ESCAPE ARTISTS: Ken Wolman's 'A Brief Guide to Middle Class Homelessness' in the PostMistress Anthology

 By Ruth Skilbeck, editor

12 days to go! There are only twelve days left to be part of this new initiative as a supporter*

Today's featured artist is Ken Wolman, poet, with a PhD in literature, a divorced father, who worked as a technical writer in telecom and financial services companies in New York for years, and before that as an adjunct lecturer.
In his sixties, Ken found himself in the downward spiral of health issues, poverty, and bad company, in a shared flat, with a bed bud infestation- with his beloved cat. He ended up homeless for months. You will be able to read his harrowing essay 'A Brief Guide to Middle Class Homelessness' in the Escape Artists anthology. His story starts: 

I don’t want to tell this story. I don’t want to roil the waters. I am 71 years old and I would like nothing more than to kick back and make my garden grow as I progress quietly into old age. Read. Write poetry. Listen to music. Play with my cat. I am not interested in capital-C Causes anymore unless I can discern something in them for me. I would like nothing more than to shut my mouth, cover my eyes, and pretend this never happened to me, or that it’s not happened to anyone else I’ve met along the way.

But it has, and it won’t stop happening.

So I can’t do that. Part of me still carries the social and even race memory of my mother’s father, Samuel Staridubsky, a tailor from Odessa, who went to jail in a 1919 New York garment workers’ strike.

 

What Ken Wolman goes on to narrate is a story that will take you into the experiences and make you feel as he did. And make you worry for your own future. It will make you want to try to change the world we are living in so that this cannot happen.

Now, homelessness can happen to anyone in a world with no safety nets.
We are delighted to be publishing Ken's essay, which is being published here for the first time.


I first read Ken's works on facebook, and met Ken when we were both in a conversation about adjunct lecturing. He told me he had been homeless and I asked him to tell me more. He sent me this essay.
There are strong comparisons between Ken's writing and George Orwell's classic book Down and Out in London and Paris. Ken's essay is written in an equally direct engaging style, diving into the world of poverty and the 'down and outs', the ever increasing underclass created by our uncaring capitalist society. It is written from the perspective of one who is not swamped by it, yet, who has come from a different background, and is shocked and horrified by what they witness, and has to tell the world, and escape.

Ken Wolman, author and poet

I’m from New York City, studied literature and criticism at Binghamton University (Ph.D., 1976), and worked for several years as a technical writer for both telecom and financial services companies. Since 1990, I’ve been published in a wide variety of print and online venues. I was awarded the 1995 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a year later studied at the White River Writers Workshop in Batesville, Arkansas. I’ve also worked as an Adjunct Instructor in English at several community colleges in the New Jersey higher education system.

* Funding 'Escape Artists' PostMistress Press Anthology

We need to raise almost $6000 in just over a week- to publish the anthology of brilliant works by well known and new artists. It is ready to publish we just need to raise the funds to cover basic print-on-demand publishing costs.
In return you will be acknowledged as a supporter on the Acknowledgements page, and receive gifts of appreciation, signed and numbered first edition Anthologies, and other books and art works donated to raise funds by the artists in the anthology. There is also a unique chance to secure discounted writing and editing and publishing offers, and a new course on author-publishing.

This anthology project, and founder Ruth Skilbeck's author publishing projects of her books, that she has sold mainly via communication with people on facebook, have attracted and drawn together a strong, supportive- but poor!- creative movement of artists and writers whose works are in the anthology.
It's make or break, will we do it?

ESCAPE ARTISTS: MAKE OR BREAK- A NEW ANTHOLOGY

WILL THEY MAKE IT?

By Ruth Skilbeck

A new arts initiative. Thirty-four escape artists. An anthology adventure. Editor Ruth Skilbeck, PhD, is an author, novelist and art writer. She has published two Australian Fugue novels.

Escape Artists is a new platform and publication that fills a gap in arts publishing, it brings together artists, intellectuals, literary writers, poets, storytellers, sound artists, photographers, who are united by their shared concern for democracy, social justice, for environmental protections, for freedom of speech and expression, for humanity and for new forms of communication.

The contributors come from around the world, and the project founder and publisher, and editor, Ruth Skilbeck is based in Australia. The idea to start an independent small publishing house, PostMistress Press, came to her after working for years in arts journalism, when the periodicals and magazines she wrote for began to fold.

Read more on the crowd funding site.

Guo Jian, pictured here on hunger strike in Tiananmen Square, now a citizen of Australia, is one of the artists in the anthology- and he has donated several art works to raise fund to publish the book.
Read more of this story on the crowd funding site- where you have a chance to support this anthology and receive public acknowledgement.

Thanks in advance for your support.

Ruth Skilbeck, Editor.

ESCAPE ARTISTS: The Dandy at Dusk- Philip Mann in PostMistress Press Anthology 1

By Ruth Skilbeck, Editor of  'Escape Artists' PostMistress Anthology 

Updated 15 October, since publication of The Dandy at Dusk by Paris Paysan Press.

Today’s featured artist in the 'EscapeArtists' PostMistress Press Anthology 1 is Philip Mann. We are delighted to be publishing a chapter from author Philip Mann’s forthcoming book The Dandy at Dusk: Stories of Elegance and Nostalgia, an elegantly written and provocative work, now published by ParisPaysanPress.  This is the first book to explore in depth the phenomenon of the dandy, in its social, cultural and political ramifications, in terms of gender and the self.

However, our pleasure was tempered by our regret, for Philip Mann, at the series of difficulties for the author in the course of his book contract negotiation with a highly regarded and long-established mainstream publisher. This is the kind of story that is not unfamiliar to those who work in publishing, and of course to the many authors who are finding it increasingly difficult to publish.

Under the title Dandies at Dusk, Philip Mann’s book was going to be published by Flammarion, a long established publisher in Paris. But then Flammarion changed hands. Philip Mann was informed that Flammarion still wanted to publish his book. But then there was unwelcome change. Flammarion, following the trend of many mainstream publishers now, requires that an author have a sponsor to back the publication. They require a sponsor or self-funding of a substantial sum. Even after the book was up on Amazon as a pre-order (where it can still be seen). In January, Philip was told that Flammarion would, regretfully, not be going ahead with the publication, which they have worked on for two years.  Here are the details of the book description from the Amazon site- which even though Flammarion sent Philip Mann a letter in January breaking the contract to publish is STILL on the Amazon website with the details of the book as if it is about to be published:

Author Philip Mann dispels the myth that dandyism centers upon aestheticism through portraits of the first dandy―Regency England’s Beau Brummell―and six twentieth-century figures: Austrian architect Adolf Loos, The Duke of Windsor, neo-Edwardian couturier Bunny Roger, eccentric writer and raconteur Quentin Crisp, French film producer Jean-Pierre Melville, and New German Cinema savant and “inverted dandy” Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He chronicles their style, identity, influence, melancholy, and often untimely demise, using a mélange of photography, biography, and anecdote. Weaving their stories into an extensive and entertaining history of tailoring and men’s fashion, he offers incisive perspectives on the dandy’s aesthetic concerns, pensive nostalgia for the golden Edwardian era, and a nonchalant persona. He contextualizes the relationship of dandyism to decadence and to modernism, while simultaneously portraying the cultural development of a century punctuated by two World Wars and social upheaval.

This volume presents dandyism—the embodiment of aesthetic and intellectual ideals—from its origins with Beau Brummell to its major twentieth-century representatives. Author Philip Mann dispels the myth that dandyism centers upon vanity through portraits of the first dandy—Regency England's Beau Brummell—and six twentieth-century figures.

 Illustration for The Dandy at Dusk by Floc'h, in 'Escape Artists' PostMistress Press Anthology 1

 Floc'h the well known French artist drew the illustration above for The Dandy at Dusk.

postmistresspress.com

ESCAPE ARTISTS' ANTHOLOGY: 

This anthology project, and founder Ruth Skilbeck's author publishing projects of her books, that she has sold mainly via communication with people on facebook, have attracted and drawn together a strong, supportive creative movement of artists and writers whose works are in the anthology.

 

Ruth Skilbeck, PhD, is a widely-published author, art writer, and photographer, and has lectured in several Australian universities.

The Anthology is being published on the Fuguescapes imprint.


FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE ANTHOLOGY HERE

There is now a way you can support the publication of this new anthology here.  
 
 

ESCAPE ARTISTS: Shifting Perspectives and Cultural Identity: The Works of Fan Dongwang in PostMistress Press Anthology

  ESCAPE ARTISTS ANTHOLOGY: The Art of Fan Dongwang

By Ruth Skilbeck

Today’s featured artist from the Escape Artists Anthology is Dongwang Fan, whose exploration of the differences in perspective between Chinese art traditions and the modern one point linear perspective in Western art history is presented in a chapter from his research as an artist in the ‘third space’ zone in-between cultures, after he left China and moved to Australia in the 1990s. 

The ‘Escape Artists’ PostMistress Press Anthology will present Dongwang Fan’s chapter “The Western Vision” from his work The Dancing Shadows: Shifting Perspectives and the Body (2013), and his series of paintings  that put his new theories of shifting perspective into practice. 

 Fan Dongwang, Descendant Bodies #1 (Blue) 1996. Acrylic on canvas, 178 x 254 cm

Fan Donwang's essay, and paintings such as Descendant Bodies #1 (Blue), above, visually and conceptually explore perspective, in cultural and aesthetic practice, as a methodology and as a metaphor for fluidity and mixing cultural and bodily identity, with other cultures, times, and machines of technology- encouraging us to consider how Postmodernism shifted perspectives of gender, and the bodily self, in many ways, or sought to.

As we are living out that computer linked virtual reality now that is one of the themes of the 'Escape Artists' anthology. We are living in the future of virtual reality shifted perspectives and screen cultures imagined by science fiction, and the future painted by Fan Dongwang, in the 1990s. How does this mixing of images and fragments in ‘posts’, ‘tweets’ of short attention spans and the scrolling flood of images in virtual communication affect concepts of selves, body image, and identity? These have been major cultural identity questions that have dominated and continue to dominate our lives.

Fan Dongwang, Descendant Bodies #2 (Green). 1996. Acrylic on canvas 170 x 280 cm.

Fan Dongwang’s essay explores ideas in the history of perspective, from Egyptian art and the Renaissance, to the Modern one point linear perspective, to the modernist return, and changes in our Postmodern era.

This is a fascinating essay grounded in deep knowledge of traditions of perspective in art in China that has much to say to us now as so many are using social media without necessarily reflecting very much about what we are really doing, and how this new screen culture is affecting our images of our selves, how we interact with others, and how others see us. Reading Fan Dongwang and studying the images of his paintings, opens up a new context for us to think about how we are communicating and representing our selves- online, and mixing of images and texts, and how this is shifting perspectives, of selves, others and of the dimensions of time and space in virtual reality.

Fan Dongwang. Shifting Perspectives and the Body #1- Double Screens. 1998. Acrylic on canvas, 244 x 180 cm.

'ESCAPE ARTISTS' ANTHOLOGY: 

This anthology project, and founder Ruth Skilbeck's author publishing projects of her books, that she has sold mainly via communication with people on facebook, have attracted and drawn together a strong, supportive, creative movement of artists and writers whose works are in the anthology.

 

Ruth Skilbeck, PhD, is a widely-published author, art writer, and photographer, and has lectured in several Australian universities.

The Anthology is being published on the Fuguescapes imprint.


FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE ANTHOLOGY HERE

ADAPTABILITY, RESILIENCE, CREATIVITY in ACTION: 'Escape Artists' PostMistress Press Anthology

Help an Artist Anthology Collective Publish A Ground Breaking Book

Ruth Skilbeck PhD founded PostMistress Press after a living and working since the 1980s as a freelance writer,  art writer and arts journalist, in Dublin, London and Sydney, and after ten years as an art media writing entrepreneur as founder of Arts Features International, her sole trader writing business which started in Sydney in 2003.

In a time when the media publishing landscape was rapidly changing, and universities dissolving and merging art schools; after the media research centre she had worked at as a contract lecturer for one year was closed down, and mainly because she had to leave Sydney for reasons beyond her control, which ended her career as an international contemporary art writer, she decided to do something to try to create an alternative way of living as a writer, and if she could make it work for herself she wanted to try to find a way to reach out to and also help other artists, writers and philosophers, to publish their own works. 

She has several books that she has written or almost finished. Rather than sending them out to mainstream commercial publishers, she found out how to use the new digital publishing software, organized a successful crowdfunding project for her first novel The Antipode Room: Australian Fugue1, and buoyed up by the support she got, she published her novel, on Amazon- as a paperback, and as an ebook. 

She has now advanced in her skills and design capabilities, and has published an abridged edition without the real life case studies of fuguers (Missing). She has published her musico-literary studies book, The Writer’s Fugue: Musicalization, Trauma and Subjectivity in the Literature of Modernity in hardcover. She is about to publish it in paperback in an updated edition, which responds to the discovery of a James Joyce manuscript with notes for his fugue in “Sirens”, in Ulysses, which she analyzed in her PhD. Using Joyce’s notes she has written the first known long analysis of the fugue in “Sirens” applying this research. This is going to be available later this month.

'Escape Artists' PostMistress Press Anthology: Resistance in New Publishing

 

Meanwhile, over the past two years she has been working on an anthology project, gathering works by thirty-three artists and writers, to publish in the inaugural PostMistress Press anthology, named Escape Artists. This anthology represents the founding pillars of Postmistress Press and the philosophy of its founder: Adaptability, Resilience, and Creativity, as a form of resistance to attacks on the arts, and survival.  

To fund the publication she has started up a crowdfunder with the goal of raising $7000 to publish the book as a paperback, as well as an interactive pdf. on which to play several songs and sound art tracks that are in the diverse inter arts collection of works.

 Cover of the Anthology, cover art by Ruth Skilbeck

The Escape Artists Range From 'Prominent' to 'Promising' 

 

Some of the artists and writers in the anthology are very well known.

They include Elizabeth Farrelly, author, and architecture critic, Christopher Barnett, self-exiled poet and dramaturg, Rhyll McMaster, poet and novelist, Guo Jian, exiled artist, Fan Dongwan, artist, William Yang, photographer  and storyteller, Ghassan Hage, anthropologist, Elizabeth Gertsakis, artist, Richard James Allen, poet, Mary Lou Pavlovic, artist, Floc’h, artist, Christen Clifford, feminist performance artist and New School lecturer, Vee Malnar, artist.

Others are younger, and publishing their writing for the first time.

The works range from essays, to poems, to travel writings, to photographs, to film stills, to paintings, prints, song lyrics and songs, electronic music, PhD chapters, cultural theory, to a short play and a novella.

There is something for everyone to enjoy and find of interest in the anthology.

Have a look at the details of the anthology and contributors at this link, and see how you can support the anthology and become a part of this project. All those who donate to support the publication will have their name in the Acknowledgements page. There are also limited edition art prints, discounted editing packages, and book club memberships as rewards for those who donate.

 https://pozible.com/project/postmistress-press-anthology

'Escape Artists' PostMistress Press Anthology- Coming Soon

We are delighted to announce that the inaugural PostMistress Press Anthology 'Escape Artists', edited by Ruth Skilbeck, will be published as an interactive pdf  and as a paperback, but only if we can raise the $7000 we need to publish.
Pre-order and make donations to the publishing project here, and have your name, or your organization name listed in the Acknowledgements.
https://pozible.com/project/postmistress-press-anthologyhttps://pozible.com/project/postmistress-press-anthology

 http://www.fuguescapes.com/

PostMistress Press Anthology Contributor Banned from Facebook and Posts for Anthology Blocked

‘ESCAPE ARTISTS’ POSTMISTRESS PRESS ANTHOLOGY NEWS

By Ruth Skilbeck, Editor

One of the 'Escape Artists' contributors, Christen Clifford, lecturer at the New School in New York, feminist artist and mother of two, has been banned from Facebook for her posts on her fight against cancer, and her posts blocked, some of which, with her permission, we were going to publish in the ‘Escape Artists’ PostMistress Press Anthology. We had not yet obtained Christen’s posts and when we were about to, found that she had been banned and her posts are now inaccessible.

     Just as we are about to launch our crowdfunding project, Christen Clifford’s posts have been censored, due to her courageous and candid #fuckcancer diary with images, photos and her thoughts, and her brave performance art on her recent diagnosis of cancer, hysterectomy and removal of ovary and her chemo, which she is documenting for her friends, readers and followers.

     Melbourne-based artist Elizabeth Gertsakis who is writing her PhD and making digital art prints on Outrage, Obscenity and Madness (sex, vile gossip, art and illustration)  “the tight pictorial censorship laws still in place today covering images and censorship in the state of Victoria” will now be in the anthology instead. Two of Elizabeth’s prints have just been acquired by the National Gallery of Australia. If Christen is allowed to return to facebook and her posts are released, with permission, we will publish them, in this issue if time allows or in the next one.
We can only publish the Escape Artists: PostMistress Press Anthology 1 with your help, we need $7000 to publish. Check out the site here with the details, of how you can pre-order and/or make a donation to receive some special rewards of signed, numbered limited first editions with supporters and sponsors names in the Acknowledgements page.
https://pozible.com/project/postmistress-press-anthologyhttps://pozible.com/project/postmistress-press-anthology

2 June, 2016