![Minor Literature[s]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_80,h_80,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe0117ca3-2d00-451e-b0c5-d09def5e487b_400x400.png)
![Minor Literature[s]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_36,h_36,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe0117ca3-2d00-451e-b0c5-d09def5e487b_400x400.png)
Monthly Dispatch #10 — February 2024
A Letter from the editor[s]
Not enough time, never enough time — it’s a familiar refrain. No time to read as much as one would like, no time to catch up, no time to relax — no time to write! Well it’s one of those years in which we get an extra day, a moment of respite from the pressure, perhaps. If nothing else an extra twenty-four hours to regret.
For all its apparent order, its regularity, time moves strangely — another common refrain. A decade disappears in an instant; an hour never seems to end. We sense it, have attempted to define it, but go on suffering at its whims, our framing so often inadequate in face of the experience.
So perhaps we put down words — when we have a moment! — sink a peg onto which we can tether, what? A self? A memory? A thought?
As responses go, it is imperfect but, by getting something, sometimes anything, down, we have a place to which we can return and from which reflect; somewhere to hang within the infinite, and where, perhaps, to catch our breath.
The Editor[s]
3 Mysteries on Samothrace — David C. Porter
“Two griffins met in a field of boulders at the foot of Mt. Fenghári and exchanged gifts. One gave the other a basket of wild berries. The other gave the first a Huawei Mate X3. Taking the device, she held it in her talons, the screen glowing softly, half-unfolded like a blossoming flower …”
David C. Porter is an only child from New York. His work has appeared in surfaces.cx, Apocalypse Confidential, BRUISER, and other publications. His hybrid collection A Hollow Shape was recently published by Feral Dove Books. He can be reached on Twitter @toomuchistrue
The Apology, or Henry Learns to Write — Jacqueline Feldman
“After giving the issue the thought it deserved, he concluded the only really possible options were 1) an angry text, but right away (it was the premediated angry text that came off truly creepy, impossible ever to apologize for); 2) no reply; 3) days later, a significant text …”
Jacqueline Feldman is a writer whose first books, On Your Feet and Precarious Lease, will be released this year. Twitter: @jacquefeld
At Full Heart — Kirsten Mosher
“The building, discreet. Its windows, cracked and greasy from years of neglect. Its previous identity, a shell for machinery. It isn’t alone; the city block is shaped by a geometry of defunct factories on the precipice of implosion, or … repurposed to house art …”
Kirsten Mosher is a visual artist and writer. Her series Automotive Stories occasionally shows up in the Automotive sections of local newspapers. Plea$e Steal Me for 100 Plus Dollar-zz has recently been published by Lily Poetry Review Books and her story Split-Screen is forthcoming in Exacting Clam. Twitter: @KirstenMosher
I’m In Love With a German Film Star — C.D. Rose
“Four slow notes of shiver, blush, echoplex, and delay, then a tiny cascade, a shimmer, and a drop. A perfectly distracted rhythm section. A cold glow of voice. Not the first record I ever bought, but the first time I ever heard music.
It hadn’t been a glamorous world, but now it was …”
C. D. Rose is an award-winning short-story writer and the author of the novels The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure and Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else, as well as the story collection The Blind Accordionist. He lives in Hebden Bridge, England. Twitter: @cdrose_writer
Zelfportret — Daniel Adler
“The hands, the backs of the hands show life pulsing through the body, how much life passes in and out with every breath, that is what he paints, the life in the body, as he goes over the backs of the hands …”
Daniel Adler was born in Brooklyn, NY and moved to Portland, Ore. at the age of eleven. He’s a doctoral student at University of Nevada, Reno. His most recent work has appeared in The Decadent Review, 3: AM Magazine and HOAX. Twitter: @anieldadler
One Thousand & One [excerpt] — Kari Hukkila (tr. David Hackston)
“January, a sunny day… a municipal worker took us on a tour of the shuttered city. A down-to-earth guy in a brown suede jacket, a hardy face, a sprawling moustache, no-nonsense conversation. Over the last fifteen or so years (after most people had left the city, I assumed), plants had occupied the streets …”
Kari Hukkila is a writer based in Helsinki, Finland, writing in the Finnish language although his work is closer to the tradition of Finnish-Swedish literature. The novel One Thousand & One is the first in a projected series of five novels.
David Hackston is a British translator of Finnish and Swedish literature and drama.
love letter to disappearance — wrath of persephone
“For as long as I can remember, I’ve been trying to disappear. As a child, a little girl, I recall the desperation of wanting to make myself smaller. I was already tiny but cursed with big feelings and the harshness of intuition. I seemed to feel everything around me—and it hurt. I was too loud, too dramatic, too needy. As an adult who does not find myself along the gender binary, I am still trying to disappear …”
wrath of persephone is a writer and digital nomad. Their work has been published by CLOAK, Expat Press, and Hobart Pulp. Read more of their musings at wrathofpersephone.com or @hacksawplaydate
Reactor Regarding Reagent and Your Previous Correspondence — Nick Blackburn
“And when I am like this I am difficult to reach old dad dead deep reach to tidal reach deliberate avoidance of the obvious reality and you’ll tell me something and you’ll catch in the eye something to catch the eye grieving farther in the eye and in the painting in the gallery and in the real all farther ahead where above the human the heart the head is displayed …”
Nick Blackburn is a writer and psychoanalyst from the north-west of England.
Mono: Sobre Lengua y Nostalgia — Fernando Sdrigotti
“Sueño despierto con el bar de mi adolescencia y juventud, ese agujero negro en el centro de la ciudad, donde pasábamos los días tomando cerveza o café, solucionando los problemas del mundo …”
Fernando Sdrigotti (Rosario, Argentina, 1977) es un escritor y crítico cultural, autor de varios libros, que incluyen We Are but Nothing (Rough Trade Books), JOLTS (Influx Press), Grey Tropic (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), y Shitstorm (Open Pen). Ha sido traducido al francés, italiano, turco, noruego, árabe, bosnio y español. Substack: The Leftovers.
“I felt these languages like parallel universes between which I was moving and balancing”: An interview with Tzveta Sofronieva — Ian Haight
“Bulgarian-born Sofronieva is a prize-winning author, physicist, philosopher of science, and poet who resides in Berlin. In this interview, Sofronieva discusses her experiences as an international writer and publishing Multiverse with an American press …”
Tzveta Sofronieva Цвета Софрониева is a poet, writer, playwright, essayist with origins in Germany and Bulgaria. She is the author of over twenty books. Her poetry has been translated into nineteen languages.
Ian Haight is an award-winning writer, translator and poet. His prose, poetry and translations have appeared in Barrow Street, Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere.
Better Shopping Through Living VI: Blood Drive — Frank Garrett
“Growing up I was certain I wouldn’t live to be twenty. The name given me had come with a deadline. An expiration date. It would happen one Halloween. I was sure of it. Or a few days before …”
Writer and translator Frank Garrett shops in Dallas, Texas, and is essays editor at Minor Literature[s]. His series Better Shopping Through Living will appear monthly. His entire life has been a haunting.
Pedro Lemebel: Farewell to a Queer Icon — Kate Averis [09/02/2015]
“On Saturday 24 January, Chile bid farewell to one of its greatest literary, cultural and iconic figures, Pedro Lemebel, who passed away in the small hours of Friday 23 January. The funeral, attended by hundreds, including Michelle Bachelet, the president of the republic, and Claudia Barattini, the minister for culture, is a testament to the massive changes undergone by Chilean society during the period of Lemebel’s lifetime and in which he can be said to have played no small part …”
Kate Averis is the author of Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women’s Writing (Legenda, 2014), and has published articles on Francophone and Latin American writing. Her main research interests lie in contemporary Francophone and Latin American literature, particularly women’s writing, gender and sexualities, feminism, transnational identities and cultures, and writing of migration and exile.
Coming in March …
fiction from Seph Murtagh and Michael Jeffrey Lee, prose from Mark Robert Lewis, Louis Armand and Frank Garrett, an interview with Jacqueline Feldman as well as an excerpt from her upcoming book On Your Feet, the Inside the Castle 10th anniversary takeover, and more …