Minerva — hardly a word you’d associate with higher education. It sounds more like a brand-name medication designed to treat anxiety — Minimize your nerves with Minerva! Or maybe a South American root that generations of indigenous populations have used to cure everything. But no. If a 39-year-old entrepreneur named Ben Nelson has his way, the word Minerva will not only [...]
Please do yourself a favor and read “Aerograms” by Jim Krosschell: I come into the teachers’ room from a class, and the sky-blue aerogram is peeking out of my letter box. I take it to my desk and sit down in my chair. We wait a moment, letter and I, objects of wonder and furtive curiosity [...]
Curse of An Addict—Zanzibar Director: Lovinsa Kavuma UK/Uganda, 2014 It’s been a month since I was first introduced to Seif and I can’t get him out of mind. Seif was a heroin addict who lived in Stone Town, Zanzibar, and I ‘met’ him through a harrowing short documentary about his life called Curse of an [...]
There are two things most people I know hate to do: Writing and running. While very different activities — one cerebral, the other physical — the primary reason people hate them is the same: They’re hard. And not just hard, but very hard. And they hurt. Also, they’re boring. Wait. What? I get that they’re hard, but how can something that [...]
A confession: As a child, while all of my friends were obsessed with the fantasy novels of Piers Anthony and science fiction, I was devouring whatever I could find by Judy Blume. I was an otherwise boyish kid — I rode bikes, played in the dirt, collected comic books. But even then, I preferred realism over fantasy, and [...]
“All poetry is experimental poetry.” ~ Wallace Stevens Turning words into art is unnatural. It begins with a contrary attitude. It says, I am unhappy with the way things are and desire to make things different. Rather than represent the world, I will make something wildly and savagely new. I will defy logic. I will [...]
“Turning words into art is unnatural. It begins with a contrary attitude. It says, I am unhappy with the way things are and desire to make things different. Rather than represent the world, I will make something wildly and savagely new. I will defy logic. I will invest in new perceptions. I will combine and [...]
I got my first period when I was thirteen years old — on the morning of my Bat Mitzvah. I was feeling chosen. There was no time to spare. My older sister Nina taught me how to insert a tampon, and off I went to get my hair braided at a salon located in a [...]
There’s an episode in the final season of Diff’rent Strokes in which Arnold (Gary Coleman) acts up in class and is challenged by his teacher, played by Kareem Abdul Jabbar, to teach a lesson one day. His topic is to be A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, and he doesn’t want to do it. But he forces [...]
We know a good story can change us. But can our stories really change society? Writers, poets, journalists, arts educators, and cultural activists based in and around Dar es Salaam, Tanzania convened on Saturday March 8 at Soma Book Cafe to explore the link between art and social change in a one-day workshop organized [...]
In “The Nervous Writer,” MFA student S.W. Flores satirizes workshop culture at its less-than-optimum. In “The Church of Poetry,” poet Dane Cervine laments poetry’s doctrinal disputes. These works bookend the Winter and Spring 2014 issues of Contrary, awaiting your eyes at contrarymagazine.com. With new poems by Weston Cutter, Samuel Hovda, Okla Elliott, Hannah Dow, Jesse Mikhail Wesso, and Anne Whitehouse. Fresh fiction by Heather [...]
In the fall of 2011, I was invited to prepare an essay for the American College Testing exam, better known as the ACT. If you live on the East or West Coasts, you’ve probably never heard of it; if you live in the Midwest or the South, it hangs over your future like a guillotine [...]
If you watched the Super Bowl last night, you no doubt watched the commercials too. So far, Bob Dylan’s endorsement of Chrysler has gotten the most attention for his weird, tautological question “Is there anything more American than America?” But that wasn’t the only ad with an overwhelmingly pro-America message during last night’s game. There [...]
I am to the listicle what my parents were to the Beastie Boys. When I was 11 years old, in 1986, I thought the Beasties were the greatest musicians of all time, and yes, I was including Beethoven, the Beatles, and Simon & Garfunkel in that valuation. My parents, meanwhile, laughed and rolled their eyes, [...]