Embroidered Worlds Meets First Kickstarter Goal in 24 Hours!

We reached our first Kickstarter goal of $5000 in less than 24 hours! That’s amazing!

Thank you thank you thank you!

Thank you to everyone who has supported us so far! Щиро дякуємо! 

Someone asked me a question about the stretch goals, so I wanted to take a moment to explain.

The way Kickstarter is set up, if a project does not reach its funding goal, none of the rewards are processed and the money is not charged. So instead it encourages creators to establish a series of goals, starting small and building step by step toward the most ambitious version of the final product.

In planning the Embroidered Worlds Kickstarter campaign, we were able to set different goals along the way. We would love to achieve all of them, but we started modestly. That way, no matter what, once we were funded we would be able to publish the book of stories by Ukrainian writers published in English for the first time!  We have now achieved this!

This means we can turn our attention to the next goals, and share the project with more people. Hopefully we can broaden our audience of readers!

  • With our base funding of $5000, we will be able to produce and print the book, with, at a minimum, the stories funded by the grant, as well as translations into English for a story written in Ukrainian by Tatiana Adamenko and stories written in Hungarian by Károj D. Balla and Éva Berniczky.
  • At $7000 we can commit to adding a selection of diaspora stories including ones by R.B. Lemberg, Valya Dudycz Lupescu, and Natalka Roshak, and also pay all three editors for their work.
  • At $10,000 we will produce a completed collection, including stories by Elizabeth Bear, Anatoly Belilovsky, David Demchuk, Halyna Lipatova, Askold Melnyczuk, and Mikhailo Nazarenko, Stefan O. Rak, and A.D. Sui.
  • At $20,000 we will hire a Ukrainian artist to design custom bookplates for this campaign only that will show that your copy is an original Founder edition. These bookplates will be sent with all print copies (for some international shipments, in separate packaging).
  • At $25,000 we’ll provide all backers a swag pack of cool, exclusive digital rewards from Atthis Arts.
  • At $30,000 we will hire three Ukrainian artists for interior illustrations, and include those in the book, all editions.
  • At $50,000 we will make available a limited-edition, numbered hardcover, with art prints of the cover and illustrations that can be framed.

Each level allow us to enhance the reading experience for our backers. (How amazing would it be to be able to make a limited-edition, numbered hardcover edition! Art prints!)

Achieving these stretch goals also means that more books are being ordered and shared! In turn, that makes it possible for our publisher to continue producing more wonderful projects in the future. I’ll keep posting updates and information here, and if you’re a backer, you’ll be receiving updates from me and others on the Kickstarter page as we go through this campaign.

Thank you again for your support, generosity, and enthusiasm!

Neil Gaiman delivered a commencement speech that was published in a book, “Make Good Art.” I’ve quoted from it before, because Neil is wise and there are a lot of good gems in there. I’d like to leave you with this:

And remember that whatever discipline you are in, whether you are a musician or a photographer, a fine artist or a cartoonist, a writer, a dancer, a designer, whatever you do you have one thing that’s unique. You have the ability to make art.

And for me, and for so many of the people I have known, that’s been a lifesaver. The ultimate lifesaver. It gets you through good times and it gets you through the other ones.

Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do.

Make good art.

Thank you again. We are able to make good art because of your support. Thank you.

Let’s keep making good art. Together!

Deepwater Horizon

Description from NASA (source): "NASA's Terra Satellites Sees Spill on May 24 Sunlight illuminated the lingering oil slick off the Mississippi Delta on May 24, 2010. The Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image the same day.

Ten years ago today, the semi-submersible offshore drilling rig the Deepwater Horizon sank, following an explosion that left the oil well gushing and caused the largest marine oil spill in history. 

This poem was inspired by that tragedy. It first appeared in Mythic Delirium in 2014:

Deepwater

April 22, 2010

Oil gushes like a wound, carrying with it the death of more creatures
than my Gulf has accepted for millennia, but this is massacre not sacrifice
offered up to unnamed gods of chaos who live in primordial seas.

As the oil consumes scales, wings, skins, and blood, it sinks like a horrible prayer.
I rise to the surface and step with feet the color of moss onto beaches covered with corpses.
Where my tears fall, spring up the tiniest flowers made from the bones of murdered fish.
When the winds blow through their delicate petals, they chime with the sound of tiny hurricanes.

I cradle dead dolphins and scream. Beneath black waters, white threads of light swirl
as they ascend, growing brighter until they explode into pure fury
formed into a flying beast of teeth, shell shards, and coral. The old god lands beside me.
Our footsteps thunder like war drums as we hunt to drain the waters of those responsible
and seal their shriveled souls into shells cast down to the bottom for fodder.

I have slept with monsters older than ice; those who swim through rock and fire,
creatures of mouth and ash. They will welcome my offering
and maybe get a taste for the world above. Perhaps they will rise to swallow cities
before returning to their volcanic dreams.

* * *

Related, my friend Eric Cox of the band The Belle Weather wrote the song “Dive” in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. They just released a new video and new recording of “Dive” for the 10th anniversary of the tragic event. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful. <3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciqk2fw8qDI

“I woke up the following morning and watched the underwater camera detail the billowing plume of oil gushing from the well. I also came across a photograph of an incredible Louisiana Brown Pelican standing tall in the surf, drenched in oil. She peered back into the lens of the camera as if to say, “You have to do better than this for us.” I wrote ‘Dive’ as a love song from that pelican to an ocean who is no longer the lover she used to be.”

-Eric Cox// The Belle Weather

 

 

Art in the Time of Quarantine

Time. Time is one of the threads that everyone seems to touch on these days in their tweets and posts. We have long been guided by schedules of work and school and other constructs, and then this virus hit and everything changed, slowed down, stopped, went out of sync. 

Each of us is going through this surreal shared moment in time, viewing the world through our own lenses, with our unique combinations of challenges and privileges, maybe sharing that view with the people we are living with or talking to. My experience is enmeshed with that of the kids. Most of the day we’re all doing our “work,” but then we have a lot of dinner-table conversations, and I cherish those, a chance to check in with one another after the day of work and school work—a time to ask about “How Things Are Going.” 

Some days the answer is: not great, frustrated, scared, lonely, restless, angry. Some days the answer is better, ok, not bad, better. So much depends on who we have (or have not)  interacted with, and how we have related with them during that day. So much depends on what we’ve heard of the news. So much depends on how the kids are doing.

When trauma typically happens at schools (and the current generation of elementary and high school students have had too much experience with this), we call in counselors. We have talking circles and support groups. We make allowances for ordinary responsibilities to allow some room for processing and healing. We try to help the kids because most of them don’t have the tools they need. Right now, those systems are not really in place to help them—even with teachers and parents trying the best they can. 

The kids have been doing the best they can, and I’m of the philosophy that we need to temper our expectations right now. If many of us, the adults, are not ok, how can we expect the kids to be? 

So they do their homework and they miss their friends; they try to connect online and on the phone, watch movies and read, and have their own creative ways of dealing with it all. 

My son is a musician and composer, and he decided when the shelter-in-place started that he would write a new song approximately every other day. 

I’m reminded of a quote from Neil Gaiman’s keynote address for the May 17, 2012 commencement ceremony at The University of the Arts. He said: 

“Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do.

“Make good art.”

This is something I often quote to my kids. Creativity is a tool we have when we need it, when we can use it. It’s not always possible. Sometimes we have to wait for life to give us a window. Sometimes we have to make that window. Sometimes we make good art.

Everyone is wondering when things will go back to “normal.” Will they ever?

I don’t think we can know what normal is going to look like. I do believe that this time will irrevocably transform our children and what they do to shape their future in ways that we cannot even imagine. I feel like the things people are doing right now to express themselves, to connect creatively with one another, to be as present for one another as possible—these will be the touchstones we have to remind us of this time and why we reshaped the future accordingly, hopefully for the the better.