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Photo Courtesy of Megan Piphus Peace/Vanderbilt/Sesame Street

MEET THE FIRST BLACK WOMAN PUPPETEER ON SESAME STREET
29th August 2022 by BOTWC Staff

The “Vanderbilt Ventriloquist’ has now made history as the first Black woman puppeteer on Sesame Street, Vanderbilt University reports. 

Megan Piphus Peace was first introduced to puppetry at the age of 10, attending a puppetry conference in Illinois with her Vacation Bible School teacher. She fell in love with the artform and ventriloquism, relating it to her favorite childhood TV programs like Sesame Street and Lamb Chop’s Play-Along. Her mother saw Peace’s passion, supporting her with VHS tapes of ventriloquists to study and a doll from famous entertainer Edgar Bergen so Peace could practice. It all paid off and Peace began performing when she was just in elementary school. By the time she was 15, she was featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show. 

“What I consider the magic of ventriloquism is getting to share that experience with someone else and have them believe that our conversations are real. I realized what an impact the writing could have on the audience, and that every age could learn something from the show. From then on, my goal was to have a theme…woven into every performance,” Peace explained.

She continued her work through highschool and when she started college at Vanderbilt University, she became known as the “Vanderbilt Ventriloquist,” performing on major platforms like the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and America’s Got Talent. Peace graduated in 2014, subsequently earning her master’s in finance from Vanderbilt as well and beginning a professional career in real estate finance. 

Peace continued doubling as a puppeteer, continuing performing across the country and abroad, working on various television shows and collaborating with the University of Cincinnati in 2019 on a musical series that taught children basic financial literacy. For her work, she received two Emmy awards for best composition and best children’s short. Now Peace has landed her biggest deal yet, joining the cast of Sesame Street in 2020 and making history last September as the first Black woman puppeteer, playing the role of 6-year-old Gabrielle. 

The puppeteer said she had no idea the role was historic and she is so grateful for the opportunity. 

“I would have cried like a baby on the 123 steps if they had told me beforehand…The sets of Sesame Street are like walking into a fantasy. To be there is really something,” said Peace. 

The process to be on the show was arduous, Peace submitting her first audition tape in 2017. She wouldn’t get a call back from Matt Vogel, the show’s puppet captain, until March 2020. He suggested she enroll in a virtual workshop to learn Muppet-style puppetry. She did and it paid off. 

“It takes time to go through video submissions, but once we do, we earmark people that we’d like to invite to a workshop where we see their skills as a puppeteer and actor in person. Zoom is not an ideal way to conduct a workshop, but we made the best of it and Megan was game to learn,” Vogel explained. 

During that time Sesame Workshop was working on their racial justice initiative and Vogel, who voices Big Bird and Kermit the Frog, said Peace was on a shortlist to play Gabrielle. 

“Megan was our choice from the beginning. She already had lip sync skills from her abilities as a ventriloquist,” said Vogel. 

Once Peace perfected her monitor work, it was a perfect match, Leslie Carrara-Rudolph, another puppeteer on the show calling her “incredible.”

“We needed authentic representation, and Megan is incredible. She’s got a light inside her,” said Carrara-Rudolph. 

Congratulations Megan! Because of you, we can!

 

ARticle URL

https://www.becauseofthemwecan.com/blogs/botwc-firsts/vanderbilt-ventriloquist-makes-history-as-first-black-woman-puppeteer-on-sesame-street

 

When you can imagine dragons but not imagine Black people in fantasy stories, your racism is showing
OPINION: White people are once again up in arms about Black characters appearing in their favorite fantasy series. You know why. 

Monique Judge
  |  
Sep 8, 2022

Wil Johnson, left, and Steve Toussaint in HBO's "House of the Dragon." (Photo by Ollie Upton/HBO)
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own.

Before I even get into this, let me (re)state for the record that when I say “white people,” I do not mean, all white people. It is more of the general you versus the specific you type of reference. I know y’all like to get your panties in a bunch about this; I have the inbox messages to prove it, but I want you to know that if it doesn’t apply? You are more than welcome to let it fly. Please and thank you. I am currently on a white tears diet, and I don’t need yours. 

Speaking of white tears, have you seen all the white tears all over the internet because both the new Game of Thrones series and the new Lord of the Rings series have dared to cast Black actors in primary roles?

If you have not, please allow me to get you caught up a little bit.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, an am*zon Prime series that is a prequel to The Lord of the Rings franchise, and House of the Dragon, an HBO series that is a prequel to Game of Thrones, both debuted recently to rave reviews. Even as fans rave daily about both series, there is a rumbling in the background of disgruntled “fans” who are upset that Black actors are in roles that they believe should be played by white people because there were actually no Black people during the time of dragons and wizards and magic and stuff. 

Seriously, that is indeed the logic of some arguing against the Black cast members. Some have been straightforward with it and made outright racist remarks. I have also seen others say on Twitter that they think the shows are being too “woke” (remind me to talk about the bastardization of that word at another time) and interjecting “politics” into their fantasy stories. 

Because putting make-believe Black characters in make-believe stories about make-believe people in make-believe lands that do not even exist is totally political and woke and beyond the pale. 

This comes from the same group of people who read the Bible, know Jesus was a Middle Eastern Jewish man and still made him white with blonde hair and blue eyes in all of their iconography. I guess it’s totally OK to play loose and fast with the “word of God,” but absolutely offensive to do so with fantasy characters written out of someone’s imagination. 

We’ve seen this before, of course. 

It really bothers (some) white people that Black people get cast in their favorite make-believe stories. Maybe we are infringing on their ability to make believe that we don’t exist. Whatever the case may be, it’s seriously time to get over it, like Whoopi said. 

If you can believe that fire-breathing, flying dinosaurs not only exist but will allow certain individuals—from a certain family with thousands of generations of inbreeding and some genetic mutation that makes a portion of them come out with dragon-like qualities themselves—to hop on their backs and order them to breathe hellfire on command, it really should not be that difficult to imagine that some of those inbred individuals might have dark skin, violet eyes and that weirdo lacefront hair color. Please. 

In summation, I want y’all to stop being so stingy with the ball. We want to play too, and let’s face it, we are good at a lot of these things just like (some) of y’all are, so calm down and enjoy the show. 

Hey. At least it will be easier for you to know these characters by name. There aren’t that many of us in it. 

Monique Judge is a storyteller, content creator and writer living in Los Angeles. She is a word nerd who is a fan of the Oxford comma, spends way too much time on Twitter, and has more graphic t-shirts than you. Follow her on Twitter @thejournalista or check her out at moniquejudge.com.

Article URL
https://thegrio.com/2022/09/08/when-you-can-imagine-dragons-but-not-imagine-black-people-in-fantasy-stories-your-racism-is-showing/

 

MY THOUGHTS

I completely oppose that title. There are already fantasy stories with black people. this isn't about Black people in fantasy stories, this is about characters being manipulated for no reason. I am a writer. Admittedly, no where near known or popular like Tolkien or George RR Martin but in most of my fantasy stories there are no whites. Does this mean black characters in my stories must be turned white? Its silly. Authors like Nnedi Okarafor or Octavia Butler or Nalo Hopkinson created fantasy stories with a plethora of black people. Even if Tananarive Due or  Steven Barnes or Jordan Peele don't have a fantasy work that may fit some theme, they damn sure can write one. Finance their work into shows and give the Black actors the Black roles. This isn't about negative bias. This is about forcing monoracial fantasy environments to reflect the USA.  I read the books. MArtin has black people, they are called summer islanders and far more Black people live in sothoryos. Tolkien has dark skinned Black people, they are in Far HArad. Both of those places aren't involved in the stories in the books in question in a major way. Cause if Corlys Valearyon can be played by a black thespian then why can't anansi be played by a white one? why can't John Henry? will I like it if John Henry is played by a white man? hell no. But, if a white fantasy character can be portrayed by someone not white then  black people can't protest when a black fantasy character is played by someone not black. The door swings both ways. I wrote in email to George RR Martin's publicist and the Tolkien estate. With no hope to reply, let me write a story about Sothoryos or Far Harad. I offer other black writers do the same. Then the black thespians can have even more roles in the Black places in the Map of MArtin's or Tolkiens world.  I oppose this line of thinking. IT isn't about negative bias, it is about getting fantasy worlds to reflect the multiracial reality of the USA. But, neither of Tolkien's or MArtin's fantasy worlds are based on the USA. Both are based on north western  Europe between circa 900 and 1300 after the death of jesus. Where Black people were not present in any noticeable form. I despise this line of thinking. 
 

Female Workers Face Rape, Harassment In U.S. Agriculture Industry

June 25, 2013, 2:39 am ET by Bernice Yeung and Grace Rubenstein, The Center for Investigative Reporting

 

SUNNYSIDE, Wash. – Esther Abarca said the foreman drove to parts of the apple orchard that she had never seen. Deep into the ranch, in what she could describe only as a “desolate place,” he parked the truck, reached over and tried to grab her.

Weeping as she told her story, Abarca said the foreman got out of the truck when she resisted his advances. He opened the side door, climbed on top of her, and began to kiss and grope her. She called for help and tried to push him away, but he got her pants halfway off.

“I kept screaming, but there was nobody there,” Abarca said.

Abarca said she kept screaming as the foreman groped her. But then, as if suddenly chastened by her crying, kicking and pushing, she said he stopped. He told her that if she didn’t tell anyone what had happened, he’d give her $3,000 for a new car.

Abarca, a mother of three, said she refused the money.

“I told him that that was the very reason why I had come here to work, that I did not need him to give me any money at all,” she said.

The foreman’s alleged first assault came in 2009, during the long days of the Yakima Valley apple harvest in central Washington. An immigrant from Mexico, Abarca was new to the Evans Fruit Co., one of the country’s largest apple producers.

Nearly four years later, Abarca’s story was the subject of a federal court case testing whether the owners of Evans Fruit looked the other way as their workers claimed they were subjected to repeated sexual violence and harassment by an orchard foreman and crew bosses.

It was a rare public accusation for an immigrant, many of whom fear retaliation and deportation if they speak up. Abarca was testifying in only the second case of a farmworker claiming sexual harassment to reach a federal court trial.

Although the exact scope of sexual violence and harassment against agricultural workers is impossible to pinpoint, an investigation by The Center for Investigative Reporting and the Investigative Reporting Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism reveals persistent peril for women working in the food industry. An estimated 560,000 women work on U.S. farms.

In partnership with FRONTLINE and Univision, CIR and IRP spent nearly a year reviewing thousands of pages of documents and crisscrossing the nation – from the tightly ordered orchards of the Yakima Valley to the leafy tomato fields of southern Florida – to hear workers’ stories of sexual assault.

Hundreds of female agricultural workers have complained to the federal government about being raped and assaulted, verbally and physically harassed on the job, while law enforcement has done almost nothing to prosecute potential crimes.

In virtually all of the cases reviewed, the alleged perpetrators held positions of power over the women. Despite the accusations, these supervisors have remained on the job for years without fear of arrest.

At the trial, Abarca was among more than a dozen women who had accused a foreman, Juan Marin, and a handful of crew leaders at Evans Fruit of sexually assaulting or harassing them. For her part, Abarca said she had been topping off bins with just-picked apples when the foreman called to her from his pickup. He told her to get in the truck, she testified.

Marin said he never sexually assaulted or harassed Abarca or any of the other women, and he has not been arrested or prosecuted in criminal court for the allegations.

At a federal civil trial this year featuring 14 women telling their stories, a jury found that whatever had happened at Evans Fruit, it did not create a sexually hostile work environment, which had to be established before the company could be held liable.

Government attorneys who prosecuted the civil case have requested a new trial. In court filings, they called the verdict “unmoored from the actual evidence.”

Marin, who had worked for Evans Fruit for more than three decades, said the claims are based on lies and rumors spread by “a bunch of jealous people” who are trying to win money from the company.

“I’ve been accused of sexual harassment, and that’s completely a lie,” Marin said in one of several interviews. “Because I never bothered nobody. The only thing I’ve been doing in my life is work. To me it’s so unfair, because I never did nothing like that in my life.”

Nevertheless, two complaints against Marin prompted owner Bill Evans to write him a letter in 2006, four years before Marin was fired for alleged embezzlement.

“We don’t have the time or energy to continue dealing with the problems you are bringing down on us,” the letter said. “Any further incidents or complaints of sexual harassment and you will be discharged.”

The company drafted its first sexual harassment policy in 2008.

A National Problem

Reports of harassment and sexual violence against female farmworkers span the U.S. map.

In Molalla, Ore., a worker at a tree farm accused her supervisor of repeatedly raping her over the course of several months in 2006 and 2007, often holding gardening shears to her throat. If she complained to anyone, he allegedly told her, he would fire her and kill her entire family.

The supervisor never was prosecuted, and a civil case against the tree farm was settled for $150,000 in 2011 without the company acknowledging wrongdoing. The payment went to the woman and three family members who said they were harassed or fired in retaliation.

Three hundred miles away, in Lind, Wash., an egg farm manager forced a woman working alone in a hen-laying house to routinely give him oral sex to keep her job between 2003 and 2010, according to a statement she gave to the sheriff. In an interview with the sheriff, the manager denied the accusation. He did not return calls for comment.

That case was settled for $650,000 this year – most of it to be paid to the woman and four other workers who claimed the company had fired them in retaliation for complaining. The manager no longer works at the farm.

In a case pending in Mississippi federal court, dozens of women hired to debone chickens at a poultry processing plant said they were violently groped by a supervisor between 2004 and 2008. One woman who said she was grabbed between her legs had to seek medical attention, according to court filings.

And a worker at a Salinas, Calif.-based lettuce farm accused a manager of raping her in 2006 – a charge he denied to company management, according to court documents. Maricruz Ladino sued the grower, and the case was settled for an undisclosed amount in 2010. She did not file a police report, and there was no criminal prosecution. He no longer works for the company.

“There are supervisors who try to use their power to mistreat people or to abuse them,” said Ladino, who has since left the company. “And it’s very difficult to fight against that because we are working out of necessity, because we need to provide for our families.”

Dan Fazio, director of the Washington Farm Labor Association, an employment firm that coordinates farm and seasonal employees in the Pacific Northwest, said similar problems exist in other industries, and he points to an example of workplace rape that involved a real estate company.

“Harassment occurs in agriculture,” he said, “but there is no proof that it occurs more (often) in agriculture.”

But a review of the 41 federal sexual harassment lawsuits filed against agricultural enterprises since 1998 – when the first federal lawsuit was filed against an agricultural company for failing to stop harassment or abuse – reveals a pattern of supervisors accused of preying on multiple workers.

Among these were at least 153 people who alleged workplace abuses, the vast majority by their superiors. Of the lawsuits, 7 out of 8 involved workers claiming physical harassment, assault or rape.

According to civil court documents, in nearly every case, workers made complaints to company management and, among those, 85 percent faced retaliation – such as being demoted, fired or further harassed. In their review of the federal cases, CIR and IRP could not find a single case in which the men accused of sexual assault or rape in the civil suits had been criminally prosecuted.

Cycle of Silence

An estimated 50 to 75 percent of U.S. farmworkers immigrated to the U.S. illegally, according to advocacy groups and government surveys. In interviews, more than 100 government officials, law enforcement officials, lawyers and social service providers said shame, fear of deportation or losing a job, language barriers and ignorance of workplace laws keep low-wage immigrant laborers silent.

For government lawyer William R. Tamayo, whose father worked at sugarcane plantations in Hawaii, the first inkling of what was happening to women in America’s fields and packinghouses came when he visited with California labor advocates in the mid-1990s.

“They said farmworker women were talking about the fields as the fils de calzón, or ‘fields of panties,’ ” said Tamayo, the regional attorney in San Francisco for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which files sexual harassment lawsuits on behalf of employees, including farm and food factory workers. “They referred to the fields as the ‘green motel.’ ”

Without immigration papers or job options, many agricultural workers live the largely traceless lives that low-wage seasonal work demands. For some, it’s a shadow dimension of disposable phones, weekly visits to check-cashing chains and elusive last-known addresses.

It’s a life based on the incessant search for the next job in whatever crop needs harvesting. Migrant workers can land year-round gigs at dairies or processing plants, but it’s not easy to forget their own financial instability – and supervisors know this.

If a foreman wants to test the extent of his authority, here are the perfect victims, worker advocates said.

“Sexual violence doesn’t happen unless there’s an imbalance of power,” Tamayo said. “And in the agricultural industry, the imbalance of power between perpetrator, company and the worker is probably at its greatest.”

The combination of financial desperation and tenuous immigration status make agricultural workers vulnerable to workplace violence and less inclined to report crimes. The federal government estimates that 65 percent of all sexual assault and rape victims never report the crime.

Immigrants, especially those who entered the country without authorization, are even less likely to complain, according to academic studies.

The legal research and advocacy group ASISTA surveyed more than 100 women working at Iowa meatpacking plants in 2009. An analysis of these surveys shows that 41 percent said they’d experienced unwanted touching, and about 30 percent reported receiving sexual propositions.

More than 25 percent of the women said they’d been threatened with firing or harder work if they didn’t let the aggressor have his way.

It’s a similar picture in California, where a UC Santa Cruz study of 150 female farmworkers published in 2010 found that nearly 40 percent experienced sexual harassment ranging from verbal advances to rape on the job, and 24 percent said they had experienced sexual coercion by a supervisor.

Many take sexual harassment as a job hazard, advocates said.

When attorney Laura Mahr started talking to Oregon’s female farmworkers about sexual harassment and assault, some of them said, “ ‘Oh, that’s not just part of the job? You have laws about that?’ ”

Many women, Mahr said, have risked their lives to cross the border, sometimes becoming indebted to human smugglers along the way. Coming forward means possibly losing their livelihood.

“It’s an epidemic in the field,” said Dolores Huerta, co-founder of United Farm Workers. “It goes back to the vulnerability that women have … especially if they’re undocumented. And you know, the machismo culture of power and when you think of this type of sexual harassment or rape, it’s always about power of men over women.”

Few Complaints Make It To Court

The only federal agency actively and systematically pursuing on-the-job sexual violence and harassment cases on behalf of agricultural workers is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is responsible for enforcing civil rights laws in the workplace.

In the past 15 years, workers have filed 1,106 sexual harassment complaints with the commission against agricultural-related industries. The allegations range from verbal harassment to rape.

Only a fraction will make it to federal court. The commission declines to pursue about 50 percent of the sexual harassment complaints across all industries for lack of substance. Another portion is settled out of court.

For the few cases in which the commission files a lawsuit in federal court – 130 cases last year out of about 11,000 sexual harassment complaints across all businesses in the U.S. – a handful will make it to trial.

Some growers said they believe the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is too adversarial and aggressive through litigation. Brendan V. Monahan, an attorney for Evans Fruit, said the commission approaches farmers as the enemy rather than trying to work constructively with them.

“The EEOC has imagined this adversarial relationship between farmers and laborers that I don’t think really exists, and they have chosen to champion labor in an imagined fight against farmers,” he said. “It should be a matter of conciliation and compliance rather than confrontation and coerced enforcement.”

But David Lopez, general counsel for the commission, disagreed and said it files cases involving “egregious cases of discrimination” that warrant civil prosecution, and he warned against painting the entire agricultural industry as bad actors.

Nevertheless, he said, “I do know that we do see very serious cases of discrimination and harassment in the agricultural industry.”

Although agriculture is America’s oldest industry, the first sexual harassment lawsuit against a grower to reach a jury trial was in 2004. The Evans Fruit trial this year was the second.

That landmark first case involved Olivia Tamayo, who worked for California-based Harris Farms, among the largest agribusinesses in the country. (Olivia Tamayo is not related to William Tamayo, the attorney for the federal commission.) She said a supervisor named Rene Rodriguez raped her three separate times after showing her he was carrying a gun. Rodriguez denied it.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed suit against Harris Farms on her behalf in 2002. After a 23-day trial, the jury found Harris Farms liable for sexual harassment and retaliation and awarded nearly $800,000 in lost wages and compensatory and punitive damages.

In a statement, CEO John Harris said the company denies any wrongdoing. The workers had a consensual relationship that the company did not know about, Harris said in the statement. He said although the jury believed the accused employee was a supervisor, “we felt he was not.”

Rodriguez retired in 1999. At an interview at his home in South Texas, Rodriguez insisted that he and Olivia Tamayo had been dating. She accused him of rape, he said, because she wanted money.

“No, no, no, no,” he said when asked if he’d used violence against Olivia Tamayo. “If that was how it was from the beginning, I would have been jailed or something.”

Olivia Tamayo’s lawyer, William J. Smith, a longtime civil rights advocate, said that when she won her case, he thought it would change the landscape for agricultural workers. He said he knows differently now.

“Even though Olivia Tamayo stood up for her rights, people are still afraid,” he said. “I don’t think it caught on the way we thought it would because the fear is still out there.”

Farmworkers’ vulnerability is compounded because a number of federal labor laws, ranging from minimum wage to underage work, don’t apply in agriculture. A handful of states, including California, Oregon and Washington, provide stronger legal protections.

“If there’s violation of wage and hour laws, if there are children laboring in the fields, of course there’s going to be sexual harassment, because even the bread-and-butter issues aren’t being addressed,” said Ramón Ramírez, a founder and president of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, the farmworkers union based in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

This year, growers and labor advocates are closely watching as a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws makes its way through Congress. Proponents say the bill, if approved, could offer protections for agricultural workers to more readily report abuse on the job.

“One of the fundamental reasons we have to get comprehensive immigration reform is so we can stop the daily routine rape of women in the workplace,” said U.S. Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, D-Ill., a vocal proponent of an overhaul.

But some who support new immigration laws have doubts that they would curb sexual harassment in the fields.

Fazio of the Washington Farm Labor Association said workers who have been assaulted or raped already qualify for a special visa for crime victims. Providing provisional status through the bill, he said, “is not going to make a person more likely to come forward.”

The primary solution lies with employers, who must create a “culture of compliance,” he said. “They need to put systems in place.”

Cases Difficult to Pursue

Beyond the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, farmworkers in some parts of the country can turn to state agencies to file workplace sexual harassment cases against agricultural employers. But those are rare.

In Washington – home to more agricultural workers than any state except California – laborers filed 92 cases of alleged sexual harassment with the state Human Rights Commission against agricultural companies between 2005 and 2012. Of those, 67 cases were shelved by the commission for having “no reasonable cause” or because the office faced uncooperative witnesses or a statute of limitation.

The rest – 25 cases – resulted in settlements or remain open.

In rural areas, access to attorneys for low-income clients is limited, making it difficult for farmworkers to file civil cases on their own in state courts. For example, in California’s Central Valley and Central Coast, some of the most productive agricultural regions in the country, there are a handful of private and legal aid organizations that take on these cases.

Michael Marsh, directing attorney of the Salinas office of California Rural Legal Assistance, one of the few organizations in the state to take farmworker sexual harassment cases, said that each harvest, at least two farmworkers come to his office to say their boss raped them. This year, he and his colleagues have already met with three.

In March, a berry farm supervisor who raped a farmworker represented by Marsh’s office was convicted in a state case and sentenced to prison, but the chances of other criminal cases moving forward are not high.

In some cases, state prosecutors are reluctant to file criminal charges. Sheriffs and police officials said these cases can be difficult to pursue. When reports are made, there often is scant evidence and few witnesses, they said. The burden of proof in criminal cases is much higher than in civil court.

“If you get into a courtroom and there is no physical evidence, it’s a tough nut to crack,” said Sgt. Kris Zuniga of the Avenal Police Department in agriculturally rich Kings County, Calif. “If there is some evidence, he can say it was consensual and then you’re back to a he said, she said.”

The 2002 civil sexual harassment case against DeCoster Farms of Iowa, an egg processing plant, and a co-defendant, Iowa Ag LLC, illustrates how well-documented civil cases go nowhere in criminal court.

After the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in a civil lawsuit accused three plant supervisors of “repeated and systematic raping” and sexual harassment of nearly a dozen women in boiler rooms and trucks over six years, law enforcement intervened. The Wright County Sheriff’s Department investigated the claims, along with representatives from the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office.

In one interview, a 28-year-old worker said a supervisor violated her in his truck when he was moving her from one part of the plant to another. She tried to scream and fight off the assault, the sheriff’s report said, but “he put the knife up to the side of her face and told her he would kill her if she didn’t let him do it.”

He told her that she was not the only woman he had raped, according to the sheriff’s report. None of the supervisors still works for the egg farm.
Paul Schultz, then the sheriff of Wright County, took statements from seven women, and five of them said they were regularly raped at DeCoster. But the local prosecutor told him there was not enough evidence to take the case to court.

It’s a case that still fills Schultz with regret. Most of the women have moved away. But Schultz said that if he had an opportunity to speak with them again, he would apologize. He’d tell them, “I’m sorry that the prosecution could not be pursued,” he said.

DeCoster Farms and Iowa Ag paid $1.5 million to settle the federal civil lawsuit later that year. In the process, they denied all of the allegations. Another Iowa egg company owned by Austin DeCoster, known as Quality Egg, settled a federal sexual harassment lawsuit in 2012 for $85,000.

But for the three men accused of serially raping the DeCoster workers, life goes on. One of the alleged perpetrators lives in a tree-lined subdivision in a small Iowa town.

According to family members, the other two have relocated to Mexico. One of them on his Facebook page lists members of the DeCoster family as his friends.

An Image At Odds With Allegations

The Evans Fruit Co. is one of the biggest apple operations in the country, shipping 320 million pounds a year to markets around the globe. A job there is desirable, workers said in interviews, because the size of the operation means more work, longer days and bigger paychecks.

The claims lodged against Evans Fruit for failing to stop sexual assault and harassment can be difficult to reconcile with its homespun image.

The company’s beginnings make it seem beyond reproach. Bill and Jeannette Evans, now in their 80s, first met at a chocolate shop in downtown Yakima, Wash., got married as teenagers and started the company with 10 acres. They work nearly every day of the year, and now the company cultivates its award-winning crop across 7,500 acres on various farms.

The ranch that Juan Marin managed is Evans Fruit’s second largest. The orchard sits at the foot of the Rattlesnake Hills, near the city of Sunnyside. The property is vast: From the main road, stands of apple trees blend into distant orchards, a blur of fruit, branches and greenery.

Here, some 50 miles from company headquarters, Marin wielded power in the ugliest ways, workers claimed in interviews and court testimony. In these remote and endless groves, Marin is said to have bragged constantly about his sexual exploits and to have groped women while they stood on ladders filling picking bags.

It’s where he allegedly pinned 15-year-old Jacqueline Abundez between tree branches and said – loudly enough for bystanders to hear – that despite her young age, she could “already endure the stick,” a former Evans Fruit tractor driver told government investigators.

Abundez filed a sexual harassment claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2006. Her mother, Angela Mendoza, filed another claim based on what allegedly happened to her daughter, telling lawyers in a deposition that Marin had said: “Give me your daughter. I’ll marry her and I’ll have her give birth every year to a son or a daughter year after year.”

In an unrelated case, Abundez was found dead in 2008 at age 17, her body dumped in an irrigation canal. The Yakima County Sheriff’s Office investigated, but her death remains unsolved. The judge dropped her harassment case, along with her mother’s.

Attorneys for Evans Fruit said the company could not substantiate the claims by Abundez or Mendoza that they had been harassed.

In 2008, more complaints came in. An apple picker named Wendy Granados told the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that Marin separated women from their husbands, who also worked for Evans Fruit, so that he could harass them. He “offered pay raises, cars, and houses in exchange for sexual favors,” according to her complaint.

Later that year, another Evans worker named Norma Valdez filed a claim alleging that Marin had forcibly hugged and kissed her in his truck and said he had done the same thing in 2005. He called her “my love” and “my star,” and he told people at the ranch that she was pregnant with his child, according to the complaint.

The company’s lawyers said they could find no corroborating evidence of misbehavior, and Marin kept his job.

In June 2010, the commission filed a lawsuit against Evans Fruit alleging that Marin and some of the crew leaders had sexually harassed or assaulted at least seven women at the Sunnyside ranch. As the case progressed, a total of 26 women with similar claims joined the lawsuit.

In her case, Esther Abarca testified that Marin groped her three more times – once again in his truck and twice after he had taken her to properties he owned.

At trial, these incidents were used to discredit Abarca because she hadn’t mentioned the later incidents in her deposition testimony.

“It made my job on cross-exam much easier,” said Monahan, the attorney for Evans Fruit. “I was able to illustrate for the jury this remarkable escalation of alleged offenses. My sense is the jury found her absolutely not credible.”

Four additional women told stories like Abarca’s in federal court: Marin ordered them into his truck and then fondled or attacked them, they said. Others said Marin had propositioned them for sex or offered to put them up as mistresses in exchange for bearing him a son.

Several women accused other crew leaders of misbehavior at the ranch, including one who allegedly exposed himself and showed pictures of male genitalia on his cellphone.

Motivation Questioned

About a month after the suit was filed, Marin was fired. His letter of dismissal did not mention sexual harassment allegations – company lawyers said they still have no proof of the women’s claims. Instead, the letter said he was let go because the company had evidence he had embezzled money.

A father of seven daughters who emigrated from Mexico in the early 1970s by crawling through a sewer tunnel, Marin emphatically denies stealing from the company. He said the apartment buildings and houses he owns around Sunnyside – valued at more than $1.8 million – are the product of hard work and sound investment decisions.

“Had to be somebody else because (it was) not me,” Marin said. “I can never betray the company.”

Lawyers for Evans Fruit argued that the women who have accused the company of wrongdoing were motivated by financial gain.

“The claimants need money, and you may consider that that is a powerful incentive to invent or exaggerate their stories,” attorney Carolyn Cairns said at the trial. “These folks are poor. For the most part, they’re uneducated, and their career paths, frankly, are not bright. This is their chance to get some extra money, and they’re grabbing the brass ring.”

But women who did not participate in the lawsuit also have accused Marin of making sexual advances.

One of those women – who is mentioned repeatedly as a Marin target in court filings – trembled as she drove down Cemetery Road, four miles from the Evans Fruit orchard. Turning onto a fire road, she pointed to a house where Marin and his family now live. She said that when she was a 17-year-old employee, he offered to let her live there for free if she would bear him a son. She refused.

A 39-year-old woman who worked at Evans Fruit eight years ago said in an interview that Marin would order her into his truck, where he would flirt and touch her legs in a way that upset her. If she defied him, she would be fired, she said.

“I know more women who have gone through this and don’t want to talk,” she said. “They’re scared. But we have to talk so that there is justice and the bosses don’t keep doing these things.”

In an interview, Marin said these claims are tall tales that have been passed around the ranch by embittered employees.

“Everyone knows each other,” he said. “And the bad people talk to other people, and people that don’t even know me start talking bad about me.”

Monahan, the company’s lawyer, said Evans Fruit never was confronted with definitive proof of sexual harassment at its Sunnyside orchard, and if it had been, the owners would have acted immediately.

By the trial date, the number of former Evans Fruit workers who remained in the case had dropped from 26 to 15. Some women could not be located. The judge ruled that the others had not been subjected to a sexually hostile work environment.

In the end, 14 women testified about being groped, verbally harassed and attacked at the Sunnyside ranch. Most of the allegations were lodged against Marin, who denied them all.

“I would never do that,” he said repeatedly at the trial.

In April, the jury – seven men and two women – found in favor of Evans Fruit. The jury members determined that the women, including Abarca, had not been subjected to a sexually hostile work environment. And, they decided, even if a hostile work environment had been proven, Evans Fruit was not liable because Marin was not found to be “a proxy for Evans Fruit” and the other alleged harassers were not technically supervisors.

When the verdict came down, the claimants who attended the final day and their lawyers sat in stunned silence in the courtroom.

“I was very sad because I felt they gave to the supervisors a free pass to do whatever they want with women, that there was no law to punish them,” said Danelia Barajas, one of the women who claimed Marin groped her in his truck.

But members of the jury nonetheless believed there was something happening in the orchard.

Bill Huntington, a juror from Walla Walla, said the jury “felt pretty much that there was some level of harassment,” though the women’s lawyers didn’t prove it to the legal standard.

“It’s not so much that we believed Juan Marin,” Huntington said. “But their (the women’s) stories lacked consistency. I hope the Evanses will realize that they need to be more vigilant in their sexual harassment policies. They trusted Juan Marin, and they didn’t think it could happen. They were a little too reliant on him.”

Even the Evans Fruit lawyers concede Marin’s stories have not always been consistent.

“Juan Marin has told a number of different stories, and it’s difficult to figure out what happened,” Monahan said. “But you can’t make these broad assertions that Juan Marin is a bad person and sexual harassment occurred and therefore find the company liable.”

The case is not over yet. Aside from its request for a new trial, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission may appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. A separate case against Marin, filed by three of the women in the federal case, is moving forward in federal court based on alleged violations of state laws.

But the trial was a sweeping victory for the company.

After they got word of the verdict, the Evanses were jubilant as they stood in the parking lot across from the courthouse.

“It is a great win,” Bill Evans said. “It all comes down to accountability and credibility.”

Before getting into his car, the jury foreman, Cameron Fischer, suggested to the Evanses that they should modernize their operations by hiring a professional human resources staffer.

“You have to get on with the times and with the way things are run today,” said Fischer, a former state workplace safety and health officer.

The couple thanked him and then drove to a Dairy Queen, where they celebrated over ice cream.

Creating Anti-harassment Policies

Throughout the trial, the Evans Fruit lawyers argued that the company should not be held responsible for the alleged harassment because Bill and Jeannette Evans could not have known about it because no one complained to them.

Because the Evanses run a business over thousands of acres, “they wanted their employees to know that if they’re out there in the orchard and the Evanses aren’t around, that they can still come to the Evanses and tell them what their problem is,” Evans Fruit attorney Cairns said at trial.

Cairns noted for the jury that some people did go to the Evanses with concerns about their supervisors or paychecks, but they were silent when it came to sexual harassment.

The women countered in court that they didn’t think they could complain because Marin was their foreman. Some said they thought raising the issue would get them fired, or they said nobody would believe them because Marin bragged that the Evanses loved him more than their own son. Others said they were embarrassed to discuss these types of issues with the owners.

The growers’ role in ferreting out sexual harassment became a key question in the Evans Fruit trial, and it’s a problem that vexes agribusiness across the country.

“If I’m the grower and I have my foreman supervising, and he’s misbehaving and I don’t know what’s going on, at the end of the day, I’m responsible,” said Manuel Cunha, president of the Nisei Farmers League, which represents agricultural businesses in five states. “But if the worker is being controlled by somebody who has an upper hand, how is a grower going to know that?”

Sexual harassment policies and complaint procedures can help, but agricultural enterprises don’t always operate on the cutting edge of human resources practices.

Gail Wadsworth, executive director of the California Institute for Rural Studies, said some growers are focused on farming and might not have the capacity or awareness to implement policies on sexual harassment.

“There is a tendency to look at farming businesses as being different from other businesses, and that’s rooted in this concept of the agrarian ideal in the U.S.,” Wadsworth said. “But I do think that farms need to create a corporate culture to include safety for women.”

For instance, in the case of the Oregon tree farm supervisor who was accused of raping a female worker while holding gardening shears to her throat, the grower testified that the company didn’t have a sexual harassment policy because “we’re just farmers.”

Likewise, Bill and Jeannette Evans said at their company’s trial that they didn’t think they had needed a sexual harassment policy before 2008, because the law doesn’t require it and because the company is guided by common sense and respect for its workers.

Sexual harassment policies and training are not mandatory in many states. California, Connecticut and Maine have instituted laws that require sexual harassment seminars for supervisors.

Joe Del Bosque, a California farmworker-turned-grower, said the culture in the fields has changed since he started harvesting cantaloupes as a 10-year-old during summer breaks.

“In the ’70s, it (sexual harassment) might have been more common,” he said. “You knew that when it’s cantaloupe season, there are going to be young women coming, and it’s open season.”

Now, “we’ve taken a new attitude,” he said. “We take these things seriously, and our people understand that.”

As chairman of the workplace safety organization AgSafe, Del Bosque has come to champion sexual harassment prevention. AgSafe helps growers, packinghouse bosses and labor contractors follow California law by providing regular sexual harassment training.

During a meeting in a Fresno hotel conference room in December attended by CIR and IRP, farm labor contractor Josh Beas took careful notes as Amy Wolfe, AgSafe’s president and CEO, clicked through a series of slides.

She encouraged attendees to create a sexual harassment policy, hold supervisors accountable, conduct random inspections and document any problems that arise. It’s about “creating a culture where people can come to work and do the job they were hired to do and people treat each other with respect and dignity,” she said.

But the message doesn’t always travel well with some managers in the industry.

From the back row, Ralph Collazo, who runs a Southern California packinghouse, offered running commentary on the proceedings. As Wolfe worked her way through the presentation, Collazo cracked jokes.

“I want a girl to sexually harass me,” he quipped to the people near him. Collazo did not return calls for comment.

When Wolfe offered some real-world case studies, such as the story of a farmworker who was repeatedly raped by her supervisor, he sounded skeptical.

“She was eating eggs and bacon,” he said, implying that the sex was consensual, “and then she decided she didn’t like it.”

 

ARTICLE

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/social-issues/rape-in-the-fields/female-workers-face-rape-harassment-in-u-s-agriculture-industry/

 

Some solutions
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/social-issues/rape-in-the-fields/three-plans-to-stop-rape-in-the-fields/

 

women out there:) this was shared to me by one of your gender... you signing up:)  
this made me laugh harder than anything else today:) and the comment by one guy, classic:) but many were fun.
The moment when the women go "Ahhhhhh"  after the instructor says : "1, 2, 3 , 4... I am staying low over the body "

Ladies yall signing up for this class? pic.twitter.com/nM1bAIRVTk

— DJ Kam Bennett (@KameronBennett) September 4, 2022

 

 

I quote some comments:) 
@MonaThorne_: Heterosexual women are the most unsatisfied partners during sex, but you never hear men taking pussy eating classes or stroking classes.
@NICHELLEAYNA :no cause i only ride twice a year birthdays and Valentine’s Day. srry im no athlete
Jose Mourinho, a coach in soccer, actually made it in this tweet comment stream:) 

LINK

Enjoy the comments, trust me, some are really funny:) 

 

IN AMENDMENT
Have you heard of early erotic photographer
Jeux de Dames Cruelles<Game of Ladies , Cruel> 1850 to 1960 from Serge Nazarieff
https://www.deviantart.com/eric123ab/art/20220904-154614-2-928349661

 

Title: One day a nigger

one day a nigger
caught in his hand
a little star no bigger
than not to understand
"i'll never let you go
until you've made me white"
so she did and now
stars shine at night

author: e e cummings
Book: XAIPE page 24

Title: (tonight

(tonight
in nigger 
street

the snow is perfectly falling, 
the noiselessly snow is 
sexually fingering the uttery asleep

houses)
The brite snow
likes
niggers. it dozes
prettily on unsafe reefs
and dangerous stairs. It
kisses a trillion times beautifully the 
sagging unlighted filth, within
-
which black bodies clutch and cuddle

(i dreamed God took away
the world, 
when the niggers were asleep
and threw it into Hell and
the white and the brown and the yellow
people all turned suddenly

black but God looked down
and the niggers were laughing at Him. 
And He laughed Himself
and told the snow "I
want you to go down into
nigger street, and put that
fire out because I have called off The Last Day.")
ONE
Bif
-
-fing street-lamp and I are
watching, in the perfect noiselessly
air which is falling, 
with kissing bright sexual
fingers fingering the utterly asleep street

the brite snow likes niggers

author: e e cummings
in correspondence between scofield thayer side himself
https://www.theawl.com/2011/05/a-lost-e-e-cummings-poem-discovered/

 

 

 

MY THOUGHTS

At least, one problem in modern humanity isn't complicated. It is very simple. It is a question.

How do you get a humanity that has a tiered system of white christian male europeans on top by militaristic power to be a humanity that is tierless? 

 

The problem with said question is any answer or process requires a majority in humanity to want the goal. And there lay the true problem. Any action can be deemed to the goal or against.  Elements of the Nigerian government have made an action that can be deemed by some long overdue to Black empowerment, to African empowerment, to Nigerian empowerment. Others can deem this a part of the process to be tierless, a nonviolent action that is trying to bring empowerment to a region in humanity controlled by those outside itself to its detriment longer than anyone has been alive.

 

What is the truth of the Nigerian governments actions? The truth is , it is both. No one is wrong in however they assess it. But arguing between the assessors gives greater hope to maintaining tiers than being tierless. And, if tiers maintain the only question you need to know is which tier you will be in. If tierless, then all the minorities in every community in humanity wanting it lucked out.

Tijan Njie as Robert Pilatus and Elan Ben Ali as Fabrice Morvan in the upcoming Milli Vanilli biopic, 'Girl You Know It's True' | CREDIT: DENIS PERNATH, COPYRIGHT: LEONINE STUDIOS / WIEDEMANN & BERG FILM

 

MY THOUGHTS

I rather it be the Frank Farian story. What convinced him to use two black models from germany and have them have lyp synching careers? I think that kind of story could had led to discussions of how white artists from the USA or Europe made careers being talentless and living off of black artists. I think that was what made Farian who was old enough to see this, be inspired to create and orchestrate milli vanilli. and then in the second act of the film. The fact that he was able to labeled blameless by the media as the producer of milli vanilli while also able to place all blame on milli vanilli, like either of them paid for the singers who were totally complicit as well. so... as always, the film has potential but I would had gone another way.

 

THE ARTICLE

Milli Vanilli biopic first look teases controversial music duo's looming vocal storm
Girl You Know It's True is produced by Netflix's Dark masterminds Quirin Berg and Max Wiedemann.
Joey Nolfi
By Joey Nolfi September 01, 2022 at 11:48 AM EDT

Girl, you know it's true: A Milli Vanilli biopic is on the way, and the studio behind the planned project has unveiled a first look at its stars.

Lead actors Tijan Njie and Elan Ben Ali appear in the new photo as Robert Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, the faces of the ill-fated German-French pop duo who notched three No. 1 singles in the United States in the late '80s. It was later revealed that the pair had taken credit for vocals actually provided by several other singers, including John Davis, who died in 2021.

Matthias Schweighöfer will star as Milli Vanilli producer Frank Farian in the Leonine Studios- and Wiedemann & Berg–produced film, currently titled Girl You Know It's True.

Simon Verhoeven will direct from a script he wrote. Producers on the film include Quirin Berg and Max Wiedemann, who previously worked on the Oscar-winning international film The Lives of Others, the Oscar-nominated movie Never Look Away, and Netflix's popular thriller series Dark.

The movie's plot follows the duo's scandal, which was allegedly orchestrated by Farian and saw the frontmen lip-syncing to the voices of other artists who were only credited as background vocalists on their official releases.

Milli Vanilli initially won a Grammy for Best New Artist in 1990, though they ultimately returned the award.

Controversial filmmaker Brett Ratner was previously working on a Milli Vanilli biopic, though that project was dropped by production company Millennium Media in February 2021, after its announcement received intense backlash in the wake of Ratner being accused of sexual misconduct in 2017. (Ratner "categorically" denied the allegations through his attorney Marty Singer at the time.)

Girl You Know It's True does not have a release date yet, but it is expected to film in Munich, Berlin, Capetown, and Los Angeles before wrapping in December.

 

ARTICLE URL

https://ew.com/movies/milli-vanilli-movie-first-look-photo/

 

IN AMENDMENT

 

beverly hills cop 4...many stockholders of the redstone company want the white jewish clan to sell the firm to an investment firm. But they are being adamant against it, which I think is the better strategy. but, having said that, they don't have the money for a high quantity of big budget films, thus why fox sold its movie division to disney and at&t sold warner bros with debt to discovery channel.  The screenwriter to this film is a former law enforcer so I don't know how funny this will be. I am not a true fan of beverly hills cop so I can't speak for the audience or the fanbase.

Witchtember 2022 collection

Witchtember 2022 by simoneferriero on DeviantArt

 

My Witchtember gallery LINK

 

I will place my days for each prompt in the comments

 

forum post

https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/9724-witchtember-2022/

 

SHE HULK!:) body paint by mccroft07

https://www.deviantart.com/mcroft07/art/She-Hulk-Body-Paint-927845707

 

 

Enjoy Dreadful Tales no.40
https://www.deviantart.com/leothefox/journal/Dreadful-Tales-no-40-927951430
The Last Homily On Liturgoid , my story, is within

The Following Art Art SHowcases, enjoy

 

NEW ARTIST

Daily Deviations - August 2022 by Moonbeam13 on DeviantArt

WALL PAPPERS DIGITAL ART STOCK IMAGES

Daily Deviations Round UP: August 2022 by Ellysiumn on DeviantArt

LITERATURE

August 2022 Literature DD Round-Up by Malintra-Shadowmoon on DeviantArt

TUTORIALS TRADITIONAL ART

DD Round Up: August 2022 by BeckyKidus on DeviantArt

TRADITIONAL ARTISAN CRAFTS

Daily Deviation Round-Up: August 2022 by Malintra-Shadowmoon on DeviantArt

PHOTOGRAPHY

Daily-Deviations Round-Up - August 2022 by KizukiTamura on DeviantArt

Title: Static of Milestone
Artist: shawn alleyne  < Pyroglyphics Studio > OR < https://www.deviantart.com/pyroglyphics1 >  
Prior post
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2052&type=status
Shawn Alleyne post
https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?q=shawn&quick=1&type=core_statuses_status&updated_after=any&sortby=newest

 

Title: Sleeping Swordsman Waking Buddha complete
Artist: shawn alleyne  < Pyroglyphics Studio > OR < https://www.deviantart.com/pyroglyphics1 >  
Referral post
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2036&type=status
Prior post
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2049&type=status
Shawn Alleyne post
https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?q=shawn&quick=1&type=core_statuses_status&updated_after=any&sortby=newest
 

 

Title: Sea Cloak
Artist: GDBee < https://gdbee.store/ > 
Prior post
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2050&type=status
GDBee Post
https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=gdbee&type=core_statuses_status&quick=1&author=richardmurray&search_and_or=or&sortby=newest
 

 

Title: Firefly, CHicory, nunchuku- weapons fairy
Artist: GDBee < https://gdbee.store/ > 
Prior post
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2037&type=status
GDBee Post
https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=gdbee&type=core_statuses_status&quick=1&author=richardmurray&search_and_or=or&sortby=newest
 

 

Title: Black Panther Sketch
Artist: shawn alleyne  < Pyroglyphics Studio > OR < https://www.deviantart.com/pyroglyphics1 >   
Prior post
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2036&type=status
Shawn Alleyne post
https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?q=shawn&quick=1&type=core_statuses_status&updated_after=any&sortby=newest
 

 

HISTORY | SEPTEMBER 2022

Was King Arthur a Real Person?
The story of Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table has captivated us for a thousand years. But is there any truth behind the tales?

By Joshua Hammer https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Joshua-Hammer/19043478

 

Photographs by Jooney Woodward https://jooneywoodward.co.uk/information/

 

A cold, wind-driven rain soaks through my parka as I walk across a narrow foot-bridge that links the Cornwall mainland in southwest England to a rocky promontory overlooking the Bristol Channel. Far below this cantilevered span, waves crash against the cliffs and swirl inside a grotto known as Merlin’s Cave. Win Scutt, a burly, amiable archaeologist from nearby Plymouth, opens a gate and leads me down a path to the ruins of a medieval castle. Its fragmentary walls mark the lair where Richard, the 13th-century Earl of Cornwall and the brother of King Henry III, is said to have gathered with his followers to feast on mutton and ale and pay homage to a monarch who may never have existed: King Arthur.

The figure of Arthur first appeared in Welsh poetry in the late sixth and early seventh centuries, a hero who was said to lead the Britons in battle against Saxon invaders. But it wasn’t until the 12th century that he was first tied to this dramatic headland, known as Tintagel. In the Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, which was written in 1136 and purported to trace Britain’s history back to its supposed founding by Trojan exiles, an almost certainly fictitious sixth-century king named Uther Pendragon sleeps with the beguiling Ygerna, the wife of a local duke, at her castle in Tintagel, after the magician Merlin turns Pendragon into a likeness of her husband. “That night she conceived Arthur, the most famous of men, who subsequently won great renown by his outstanding bravery,” Geoffrey wrote.

Scholars have universally dismissed Geoffrey’s text as a pseudo-history, woven from ancient Welsh folk tales and his febrile imagination. Still, many people at the time believed the story, and Richard, Earl of Cornwall, was so convinced Arthur was real that, in May 1233, he traded three prime estates for this treeless headland, which is separated from the mainland by an isthmus, and built a castle on it. “It had no function,” Scutt says, as he leads me through the stone ruins of the castle’s great hall. “It’s in a remote part of Cornwall that had no use to him. But he wanted to anchor his position in legend and history. He was the Earl of Cornwall—but he was also the successor of Arthur.”

King Arthur has never relinquished his hold on the imagination. Writers in Geoffrey’s wake added their own flourishes—the magical sword Excalibur, the Knights of the Round Table, Arthur’s romantic triangle with Queen Guinevere and Sir Lancelot, and Arthur’s mortal wound at the Battle of Camlann. Arthurian tales of courtly love, magic and martial bravery have been told and retold in countless versions over the centuries, from the earliest eulogistic stanzas in Welsh poetry to T.H. White’s 1958 novel The Once and Future King, from Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th-century Le Morte d’Arthur to the 2021 film The Green Knight, starring Dev Patel as Sir Gawain, a knight at Camelot, the legendary castle where Arthur held court. “There is something in the Arthur legend for everyone,” says Leah Tether, a professor of medieval studies at Bristol University and former president of the British branch of the International Arthurian Society, which regularly brings together scholars and other enthusiasts interested in Arthurian literature. The story of King Arthur, she says, “has got flawed characters with whom we can empathize, quests to achieve impossible goals, and an adaptable story line that fits the sociopolitical landscape of the time.” Raluca Radulescu, a professor of medieval literature at Bangor University in Wales, suggests Arthur’s perennial appeal is also tied to “a standard of moral integrity” that readers find inspirational, one “they cannot find in the world around them, but will discover in the stories of King Arthur.”

The timeless popularity of the Arthur legend has overshadowed a central, unresolved question: Was there really a King Arthur, or at least a historical prototype upon whom Geoffrey’s hero is based? That’s what has brought me to Tintagel on this stormy winter morning. Scutt leads me down a grassy slope to the foundations of a dozen houses built on terraces overlooking the sea. Ralegh Radford, the English archaeologist who exposed these ruins in the 1930s, was reminded of similar structures at remote sites in Ireland, and after observing Christian symbols on ceramics found at the site he guessed the ruins were the remains of a Celtic monastery that existed between the fifth and seventh centuries.

Over the past four years, however, Scutt and his team from English Heritage, a nonprofit organization that administers more than 400 historical sites in Britain, have conducted their own research, and they’ve challenged Radford’s assessment of the site. They have excavated three additional houses and have also unearthed fragments of glass goblets from Spain, cups from Merovingian-era France, pottery from Tunisia and amphorae from Turkey used for storing wine or olive oil. Carbon dating, unavailable to Radford a century before, has confirmed the settlement existed in the sixth century. But rather than being a retreat for religious ascetics, Scutt believes that the site, with its protected position on the Cornwall coast, was a flourishing local stronghold. “This could have been home to a mercantile elite whose economy was based entirely on trade,” he says.

Tintagel, Scutt says, was likely home to several thousand people and controlled a territory that extended across modern-day Cornwall. He points out that while much of the British Isles had sunk into illiteracy and destitution during this period—commonly known as the Dark Ages—most residents at Tintagel lived in comfortable slate-roofed homes with sturdy wooden timbers and, in some cases, a second story. It’s not implausible, he argues, that a ruler or commander—perhaps one named Arthur—rose out of this society, and served as an inspiration for Geoffrey of Monmouth. The headland has given up other tantalizing clues, including a sixth-century stone slab with the mysterious word “Artognou” carved into it. Experts in Celtic, the language spoken in Britain at the time, dismiss its significance. But some insist the inscription is a variation of “Arthur.” The slab, they say, is a mark of the king’s realm.

When the legend of Arthur was born, Britain was in a state of collapse. The Roman Empire had made its first incursion into the British Isles in 55 B.C., eventually conquering much of the territory up to present-day Scotland. Its conquest and long rule was often violent, but the Romans also built roads and established towns such as Londinium and Durovernum Cantiacorum, today London and Canterbury. Throughout the Roman province of Britannia the quality of life largely improved.

Then, in A.D. 410, Rome, under siege at home from Visigoths, a Germanic tribe from Eastern Europe, withdrew its troops and plunged Britannia into chaos. Civil institutions vanished, the economy collapsed, and basic household goods became scarce. Saxon invasions terrorized the population, and Britannia fragmented into fiefdoms dominated by often brutal strongmen and their gangs. “Britain has kings, but they are tyrants . . . engaged in plunder and rape, but always preying on the innocent,” a British monk named Gildas wrote in the sixth century. Plague and drought struck the region, wiping out a significant part of the population.

“Britain was a failed state,” says Marc Morris, a British historian and author of 2021’s The Anglo Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England: 400 to 1066. “It was a miserable time to be alive.”

Many historians believe that a heroic warrior likely rose during this period to lead the Britons, who had largely embraced Christianity, against the pagan Saxons. The Welsh poem Y Gododdin, written between A.D. 540 and 640, describes a fallen soldier by likening him to another called Arthur, which some scholars interpret as showing that a warrior named Arthur was so famous when the poem was written that the bravery of others could be measured by comparison. Around the same time, Gildas, the monk, described a British triumph at the Battle of Badon Hill, which he dated to “the year of my birth,” probably in the early sixth century. He didn’t mention Arthur (he called his hero Ambrosius Aurelianus), but three centuries later, around 830, a Welsh monk named Nennius, in his History of the Britons, described how a warrior named Arthur led the Britons to victory in 12 glorious battles against the Saxons. “The twelfth battle was on the mountain of Badon, in which there fell in one day 960 men from one charge of Arthur, and no one slew them except him alone, and in all battles he was the victor,” Nennius wrote.

Some scholars have pointed to Nennius’ account as evidence of Arthur’s existence. Yet Nicholas Higham, a retired medievalist at University of Manchester and the author of 2018’s King Arthur: The Making of the Legend, says the evidence is hardly conclusive. For one thing, the account was written 300 years after the Battle of Badon Hill was purported to take place. (Although Gildas’ text provides the only contemporaneous mention of the battle, other British histories, including the eighth-century Ecclesiastical History of the English People, describe the fighting in detail, and scholars are generally convinced that such a battle did take place.) For another, historians in the Middle Ages are widely known to have blended fact and fiction to advance a political or religious agenda. At a time when the Saxons were conquering Britain, Higham says, the Britons needed a “god-beloved warrior” to rally their spirits and restore the emergent nation to glory, and Nennius concocted a character to fit the bill. “Arthur was winning battles with the support of Jesus Christ and Mary against the Saxons,” he says. “The Saxons were presented as barbaric, dishonest and latecomers to Christianity.” To show that Arthur had roots in Roman culture, which was still widely admired, Higham argues, Nennius derived the name from Artorius, a general who gained fame in the Punic Wars in the third century B.C.

If Nennius established Arthur as a British hero, Geoffrey of Monmouth brought him to life. Born around 1090, possibly in Wales, and educated in Paris and Oxford, Geoffrey was ensconced as a bishop in Britain in the mid-1100s when he wrote, in Latin, perhaps the most influential book ever about Arthur. Like Nennius, Geoffrey had a political agenda: to show the superiority of the Celtic-speaking Britons, and by extension, the Welsh, who spoke the same language. “There were a lot of criticisms of the Welsh as being savages, barbarians,” says Morris. “Geoffrey invents a noble history for them, going back a hundred kings before Arthur.” A cipher in Nennius’ history, Arthur now became a Celtic-speaking warrior-king within a richly imagined narrative.

Geoffrey claimed that he’d gleaned details of Arthur’s life from an ancient Welsh history book shown to him by an Oxford archdeacon, but there’s no evidence such a book existed. There’s also no knowledge about what might have led him to set Arthur’s origin story at Tintagel, or if he ever visited the remote headland. “He would have known it as a very dramatic, rocky clifftop, a mystical place, a place that there were plenty of stories about,” says Higham. “But that’s all we can say.”

Geoffrey introduced Guinevere’s infidelity to Arthur, the wizard Merlin (a composite of earlier Welsh prophets) and a magical sword he called Caliburn (based on the Irish sword Caladbolg, a derivation of the Welsh Caledfwlch), which later became known as Excalibur. He ended the tale on an island called Avalon, where Arthur is carried by the enchantress Morgan le Fay after being “mortally injured” against the Saxons in the Battle of Camlann. Geoffrey apparently plucked this battle from The Welsh Annals, written in the late tenth century. This set of chronicles, an apparent blend of fact and fiction, established A.D. 537 as the year of “The Battle of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut”—or Mordred, who in later Arthurian tales becomes Arthur’s treacherous nephew and rival—“fell, and there was plague in Britain and Ireland.”

Geoffrey’s fantastical account had its share of skeptics. “It is quite clear that everything this man wrote about Arthur and his successors, and indeed his predecessors...was made up,” the medieval historian William of Newburgh wrote. Yet many Britons accepted it as the truth. In 1191 the monks of Glastonbury Abbey dug up a pair of skeletons in their churchyard and touted them as the remains of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere—a clever hoax to draw paying tourists to the abbey. By the 13th century, writes Morris in 2015’s A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain, “It was proof positive that the fabulous king about whom Geoffrey of Monmouth had written had once really existed.”

One true believer was King Edward I. In 1278, the monarch visited the grave site at Glastonbury and ordered the remains to be disinterred, partly to lay to rest the belief in some quarters that Geoffrey’s hero was superhuman and still alive—and thus could potentially challenge Edward for the throne. “There in two caskets were found the bones of the said king of wondrous size, and those of Guinevere, of marvellous beauty,” wrote a local observer. Afterward, the king and queen wrapped the skeletons in silk, placed the royal seal on them, and returned them to their graves.

From this point, the Arthur legend not only grew but became the dominant literary tale of medieval Europe. Monasteries and royal courts bought more than 1,000 copies of Geoffrey’s manuscript, making it the most popular text in the Middle Ages after the Bible. Richard Barber, an Arthurian scholar in Sussex, has personally tracked down 235 surviving copies. He might have found more, but when Henry VIII shuttered the country’s monasteries in the 1530s during his break with the Roman church, “A lot of them were torn up and used for wrapping pies,” Barber told me.

Meanwhile, Arthur’s legend traveled across the English Channel to France, thanks to the hugely influential 12th-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes. Possibly borrowing from Geoffrey and from Welsh folk tales, and writing under the patronage of the Plantagenets, the British-French dynasty founded by Henry II, de Troyes invented Sir Lancelot, Camelot and the Holy Grail, which he described as a “vessel” used by Jesus at the Last Supper. “The Arthur story began to take off,” says Barber. “One hundred years later, you’ve got Arthur in Germany and all around Italy.”

Manuscripts retelling the Arthur myth became so common that they were often discarded and recycled, and not only as pie-wrapping paper. One winter morning I visit the rare-book room at Bristol’s Central Library with Leah Tether, the University of Bristol medievalist. A library staff member brings us four leather-bound tomes written by the French philosopher Jean Gerson and printed in Strasbourg in the late 15th century. But what we’re really here to see is something that one of Tether’s colleagues discovered pasted inside the bindings in 2019: seven parchment manuscript pages written in Old French, dating to around 1250. These pages—discarded and recycled as protective filler inside the newer volumes—show how the Arthur legend took on embellishments and mutations as it proliferated across Europe, introducing new characters, developing story lines, and reflecting the mores and culture of the different societies in which it appeared.

The seven pages come from a series of French stories known as the Vulgate Cycle, and they constitute some of the oldest known adaptations of tales by Chrétien de Troyes. I scan the thousand-year-old parchment and spot references to “Merlin” and “Gauvain,” the French spelling of Sir Gawain. Here, Tether says, Merlin advises Arthur on military tactics, leads a charge using a dragon standard that breathes real fire, and engages in an amorous encounter with Viviane, otherwise known as the Lady of the Lake, a fairy queen invented by de Troyes and further developed by later French writers. This version, says Tether, is “more chaste” than standard French medieval accounts of the relationship, which describe a spell written across Viviane’s groin that prevents men from sleeping with her; in this early version the spell is written on her ring, and prevents men from “speaking” with her. “Very little is known about de Troyes’ life, but he’s the ultimate medieval storyteller,” Tether tells me. His stories were translated into Old Norse and Swedish—the latter, Tether says, inscribed on doors across Iceland in the 12th century.

Other writers added their own touches to the Arthur story and canonized his place in literary history. Thomas Malory, a British member of Parliament and a violent criminal who probably wrote Le Morte d’Arthur while doing time in Newgate Prison for robbery or rape, created the definitive version of the Sword in the Stone story. In his account, the teenage Arthur answers a challenge inscribed on the stone—“Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is rightwise king born of all England”—by performing the feat multiple times other nobles have failed. Four centuries later, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in Idylls of the King, described the tortured romantic triangle involving Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere that tore apart the Knights of the Round Table: “The great and guilty love he bare the Queen, / In battle with the love he bare his lord, / Had marr’d his face, and mark’d it ere his time,” he wrote. Tennyson also brought the story full circle. The Victorian poet described the waves of the Bristol Channel carrying the infant Arthur, an abandoned castaway, to the shore of Tintagel. There Merlin stashes him in the grotto—now known as Merlin’s Cave—to protect him from the enemies of his father, Uther Pendragon.

As he had from the beginning, Arthur remained a source of legitimacy for Britain’s ruling elite. Where early medieval legends sought to cast Celtic-speaking Britons favorably, the Tudor monarchs, who came to power in the late 15th century, claimed Arthur as a direct ancestor, deriving from him the right to rule the nation. Henry VII even baptized his son Prince Arthur. And for writers, he remained the ideal vessel into which they could pour their social commentary. Tennyson, writing during the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, portrayed Arthur as a figure of moral stability and certainty, whereas Guinevere, in the light of Victorian morality, was an adulterer whose transgressions contributed to the general sickness of society.

“The interesting thing about the Arthurian legend is that it has periods of both ebb and flow,” says Tether. “It’s able to be molded to fit with current preoccupations, such that it can find applicability no matter what the mood of the moment.” She points out that the elasticity of the narrative has its roots in the Middle Ages: “Stories were transmitted orally and via manuscripts, meaning that no two versions were identical. It’s actually impossible to identify an ‘original’ version of Arthur. Arthur’s appeal is, and always was, precisely in his multiplicity.”

In and around Tintagel, the legend of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Arthur continues to draw pilgrims to the king’s “realm.” The Earl of Cornwall’s 13th-century stronghold receives 250,000 tourists a year, including 3,000 a day in the summer. Many, says Win Scutt, “believe that they’re seeing King Arthur’s castle.” Critics say English Heritage has fed that misconception since taking over the site two decades ago. In 2016, two hundred Cornish historians criticized the group for turning the castle into a “fairytale theme park” by erecting kitschy monuments such as a Merlin relief carved into stone near the grotto. Scutt replies that his organization has made it clear that the castle is Richard’s, not Arthur’s. But, he adds, “there was a great mythology to this site that was denied up to this point.”

The theme park atmosphere carries over into the modern village of Tintagel on the Cornish mainland. Visitors can spend the night at the hulking Camelot Castle Hotel, hunt for souvenirs at the Pendragon Gift Shop, or grab a pint and a Cornish pasty—a traditional crescent-shaped pie filled with meat—at the King Arthur’s Arms Inn. Tour guides in North Cornwall, meanwhile, promote several sites, claiming the places may have once been frequented by King Arthur and his knights. There’s a pair of mysterious labyrinth symbols carved into a stone in a forest, supposedly during the Early Bronze Age (skeptics say it’s a fake done by a student in the 1930s); a Neolithic stone enclosure on the eerie Bodmin Moor that some say was an Arthurian ceremonial site; and St. Nectan’s Glen, a mossy waterfall where Arthur’s knights are said to have cleansed themselves before setting off to find the Holy Grail. Matt Ward, a manager at St. Nectan’s, and previously property manager of Tintagel Castle, says he’s convinced there’s something to the Arthur story. “I think Geoffrey of Monmouth heard about Tintagel from people at the time,” he tells me. “They told him, ‘There were powerful people up there—kings.’”

About five miles southeast of Tintagel lies the village of Slaughterbridge, which has laid its own claim to the Arthur legend. Joe Parsons and his family have owned an expanse of meadows and forest here for three generations; it was the site, he maintains, of the Battle of Camlann—King Arthur’s last stand. Geoffrey of Monmouth described the battle as a fatal showdown between King Arthur and his nephew, Mordred, who had raised a rebellion against him. “Arthur was filled with great mental anguish by the fact that Mordred had escaped him so often,” Geoffrey wrote. “Without losing a moment, he followed him to that same locality, reaching the River Camlann, where Mordred was awaiting his arrival.”

Parsons leads me down a dirt road from his small museum and gift shop through the forest to the rushing Camel River. Slipping down a wet slope, he straddles a mossy stone column that lies toppled over on its side along the riverbank. Known as the Slaughterbridge Stone, the column, apparently a burial marker, bears inscriptions in Latin and Ogham, an Irish script extant during the Dark Ages. The Cornish historian Richard Carew, in his 1602 Survey of Cornwall, was the first to document this slab, noting that “the olde folke thereabouts will shew you a stone, bearing Arthur’s name.” Some have claimed the last words of the worn-away inscription once read Latinus hic iacet filius Merlini Arturus, or “Here lies Latinus, the son of Arthur the Great.” Most, however, have read it as something more prosaic: Filius Magari, or “the son of Magari.”

Parsons imagines that in A.D. 537, a warrior-king named Arthur presided over a domain in Cornwall that was centered at the stronghold of Tintagel and guarded at its borders by half a dozen Iron Age hill forts that still stand. Then invaders—possibly Saxons, possibly a splinter group from Arthur’s British tribe—crossed the Bodmin Moor and made their way west across the marshy ground toward the Camel River. “This crossing of the river into north Cornwall was the last defense of that kingdom,” he tells me. At a fording point where the Camel joins the Alan River, he theorizes, the invaders met Arthur’s men in the epic clash. Both Arthur and Mordred, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, were mortally wounded.

Parsons rattles off evidence that he says supports this scenario: beside King Arthur’s stone, an A.D. 1086 reference to a nearby village called Tremordred, which Parsons suggests may refer to Arthur’s nephew; the fact that the Camel River joins the Alan River on his property, making the portmanteau Camlann (there are several other rivers throughout the British Isles with similar names); and a wealth of archaeological evidence that, he says, was found here in the 19th century. “Spurs, battle stuff, arrowheads, horse harness pieces, other bits of weaponry.” The trove of material was taken to a Cornwall museum, he says, “and then disappeared.”

But Nicholas Higham, who’s spent much of his career subjecting claims about Arthur’s historicity to scrupulous analysis, views the Camlann story as one more tall tale pieced together from specious “evidence.” He was an undergraduate at the University of Manchester in the early 1970s, he tells me, when “archaeology and history were surging” with attempts by respected academics to prove that King Arthur had really existed. In the 1960s, Leslie Alcock, an archaeologist at the University of Glasgow, conducted excavations at Cadbury Castle, a Bronze and Iron Age hill fort in England’s Somerset County that had long been identified by Arthurians as being the real Camelot. Alcock insisted he was “an agnostic” on the question of whether Arthur had really lived, but his discoveries of fine Mediterranean pottery fragments—similar to those found at Tintagel—as well as expansive fortifications stirred speculation, and he stoked excitement by writing a book in 1972 called Was This Camelot? The next year, an English historian named John Morris, who specialized in Roman-era and Dark Ages Britain, cited the sudden appearance of the name “Arthur” in sixth-century accounts as proof of the existence of the great warrior hero.

“There was extensive pushback,” Higham tells me. He joined the ranks of the skeptics himself. “What really got me fired up was the constant flow of very bad history writing. You’ve got a whole series of writers like Alcock and Morris who accept what is not recorded until the early ninth and tenth centuries as a factual account of what happened around A.D. 500. It’s nonsense.” Morris, the British medievalist, agrees. “It’s like asking about William Wallace based on Braveheart,” he says. “There’s no evidence for it.”

The investment of time and energy that scholars have put into the question of whether Arthur really lived—to say nothing of the enormous popularity of Arthurian tales through the ages—suggests that the pursuit goes far beyond narrow academic interest. Why are cryptic references in 1,500-year-old Celtic texts so tantalizing? Might it be they’re a way of transcending humdrum reality and connecting to a glorious past and the possibility that, deep in the mists of time, giants walked the earth?

Win Scutt, for his part, isn’t ready to write off King Arthur just yet. The four years that he spent working here impressed on him the “extraordinary nature” of this Dark Ages enclave, he says, as we perch on a slope overlooking the crashing sea on a windswept morning. At a time when most Britons were struggling to find cooking utensils, Tintagel’s inhabitants were using crucibles to forge metal, inscribing slabs with Celtic writing, and controlling agricultural production across substantial territory. The settlement would have been well defended against the marauding bands that plagued the mainland: Geoffrey of Monmouth noted that just a handful of warriors positioned at the narrow neck could have staved off an army. It is not difficult to envision a charismatic leader rising here to defend northern Cornwall from Saxon invaders, says Scutt, or to imagine that his feats would enter sixth-century folklore and be passed down by storytellers to Geoffrey and other chroniclers. “We know this was a center of power,” he says. “But whose power was it? It’s always going to remain a mystery.”

ARticle link
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/king-arthur-real-person-180980466/

 

MY THOUGHTS
To me, growing up on High John and the Devil's Daughter I can say that the path of characters created in an environment that is not bound to books can not survive. Where Arthur went from a simple king victorious on a few battlefields, and modulated into the christian warrior with ideals that extend to places far from england. 
High John is barely known by Black people in the USA. The why is simple. It isn't that High John isn't flexible. It is the identity of High John as a slave to whites that is not enslaved. The DEvil's daughter as the Devil's daughter, the daughter of a the embodiment of sin, undetachable from sin, who is a hero. That is the problem with both characters in a Black community post War between the States whose internal minorities want the larger black community to be christian or in positive association to whites. The two paths that the characters by default oppose. 
But the question to what black fable started before the civil war in the black community in the USA can arrive stronger today is an interesting question. In england , Arthur had the luxury of a pre modern sense of storytelling or communal pride. In modernity, the idea of the global human family , has powerful priest or priestesses in the USA or elsewhere in humanity, which influences characters from any culture. 

 

 

A Festival That Conjures the Magic of H.P. Lovecraft and Beyond
At the Rhode Island event, revelers danced to murder ballads and celebrated all things weird. They even found time to reckon with the writer’s racism.

By Elisabeth Vincentelli https://www.evincentelli.com

Matt Cosby of NY Times is the photographer

Aug. 28, 2022

There’s bacon and eggs, and then there’s bacon and eggs at the Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast. Named after the cosmically malevolent and abundantly tentacled entity dreamed up by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the event, among the most popular at NecronomiCon Providence 2022, filled a vast hotel ballroom at 8 a.m. on a recent Sunday.

To the delighted worshipers, Cody Goodfellow, here a Most Exalted Hierophant, delivered a sermon that started with growled mentions of “doom-engines, black and red,” “great hammers of the scouring” and so on.

Then the speech took a left turn.

“I must confess myself among those who always trusted that a coven of sexless black-robed liches would change the world for the better,” said Goodfellow, who had flown in from the netherworld known as San Diego, Calif. “But the malignant forces of misplaced morality have regrouped from the backlash that stopped them in the ’80s, and the re-lash is in full swing.”

And so it went, with delicious jabs at incel culture (of which, one might argue, Lovecraft was a proto-member) and plutocrats.

The conference, which took place on Aug. 18-21 in Providence, R.I., for the first time since 2019, is named after Lovecraft’s hometown and another of his literary inventions — a grimoire so dangerous that those who read it meet ghastly ends. (The biannual convention takes place around his birthday; he was born on Aug. 20, 1890.)

The problem is that Lovecraft was a deeply racist and xenophobic man. How we deal with the legacy of a decidedly unsavory person is an issue of great political and cultural relevance nowadays, and the event has tackled it not by retreating or trying to defend the indefensible but by opening up its programming and the range of people invited to participate.

Cordelia Abrams, 49, a Bostonian life coach dressed as an anglerfish at the breakfast, has been attending these events for almost a decade. “This is weird and literary and local,” she said.

Although the event was Lovecraft-centric in its 1990s iteration, it has broadened since a 2013 reboot under the aegis of the nonprofit Lovecraft Arts & Sciences Council and is now subtitled “the international festival of weird fiction, art and academia.” Which, of course, poses the question: What does weird even mean when swaths of the mainstream have a slipping grip on reality? A large number of folks, after all, falsely believe that satanic pedophiles operated out of a pizzeria.

At the “Welcome to the New Weird” panel, the editor and publisher Ann VanderMeer, one of the festival’s guests of honor, posited that “the weird is a way to connect with the world around us and make sense of it.” Most people I met or heard speak over the weekend agreed there was a common element of unease and unsettlement, which explains the panels dedicated to simpatico artists like Clive Barker, David Cronenberg and J.G. Ballard.

What was striking was how many of the participants have worked through the problem of Lovecraft himself to repurpose the basic tropes in his fiction. They are appropriating its overarching themes — the powerlessness of humanity against great, unknowable forces — and turning the weird into an instrument of self-exploration, liberation and creativity.

“What really brought me here is the fact that I love horror,” said Zin E. Rocklyn, a 38-year-old queer Black writer from Florida who was on three panels. “I love the catharsis that it brings, the truth that it brings. An incredible imagination came up with some really shady” garbage, she added, using a stronger word to describe Lovecraft’s views. “It’s based in ignorance and fear, but it taps into a universal fear. Being able to examine that and talk about that and expand on that is a great example of what you can do with such an ignorant business.”

Besides academic papers, the convention offered an abundance of panels sharing a dark sensibility: “Not Just Three Acts: Narrative Structure and the Weird”; “Out of the Shadows: A History of the Queer Weird”; and “The Horizon Is Still Way Beyond You: Zora Neale Hurston’s Life and Legacy.” For the last session, the panelists somehow wrangled an interesting 75 minutes out of Hurston’s and Lovecraft’s irreconcilable differences — contrasting, for example, her searching curiosity about other people with his bigotry.

Among the most eye- and mind-opening panels was the one on body horror, which, for you literary fiction folks, included a reminder that the subgenre encompasses classics like “Frankenstein” and “The Metamorphosis.” That panel felt pointed at a time when control over one’s body is being hotly debated in issues relating to transgender lives and abortion.

Another bracing session dealt with Lovecraft and Southeast Asia, in which the Indonesian-American writer Nadia Bulkin said she loved the idea that Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones (ancient gods as powerful as they are malignant) “are the European invaders trampling on lands that aren’t theirs.” Cassandra Khaw, a Malaysian-born writer and another guest of honor, pointed out an essential distinction between Asian horror movies and their American remakes: The American versions are inferior because they add an element of salvation or moral redemption where there was none.

But many attendees preferred gaming over metaphysical discussions. Several sessions were spread over various tables, mostly on two floors, and ranged from the popular (“Call of Cthulhu,” which is widely credited to have reignited interest in Lovecraft when it came out in 1981) to the willfully obscure (“Hecatomb,” a failed collectible-card game meant to be a dark version of “Magic: The Gathering”) and the hilariously entertaining (“Pirate Borg,” complete with swashbuckling outfits and a screen showing close-ups of the dice rolls).

The volume and variety of the programming was enough to make your head spin like Regan MacNeil’s. There were also film screenings, readings, concerts, live podcasts, walking tours of Lovecraft’s Providence, an art exhibit and theatrical performances. There was even a mushroom jaunt in a nearby park, in tribute to the recurrence of things fungal in Lovecraft’s fiction.

According to Niels Hobbs, the “arch director” of the convention and a marine biologist at the University of Rhode Island (he was on the “Under the Sea: Horrors of the Deep Ocean” panel), this year’s edition drew around 200 guest panelists, artists and reading authors; over 100 volunteer staff members and “minions”; and 1,400 attendees. (Absent from the official proceedings was the pre-eminent Lovecraft expert S.T. Joshi, who later wrote in an email that he had been at NecronomiCon but “kept a low profile.”)

Some preferred focusing on the core mythos, like Brian Vann, 53, a data analyst from Costa Mesa, Calif. “His characters are so frequently warned off: ‘Don’t go there, bad things happen,’” Vann said. “But they go, with terrible results. That speaks a lot to the human condition: How do we just ignore the warnings?”

In comparison to commercial enterprises like Comic Con, Providence had no Hollywood presence and only an infinitesimal amount of cosplay. The one big event that involved dressing up, the Eldritch Ball, had a theme, “Masque of the Red Death,” that freed up the imagination rather than constricted it to trademarked characters — instead of, say, Darth Vader, there was a woman dressed as Persephone, queen of the underworld, and a tuxedoed man in what looked like a green crochet Cthulhu mask. Revelers slow‌ dancing to murder ballads was a sight to behold.

Lovecraft himself might have been surprised to see his work bringing together such an inquisitive, welcoming congregation. But to Goodfellow, 53, the conference is a good antidote to the nihilism ravaging parts of America.

“Instead of rooting for the apocalypse, we’re rooting for sustainability and for people to radically accept each other as who we are and all move forward together,” he said. “It’s a wonderfully ironic backhanded way of finding positivity in absolute negativity.”

Article link
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/28/books/necronomicon-providence-hp-lovecraft.html

 

My Thoughts 
I am not a fan of the squid god:) But I never knew of the festival and it seems on reading like what the comic con used to be in NYC, what jazzmobile used to be in harlem, what many festivals used to be that I liked once upon a time.
I oppose the idea that Lovecraft was unsavory. Hitler as leader in the german government did many things that hurt people, whether german or not, ala The romani. But, Hitler had friends. I have never supported Donald Trump's as a real estate man or reality television mogul or president of the united states of america. But I don't know Donald Trump. The white men of european descent who enslaved my forebears , before during or after slavery , I do not like or support or have positive thoughts to. But that doesn't mean they were unsavory. Said white men had friends and loving ones. JK rowlings isn't unsavory. She has positions or viewpoints many do not like, many oppose, many despise, but that doesn't mean she is unsavory. An artist person not fitting a heritage or cultural mold in any community isn't a problem. Their art can still be liked. The problem is communities who confuse liking an art to liking an artist. I don't like the Nazi German party as I am black and by their law I am unfit to live or be treated with positivity if they have control to determine things. But, their night marches are lovely. 
The article shows in this convention, the people who attend it were able to do what I have heard or read many artist say they can not do, to Michael JAckson or R Kelly or Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein or DW Griffith and that is separate the artists from the art. And that shows a maturity that is rarer or rarer within the consumers or creators of art. 

 

 

The Last Homily On Liturgoid
Audio
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/the-last-homily-on-liturgoid
Colored Mural
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Mural-of-Beginnings-and-Mural-of-Ends-Colored-927830149
Coloring page Mural
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Mural-of-Beginnings-and-Mural-of-Ends-Coloring-pag-927830557
Text
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/The-Last-Homily-On-Liturgoid-927819243
For Dreadful Tales issue 40
https://www.deviantart.com/leothefox/art/Dread-Deadline-Forty-01-921208219

 

Enjoy the excerpt below

 

Introducing the GanYok, the monster partner for Princess Candace as she is on her Legendary Bloody Melee Gatlopp Run on the planet called Dahesh
Colored page
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Invitation-A-Moment-In-the-LEgendary-Bloody-Melee-927346127
Black and white page
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Coloring-page-A-Moment-In-the-LEgendary-Bloody-Me-927346301
Storyboardfilm
https://richardmurrayhumblr.tumblr.com/post/693729651227492352/princess-candace-has-a-monster-partner-it-is-of

....
PRincess Candace Videos
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Videos-of-Princess-Candace-927354237
 

 

 

Congrats to these three Black female athletes, but for the record, lacking opportunity isn't about you. Individuals do have limits. So for those black female athletes in places where they are still restricted/blockaded/not opportune... you are just as great as these three black athletes who stand on podiums aside each other. 
The goal isn't to make history. The goal is to be free. And if you are still not free to be in the USA , leave for other places. Don't wait for the USA to change. Find a new place, where you can be. 

 

FROM
A’Dorian Murray-Thomas Newark Public Schools Board Member
https://www.adorian.org/

 

It’s never too late to make history!
We Love To See It!
In a historic first, Black women stood proudly in the All-Around podium at the U.S. Gymnastics Championships! 
Konnor McClain @konnormcclain_ 
Shilese Jones
@shicanfly 
Jordan Chiles
@jordanchiles 
THIS is the legacy of 
#GabbyDouglas #SimoneBiles #DominiqueDawes and so many other trailblazers who trained and stood alone. 
#KonnorMcClain 
#ShileseJones
#JordanChiles
#BlackGirlMagic 
#Gymnastics #SHEWins #HERstory #TuesdayVibes #USA
#BlackHistoryIsAmericanHistory

 

MONICA RAMBEAU: PHOTON #1 (OF 5)
Written by EVE L. EWING
Art by MICHAEL STA. MARIA
Cover by LUCAS WERNECK
On Sale 12/7

THOUGHTS ON THE ARTICLE BELOW

 

Where to begin...first, even though some know it, all do not. The whole captain marvel comic book line was created to keep a name safe. DC Comics denied the original creator of the first character named captain marvel to exists. Then DC bought that company. But, Before DC bought that company, MArvel comics realized, DC comics having a character named Captain Marvel would be just ... so to keep a trademark, they have to publish a captain marvel comic for the legal sake. 
So, this is a comic book born from fiscal warfare... That is the first problem. Art has nothing to do with the genesis of the Captain Marvel line in Marvel Comics. 
Second, because this comic book line was never about artistic quality, but always legal activity, it probably has <I didn't check> the longest comic book run without any consistency in the marvel comics universe. Marvel has to keep the making captain marvel comics for the name. But, the nature of the USA comic book industry is to make erratic plot changes to characters over time. 
Third, the greatest erratic plot twist to captain marvel was when Marvel Comics now owned by Disney, decided to make Ms Marvel, Captain Marvel and give the mantle of Ms Marvel to a young female non white/non christian acolyte/arab. Which on its own, you may suggest, what is the problem? In the line of Captain Marvel's was already someone not male/not white/not european who had already been rechristened, not killed like the first marvel captain marvel <poor patriarchy> three times. So the original female Captain Marvel was technically still alive in the Marvel Comics universe as spectrum or pulsar or photon but Marvel decided to make Ms Marvel , captain marvel. 
It is called plot quagmire. 
As a writer, it disgusts me. The comic book industry in the USA's great flaw is the disrespect to plot. Plot means nothing. Reboot universes, kill off, always do random radical things. I argue, what will the USA comic book world be if all the comic books, Marvel + DC+ all the smaller prints, actually kept to a real plot, and never cheated or schemed or did silly radical things, but actually kept to plots. 

Now, as someone who supports Black artists, and knows the importance of Black characters in majority white owned/employed media organizations in the USA to a large ,not necessarly majority, percentage of black people in the USA. I say, the new photon comic book is great on arrival.
Black Woman, slick outfit- no cape nonsense, glowing fists- punch everybody, flying through space with no need for a suit while her makeup is perfectly on and she has a creamy crack hairdo, so near godlike. Drop the Mic buy the comic, and start reading, and get to cosplaying. 

Storywise, I have long since, left the USA comic book world. I enjoy images and I don't bother with most stories. Cause I don't appreciate the reboot nature. That is silly to me. But, love the look.

 

SOME OTHER THOUGHTS OF MINE ON SUPERHERO-DOME
Is Superman Outdated? 
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1905&type=status
Multiracial in multiversal
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1967&type=status
Making more money by changing the palette
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1562&type=status
reparations in comic book world
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1712&type=status
Does Disney need to buy Milestone? 
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1663&type=status
I don't publish agenda that isn't from my heart
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=1514&type=status

 

THE ARTICLE

Photon's Limitless Power Threatens to Break the Marvel Universe in Monica Rambeau's First Solo Comic Series
Eve L. Ewing and Michael Sta. Maria launch 'Monica Rambeau: Photon,' a new limited series coming in December.
BY MARVEL

This December, universal powerhouse Monica Rambeau will star in first-ever solo comic series! A five-issue limited series, MONICA RAMBEAU: PHOTON, will be written by award-winning author and scholar Eve L. Ewing and drawn by new Marvel talent, artist Michael Sta. Maria. The iconic Marvel super hero with four decades' worth of amazing stories will at long last headline her own saga. 

From the New Orleans Harbor Patrol to the Avengers to the Ultimates, Monica Rambeau has been a leader and team player her entire life, but now she’ll face a reality-shattering crisis that she’ll have no choice but to take on single-handedly. In order to do so, Photon will need to reach new heights of her incredible abilities—and then surpass them!

In a revelatory journey spanning time and space, fan will behold Photon’s true potential. The adventure begins when Photon is charged with making a very special, very cosmic delivery. What should be light work (get it?) for Monica becomes increasingly complex and dangerous due to a threat from beyond and family drama.  

“It's such an honor to be taking on the story of a legacy character like Monica Rambeau,” Ewing said. “Monica's character has a long history in the Marvel Universe, but she's way overdue for getting her own story told. I'm picking the pen up from the legend himself, Dwayne McDuffie, who put out the last Monica Rambeau solo adventure almost three decades ago. It's a privilege and I'm excited to tell the story in a way that both highlights her incredible cosmic abilities as well as her everyday, relatable struggles. I hope this will be a title that has something equal to offer to veteran readers and folks who may be brand new to comics.”

Explore the outer reaches and wildest vagaries of the Marvel Universe through the eyes of one of its most powerful heroes when MONICA RAMBEAU: PHOTON #1 arrives in December.

ARTICLE LINK
https://www.marvel.com/articles/comics/photon-monica-rambeau-first-solo-comic-series-eve-l-ewing
 

 

UPDATE: Prices reduced for the summer! Get 'em while they're hot! Open for ten slots right now!

Decided to put together a modified price sheet for the kinds of commissions I'm currently accepting. This is the current pricing for the foreseeable future.

If you are interested, contact me at jon@jonathanpriceart.net or send a note!

 

Commissions Open! - SUMMER SALE by Dualmask on DeviantArt

 

Why there's a 'high bar' for new EV tax credits, according to a Biden economic adviser
Akiko Fujita
Akiko Fujita·Anchor/Reporter
Thu, August 18, 2022 at 9:16 AM

The White House’s top economic adviser defended restrictions placed on the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)’s key tax credits that are intended to accelerate electric vehicle (EV) adoption.

Under the new bill President Joe Biden signed into law on Monday, drivers are eligible for a $7,500 tax credit for new EVs or $4,000 for used vehicles largely sourced and manufactured in the U.S.

However, critics — including some carmakers — have criticized the administration for limitations placed, saying it’s likely to slow down the adoption of EVs and leave drivers with few options.

“Certainly, it sets a high bar that that tax credit is eligible for batteries and vehicles that are produced in the United States or in North America or countries that we have free trade agreements with,” Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council, told Yahoo Finance Live (video above). “We think that that's an appropriate bar because what we want across time is to provide a strong incentive for us to have secure supply chains in those areas.”

 

Specifically, the new law restricts the full tax credit to EVs with battery material sourced from the U.S. or free-trade partners, starting in 2024. Any minerals or components sourced from “foreign entities of concern” including China would not qualify for the $7,500 credit. Final assembly of the vehicle would also need to take place in North America.

Adding to the restrictions, the law only applies to vehicles with a manufacturer suggested retail price (MSRP) below $55,000 for cars and below $80,000 for trucks and SUVs.

A necessary step
Biden has hailed the hundreds of billions of dollars committed to tackling climate change through the IRA as “one of the most significant laws in recent history,” but carmakers have criticized the new legislation for attaching too many strings and limiting the wide-scale adoption of clean cars.

In a recent interview with Yahoo Finance Live, Fisker CEO Henrik Fisker called the restrictions counterproductive, arguing that the limitations would actually “slow the adoption of EVs.”

“It's going to offer less choice to the consumers," he said. "I'll be surprised if there's even 10 vehicles in the US that will qualify for the full amount."

An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office estimated the $85 million set aside for new EV credits in the 2023 fiscal years would only translate to 11,000 new vehicles sold under the $7,500 credit. That pales in comparison to roughly 630,000 EVs sold in 2021 just in the U.S.

Deese said the “high bar” is a necessary step to entice carmakers into investing in supply chains closer to home. An overwhelming majority of minerals and components used in vehicles today are currently sourced from China.

Specifically, the new law restricts the full tax credit to EVs with battery material sourced from the U.S. or free-trade partners, starting in 2024. Any minerals or components sourced from “foreign entities of concern” including China would not qualify for the $7,500 credit. Final assembly of the vehicle would also need to take place in North America.

Adding to the restrictions, the law only applies to vehicles with a manufacturer suggested retail price (MSRP) below $55,000 for cars and below $80,000 for trucks and SUVs.

A necessary step
Biden has hailed the hundreds of billions of dollars committed to tackling climate change through the IRA as “one of the most significant laws in recent history,” but carmakers have criticized the new legislation for attaching too many strings and limiting the wide-scale adoption of clean cars.

In a recent interview with Yahoo Finance Live, Fisker CEO Henrik Fisker called the restrictions counterproductive, arguing that the limitations would actually “slow the adoption of EVs.”

“It's going to offer less choice to the consumers," he said. "I'll be surprised if there's even 10 vehicles in the US that will qualify for the full amount."

An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office estimated the $85 million set aside for new EV credits in the 2023 fiscal years would only translate to 11,000 new vehicles sold under the $7,500 credit. That pales in comparison to roughly 630,000 EVs sold in 2021 just in the U.S.

Deese said the “high bar” is a necessary step to entice carmakers into investing in supply chains closer to home. An overwhelming majority of minerals and components used in vehicles today are currently sourced from China.

“The core of this bill on the clean energy side is to provide long-term technology-neutral tax credits so that we generate lower carbon energy here in the United States and we generate the technology and the technological advances that come with that,” he said. “We certainly expect that because of this legislation, companies and the suppliers in the supply chain are going to respond quite significantly.”

Companies like General Motors (GM) have already responded by seeking out minerals sourced in the U.S, and investing in mining operations in places like California. But the timeline for completion of those projects still remain years away.

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation — a trade group that counts Toyota (TM), Ford (F), and GM among its members — estimated that 70% of the 72 EV models currently sold on the market will be ineligible for the new car tax credits because of the restrictions.

In the immediate term, Deese said, the $4,000 tax credit for used cars would likely accelerate adoption, given that the same limitations do not apply.

“Most Americans who are out there buying vehicles are actually buying used cars, particularly lower working class folks,” he said. “So we have more electric vehicles in our vehicle mix. Having a credit for used vehicles is incredibly powerful. It helps broaden the number of Americans who could see themselves getting into an electric vehicle."

Akiko Fujita is an anchor and reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter @AkikoFujita

ARTICLE URL
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-theres-a-high-bar-for-new-ev-tax-credits-according-to-a-biden-economic-advisor-131611401.html

 

What's In the Inflation Reduction Act?

JUL 28, 2022

Update (8/11/2022): The Senate passed an amended version of the Inflation Reduction Act on August 7, which included several changes to the bill's tax and prescription drug provisions. While the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has indicated a full score of the amended bill will be published in the coming weeks, the Joint Committee on Taxation has released an updated score of revenue provisions in the bill, showing the new version would raise an additional $22 billion in revenue. However, we anticipate the prescription drug savings provisions will now save less than the $322 billion in the previous version. We will update this analysis once CBO releases its full score of the bill.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just released its score of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022, legislation which would use Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 reconciliation instructions to raise revenue; lower prescription drug costs; fund new energy, climate, and health care provisions; and reduce budget deficits. 

Based on the CBO score, the legislation would reduce deficits by $305 billion through 2031 – including over $100 billion of net scoreable savings and another $200 billion of gross revenue from stronger tax compliance.

Because the prescription drug savings would be larger than new spending, CBO finds the legislation would modestly reduce net spending by almost $15 billion through 2031, including by nearly $40 billion in 2031.

Once fully phased in, the plan would also slightly cut net taxes by about $2 billion per year – with expanded energy and climate tax credits roughly matching the size of new tax increases. The legislation would generate nearly $300 billion of net revenue over a decade, mostly from improved tax compliance and the spillover effects of higher wages as a result of lower health premiums -- neither of which are tax increases -- along with early revenue collection as corporations shift the timing of certain payments.

Overall, CBO estimates the legislation includes $790 billion of offsets to fund roughly $485 billion of new spending and tax breaks (as negotiators account for the policies, it includes $739 billion of offsets and $433 billion of investments). Unlike prior versions of this reconciliation bill, such as the House-passed Build Back Better Act, this legislation would reduce deficits. Along with other elements of the bill, it is likely to reduce inflationary pressures and thus reduce the risk of a possible recession.

 

The package includes $386 billion of climate and energy spending and tax breaks – mainly for new or expanded tax credits to promote clean energy generation, electrification, green technology retrofits for homes and buildings, greater use of clean fuels, environmental conservation, and wider adoption of electric vehicles, among other purposes. The package would also increase health care spending by nearly $100 billion, mainly by extending the American Rescue Plan's temporarily-expanded Affordable Care Act (ACA) premium tax credits for an additional three years, through 2025. Accompanying this new spending would be various regulatory and permitting reforms to help reduce energy costs outside of the reconciliation package.

The $485 billion of new costs would be offset with $790 billion of additional revenue and savings over a decade. This includes roughly $313 billion from imposing a 15 percent minimum tax on corporate book income; $322 billion for various reforms to reduce prescription drug costs; $124 billion ($204 billion gross) from reducing the tax gap through stronger Internal Revenue Service (IRS) enforcement; $13 billion from closing the carried interest loophole; and $18 billion from fees on methane emissions, Superfund cleanup sites, and a permanent extension of the higher tax rate for the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund.

The legislation would reduce deficits by over $20 billion in the first year, and – with interest – over $85 billion in 2031. We recently estimated it would reduce debt by nearly $2 trillion over two decades. Assuming the permanent unpaid-for extension of ACA subsidies (which we would strongly oppose), the plan would likely save almost $50 billion per year by 2031.

Although reconciliation was designed for deficit reduction, this would be the first time in many years it was actually used for this purpose. It would also be the largest deficit reduction bill since the Budget Control Act of 2011. With inflation at a 40-year high and debt approaching record levels, this would be a welcomed improvement from the status quo.

WEBPAGE
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/whats-inflation-reduction-act

 

great tweet stream from @Thistleandverse for those writers who may feel the Shuster/Penguin merger is the christian rapture for publishing
From #THistleandverse 
I know a few small or independent presses so (for others who might be interested) I thought I'd share their names, their publishing focus, and some books I've enjoyed from them or books I'm excited to read from them (1/23)
CLICK THE LINK TO VIEW MORE

 

 

CENTER FOR BLACK LITERATURE
A CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Killens Review of Arts & Letters
Fall/Winter 2022
Jubilee: A Celebration of Voices throughout the African Diaspora
Founded in October 2002, the Center for Black Literature (CBL) has been committed to its mission 
to broaden and enrich the public’s knowledge and aesthetic appreciation of the value of Black 
literature. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Center and as part of this commemorative 
milestone, the next issue of the Killens Review of Arts & Letters will focus on “times for celebration.”
Despite periods of despair during these past few years and the economic, social, political, and 
racially charged challenges we have faced, we will focus on life’s jubilant experiences. We will 
highlight moments of hopefulness and elevation for and of the global Black community.
For the Fall/Winter 2022 issue of the Killens Review of Arts & Letters, we are seeking short stories, 
essays, creative nonfiction, poetry, art, and photography. We are looking for content that reflects
the ways Black creatives from all parts of the world celebrate our daily lives, our culture, and our 
history in a contemporary world. Unless otherwise selected by the editors, we cannot publish work 
that has previously appeared elsewhere in print or on the web. Prospective contributors are asked 
to submit work that is aligned with the current theme (the themes are announced in advance).
- SUBMISSIONS GUIDELINES -
(DEADLINE: AUGUST 26, 2022, at 11:59 PM ET).
Please submit to only one category: short stories, essays, creative nonfiction, poetry, art, 
photography, and interviews. We will respond to your submission within one month.
Notes for Submitting for the Fiction, Nonfiction, Essay, or Interview Category
1. Please submit one piece at a time. We have no set or minimum length for prose 
submissions. Average word count: 2,000–3,000 words.
2. Please use Microsoft Word format, letter-sized page.
3. Use one-inch margins on all sides. Line spaces should be double-spaced.
4. Use a standard typeface (e.g., Times New Roman) and use the 12-point font size.
5. Make sure the pages are numbered.
6. Include your name, title of the work, and page numbers on your submission.
7. Please do NOT submit book manuscripts.
8. Please include a two- to three-sentence biography. If the submission is an academic essay 
with references, please include a bibliography.
2
Notes on Submitting for the Poetry, Art, or Photography Category
1. Poetry: Please send up to three poems only.
2. Art and Photography: We welcome all types of visual and image submissions. Please 
include a short note about the context of the visual or image and title and/or caption 
information. Please include no more than six hi-res JPGs (at 300 dpi).
3. Email material to writers@mec.cuny.edu and to Clarence V. Reynolds at 
reynolds@centerforblackliterature.org.
4. Please write “Killens Review Fall/Winter 2022” in the email message’s subject heading.
5. Please include a brief introduction of yourself and of the work being submitted. On the first 
page of your submission be sure to include:
 Your full name
 Telephone number
 Email address
6. The Killens Review of Arts & Letters cannot be held responsible for unsolicited manuscripts, 
photographs, or artwork that do not follow the guidelines.
The material in this publication may not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of the CBL.
CONTACT US
Address: 1650 Bedford Avenue | Brooklyn, New York 11225
Email: writers@mec.cuny.edu
Phone: (718) 804-8883
Website: www.centerforblackliterature.org
ABOUT THE PUBLICATION AND ITS NAMESAKE
The Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, of the City 
University of New York, publishes the Killens Review of Arts & Letters. It is 
a peer-reviewed journal published twice a year that features short stories, 
essays, nonfiction, poetry, art, photography, and interviews related to the 
various experiences lived by writers and artists of the African Diaspora, as 
well as the African continent. The aim is to provide accomplished and 
emerging Black creatives with opportunities to expand the canon of 
literature and art. The latest issue of the Killens Review is available for 
purchase today. Click HERE.
It is named for the late Georgia-born John Oliver Killens (pictured; 1916–1987). He was a renowned 
African American novelist and essayist and was a writer-in-residence and professor at Medgar Evers 
College from 1981 to 1987. Killens was also the founder of the National Black Writers Conference, a 
major program of the Center.
The Killens Review of Arts & Letters is supported by the am*zon Literary Partnership. For more 
information, visit www.centerforblackliterature.org/killens-review-of-arts-letters/
information 
https://centerforblackliterature.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Killens_FallWinter2022_CALLfinal.pdf

 

Title: Rosy maple moth, amaranth, spiked club - weapons fairy
Artist: GDBee < https://gdbee.store/ > 

Prior post
https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2025&type=status
GDBee Post
https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=gdbee&type=core_statuses_status&quick=1&author=richardmurray&search_and_or=or&sortby=newest