About a year ago, amid the Tumblr minefield, I came across a blog called Medieval People of Color. Rather than use my (albeit limited) platform today to highlight the (good) work of another museum—while often worthy and fair game—I choose instead to share this incredible resource. Yes, I’m not a person of color; and please consider me liable, as always, for whatever words I say. Medieval People of Color exists to provide counter-argument to the popular sentiment, grown up fro

I’m not going to write about the “orange thing with tiny hands” that I know people in my camp are writing about, talking about, avoiding, bemoaning, resisting, marching, crying, and/or self-medicating over. I won’t mention how “orange face w. tiny hands” on his first day in office overhauled the White House website so that it’s now very clearly missing pages for climate change, civil rights, disabilities, gay rights, and health care. Other news sites have parroted “OFTH’s” th

If it’s lucky, a place gets three wishes. The Aladdin Theatre, built in 1927, located in Portland’s now-gentrifying southeast quadrant, got four wishes and hasn’t needed a djinni since. People know The Aladdin today as a concert and comedy venue, capacity 620, with its few surviving touches of vintage décor and its reputation for intimate shows, all barely hinting at its colorful (and sordid?) past. The word, intimate, is the giveaway. The Aladdin’s third wish was for a porno

At the beginning of 2012 I bundled up my life as I knew it – my home, my job, my marriage – and ditched it by the curb. I didn’t have a car so my mom drove me away from Portland where up until then I’d lived my whole life, and dropped me off 6 hours later in Moscow, Idaho to stay with a friend and mentor. I needed an escape, I needed space to think, to sort some things out before I could return and pick up the pieces I’d left behind. The University of Idaho in Moscow has an M

Over the weekend, I was hosting a Portlander here in Hollywood—my friend, Ginger Duncan, down from the Pacific Northwest for her first visit to Los Angeles. Her visit comes on the heels of my own relocation just three weeks before: a sort of fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants uprooting that has repotted me back home and also not home. Home, in the sense that I was born in Los Angeles; home, likewise, in the sense that home is (as my friend, Asaf, is fond of saying) wherever you are.

As we move into December 2016, after a long year of enormous change (both good, bad, and in-between), our team here at Backwords Press is grateful for a mainstay: the poet and freelance graphic designer, Phillip Brown. Given that Phillip has worked with us throughout our 2015 and 2016 years, on two separate redesigns from our Inaugural Issue, and then again on the Spring 2016 Issue, he's long overdue for a spotlight here on the blog that showcases his particular talents and e

The scene is set for something dark and slow – the camera follows the silhouette of a man making his way through a small crowd. Slow claps of rhythm begin and the man finds his match – a woman in the audience with a shock of red hair. As the music begins to unfold he turns to her with purpose, gives a look that could almost be menace. What we know for sure is that these two are not strangers. She closes her eyes as the next beat hits. The song pushes forward and the camera c

Where do I start? Do I start on Wednesday November 9, 2016 at 4:27 a.m. when I woke up to the confirmation that Donald Trump would be the next President of the United States? Do I start somewhere in the middle of my sleep-deprivation, moving through the waking nightmare that Americans elected a glorified reality TV star; a liar and a bully; who repeatedly denigrated immigrants, people of color, and assaulted women; who ran on a platform of massive deportations, on surveillanc

In a strange yet somehow-exactly-anticipated respect, Jenny’s blog piece last Wednesday—her “Prolonged Performances of Grief,” the fiercely humbling tribute she wrote on losing me to Los Angeles—has made (the thought of, the act of) moving easier. She’s done the grieving, honestly, openly, already. Her gift—not in the least because it went on for pages, and whoever ever has pages devoted to themselves and their (apparent) virtues—had me in tears, getting up from my spindly co

In 1986, BOMB Magazine’s Bruce Wolmer interviewed the first American surrealist poet and artist, Charles Henri Ford. Ford—not content with keeping only to poetry or art-making, but also an editor, novelist, filmmaker, and photographer—chronicled his life for Wolmer, claiming nevertheless (like one of his primary influences, Jean Cocteau) that poetry was a kind of “everything,” an ecstatic lens that was for Ford the central conception of a surrealist mission. This is one kind