Perigee

Nonfiction

Not Just Guilty: A White Response to the George Zimmerman Case

30 Sep 2013
0
This is the first of two essays that reflect on what has happened in the months since the trial of George Zimmerman. You can read Apogee’s original response to the not guilty verdict here.   by Melody Nixon, Editor-at-Large   Have we already forgotten about Trayvon Martin? There’s a kind of disbelief that is so strong it makes you wish you didn’t have a body. When I first learned of the not guilty verdict I was punched in the gut with horror and surprise. The deep horror of Trayvon Martin’s story – and George Zimmerman’s story – is tied so inherently to the body: First, to Trayvon’s body with darker skin, with smaller frame than George’s, without armor. Secondly, to George’s body, to the car it sat in, the gun it held, the property it thought it was defending. W.E.B. DuBois wrote, “How does it feel to be a problem? To have your very body and the bodies of your children to be assumed to be criminal, violent, malignant?” How does it feel, too, to be consumed and distorted by your own power? What malignancy, crime and violence wait there? The horror of this story is tied in an indirect...
Read More
Uncategorized

A Queer Aperture: Mia Nakano and the Visibility Project

10 Sep 2013
0
by Cecca Ochoa,  Editor   Mia Nakano is a photographer, served as the  founding photo editor for Hyphen Magazine, and is currently the lead artist for the Visibility Project. In August, Ochoa met with the photographer in her Oakland home to discuss the project. All images copyright of Mia Nakano, visibilityproject.org.   A thought experiment: Imagine a body without race or gender. What do you see? Imagine a body with race and gender. Who do you see? Last week, Germany announced that it will be the first European nation to put a third gender distinction on birth certificates. Nepal instituted a third gender citizenship certificate earlier this year and Sweden has recently established a third gender pronoun. These are exciting wins for the LGBTQ community whose mainstream US efforts have been ardently and monogamously wed to gay marriage at the expense of issues like trans healthcare and representation for (binary) gender non-conforming individuals.

Representing Difference In Writing – The Rumpus

28 Aug 2013
0
The Rumpus has posted a thoughtful essay by Delaney Nolan about writing poor, black characters as a white fiction writer. The purpose of good literature, as far as I can tell, is to find a common human ground that we can all relate to. So I’m not going to represent difference by pretending like I know exactly where Marie’s coming from, or by throwing in a rainbow-colored cast. But I know, at least, some things we have in common now. I know what it’s like to rely on family who’re in a hard place themselves. I know what it’s like to be isolated, to be powerless. I know what it’s like to be, in some sense, unhoused. I don’t know precisely what life is for the people on Marais Street, but I can get myself partway there, and the rest of that bridge is what makes fiction necessary and superlative—empathy, understanding, and a sincere belief in some common thread of humanity. Read the rest here.

The Gray Area: Gentrification in Manhattan's Hamilton Heights

14 Aug 2013
0
  by Alexandra Watson, Editor-in-Chief   As a mixed-race graduate student at Columbia living in Hamilton Heights, a neighborhood in Harlem destined for “urban renewal,” my relationship to the word gentrification is ambivalent. As a child, I associated the word “gentrification” solely with white people—I thought it referred specifically and only to the moving of white people into a neighborhood. In popular usage, among my peers and members of my family both black and white, this seems to be the way the word has come to be understood, despite the fact that the word’s real definition refers solely to class and property—“the buying and renovation of stores and houses in deteriorated urban neighborhoods.” The word has taken on a negative connotation, oftentimes rightfully so—gentrification strips a neighborhood of its history, it drives out long-term residents, it either appropriates or overruns culture.

Donate To Our Kickstarter, Feel Good!

Donate To Our Kickstarter, Feel Good! For Apogee Issue 3, we’re bringing you more great writing from authors you do know and from lots that you should know. We’ll also be upgrading our website, and selling more print journals. All we need is a little help from you. We just launched a new Kickstarter to help print more copies of Issue 2, and to help with costs for our re-launch with Issue 3. Please visit the website–read, watch, and consider donating. Every little bit helps!

Notes from "A Guide to Drag Kinging", by Franny Choi

19 Jul 2013
0
Apogee Journal is pleased to share the first nonfiction piece in our Overshare series,* Franny Choi’s Notes from “A Guide to Drag Kinging.”   “AS YOU PROWL the sidewalk, cross the stage, lights hot and bright on your face, on the front of your pants, feel it hanging, shifting with each step, strapped tight into shorts. Armed and ready, standing at attention. Soon, you will find it affecting your walk, longer lunges that land like declarative sentences…”  

"Eviction Notice," by Brian Patrick Heston

16 Jul 2013
0
While the Trayvon Martin trial hangs over all of us here at Apogee, despite some small triumphs, some cool blog projects, and the protests that continue — albeit misreported — we thought this poem by Brian Patrick Heston, published in Issue Two of Apogee, fits well as this week’s content share.
Uncategorized

Issue Two Overshare

12 Jul 2013
0
Apogee Journal is pleased to announce that we are now letting loose some of the content from Issue Two here on our website, and on Facebook and Twitter. Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, we'll post some of the varied, excitingly diverse short stories, poetry and nonfiction that made it into our second, stellar issue.
1 … 42 43 44 45

FOLLOW US: @APOGEEJOURNAL

Twitter feed is not available at the moment.