For those this may engage:
A fellow student from Reed College and I would like to introduce you to a new journal that will be coming out February 2014. Welcome to TableTalk.
TableTalk will be a space that will bring together established academics and artists with young thinkers and students to discuss topics that often fall outside the range of academia. Each issue will explore a central concept that borders on the incommunicable – the unwritten cultures, pregnant silences, and marginalized emotions that we so often ignore. These spaces that resist representation can be essential to studying how we convey and create our identities and realities. Through opening up a table to discuss these fuzzy phenomena from diverse perspectives we hope to open up new forms of social and ethical belonging.
The first issue will address the idea of Duende, the Spanish word that attempts to define the indescribable shiver that runs throughout our body when we are moved by a performance. We are inviting thinkers from different disciplines and backgrounds to take this concept and run with it in any way that moves them. It could be a short anthropology of New York City subway buskers, or a few paragraphs on what drives us to write love poems. Each contribution does not need to directly reference the theme itself but can use Duende as an entry point for various lines of investigation in your area of study.
We are accepting 200 word piece proposals that outline the scope and subject of your submission until October 31st. Accepted submissions will be decided by mid-November. The journal premiers on February 2nd so we would need your final piece by January 1st.
Your contribution could be in a range of forms. An essay, narrative, poem, drawing or list of thoughts. These are suggestions but should not limit the form of your submission.
We also want to reimagine the often unhappy marriage between online and printed content. The TableTalk website will be a carbon copy of the journal, the home page simply being the cover. Users will have the option to revise and edit the journal, crossing things out and writing in the margins. Submissions that add new elements to the conversation will be added as filters, so people can not only view the original issue but also how it is being reconceived and reconsidered. The hope is a deterritorialized journal that leaves ideas open even after they have been printed. A conversation that continues.
The first journal’s 800 copies will circulate around Reed College as well as the greater Portland area. With each bi-annual edition we will bring TableTalk to additional universities, libraries, bookstores and cafes around the country. We hope you want to be part of this beginning and help us foster a new kind of conversation.
Many thanks for your consideration and warm regards,
Maya Frodeman and Benjamin Moe
Contacts us at:
mfrodema@reed.edu
bemoe@reed.edu