JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher

Delighted to share that Anti-Oedipus Press will be publishing my first book, Nervosities, a collection of experimental short fictions, in 2024. Ka-pow!

Nervosities chronicles the complexities of identity, memory, history, and language, the various fragmentations resulting from and the violences occurring within and because of these heterogeneities and instabilities. Borne of diaspora and transversalism, Nervosities employs disruptive narrative modes, registers, etc., to deeply engage and interpret our over-saturated and over-stimulated post-industrialized worlds. What is ultimately enacted in these fictions is confrontation with and destabilization of what Deleuze and Guattari via Antonin Artaud call “the cancerous body of America, the body of war and money.”

Helmed by D. Harlan Wilson (an exemplary writer in his own right), Anti-Oedipus Press has a commanding list of fantastic writers that includes Ansgar Allen, Louis Armand, Steve Aylett, Eugen Bacon, Harold Jaffe, Barry N. Malzberg, Lance Olsen, James Reich, Lawrence A. Rickels, and Kim Stanley Robinson. I’m amazed and thankful to be counted among this innovatively unruly number.

Big thanks to editors Bradford Morrow, Jason Teal, Douglas Glover, Adrian Todd Zuniga, and Elizabeth Cohen, who previously published one or more fictions from Nervosities in, respectively, Conjunctions, Heavy Feather Review, Numéro Cinq, Opium Magazine, and Saranac Review!

Big thanks, too, to several other supporters of this work, namely, Rikki Ducornet, Brian Evenson, Robert Lopez, Carole Maso, and Lenina Nadal!

(Image: Bridget Riley’s Current, 1964)

Good news! Salt Hill: 47 is now available! It features “Blues for Borinquén,” an experimental fiction of mine that foregrounds two Puerto Ricans in the middle of Hurricane María, the first in the storm’s eye, the other in its mediation and aftermath. The fiction is full of black holes—call them shrouds, caesuras, portals, thresholds.

I wrote this fiction in response to another journal’s call for fictions about “mutants” and “castaways,” so of course it features Puerto Ricans, we hybrids, fusions, and reified hyphens, we who are largely invisibilized in literature, not to mention culture as a whole, mainstream and otherwise.

Big thanks to editor Si Yon Kim and the rest of the Salt Hill team!

Excelsior!

Delighted to recently receive my contributor’s copies of Contrapuntos IX: Antropoceno, which features two of my poems (“‘The Science of Storytelling'” and “Two Spaces After a Period”), which limn the liminality, precarity, and atomization of life in/within the Capitalocene-of-the-crime, the poems also featuring a host of ghosts, among them John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Matisse, Virgil, Caravaggio, and Monteverdi.

Big thanks to editors Lacie Cunningham and Marcos Pico Rentería!

Delighted to share Brendan Lorber’s interview with me in Maudlin House about my tenure editing and publishing Big Other.

Lorber: What is good writing?

Madera: What we talk about when we’re talking about literary writing, though, is love, that is, the art of writing is an eros of writing. And by “eros,” I mean, not only life-affirming and revivifying but life itself. Also, how long would you endure a lover who always said not only the expected, but the hackneyed, whose utterances were full of overused words, phrases, and sentences, a lover whose gestures were rehearsed and mechanically performed? And yet, and yet, this is what we so often accept from artists, literary and otherwise. In other words, always refuse the thanatos of writing, of art, generally; and always pursue, affirm, and propagate the eros of art, literary and otherwise.