A Collective Action: Read our poetry!

“Be of your time.”

My friend, Sarah Daniele, a fellow writer and former classmate, would say this to me, announce it to the class, I imagine even mutter it to herself gracefully in her mid-sleep. It’s a difficult thing to grasp and embody and ultimately accept, this task of being of your own time. To embrace this is to understand that you are a participant in a unique perspective, one that is both spatially and temporally discerning. What is ultimately daunting about this is that there is no exact precedent for this time.There are circumstances we can indeed learn from. But, this, this is  all an experience experiment.

Daniele and Carl run the Revel Empire Collective and invited me to participate in the most recent issue, an experiment of automatic writing. Seven different writers wrote seven pieces, our automatic responses to seven words. The first installment of RE is out right now and the prompt was “fortune”. Readers should catch this installment before the next one comes out, and then of course continue to read the next six.

About this issue of Revel Empire:

The whole of us is greater than its pieces, and our survival as a species depends on our ability to transcend imaginary, inherited borders. At Revel Empire we wanted to test and materialize this belief, this impending reunification. Seven members of our team received and responded to seven key words. These key words unlocked rooms of consideration within our individual minds. Members took no more than five minutes to respond in writing to each key word. The only requirement was an authentic, automatic action.

Speaking of being of your time, imagine a “short-story-audiobook-mixtape” published in both print and web format, that’s also available on Soundcloud for your instant indulgence (the consumption speed of our time). That’s Invisibly Wounded Adult-Sized Children, Sarah Daniele’s aptly titled chapbook. I read/listened to it in one sitting and was humbled by its honesty and intuitiveness, and I was empowered because it felt like an embodiment of a thing of “our time”. Check it out.