in Mannheim, she currently lives in Pulheim, near Cologne. Her poems have been published in numerous anthologies, journals, and blogs. Her collection Portugiesische Notizen (Portuguese Notes) was published in 2019 as LyrikHeft 24 by Sonnenberg-Presse, Chemnitz.

Web patricia-falkenburg.com

On Poetic Process

As it turns out, ekphrastic writing is one of my major poetic occupations. Being myself both a scientist and a poet/visual artist, I am very fascinated by the intersection of art and science and exploring their relation in the poetic process.

Supplementary Artwork

Patricia writes: “I accept the invitation and send two images in addition to the poems I am going to read. I perceive both as connected to the subjects explored in the texts. I realized hands on in correspondence to my poem ‘Watching Carole Feuermann sculpturing womb’ – quite a sarcastic comment maybe. The second poem I’d like to present, ‘Traditional dilemma,’ takes us to the zone where science and religion meet not all too happily. ‘Faith’ may give room to ponder on implications and is in itself an ekphrastic image referring to a musical event that took place in pre-covid times in my favourite Cologne museum (the Kolumba Museum).”

"Faith" by Patricia Falkenburg. Courtesy of artist

"hands on" by Patricia Falkenburg. Courtesy of artist

Ben Luton

is a student of CD Wright and an avant-garde radio artist from the Gulf Coast, with the notable distinction of Hurricane Katrina refugee. His poetry can be found in Lana Turner and his extraterrestrial dispatches on Radio Free Brooklyn.

On Poetic Process

I believe that anthropology and all its outgrowth classifications (e.g., psychology and sociology) are not only capable of defining culture itself but set a prerogative for cultural activity: social stewardship. Art, just like any other form of social organization, is an ongoing non-terminating activity; that is the nature of history, and neither art’s culpability nor its potential for transformation and liberation can be unwound from this activity. Using Federico’s bee dance prompt, I juxtapose a public/poem voice fragmented by brute sound with social media transcripts in an attempt to describe the permeability of identities through social organization.

Link

Recently published interview
Ben’s radio show, “No Thing Considered”

Rea Maac

is originally from Marinduque, Philippines and has been working in Singapore since 2010. Her poem was shortlisted in Migrant Worker Poetry Competition Singapore 2017.

On Poetic Process

In writing my poems, I often wonder what's the real story behind an artwork and this leads me to dig deeper. Art allows me to process the feelings it evokes, in a way that captures my own experience.

Miguel Barreto García

writes poetry and performs spoken word about family, boyhood, and history. They completed their PhD in decision neuroscience, and began performing in Switzerland’s poetry slam scene. Their poems have appeared or have been accepted in Rattle, Magma, wildness, harana, and The Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, among others.

On Poetic Process

Many of my poems are influenced by Mark Rothko, especially his Red on Maroon series. There are so many ways to engage with the painting, and I've written many poems about it.

Link

Red on Maroon by Mark Rothko, oil on canvas, 1959

Co-Hosts

Reading Moderators

Jake Schneider, Editor in Chief at SAND
Charlene Shepherdson, Station Control of Sing Lit Station

SAND

Based in Berlin, SAND is a nonprofit literary journal published twice a year by a team from the city’s international community. Featuring work by writers, translators, and artists from around the world, SAND seeks out fresh and underrepresented perspectives. Since our founding in 2009, our large, evolving team has published more than two thousand pages of visual art and English-language fiction, nonfiction, and poetry (including translations) from over fifty countries and territories.

Our current issue, SAND 22, is available here in both print and digital versions.

Learn more:

You can learn more about SAND on this website, follow us on Instagram (@sandjournalberlin), Twitter (@sandjournal), or Facebook (SAND Journal), or subscribe to our newsletter to hear about future events, news, and opportunities:

Voluntary donations:

Sing Lit Station & SingPoWriMo

Members of the SingPoWriMo online community have written more than 20,000 poems in response to diverse prompts over the past eight Aprils. Sing Lit Station has also staged poetry readings on trains, buses and ferries; painted invisible poems on Singaporean sidewalks that appear in the rain; and organised the first Manuscript Bootcamp in Southeast Asia. It also administers the Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry and stages the only performance poetry / professional wrestling hybrid performance in the world, Sing Lit Body Slam. As a physical space, Sing Lit Station hosts a writing residency, masterclasses, and monthly peer-run writing groups consisting of practicing and aspiring writers, migrant workers, queer folk and more, and more facilitated communities such as Writing The City.

Learn more:

You can learn more about Sing Lit Station on their website. SingPoWriMo is organized as a Facebook group, which you can join here.

Voluntary Donations:

Poetic Vision: Intermingled Visions (A Reading) Read More »

Our Poetic Vision virtual event series is exploring the intersections between poetry, visual art, film, and the sciences. In the opening webinar on 25 April 2021, available as a replay, four interdisciplinary poets shared insights from their practice and presented these four writing invitations so you can try writing across realms yourself.

Some of the poems generated using these prompts will be read on at our Intermingled Visions reading on 23 May, co-hosted by Singapore’s Sing Lit Station, on our YouTube channel.

Artwork by Crista Siglin

1. Art and Gender

by Janée J. Baugher

Writing Invitation:

Here are two ideas for writing an ekphrastic gender-politics poem/essay/story: contrast the fashion designs associated with female heroes versus male heroes, and explore the portrayal of stereotypical gender behaviors in art—females and maternity, domesticity, matrimony, and sexuality as symbols of weakness versus males as warriors, deities, religious leaders, thinkers, and machinists as symbols of strength.

(from The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction, page 209)

Suggested Viewing I:

The artwork of contemporary hyperrealism artist, Carole A. Feuerman

Suggested Viewing II:

The artwork of contemporary multimedia artist, Wendy Red Star

Janée J. Baugher, MFA, (Seattle, WA, USA) is the author of The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction, a comprehensive guidebook for engaging with art in words, as well as two poetry collections, Coördinates of Yes and The Body’s Physics. Her recent art/flash exchange with Qrcky was featured in the light ekphrastic. She is also the columnist at The Ekphrastic Review.

2. Remembering Art in a Public Space

by Jess Mc Kinney

Writing Invitation:

Cast your mind back to the last piece of art you saw in a public space, whether that be an art gallery, museum or cinema. Think about why it spoke to you and has since lingered in your mind. Try and name the ways in which you felt close to it in that moment, and feel affected by it still.

Pause in that instance of the glimpse.

Investigate the space between yourself and the work.

Jess Mc Kinney is a poet from Inishowen, C. Donegal, Ireland who recently completed her MA in Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast, where she was awarded the Irish Chair of Poetry Student Award 2020. Her poem “Deluge” in the current SAND 22 rewatches the classic anime film Spirited Away, lip-syncs Leonard Cohen, and exposes the startling sweep of its own poetic vision. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Abridged, The Open Ear, Channel Magazine, and The Poetry Jukebox. She was awarded an artist bursary from Donegal County Council to complete her debut poetry pamphlet.

3. The Bee Dance

by Federico Federici

Background:

Bees and honey are a worn-out poetry myth, but one can accept the challenge and try to revive it. In the mid-1940s, Karl von Frisch discovered a connection between the dance in the hive of bees returning from a successful exploration outside and the presence of nearby/distant food sources.

The presence of an abundant source within a range of 100 m away is conveyed to hive mates by means of a round dance (fig. 1). If the food is further away, the successful bee starts dancing in the shape of a figure of eight (fig. 2). It starts with a straight line, followed by a semicircle, then another straight line and a semicircle again in the opposite direction.

The angle formed by the straight line in relation to gravity (dances are performed on a surface perpendicular to the ground) corresponds to the angle to the sun the bee flew from the feeding place back to the hive. The speed of waggling the hindquarter indicates the distance to the source (1 s ≈ 1km).

Writing Invitation:

The language of bees combines space and time, shapes and rhythm like a text.

read up more on the topic and familiarize yourself with it
state in a preliminary prose the connection between the text and the dance of bees: you may eventually adapt it later
this must both guide you and serve as a primary source for the reader to get acquainted with the elements of the phenomenon
on an evening at your choice, try to convey in the form of a few short texts the most important “sources” of your day
play rigorously around with rhythm and figures according to what you stated: you are a bee now and precisely know your task
waggling: length of lines, rhymes, rhythm and so forth
even a one-word poem laid out on a circular shape should vibrate in a strong way now

Federico explains prompt during webinar:

More information and publishing opportunity:

You can download Federico’s full presentation from the event here on his website.

Anyone who tries this prompt is also invited to submit your results to be considered for a forthcoming issue of the magazine Die Leere Mitte, co-edited in Berlin by Federico and Horst Berger. Send your submissions to leeremittemag [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

Federico Federici is a conceptual artist and physicist who approaches poetry as a visual medium. Four asemic poems from his Concrete Disassembled Poems series, created by typewriter and pen, were featured in SAND 18. Among many other projects, he is the author of Transcripts from demagnetized tapes, Vol. 1 and A private notebook of winds.

4. A Process/Prompt for Thinking and Writing with Scientific Texts

by Kanika Agrawal

1. MIT Professor Sherry Turkle is a sociologist and psychologist who studies people’s relationships with science and technology. In her editor’s introductions to the essay collections Falling for Science: Objects in Mind and Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, she writes:

[T]hinking with and about things is not a cold, intellectual enterprise but is charged with eros. (Falling 6)

Science is fueled by passion, a passion that often attaches to the world of objects much as the artist attaches to his paints, the poet to his or her words. (Falling 36-7)

We find it familiar to consider objects as useful or aesthetic, as necessities or vain indulgences. We are on less familiar ground when we consider objects as companions to our emotional lives or as provocations to thought. The notion of evocative objects brings together these two less familiar ideas, under-scoring the inseparability of thought and feeling in our relationship to things. We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with. (Evocative 5)

2. As a former scientist-in-training, I’m interested in how scientists attend to what they love—and what I love—in/through their scientific work. As a writer, I’m interested in how that attention and its outcomes are conveyed in scientific texts.

3. How and why is a particular thing evocative/provocative to me, and what happens to my relationship with it and my understanding of it when I (re)examine it through scientific thought, language and image?

4. Where does poetry come into this?

In Forms of Poetic Attention, Lucy Alford writes:

It is true that poetic language is densely formed. But what is formed by and in poetic language is an event of attention generated in the acts of reading and writing. I suggest that a poem might be better understood not simply as a gathering of composed formal features, but as an instrument for tuning and composing the attention. (3-4)

Poetic form forms attention. What does this mean for us? What does it do to us?

[W]e begin to see attention not as a fact, not as trend, not as mandate, but rather as medium, a medium that can be formed in a variety of ways, and which makes up the structures and terrains of inner experience where it meets sensual perception. And, going a step further, we begin to see “the poetic” not as a narrow set of qualities or ideals but as a process through which the material of language forms—dynamically and fundamentally—the very shape and texture of inner life. (Alford 270)

5. I’ve come to love scientific texts themselves as things to think and feel with. When I work with them, I read and write to form scientific attention and the language that describes it as poetic attention in language. Whatever the science attends to becomes also linguistic material becomes also inner experience. How do these (trans)formations happen?

Source Materials:

I’m providing three foundational scientific papers that I’ve worked with as initiating material for your experiments with form. Of course, if you continue to work with scientific texts, please find the objects and texts that are “charged with eros” for you.

Watson & Crick: A Structure for DNA

WATSON JD, CRICK FH. Molecular structure of nucleic acids; a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid. Nature. 1953 Apr 25;171(4356):737-8.

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Alan Turing: Computing Machinery and Intelligence

A. M. TURING, I.—COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE, Mind, Volume LIX, Issue 236, October 1950, Pages 433–460

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Darwin & Wallace: Species and Varieties

Charles Darwin, Esq., Alfred Wallace, Esq., On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, Volume 3, Issue 9, August 1858, Pages 45–62

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Writing Invitation:

Here are three exercises to try with one or more of the papers:

Choose a technical term and track it through the text (or part of the text, if it appears frequently or the text is very long). For each appearance, write down the type of phrase/sentence it’s in. For example, is it a claim, a question, a description of method? Now, write a new line/sentence for each instance of the term, and each must preserve the term and do the same rhetorical work as the original phrase/sentence. At this point, you can change the order of the lines/sentences. You can also replace the technical term with an entirely different Finally, select a word or phrase from the same scientific text to title your piece.

Write a Q&A piece using at least two scientific texts from different disciplines. Make a list of all the questions that appear in your chosen texts and select at least seven for your Each question must be answered with language appropriated or adapted from a different text. You can add an introduction that frames/contextualizes the Q&A.

Find a phrase in one text that is both meaningful and mysterious to you. (For example, I’m obsessed with Watson and Crick’s “This figure is purely diagrammatic.”) Set up a physical or virtual bulletin board and pin your phrase at the center. For the next week, allow this phrase to form and direct your attention. Whenever you recognize a change in your thinking/feeling/experience as a result of the phrase, add a note to the board. Add also whatever new words/language the phrase leads you to or seems to attract to itself. Try to read all other texts you encounter through the lens of the phrase. How does this alter your reading of those texts, and how do the texts expand or shrink the possibilities of the phrase? Add these ideas to the board. Move and edit the notes as needed as you rethink their relationships to the phrase and to other notes. You may even decide to displace the phrase from the center. By the end of the week, you’ll have a constellation of thought and language to give shape to your next piece of writing.

Works Cited:

Alford, Lucy. Forms of Poetic Attention. Columbia UP, 2020.

Turkle, Sherry, editor. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. MIT Press, 2007.

—. Falling for Science: Objects in Mind. MIT Press, 2008.

Video of Kanika’s Presentation & Interview:

Kanika Agrawal’s work-in-progress Okazaki Fragments, excerpted in SAND 19, adapts language and images from a series of scientific papers on discontinuous strand synthesis during DNA replication. This research was led by the Japanese molecular biologists Okazaki and Okazaki. Okazaki Fragments (re)constructs Okazaki and Okazaki’s experiences by reading their lives into (or out of) their scientific papers. Kanika studied biology many years ago as an undergraduate at MIT, and she has been thinking and writing about Okazaki fragments and various other cellular molecules and processes ever since.

Upcoming event: Intermingled Visions reading

23 May 2021

Intermingled Visions (A Reading)

23 May 2021

The concluding reading of our series, co-hosted by Sing Lit Station, will intermingle poetic visions. People who wrote poems using the writing invitations above, including participants from Crista’s workshop and April’s annual Singapore Poetry Writing Month (SingPoWriMo), will read on our YouTube channel.

About the Co-Hosts:

Details:

Date: Sunday 23 May 2021
Time: starting at 2pm Berlin / 8pm Singapore / 1pm Dublin (12pm UTC)
Length: 1 hour
Platform: YouTube Live on SAND‘s channel
Free
Co-moderated by Jake Schneider, SAND Editor in Chief, and Charlene Shepherdson, Station Manager of Sing Lit Station

Voluntary donations to support Sing Lit Station & SAND are welcome

Four Invitations to Write Across Realms Read More »

Poets spend hours scrutinizing words on the page. In spring 2021, SAND’s virtual event series “Poetic Vision” turned our gaze outward through a poem’s lens. How do poets view visual art, science, and film? How can we creatively channel other media in a text that speaks for itself?

Artwork by Crista Siglin

I. Poems Meet Visual Art, Science, and Film (A Webinar)

Sunday 25 April 2021

The series kicked off with a webinar (available as a replay) featuring four guest poets with varied vantage points: a practicing expert on art-influenced writing, an MIT-trained biologist whose poems read between the lines of genetics papers, an Irish poet who responds to anime and mantis shrimp, and a conceptual artist whose asemic poems are themselves visual artworks. In short presentations, each guest offered “a glimpse through their glasses,” shared their poetic perspective, and introduced writing prompts for the audience to try at home.

Presenters:

Janée Baugher is the author of The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction, a comprehensive guidebook for engaging with art in words, as well as two poetry collections, Coördinates of Yes and The Body’s Physics. Her recent art/flash exchange with Qrcky was featured in the light ekphrastic. She is also the columnist at The Ekphrastic Review.
Kanika Agrawal’s work-in-progress Okazaki Fragments, excerpted in SAND 19, adapts language and images from a series of scientific papers on discontinuous strand synthesis during DNA replication. This research was led by the Japanese molecular biologists Okazaki and Okazaki. Okazaki Fragments (re)constructs Okazaki and Okazaki’s experiences by reading their lives into (or out of) their scientific papers. Kanika studied biology many years ago as an undergraduate at MIT, and she has been thinking and writing about Okazaki fragments and various other cellular molecules and processes ever since.
Jess Mc Kinney is a poet from Inishowen Donegal who recently completed her MA in Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast, where she was awarded the Irish Chair of Poetry Student Award 2020. Her poem “Deluge” in the current SAND 22 rewatches the classic anime film Spirited Away, lip-syncs Leonard Cohen, and exposes the startling sweep of its own poetic vision. Another poem of hers in The Moth looks through the technicolor eyes of swifts and mantis shrimp. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Abridged, The Open Ear, Channel Magazine, and The Poetry Jukebox. She was awarded an artist bursary from Donegal County Council to complete her debut poetry pamphlet.
Federico Federici is a conceptual artist and physicist who approaches poetry as a visual medium. Four asemic poems from his Concrete Disassembled Poems series, created by typewriter and pen, were featured in SAND 18. Among many other projects, he is the author of Transcripts from demagnetized tapes, Vol. 1 and A private notebook of winds, and will discuss both books during the webinar.

Hosted and curated by Jake Schneider, SAND Editor in Chief

Details:

Date: Sunday 25 April 2021
Recorded replay available
Platform: Crowdcast
Length: 2 hours

Proceeds supported the guest poets and will help pay future SAND contributors.

Federico Federici: from Concrete Disassembled Poems, SAND 18

Jess Mc Kinney: "Deluge," SAND 22

Kanika Agrawal: from "Okazaki Fragments," SAND 19

Janée Baugher: The Ekphrastic Writer (McFarland, 2020)

II. Poetry As_A Lens (A Workshop)

Saturday 8 May and Sunday 9 May 2021

Anyone who tries our guest presenters’ prompts was encouraged to sign up for a workshop with Crista Siglin, one of SAND’s two poetry editors, who is also the coordinator of Poetry As__A Workshop, author of the collection Unpleasable Nature, and a practicing visual artist. During this guided, collaborative workshop, poets of all experience levels shared, discussed, and honed their pieces.

III. Intermingled Visions (A Reading)

Sunday 23 May 2021

The concluding reading of our series, in collaboration with Sing Lit Station, intermingled poetic visions. Participants from both the Poetry As__A Lens workshop and April’s annual Singapore Poetry Writing Month (SingPoWriMo) performed original work that expands poetry’s borders, generated using the prompts from our opening webinar “Poems Meet Visual Art, Science, and Film.”

You can read about all twelve of the readers and their poetic processes and influences here.

About the Co-Hosts:

Watch the event at this link on SAND’s YouTube channel.

Details:

Date: Sunday 23 May 2021
Length: 1 hour
Platform: YouTube Live on SAND‘s channel
Free

Voluntary donations to support Sing Lit Station & SAND are welcome:

Poetic Vision Read More »

This event has already happened, but if you register after the fact via the links below, you can still view the full replay at the same place on Crowdcast.

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Have you ever wanted to listen in as literary journal editors discuss and choose pieces for publication? Do you want to better understand how to get more acceptances and fewer rejections when you are submitting your own work to literary journals?

Then join us on March 14, 2021, for SAND’s first-ever editorial webinars in poetry and prose.

Listen in live and ask questions in real-time as SAND’s prose and poetry editors pull back the curtain on topics like these:

What are editors really looking for in submissions?
Why do certain pieces stand out in a submissions pile and get published?
Why do other pieces never make it on to the next round of consideration?
Are pieces edited before publication, and how does that process even work?
How can I use this knowledge to increase my chances of getting published in literary journals like SAND?
And more…

SAND poetry editors Crista Siglin and Emma C Lawson will lead the poetry edition of our webinars, and fiction editor Ashley Moore and creative nonfiction editor Melissa Richer will lead the prose edition:

Poetry: 6:00 – 7:00 p.m. CET, March 14, 2021
Prose: 7:30 – 8:30 p.m. CET, March 14, 2021

Participants writing in multiple genres are invited to attend both live events: each webinar will be specific to the genre with little overlap in content. Can’t make it to the live event? No worries. Everyone who signs up will be sent a link to the recorded replay of the webinar, which can be watched at any time.

Because we believe in accessibility and know that many creatives are hurting thanks to the events of 2020 and 2021, we’re offering tickets on a sliding scale. Pay what you can or pay what you want, whether that’s €5 or €20.

Learn more and register here on Crowdcast:

For more on submitting to SAND, our editorial style, reading issues of SAND, and all the latest news, check us out at sandjournal.com, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.

We hope you’ll join us for our editorial webinars on March 14 and look forward to seeing you then.

Webinars: Secrets to Standout Submissions Read More »