One Black Perch Publishing

14/10/2025

hosted a 50th anniversary celebration of the featuring a talk with political scientist .j.cohen, Rick Perlstein and contributing editor , reading from their work addressing what our political moment requires of journalists, historians, citizens; all of us.

I was most interested to hear if Co-Editor in Chief Joshua Cohen had anything to say about the role of the journal today, and its responsibility to readers, and contributing writers. Thanks to standstills and stop-and-go’s on the expressway, we’ll never know. Joshua Cohen, co-editor of the journal, probably intro'd with it.

But I did catch the second half of the talk, grab a back issue (“AI Futures”, which discusses AI warfare and ChatGPT novels), and get to check out Haymarket Books's space for the first time.

Literacy, cognition and critical thinking are under explicit, direct attack. History is being smeared before the coming makeover. Entertainment is being charged with implying truth, modeling the precarity of imagination and openness, despite any perceived victories like Jimmy Kimmel going back on air before his infraction. The enforced silencing, which seemed like a theatrical suspension, was supposed to be loud enough to send a message to the rest of us.

How do you respond in your art? In your genre or form? What responsibility should poets, novelists, and memoirists assume in these unique times?

08/10/2025

...for more than just the playwrights.

22/07/2025

For the writers who (still) read to get better.

21/07/2025

25/06/2025

“When we live in a place for too long, we grow dull. We don’t notice what is around us. That is why a trip is so exciting. We are in a new place and see everything in a fresh way…A writer is a visitor from the Midwest…only she never leaves the Midwest; she sees her own town with the eyes of a tourist…And she begins to see her life this way too.”

– Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

A detached, objective curiosity and openness to wonder about the deeply familiar or routine is where the universal connectivity that our stories strive for lives.

Borrow and adapt a practice of detachment (or perspective-shifting from a spiritual or religious system of your choice to help you step into the openness your inner tourist needs.

24/06/2025

It begins with you.

19/06/2025

05/06/2025

I’ve received a good number of submissions over the past few weeks, but unfortunately submitting doesn’t mean automatically accepted and its hurt the acceptance goal for the issue. I expected to accept a higher percentage of submissions. I don't think im that critical. But maybe.

I’m planning to release the journal for digital download July 31st, and working on a print run at the end of the year with a Black-owned family-run print company I’m hoping to build a partnership with. *fingers crossed*

The best writers are observant. They shape their work around what they believe people may need, sometimes beginning with themselves, and offer their work as a response, or for a return to comfort or escape. And when your work resonates with readers, it makes them feel seen, validates the observations you made from afar about unacknowledged human needs.

So flood my inbox: Personal essays. Poetry. Short fiction, open to genre. Creative nonfiction. Memoir.

I’m reading it all, pretty much. Even if you have critical reviews of books, shows or movies that reach beyond surface responses, send those, too.

If you’re not exactly sure what to send, send what you needed at the moment that you conceived and wrote it. Above any intention for any journal is that it's a time capsule for the human archive.

Don’t discount the impact of something you wrote for catharsis, or survival, just because you’re not in that place anymore. When you free your work, you may free someone else. And as writers, we really can’t do any better than that. That’s our highest ideal.

Submissions requirements in the first comment. Hope to read you later.

03/06/2025

In a world divided by borders and ideologies, the call for unity has never been more urgent. As philosopher Slavoj Žižek emphasized in Monthly Review:

“We should put forward a positive, universal project which is shared by all participants, and fight for it.”

If writing is how you answer your urgent call, reflect on your own universal project—the core question or emotion that drives your creativity.

30/05/2025

This is for your writer-friend whose notebooks, docs, notes app, etc., that are overflowing with half-told stories, waiting for a throughline to pull them to the finish.

Sometimes, the reminders we need aren't about upskilling. Sometimes, it's about grounding.