Apogee Journal

Psychosis and Black-Eyed Dreams Sophia E. Terazawa A stain on the right lens of my glasses looks like Princess Kaguya of the moon floating in the iris. I take them off. Someone must have put her there, I think. My father had shown me a photograph of her once. She used to be a parachute in the sky. Pale. A dandelion seed in her own night. “Is she watching over me now, papa?” “Yes,” he says. And I become happy. When my father finds me in front of the television at two in the morning, he slaps me so hard that the glasses fly off my face. Loud questions in male voices scare me: “What are you doing, huh? Why are you looking at me like that? What is your PROBLEM?!” The illness angers my father. He does not know why I watch television at two in the morning. I stare him down. No explanation. No answer. He slaps me so hard that it sends me into lunar orbit. “Papa, can you tell the story again? The one about the lonely princess?” “Yes,” he says. And I adore him whole. Whole....

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Reason to Give #6: Writing in the Margins

Apogee Journal

21 Sep 2015

Our 6th reason to give: we want to reclaim the margins, and we are committed to help others do so with words. Check out our Writing in the Margins Workshops. There are too few spaces that allow writers and artists to grapple with their complex social and political identities, and use that interrogation to expand the scope and relevance of literature. This was the aim of Writing in the Margins, our 8-week writing and critical discussion group in Brooklyn. We demand relevant literature! We are working to create it, are you? Read some of the incredible writing by the workshop participants on Perigee: I remember the immediate bond we felt as young widows whose husbands had been taken from us by the AIDS epidemic. Mari’s husband Reinaldo had returned from the war in Angola in 1985, around the same time that my husband Clarence had finally kicked a 13 year heroin habit that started when he served in Vietnam. Different wars, different countries…two women unknowingly at risk. Every time I visited with Mari I had the same unspoken thought––why her, why not me? I was painfully aware of the different route the virus had taken through each...

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Tibetan Resilience: an interview with Jamyang Norbu

Apogee Journal

21 Sep 2015

Apogee Benefit Preview #1 This week we’re posting interviews and previews for our annual benefit on Friday September 25th. Today’s interview features Tibetan writer and intellectual, Jamyang Norbu, one of our four benefit readers. Tibetan resilience: an interview with Jamyang Norbu by Tenzin Dickie I talked to Tibetan writer and intellectual Jamyang Norbu, who lives in Tennessee, on Skype the other night. His Skype handle includes the numbers 59, referring to the year the Chinese army consolidated its occupation of Tibet, an event that radically changed the trajectory of JN’s life. As a teenager growing up in the Indian border town of Darjeeling where a substantial Tibetan refugee community had resettled, JN dropped out of school to join the Tibetan resistance forces based in the Himalayan kingdom of Mustang in Nepal. Still in his late teens, he taught the Khampa guerillas Nepali and military history. The CIA had been covertly supporting the Tibetan resistance but when they began pulling out, the Tibetan government sent JN to Paris. He was successful in his mission and French intelligence supported the guerillas for two more years. Coming back to Dharamsala, the Tibetan capital of exile in northern India, as...

NONFICTION: Psychosis and Black-Eyed Dreams, Sophia E. Terazawa

Tibetan Resilience: an interview with Jamyang Norbu

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