slips slips slips slips slips slips slips slips
Announcing a new project, with thanks to Gertrude Stein and maybe YOU???
Before the how or (god help us) the why, here’s the what: In collaboration with my dear friend of 30+ years, the writer Kristen Leigh, and my own wife and creative partner Hope Cartelli, I am about to embark upon an exciting new venture: an art and literary publication called slips slips. And we’d love for you to be a part of it!
slips slips will be a sporadic, print-forward journal featuring writing and images from a variety of contributors. Each issue either will or will not have a completely different format and focus from the last. There will be no set release schedule - it will be ready whenever it’s ready. Most importantly, It will be an experimental laboratory toward which we hope our many friends and collaborators might be willing to contribute ingredients.
We're planning the first print issue of slips slips in a broadsheet format that takes inspiration from the stacked cacophony of 19th-century newspapers. Items will be laid out in columns across multiple pages that mimic the experience of browsing through an entire world at once.
With this in mind, the theme for our premiere issue will be "Dispatches" - in other words, brief, urgent bits of information and insight that desperately need to be shared. These can come in the form of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drawings, etc. The content is, of course, up to you, provided it conveys the sense of an important message from a world - inner or outer, actual or imaginary - onto which you have a unique perspective.
So here’s the how…
FOR WRITERS: Please send a submission of no more than 500 words, in any genre, style, or format you prefer. Titles are encouraged but not mandatory and will not count toward the word limit (unless they're super-long).
FOR VISUAL ARTISTS: Please send 1-5 small, black and white images that would reproduce well on newsprint (e.g., not too much delicate detail). These can be either a serial/sequence or stand-alone images - in the case of the latter, we might pepper them throughout the publication rather than running them together, unless you specify otherwise.
NOTE: If submitting poetry or images, please keep in mind that the formatting of each entry in this issue will be in vertical columns - this could affect the positioning of line breaks or drawings.
DEADLINE: Please send us your contribution via email at slipsslipsslipsslips@gmail.com no later than Friday, December 13. We will contact you if we have any concerns or to confirm that your contribution will be included in our premiere issue.
And now about that why…
Kristen and I met 31 years ago at Center for Creative Youth (CCY), a summer arts program for teens held annually on the campus of Wesleyan University. For most of us, this was our first time congregating with fellow freaks from across the region, nurtured rather than shunned for our eccentric sensitivities, and, as such, it was life-altering. Kristen and I were both part of the creative writing group and, despite the different tracks along which the decades have dragged us, we’ve continued to build much of our grown-up experience around the expression of language. We lost sight of each other for large chunks of time but recently picked back up as if nothing had changed. When I started feeling a yen for doing something like this, Kristen was the second person I spoke to (after Hope, who has to hear EVERYTHING).
This backstory is important to understanding why our project is called slips slips. A couple months ago, after we’d begun planning, the three of us visited a used bookstore in Bushwick. Among the items I brought home that day was an unread, two-volume Modern Library edition of the complete works of Gertrude Stein. Sitting down afterward to discuss possible names for our publication, we thought it might be fun to let her guide our thinking. I opened up to a random page and immediately shrieked.
You see, the page featured a poem called “Susie Asado.” It’s a richly textured, nearly nonsensical work structured entirely around sound. (“Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea. / Susie Asado.”) Many years ago, it was one of the works that helped me understand that poetry could be playful and sensual, not just cerebrally musty. I hadn’t thought about this poem in a very long time. But more to the point, the first time I encountered it I was sitting right next to Kristen while a counselor read it out loud to us at CCY.
I believe more in chaos than “signs,” but I’m willing to take one when it insists. Of all the poems in all the books in all the world (or my house, which is close enough), I happened to stumble on exactly this one at exactly this moment with exactly this person. As a symbol of unbroken friendship across the churning seas of time, and as a benediction at the start of a path unknown, it could hardly be surpassed. The image of a numinous little Gertrude Stein inundating us with a sackful of pointy, oblique little stars may not be anything short of ridiculous, but you’ll never be able to unsee it.
We spent the rest of the afternoon toying with various words and phrases from the poem - “silver seller,” “bobolink pins,” “tremble trees” - before zeroing in on this line: “A lean on the shoe this means slips slips hers.” We loved “slips slips,” but it took another two months of discussion to figure out how to use it: Slip Slip? Slipslips? SlipSlips? We finally decided to just lift it exactly as Stein wrote it: slips slips. It’s confounding, meaningless, and nearly impossible to utter with a straight face. The stranger it sounded, the more we liked it.
And so, just as the phrase “slips slips” isn’t easy to say, the publication slips slips won’t be easy to pin down. It's intended to be a showcase for voices and images that gather, collide, sneak around together, and tumble head over heels into unexpected harmony. The tighter we try to hold it, the less it will be ours. But by opening ourselves up to chance and trusting the hidden connections that lay across our intertwined pasts, we might just slide into something special.
Over the coming months, as our first issue comes together, I’m sure I’ll write more about our processes, our inspirations, and our hopes for the future. But for now, I want to repeat that we hope you’ll join us on this adventure. There will be room for just about everything in slips slips - the serious, the silly, the sapient, the serendipitous. Wherever you are, there we’ll be. I hope you’ll consider joining us!
Inspirations (to be added to as I write about them):
How exciting! Here’s to new adventures!
This is great! I would love to send in something.