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My Vision for Multi-Faceted Wellness
By Tiana Dottin
My time as a personal trainer, yoga teacher, and life coach has taught me a lot about people. More than designing workouts or creating playlists, connecting to people is the most important part of my job. And if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s this: Humans have untapped and unlimited potential, stored in the body and mind. That’s what each of my clients has shown me.
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Is Stranger Things Still Strange Enough?
By Joanna Patzig
Stranger Things is way too consumable, I found myself binge watching the third season at an alarming rate -- just like I did with the first and second. It was great, the perfect series to watch while I stayed in with a cold. Season three is rich with that winsome nostalgic humor the show is known for, and dramatic coming of age stories as the characters grow up. The only pitfall Stranger Things faces is becoming predictable as the series continues.
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Interview: David Coogan and Stanley Craddock, Authors of Writing Our Way Out: Memoirs from Jail7/30/2019
Open Minds Lead to Freedom
By Rachel Rivenbark
Courtesy of Brandylane Publishers and Dr. David Coogan
Dr. David Coogan is an English professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, largely specializing in both rhetoric (the study of argument, and how it is formed) and the topic of social change. He has been teaching at VCU for more than ten years, and just this last Spring, I had the distinct advantage of being able to take his Introduction to Modern Rhetoric course at the university, which allowed myself and the rest of the class to engage in an ongoing, semester-long debate about issues such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and many others.
In 2016, Dr. Coogan - in association with Richmond’s own Brandylane Publishing - published Writing Our Way Out: Memoirs From Jail, a vivid, emotional, and highly enthralling collection of memoirs written by ten men incarcerated in the Virginia prison system, detailing their life stories and the circumstances which led to their incarceration. These men included Kelvin Belton, Karl Black, Stanley Craddock, Ronald Fountain, Bradley Greene, Tony Martin, Naji Mujahid, Terence Scruggs, Andre Simpson, and Dean Turner, all of whom formed a significant and lasting relationship of trust and respect with Dr. Coogan throughout the years he worked with them to write this book. Early last week, Dr. Coogan and his good friend and co-author Mr. Craddock both agreed to meet with me at Mr. Craddock’s place of employment, for the sake of conducting an interview about their involvement in the process of creating Writing Our Way Out. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
We all have something to learn, buckaroo.
"Are you dead yet? Good, then you're not done learning. Saddle up! Life is (or will hopefully be) a long ride!" That's the gist of what I wish I had said to fellow creative writing undergrads back in my own arrogant days of youth. Some classmates were just...the worst. I'll never forget the woman who started sobbing in the middle of class and exclaimed that she was more talented than all of us. Dear reader, I promise you that we were not attacking her. She simply couldn't bear an ounce of constructive criticism. If anyone did the attacking, it was her, workshop after workshop. Now that I have a few years of emotional distance, I wish I could go back and say these 7 things to her and other smug creative writing classmates:
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KAINA Reflects the Golden Age of R&BBy Ryan Brunt  Sooper Records We’re in a golden age of alternative R&B. There are seemingly countless new artists from around the country pushing the boundaries of the genre and producing some great music in the process. One of the most exciting artists in this new crop of talent is Chicago’s KAINA, who’s just released her debut full-length album, Next to the Sun. Following up a string of promising EPs, Next to the Sun offers a warm and genre-bending vision of R&B, but also delivers some strong political messaging.
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Rape at Bergdorf’sWords and Images by Marleen S. Barr  E. Jean Carroll’s account of being raped by Donald Trump in the Bergdorf Goodman department store’s lingerie area initially did not receive a lot of attention. On June 24, CNN’s Anderson Cooper corrected this oversight when he engaged in a lengthy interview with Carroll. While sexual accusations against Trump are not new, the interview reveals several timely insights related to language and intention.
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Folk Horror Not for the Faint of Heart
By Joanna Patzig
A24 Studios
By now you’ve probably heard about how wild the movie Midsommar is, and it’s all true. It’s a marathon of grief, sex, and death, shown in bright northern daylight. The story follows Dani, a young woman with anxiety that’s compounded when she tragically loses her family. Struggling with grief, she ends up joining her unsupportive boyfriend and his friends on a trip to Sweden where they find themselves immersed in a pagan festival. Director Ari Aster aptly describes the film as “a break up movie disguised as a folk-horror.” Like Aster’s first film, “Hereditary,” the movie combines psychological horrors with the occult.
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Studio Ghibli's Iconic Witchling Film Turns 30 Years OldBy Ghia Vitale  Today is the 30th anniversary of Kiki’s Delivery Service's release. Happy anniversary, Studio Ghibli! After all these years, this classic is still giving viewers a taste of its magic.
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I Know You See Me Dear People Who Ignore Me At Poetry Readings,
I know you. You know me. I know you know me and that you know I know you. We've read together before. We've had our work published in the same magazines. Our work appears in some of the same anthologies. Our books are sold at so many of the same venues. So why are you pretending not to know me? The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Graphic WitcheryBy The Editors  Belladonna Magic: Spells In The Form Of Poetry And Photography, a book by our founding editor Christine Sloan Stoddard, made it on New World Witchery's list of books employing graphic witchery. The other books are mostly—but not all—occult graphic novels. Check out the list here.
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The Power of Fringe CandidatesBy Joanna Patzig  Flickr: Marc Nozell There are a lot of candidates in this presidential race. For some that makes it hard to stand out, while for others the broad competition adds policy pressure from all sides. The context of the other candidates really influences how we understand the competition. It’s helpful to see Biden’s outdated watered down republicanism in contrast to Bernie Sanders’ democratic socialism. It’s weird to see Marriane Williamson next to anyone, frankly, but her charismatic big picture ideas (best set to Twin Peaks music) reveal a lot about our political expectations for her and the other candidates.
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Community Block Party to PromoteBy Gretchen Gales  Summertime is still in gear and so are the community events! Diversity Thrift will be hosting a free indoor block party on July 26th, 2019 from 5 to 8pm.
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Quail Bell to Read at New York Poetry FestivalBy Rachel Rivenbark  Courtesy of the New York Poetry Festival Brace yourselves, Fledglings, because July is shaping up to be a very exciting month for Quail Bell Magazine!
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A YA Novel That Centers Friendship Between Women
By Ghia Vitale
Please Send Help is a sassy YA novel that explores relationships and sexuality in detail. It’s the sequel to I Hate Everyone But You, a New York Times bestseller written by Gaby Dunn and Allison Raskin.
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Godzilla Stumbles on Clumsy Plot By Ryan Brunt  Courtesy of Flickr: AntMan3001 Some movie franchises I go to for their nuanced storytelling or their ability to excel in a wide variety of areas. Godzilla- particularly the American version- is not one of those franchises. While I certainly understand and appreciate the anti-war and anti-imperialist messages that are inherent in the Godzilla mythos, when I see a new installment, I’m really there for one thing and one thing only. I want to see a really big lizard blow stuff up. What can I say? When I see Godzilla my inner eight-year-old jumps out. The latest installment, King of the Monsters, is no exception; I went to the theater to see some giant monsters beat each other up and beat each other up they did. It’s just a bit of a slog to get there.
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Celebrate 20BiTeen, With These 10 LGBTQ-Friendly Novels to Read This Summer
By Rachel Rivenbark
Summer is the perfect time for fun in the sun and to catch up on all the reading you missed out on during the other three seasons. In honor of 20BiTeen, here is a round-up of 10 of the best LGBT YA reads to devour during your next vacation:
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Belladonna Magic LaunchBy Rachel Rivenbark  We’ve got a lot of really incredible events coming up in the next few weeks, Fledgelings! But perhaps most excitingly of all, we are very much pleased to announce that our founder Ms. Christine Stoddard is soon to be launching her latest book, Belladonna Magic: Spells In The Form of Poetry and Photography, published by Shanti Arts LLC.
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Fierce Fat Girls Tell Their Stories
By Ghia Vitale
Hot & Heavy is a fat positive anthology that’s edited by Virgie Tovar. According to the cover, this anthology features stories by “fierce fat girls on life, love & fashion.”
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Determining the Best 2020 Presidential CandidateBy Rachel Rivenbark  Saying that the upcoming primaries for the 2020 presidential election are going to be hectic seems like a little bit of an understatement. Perhaps “bonkers” might be a more appropriate word, given that there is now an utterly ground-breaking twenty-seven primary candidates in total currently in the running - twenty-five of whom are Democrats, and only two of whom are Republicans. This beats out the last historical records for the highest number of primary candidates by almost ten, with the last records having been broken in 1976 with sixteen Democratic primary candidates, and again in 2016 with seventeen Republican candidates.
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An Obituary Revisited The Miami humidity put me in a stupor when I was already low on energy. My sister Nina and I crammed into her car to drive from her apartment in Miami to the southern suburb of Kendall. This was not a holiday. The occasion was the death of our Uncle Bobby, a man who was not actually our uncle. We sat in silence, partially because of the heat, partially because of the mood. I had flown in from Washington, D.C. already expecting and dreading this half-hour drive. Neither one of us wanted to cry, but it happened anyway. The blasting air-conditioning smeared our tears before we could wipe them.
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Burnt Stakes
By Alex Carrigan
Recollecting one's teen years can be a complete mixed-bag. It's a lot of scattered events with almost no connection between any of them, it's marking the days with routines and vague aspirations, and it's about remembering how you spent those days obsessing or idolizing something odd in hindsight. That's not to say that everyone's teen years are a complete jumbled mess, but when looking back, it's the realization that some of the most important and developmental years of your lives were completely out of your control, and realizing that this is merely a sampling of your adult life. As someone who did virtually nothing with people his age, spent time working as a games attendant at a theme park, and was into reading Wikipedia articles for fun, it really dawns on how much that bizarre period of life has shaped me as an adult.
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Come On, MaBy Joanna Patzig  NBC/Universal There’s something about going to historic theaters that raises my expectations for movies a little. The movies these little places get are more curated than a normal box office, and they’re often so decorated and grandiose that everything seems important. The screen of the Byrd Theater in Richmond, Virginia did elevate the movie Ma at times, but not all of it. I can’t say enough that Octavia Spencer was amazing and she deserves an Oscar. The rest of the movie was just okay.
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The End of the Biggest Illusion By Rongqing Dai  The essence of the notion “illusion” is something that feels real but indeed unreal. The key point here is the antithesis between real and unreal. Obviously, in order to make something more illusory, we could either make its fake appearance look more real, or make its substance even more unreal, or push it in both directions so that it would feel more real while it is indeed more unreal. Based on this understanding about how to make things more illusory, we can conclude that the most successful illusions would be those that could have billions of people feel it real for generations. Still, if someone can make billions of people to believe something that is in fact real to be unreal for generations, then it would be even more successful than just making people feel something unreal as real, because it is more difficult to have people collectively disbelieve what they clearly see with their eyes. Furthermore, if someone can make billions of people believe something real not just unreal but actually illusions for generations, then I would feel compelled to credit them collectively as the biggest illusion.
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Yesterday is a Modern HitBy Rachel Rivenbark  Universal Pictures Going to the movie theater with my girlfriend this past weekend, I found myself very unexpectedly being talked into seeing Yesterday. I’d have gone for John Wick: Chapter 3, personally (I don’t like action flicks, but I would die for Keanu Reeves), but my girlfriend’s family being included in the plans necessitated a last-second change to something a little more child-friendly.
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Ridin' with Biden: Part TwoBy Christopher Sloce Image by Marc Nozell  Happy Tuesday, and welcome back to Ridin’ with Biden. It’s been a bad week for the big guy, since he got burnt so bad by Kamala Harris at the debate she paid a prisoner exactly five cents to put him out. A lot of what the week has amounted to is an attempt to stop the bleeding since he took one on the chin.
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