Jam Journal Sampler: Sound & Silence
Image: Keisha-Gaye Anderson
from the Editor, Sherese Francis:
About four years ago, I started my mobile library project, J. Expressions as a way to promote Southeast Queens writers and authors. As a writer myself, I longed for a literary community that came from within my neighborhood. Often growing up I had to leave Queens to travel far to Manhattan or Brooklyn to find them, and while I do cherish the communities I have found, sometimes I do feel like an outsider. When I started J. Expressions, I was finishing my time with the Queens Book Festival and through that work, I had found other writers who lived in my borough as well, including in my neighborhood of Southeast Queens. At that time, the general Queens literary community was growing with new reading series and journals like Newtown Literary, but it hadn’t quite reached my neck of the woods yet. So I took the books I had received and bought during my time at the festival and began my library.
Since then I have come a long way with various events like Reading (W)Riting Remedy, Book Boutique, Kinetic Literary Jam and several pop-ups and workshops. Now, I move to my next iteration of J. Expressions with the Jam Journal. Beginning with the Jam Journal Jars, a kind of tip jar I would use at events and popups, I invited people to place a small piece of writing in the jars as a kind of free and open journal. While I do want to continue with the jars, I decided to turn this into a more formal but experimental journal open to literary collaborations, remixes and mashups between writers/literary work, visual artists/art and/ or sound artists/art. Southeast Queens has a cultural history that emphasizes music and dance and I want this journal to be somewhat an engagement with those worlds. In this sampler, the theme was “Sound and Silence,” in which I asked poets and writers to offer works that explores and reflects on the sounds that inhabit local communities and memories; but also the silences and the gaps where the unheard haunt, may have yet to be acknowledged and are not given the space to be heard, or were lost in the process of a changin city? These works from Southeast Queens writers Rowana Abbensetts, Christopher Smith, Bob McNeil, Keisha-Gaye Anderson, Jacqueline Herranz Brooks, Allia Abdullah-Matta and myself highlight the parts of the city and daily life we miss or don’t engage with enough in our rush to get from one place to the next.
