Editor’s Note:

I spoke with Chad Smith of The Red Hot Chili Peppers who has given so much time and energy to the nonprofit organization, Little Kids Rock that he was given an honorary award for his service at Facebook Headquarters on May 16, 2015. As a lobbyist and crusader for free and mandatory music education in public schools, Smith spoke about his early years being sculpted by the music classes in the public schools he attended right outside of Detroit, Michigan. Among other things, he also shared how the impact of those music classes inspired him to work to help children attain the same free music education he received when he was growing up.

Take a listen to our conversation on Publik / Private Podcast w/ Jordannah Elizabeth. Continue reading →

Written By: Jordannah Elizabeth

(this photo is missing one of my grandmothers. She’s in my heart and with my spirit)

I lost my great aunt and my grandmother this year. I lost my grandmother on my mother’s side a little over a decade ago. I was very close to all three women. I spent many hours at their houses as my courageous and beautiful single mother raised my two brothers and I.

My two grandmothers and great aunt probably served over 100 years in the church between them all. They were devoted, powerful, loving and committed women. I will mourn their lives with gratefulness and respect. I would not be the woman I am without their guidance. I would not be spiritual, passionate, feisty, penetrating, strong, compassionate, honest and maternal without their unwavering love and general influence.

Whenever I was home and I missed my mom, I would bury my entire 6 year old body in her hanging clothes and inhale as hard as I could, just to get a whiff of her perfume laced fabrics. My mother’s closet always smelled sweet. She was and is glamorous and beautiful. Continue reading →

There are times when I become tired of talking. Words are my life: ideas, questions, essays, articles, conversations, blogging, podcasts, television and radio. I live my life in different cities and work to maintain a healthy balance of privacy and happily fulfilled expectations.

The balance of Publik / Private.

Sometimes, it’s best to be quiet. Speak less, feel more – enjoy what isn’t being said.

There are some realities about life that are hard to deny. If you ask any woman about the difficult process of keeping and maintaining female friendships, there is a very high probability that she will have a number of stories to tell about experiencing a falling out with more than one of her female friends. Author, Nina Gaby explores female friendships in her new book, Dumped: Stories of Women Unfriending Women.   Gaby is a writer, widely shown visual artist, and psychiatric nurse practitioner whose essays and fiction have been published by Lilith Magazine, Creative Non Fiction’s In Fact imprint, Seal Press, Paper Journey Press, Wising-Up Press, The Prose-Poem Project and on Brevity.com.

Pre- order Dumped: Stories of Women Unfriending Women. The book will be released on March 3, 2015 by She Writes Press.

Continue reading →

Written By: Joyce Riha Linik

Image By: Taty Lopez

Joyce Riha Linik has a Master’s degree in creative writing and English literature from Portland State University.  She started her writing career as a “madwoman” copywriter at an advertising firm in New York City. She’s now based in the Pacific Northwest where she works as a freelance journalist, and was selected as a national EdPress Distinguished Achievement Award finalist for an article called “On the Road to Oz,” published in Education Northwest Magazine. Joyce has been nominated an won a number of writing awards.

She’s contributed this steamy short story to Publik / Private, and we’re so pleased to start off the new year with a sexy piece of literature. This is NSFW!!!

~

Jack’s eyebrows had grown together years before I met him, no doubt by the end of puberty, and hair now covered his back as well as his chest. It was as thick as fur in some places, something many of my female friends found disgusting. I, however, having grown up in a family full of hairy men, found it familiar, even comforting. Sleeping with Jack was a bit like snuggling up on a sheepskin rug. And having just moved out to this unfamiliar terrain from the East Coast, I welcomed his warm, if shaggy, embrace, particularly during the rains that fell for months on end here. Continue reading →

Written By: Emily Ballaine

Our resident book reviewer, Emily Ballaine has chosen Publik / Private‘s best books of 2014. She spends her time working at Green Apple Books on the Park in San Francisco and has done nothing less than given great insight and honest criticism of some of this year’s most acclaimed books.

Sidewalks -Valeria Luiselli

Mysterious, fragmented dreamscapes. The essays in Sidewalks exist in a place that moves a little slower: meditations and obsessions on empty spaces, new apartments and collapsing buildings. A glimpse of the world through the eyes of a poet. Luiselli has the remarkable ability to make connections, such as comparing her search for the writer Joseph Brodsky’s grave in Venice to the thrill of anticipation when meeting a stranger in a hotel lobby, seem not only natural, but obvious.

Nobody is Ever Missing – Catherine Lacey

My copy of this book is completely dogeared and underlined and I’m starting to lose track of the number of people I’ve forced it upon. Nobody Is Ever Missing tells the story of a woman who decides to abandon her life (without actually informing those she is leaving behind) and take off for New Zealand. Lacey’s writing style is unlike anything I have every read before, alternating between long rambling sentences and short, repetitive images. She writes about our hidden desires for escape and invisibility in a way that is poignant and heartfelt, while never falling prey to sentimentality (this book is definitely dark, in the best possible way). Continue reading →

Written By: Thomas Murphy

Veteran music journalist, Thomas Murphy of the Denver Westword was kind enough to compile the best albums of 2014 for Publik / Private. If anyone knows music, it’s Tom. Check out these awesome 2014 releases!

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Andy Stott – Faith in Strangers – Modern Love

Even when Andy Stott dips into his old bag of tricks for this album he puts an interesting new spin on it. Rather than the smoothed out bass sounds and unconventional dance rhythms found on the Passed Me By EP and Luxury Problems, Stott seems to be tapping into the same cosmic zeitgeist of soundscaping that has informed some of the best work of Hammock, Tim Hecker and A Winged Victory for The Sullen. Naturally, Stott is coming from a different musical place than any of those artists but opening track “Time Away” has that almost 20th Century avant-garde classical sensibility that is one layer of the aesthetic of those artists. The swells and depth of sound work incredibly well together on this release. Stott wasn’t lacking in that capacity on previous albums but it is fully developed here making for a consistently satisfying listen for those who like some mystery with their melodic atmospheres. Continue reading →

Written by: Emily Ballaine

But is it art? This is the question that seems to come up most often when one talks of comics, and really by asking “Is it art?” what one is really asking is “Is it important?” There is the belief that comics are the sort of thing one should “grow out of,” the type of adolescent amusement we abandon upon entering adulthood. The inherent fallacy, however, in that sort of belief is the assumption that comics are an unworthy art form devoid of substance and lacking in that magical ability art has to move us, to make us feel, to connect one lonely soul to another.

Berlatsky’s goal in Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941 – 1948 is one then that is as subversive as the Wonder Woman comics themselves, a desire to change the way we view comics and a belief that comics, as a medium and art form, have the ability to do so, like any great art, to change one’s perception of the world. But here in is also the great struggle of art: many people are unable to change their perceptions, unable to see things from outside themselves. And here I will admit my initial perception of a book about bondage, feminism and Wonder Woman was an assumption that it would be the sort of male-gaze dominated text that leaves one feeling angry and hollowed out and resigned to the fact that there will always be men explaining things. Let me say now, this is not that sort of book. Continue reading →

Written By: Lee Davis / Originally Posted on Le Bete Noire

Those of us who live or have lived in neighborhoods with more liquor stores, pharmacies and churches than cracks in the concrete understand. If you are greeted in the morning to the sounds of a nearby garbage truck having a weeks worth of trash for breakfast, if police sirens, fire trucks, buses account for the daytime noise, while helicopters, gunshots and more sirens wail at night, then you understand. You get it because you inevitably have said it. Perhaps you say it every day.

“I’m good.”

We say it all the time. Like many colorful phrases it has several meanings. It can mean “the world is great,” as in I just got paid or we just had a baby, or I got a great new job. Or it can mean, “I’m surviving,” despite the circumstances, I haven’t gone under yet, I’m up off the canvas. Sometimes we mean it when we say it, and other times, we say it hoping to mean it, knowing nothing could be further from the truth. Continue reading →

I want to bring to you something about you. It is a quote. I quote “Our worst fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves who am I to be brilliant or just talented – fabulous. Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us. It is not just in some of us, it is in everyone and as we let our own light shine we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated by our own fear o ur presence automatically liberates others”. – Marianne Williamson from the lips of Odetta