Publishing Houses (Online): Boost House

Hi everyone. I’ve been cleaning out my drafts and trying to prep some more information about Space In Your Head, as well as online publishing, and mental health. One of my ideas was this: Publishing Houses Online. A segment where I can talk about different publishing opportunities if you don’t think Space In Your Head is right for you. Obviously our target is any art or writing, from people who suffer from mental illnesses. We are less aesthetic based, whereas if you’re a minimalist or new sincerity writer, for example, you might be suited to different publications. Even if you aren’t a writer and are just someone who likes looking at words and cool arty things, you might like to check these out and give them a follow. I’ll be looking at Illuminati Girl Gang, EmpathLit, Electric Cereal and Faces Of Mental Health too, in upcoming versions of these. I might even put them all up tonight and share them at different times, for anyone who is nosey and can’t wait (totally fine, btw.)

In this first edition, we’ll be talking about Boost House. Founded by Steve Roggenbuck, Boost House a publishing group based around making videos and printing books from contributors, as well as making t-shirts and a heap of other thing. They’re also living in a residency style, which is pretty awesome, as it allows all of these differing creative forces to work together and maximise their conceptualisation strategies. They recently released a book ‘I’M ALIVE/ IT HURTS/ I LOVE IT’ and a video for Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, and have in the past printed one of Steve Roggenbuck’s poem books ‘Crunk Juice’, as well as the lit journal ‘Boost House’, PLUS, a Walt Whitman anthology.

What I love about Boost House (aside from the output) is the way they are ambitious, despite having people coming and going. There’s a huge drive to produce original content for everyone, such as their idea to put up a free online school to talk about current issues facing millennials, which I find super important. Boost House have been doing this since 2013, and I’m so proud of their work so far. I know that they’ve got it in them to make something amazing, that will help legitimise what the online lit scene is and encapsulates. And I guess that’s why they’re succeeding as well – they’re all from the internet, essentially. They’ve seen what this scene is twist and turn for years, and now they’ve tried to make a home for it. Not just an online hub, but a physical home, making physical things. That’s why Boost House are killing it, and I wish them all the best.

Boost House have an online store you can find on their website, http://www.boost-house.com. But you should follow them on twitter, @boosthouse and find them on Facebook. They’re always posting really interesting content, and they’re such approachable, and really hardworking, fantastic people.

RIP HTML Giant

Around a week ago today, HTML Giant ceased operations. HTML Giant were one of the places I was first exposed to online writing, and they’ve been doing good things for the duration of their operation. Space In Your Head has been started because of groups such as this, and with alt lit ‘dying’, we’ve started to find our place more and more important. Maybe not being defined by alt lit, but moving to be defined by something different. HTML Giant proved that getting in the middle of a circle of writers was the best way to find new talent. And for me, it showed that you really don’t need to wait for anyone to write a book, or get published, to notice talent. There’s writing everywhere, and it’s up to a good group to help tap into that.

I find Space In Your Head in a strange situation right now. With this exodus of alt lit writers and writing circles, what does that mean for contemporary publishing? For years before this, I thought that publishing online was the way forward, but how do you avoid creating any problems? Within any circle, there’s going to be influential people, and there’s going to be abusive people. We’ve been lucky or under the radar enough to avoid having anything like that come up, and I’d like to hope we’ve had a good mix of submissions, and as proper representation as possible. We love art, and we use what gets sent our way.

Seeing HTML Giant be affected by this is sobering. But as I mentioned in a previous blog post is that this isn’t a bad thing. This is only going to motivate me to promote a safe space for everyone, and a place where art and writing can get shared no matter what, where no weeds can thrive.

I want to be the gardener of this online community. I want to pay close attention to any beautiful seeds I am fortunate enough to come in contact with, and I want to make this into something big. I want more and more people from all over the world sharing their experiences through art. Because with mental health, sharing experience is so important. But of course, you need the right conditions. If I could control the weather, I’d want to make this as bright and sunny as possible.

We’ve had a fortunate first two months. Here’s to many more, of the same feeling, to come.

What makes a Love Letter a Love Letter?

There’s not much time to submit for this months theme. Our philosophy is any art is good art. Some people find solace in making art, and others fine it hard to get their art out there. This month’s theme is ‘Love Letters’, and we hope people haven’t been dissuaded, and we hope you haven’t been thinking ‘I need to pen a love letter.’ Because that’s not the case.

Love Letters aren’t easy. But, they don’t have to be some 19th century ode to someone you find gorgeous (but of course, it can be.) What I love about the internet is the translation of things that appear seemingly one dimensional (just like love letters) into something more accessible. I mean, when the first person wrote a love letter on a typewriter, I’m sure there was some backlash along the lines of ‘But you didn’t put pen to paper! That’s so insincere!’. So of course, you can get typing, you can get penning, you can get your typewriter out, but why keep it limited to words?

Take a selfie. It’s a love letter to yourself. Your best angle, in the best lighting. Or your most artistic take on your face. I find it hard to see this as something non-romantic. Or maybe have someone in the shot, make it about someone else. It’s up to you. Decorate it, put some text, some stickers over it. Make it about love.

Find a picture at home, snap it. Share it, it can be a love letter to that one time you printed film photos, or the park you took this picture.

Paint something, or someone. It can be your love letter to them, or to painting.

Love letters are hardly one dimensional. We’ve had some amazing poems and short pieces come in, but why keep it limited? Express yourself, express your love in a way that you want to. Make it artistic, make it fucking brilliant (because of course you can).

Share your art. Share your love letters. Tweet us, mention us, tag #spaceinyourhead, email us. And most importantly, do your thing!

Are writers just like superheroes?

Over this several carefully paragraphed blog post, I’m going to talk about people like us – superheroes.

Up into the late ours of the night, looking for ‘something’

Anonymous (or ‘masked’, at the very least)

Experts

Outsiders (in the best sense of the word)

Misunderstood

Full of secret weapons

Highly trained

Kick-ass

I mean, this pretty much sums up what a superhero is. And I bet if you’re a writer, there’s a small part of you thinking ‘hey, thats me!’

While our words may not stop crime, words can save lives. Kind words, smart words, insightful words, big words, small words. We’re working to help people, and sometimes, not always, but sometimes, change the world. Our efforts as masked vigilantes, acting alone or in a group, can help people get by that extra day.

Superhero movies always stress an aspect of ‘anyone can be a hero’. I think in the writing world that goes without saying. Any writer can produce something that someone else loves, and sometimes, this turns the writer into a figurehead, or a metaphor, for anyone young or old. Not only someone to look up to, but someone who is pioneering, fighting for a particular ideal. We could talk a lot about what’s more important: a superhero’s actual contributions (eg fighting crime, locking lots of baddies up) or their position as a beacon of hope, that metaphor for something. And while the market for posters in K-Mart with depictions of Chekhov and Vonnegut haven’t quite picked up yet, the names on a bookshelf remain as these go to places for inspiration in a time of desperation.

So how does a writer go from hero, which is a given, to a ‘superhero’?

The words written on a page, or on a screen, have a strange tendency to fight the fears and reservations in our hearts and minds. Whether it’s the fear of an impending assignment, a hard day at work, a relationship, or just a general off feeling, there’s a way that words can fight back for us. Writers create these things, they work hard, tirelessly, and with a vision, so we can pick them up and enjoy them. And that’s the fighting. It’s not vigilantism, it’s not illegal (although it can be), and it’s not a legal grey area – it’s hard work, it’s adored, and it’s effective.

Sure, it’s not fighting crime, but it’s fighting something.

‘To Transit, To You’ Part 5, ‘Belmont (Afterward)’ by Ananta Prayitno

Sitting opposite the way a train’s moving feels like time travel, like abridged history at 55 miles an hour. I could close my eyes for a minute or two and wake up seeing a version of Chicago anywhere from five to a hundred years ago. Sometimes it feels like rebirth.

These past few days I’ve ridden into Belmont wanting to catch a glimpse of you on the platform, the person whose hand I’d hold through the quiet dinners, through the unseasonable cold. You, who felt my heartbeat thudding on your back and the lingering sunlight.

I want to see you framed by the brick gradients, waiting behind the blue–a small reassurance that you’re living, breathing, healing. It’s one of the few times I want the conductor to slow down, so I can sit in vain hope that I’ll see you and one day we’ll ride together again.

As far as this train goes.

‘To Transit, To You’ Part 4. ‘Merchandise Mart’ by Ananta Prayitno

On the first day of my first job in town, I got off the Brown Line at a station more than a mile walk away from where I needed to be. The weekend prior was spent packing my material life into a cross-country U-Haul. A buddy and I left Austin at 11 AM on Saturday and drove through the night to get to my new apartment by 8 on Sunday. We ran on jet fuel and pop music. By that morning it was fumes.

My harried scrambling served as a quick lesson on navigation in the style of Stonehenge. The rising sun funneled itself between the buildings, I knew I needed to go east, I walked towards it. I tried to play the entire ordeal off when I showed up in front of the receptionist out of breath and sweating through my clothes.

That station, Merchandise Mart, became a habit.

It wasn’t the closest Brown Line stop to the office but it was close enough to where I could get a lay of the land by wandering to work from it. I’d still start each walk with a wrong turn, but as the week went on I started to panic less. I spent more time studying the jagged scrapes of blue formed by rooftops and the steam floating from them. I imagined the buildings as tumblers in a deadbolt, poised.

The last time I was at Merchandise Mart, I was holding your hand. You were wearing a striped dress, I was in a plaid shirt. I liked watching how you fixed your hair, lightly twisting locks between your middle and ring finger to brush them aside. We went out on the river in a tourist boat and I wrapped my arm around you, feeling the sun stick to our skin and fabrics as a woman gave a well-rehearsed spiel about the city’s architecture. All I cared to see was the way your lips curled for a smile.

Chicago’s a city where it’s hard not to fall deeper in love.

‘To Transit, To You’ Part 3 – ‘Belmont’. By Ananta Prayitno

The trains sound like they’re dying whenever they take a bend too quickly. A lot of times, this happens at Belmont.

Heading south, the Brown, Red and Purple lines feed into Belmont and start sharing a path, the tracks turn from a dizzying soup of rust and curved rails into neat, orderly rows. I’d close my book for a second and listen to the growing din of people moving towards the doors. Three quarters of the passengers would exit, half of that would come in to fill in the gaps.

Riding home one afternoon, I stood next to a coworker for ten minutes before realizing he was there. He tapped me on the shoulder, we got to talking. I complained about the average forty minutes it would take for me to get from door to door. I told him how nice it was to have so much time to think and read but how draining it was; I could be doing those things at home, and I wasn’t home, and I wouldn’t be home for another ten stops.

“When I worked for Discover, I used to take the Purple Line to State and Lake. Most of the time, when it got to Belmont there’d be a Red Line waiting,” he said, “I looked it up and saw both lines take you to Lake, but the Red does it in less stops.” I checked the printed map in the train car. “So this one time,” he went on, “I said, ‘fuck it’ and crossed over.” We laughed. “You should try it.”

Time on the CTA is a twisted arithmetic. Fifteen minutes can be the difference between being wedged close enough to strangers to know whether they’ve skipped breakfast and having the luxury of sitting while staring at shoes. Fifteen minutes can trick your entire body into living 26 hour days. I took my coworker’s advice the next morning.

Shaving fifteen minutes off my commute was a revelation.

‘To Transit, To You’ Part 2 – Kimball. By Ananta Prayitno.

At the end of the Brown Line, just past the north branch of the Chicago River, is a neighborhood called Albany Park. It’s a cash-only kind of community where the Jordanian grocery tosses its spilled corn flakes out front for the birds while a block away two Korean grandmothers bake cakes for quinceañeras.

I live perpendicular to them, in a century-old three-flat that groans whenever someone opens the door and smells like it’s burning whenever the heater starts up. Once I tell people how much I pay in rent I get a mix of disbelief, scoffs and expletives that ask, “What are you giving up by being there?”

The question eats away at me when the clerk at the corner store hands me my change while wearing blue latex gloves, when it’s storming and the litter floats on the streets in a river of rain and rehydrated piss. I’ll wake up the next bright morning to laughter and the smell of paella from next door, to the romanticism of riding a train until its very last stop. Where it can finally get some rest.

Recently realtors and developers have pitched Albany Park as right on the edge of gentrification, that sooner rather than later they’ll barrel through the ancient, creaking bungalows and the quiet working-class families living in them will flock further west, past the highway, out of sight. One night I met a man named Victor, born and raised in the neighborhood, who said: “You know a place’s changed when you see white kids walking around with cases of PBR like it’s no big deal.”

‘To Transit, To You’, Part I. “Chicago” – Ananta Prayitno

The CTA runs thousands of miles each day. Elevated rails weave through Chicago like the tangled strands of a nightstand hairbrush.

There are two stretches of underground track that run parallel to each other, cutting across downtown. These subways are caverns of light mildew, pothole puddles seep through their ceilings. The squeaks and screams of wheels on rails take priority over anything else you’d hear.

Most people riding do so in silence.

My current job is just outside the Red Line station at Chicago and State. In the morning I have to push through a dozen people less than six inches apart from each other to get off the train. I look dead ahead to the exit, it’s the only way to ignore their discontent.

One day, I squeezed through the crowd and ripped my headphones off in the process. I stepped against the wall and decided to pack them into my pocket. It wasn’t long before the other commuters cleared the platform. Once I started for the stairs, I could hear the sound of cooing bouncing around the tunnel’s acoustics.

Six feet ahead of me was a fat, scruffy pigeon. Gray feathers, bright green tuft along its neck. I stopped to think about the logistical nightmare it must’ve taken for that pigeon to start pecking around for crumbs left behind by tourists. My heart warmed in the strangest corners. I tried giving it a name.

Fucking Phillip. I see him every week.

The Alt Lit Scandal – Our Thoughts.

TW: Rape

The news recently about the abusive alt lit community is deeply disturbing. I have a couple of things to say on the issue regarding mental health, online communities, support, this project.

Tao Lin could only be described as hero of mine, a favourite writer, I’ve met him, I wanted a tattoo of something he drew.
Richard Yates was the first book of his I read. I always thought was about a relationship that was fucked beyond its limits. I guess I didn’t really think about it too much. The person this story was based on has come forth and said that Lin was abusing her at the time, he stole her emails and work for his book, and it is not something he should be profiting off. The conflict has finishing with both of them saying it was their issue, but this came out in-amongst a series of people telling about rape that has come from several other writers, such as Stephen Tully Dierks.

I’m really fucking disturbed that this is a thing in the community.

Alt Lit is a space I’ve studied this online space a lot in my degree, and this group was heavily inspired by it. Originally, I wanted to be distanced from it, use the concept of an online lit community, but try and do my own thing. I was there in its earlier stages, when i was interested in creating my own work, and I loved it. There was a lot of support for writers of all kinds. Slowly, it became hierarchical and poisonous and not conducive to original work. I hated it in the end.

I saw more positive things coming from Illhueminati, and Steve Roggenbuck, who again, both began and (Steve at least) still identifies as being a part of the community. There were some really original works being made, and there still are in other branches of what the community was. But this news is just too much. I don’t want to continue supporting this, and I feel even more motivated to use Space In Your Head as a safe, supportive space for art and writing of all kinds. This is what I really want to do with this opportunity I have. And I hope everyone can continue supporting this.

Abusive relationships are a huge, huge problem. Masculinity, emotional manipulation, are present and that’s fucked. These people who have come out are so fucking brave. It’s clear that there is a lot of fucked up things going on in these communities. Space In Your Head is here for any of you, at any time, even if you want to talk, not necessarily share art. You can always email us at thespaceinyourhead@gmail.com.

We want this place to be free of shit. We want this place to grow. We want this place to be supportive, kind, and fostering the amazing work that everyone is creating.