One Black Perch Publishing

14/12/2025

For the first issue of our literary journal, One Black Perch Review, abstract expressionist and surrealist artist Alex Puryear blessed us with an original painting that'll don the cover, a meditation on the journal's first theme: fulfillment.

Leading up to the launch of the digital and print releases, and well into 2026, we'll explore how we've been taught to conceive fulfillment, how we construct and pursue it, its distinctions from joy, happiness, and contentment.

Excepts from an interview with Alex on the topic will appear in the journal.

Looking back on 2025 (or even before that), have your ideas about fulfillment (or joy, happiness, etc.) changed or shifted?

What were the events that demanded a change of your perspective, your formulation for joy? What new formulations has it brought you to?
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Alex's work explores the layered relationship between emotion, transformation, and the unseen. His introspective, surreal, immersive work can be found at:

www.puryearart.wixsite.com/alex/gallery-portfolio

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Share with your writer friends:

[email protected]

11/12/2025

04/12/2025

No need for an introduction...

01/12/2025

Navigating the creative frailties and unique circumstances that most writers come with, bringing the best out of them, or projecting what readers will have an appetite for; none of it easy, especially when dealing with big personalities like Ali, or the skillfulness of Toni Cade Bambara.

28/10/2025

Let your work do the legwork.

Have your work heard.
Submit your work, widen your readership.

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.