[alert type=alert-white ]Please consider making a tax-deductible donation now so we can keep publishing strong creative voices.[/alert]
Well, it’s impossible to do everything and help every one and every righteous cause. And the causes and the need will be ever more present in the coming years, with the captain manning the bridge of our ship of state making Ahab seem like a wallflower and the Klingons seem like Walt Disney bobble heads.
Who knows who is going to need our support, our voices raised in solidarity. One minute I’m hopeful, the next I experience despair, and in between, fear that nothing can be done to stop this sea change. Steve Bannon, the racist/anti-Semetic/white nationalist head of Breitbart News said this could mean the Alt-Right might hold power for the next 50 years. But I’m hopeful through it all, and feel sticking my head in the sand won’t be good for the health of the nation nor the health of my own psyche.
We can make a difference, in the big scheme and in the small scheme. One action here begets another action over there. What the physicist Rupert Sheldrake called “morphic resonance.” So while we pick and choose our causes and the sphere of those causes, I am offering one possible one for you. Cultural Weekly is an important balm for the soul, a nourishment for our cultural vision and creative being. I’d hate to see it have to close shop. Cultural Weekly‘s editor Adam Leipzig has taken steps to insure it’s survival, but he needs your help as well.
We do what we can in increments, it all adds up.
If you can help, please do so. I don’t know what the gods pay attention to, big or small, so I made a donation of $10, and another for $250.
Good Karma.
Here’s an email Adam sent to me and other contributors to Cultural Weekly, and I want to share it with you, too:
Cultural Weekly is going non-profit, and our fund-raising starts now. Here is today’s lead article.
We need to raise $15,000 by January 31, 2017. That is our full year’s cost, and it will ensure we will keep publishing uninterrupted.
We need your help. Please:
1. Make a contribution yourself. No matter how small. It will give you spiritual power for Step 2.
2. Post and share on your social media and to your networks.
a. You can also share our direct Donation page: https://nextecho.org/donate/
b. Encourage people to make a monthly donation of $5 or $10 – after all, that’s Starbucks money! (If we can get 125 people to donate $10 a month, we will meet our goal!)
If any of you would like to host a fund-raising event, or invite your friends to one I will host at my loft in Downtown LA’s Arts District, and the event has the capacity to raise at least $1,000, please email me directly.
Thank you for your continuing contributions to Cultural Weekly, and for the community your creativity supports.
Jack Grapes is an award-winning poet, playwright, actor, teacher, editor and publisher. For 25 years he was editor and publisher of ONTHEBUS, a literary journal that has published the work of nearly a thousand poets and writers from all over the world. Library Journal declared that ONTHEBUS was "destined to be a major aftershock in American literary history." Jack has received several National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Literature, numerous NEA Publishing grants, and six grants from the California Arts Council to teach poetry in over 100 Southern California schools. He wrote and starred in Circle of Will, a metaphysical comedy about the lost years of William Shakespeare, which ran for several years in Hollywood and won theater critic awards for Best Comedy and Best Performance by an Actor. For the last 40 years, he has taught writing to over 3,000 poets and writers in his private classes, working from his two books Method Writing and Advanced Method Writing. Published in 2019 by Chatwin Press in Seattle, his Collected Poems: Last of the Outsiders included work from 24 previous collections of poetry written over the last 50 years. His most recent book is Wide Road to the Edge of the World, 301 haiku with an introductory essay, “A Windswept Spirit,” in 201 chapters and 601 paragraphs. Due for publication in 2021 are four non-fiction books: Etherized Upon a Table, a two-volume study on the history and evolution of modern poetries; How to Read Like a Writer, a study of the “six-ways writers write sentences”; The Tender Agonies of Charles Bukowski and Other Essays, covering the work of Marcel Proust, Anton Bruckner, Catullus, Bukowski, and the stylistic strategies of dozens of novelists and poets; and a study of James Joyce and his novel Ulysses, tentatively titled Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes. Jack is also working on a new book of poem, Exit Music.