SvenDavisson{dot}com

Ashé Journal 7.1

ISBN: 978-0-9790838-4-6
Paperback, 120 pages, 6×9, $12.95

PUNK BUDDHISM

Features an examination of the Buddhist influence on the artwork of Sylvain Bouthillette by Peter Dubé; new fiction from Riley McLeod; The Sutra of Immeasurable Life and Wisdom translated by Brendan Connell; excerpts from Brad Warner’s Sit Down and Shut Up; and writing from Darin Beasley, Tim Holmes, Iamba, Thomas Fuchs, Girish Menezes, Charles Suhor, Bob Makransky, Stephen Killeen, Toni Fergusson and Farrell Davisson; artwork by Garin Horner; plus books reviews.

With the release of 7.1 come some exciting changes in the direction of the journal. We have decided to expand the Ashé project by increasing our focus distribution of the print edition. In order to make this feasible, the Journal will be issued biannually around the spring and vernal equinoxes. The full table of contents and selected samples of each issue will be presented online immediately. The release of the full online edition will be embargoed for approximately twelve months.

The full print edition is available through your local bookseller or directly from Rebel Satori Press at http://www.rebelsatori.com/shop/

Subscriptions

Many people have asked about journal subscriptions over the past several years. Now, with the move toward full print runs, we are introducing a subscription service.

Introductory subscription rates are $16.00/ year (2 issues) within the USA. That’s over 60% off the cover price and 20% off regular subscription rate.

Subscription information is available on the journal’s website. International readers should contact the journal for a custom quote.

Just out from Rebel Satori Press…

Dreams, desire, darkened streets and the sudden miracles that appear there, the deep places of the mind. Two groups made these the heart of a radical project of liberation: queers and surrealism.

Better than many others, queers understand the power of these dark areas. The rich, complicated culture we’ve created for ourselves is constantly ready to allow us to follow our dreams and fantasies, carried by the surging waves of sexuality into some pretty and magical places. It’s just as clear that the surrealists were chasing similar adventures as far back as the ‘Twenties and ‘Thirties. Given the similarity of their motivations, why have the two so often been in violent opposition to each other?

Madder Love is an anthology of cutting-edge writing that wants to look at that a little closer. It opens up the surreal possibilities of queer literature while simultaneously displacing the historic homophobia of Surrealism.

From dream states to erotic obsessions, from the muttering of the unconscious to parallel worlds (and the weirder cracks in this one) Madder Love tackles why surrealism can be so queer, and why being queer can be so surreal.

Contributions from Will Aitken, Stephen Beachy, Jeffery Beam, Stephen Boyer, Tom Cardamone, Sven Davisson, Peter Dubé, Craig L. Gidney, Nicholas Alexander Hayes, Trebor Healey, Kevin Killian, Shaun Levin and Rob Stephenson help make the case.

Peter Dubé is the author of the chapbook Vortex Faction Manifesto (Vortex Editions, 2001), the novel Hovering World (DC Books 2002) and At the Bottom of the Sky, a collection of linked short fiction (DC Books, 2007). In addition to writing fiction, he is a widely published cultural critic with essays on books and the visual arts appearing in journals such as CV Photo, ESSE and Spirale, and in exhibition publications for various galleries, among them SKOL, Mercer Union and the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery of Concordia University. Peter lives and works in Montreal.

MADDER LOVE
Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism

Peter Dubé, Editor
ISBN 978-0-9790838-2-2, May 2008
Paperback, $14.95, 146 pages, 5.5 x 8.25.

http://www.rebelsatori.com/shop/

The Saints and Sinners/New Orleans Literary Festival is just a month away… May 8-11.

I will be among the presenters again this year. My panel:

IT’S NOT JUST NEW YORK, BABY
Outside the major publishers in New York, the university presses and the small presses are doing an excellent job of publishing LGBT work, picking up the slack that the bigger presses are dropping. What are the differences between publishing with a smaller publisher? What criterion do they use for selecting what to publish? Is this a better option than the mainstream for a LGBT writer? Join a distinguished panel of editors to see what they are looking for, what their missions are, and if this is the right venue for your work!

Other confirmed speakers include: Dorothy Allison, Mark Doty, Jewelle Gomez, Jim Grimsley, Aaron Hamburger, Stephen McCauley, Val McDermid, Tim Miller, Michelle Tea, and Elizabeth Whitney.

If you were ever looking for an excuse to visit New Orleans, this would be it!

For more information visit: www.sasfest.org

My Hero: A Wild Boys Tale

A Novel by Tristram Burden

ISBN 978-0-9790838-1-5, March 2008
Paperback, $16.95, 269 pages, 6 x 9.

“My Hero is a Jungian tale that combines mythology, science fiction, and eroticism to create a brilliant hybrid unlike anything I’ve read before. Original, exciting, and transcendent. A bloody great read! Very unique.”
—Douglas Ferguson author of The Forgotten Ones

“A brilliant fusion of William Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft set in the post-apocalyptic wilderness of Mad Max…”
—Ashé Journal

2006 Finalist Project: QueerLit

Set in a post-apocalyptic America, Tristram Burden’s novel tells the story of 17 year old Joshua My Hero. The youth lives out a humdrum existence, struggling to find truth and sense in a Christian-fundamentalist trailer park. But his psychic powers and sexual tastes leave him an outsider of his community, and forced to commit patricide in a final and desperate struggle for self-defence against his father’s rage, Joshua escapes into a wasted planet, armed only with an oracular penis, the patronage of an ancient earth spirit sent to rid the planet of all of its ills, and the wisdom of the Tao Teh Ching…

Tristram Burden’s short stories, poetry and articles on contemporary occultism and self-transformation have appeared internationally in a variety of journals and anthologies. This is his debut novel, a finalist in the 2006 Project: Queerlit contest. He currently resides in Bath, England where he’s recording his first album and writing a TV series in-between working on his second novel.

Buy Direct: www.rebelsatori.com

Rebel Satori Press and Ashé Journal are proud to be sponsors of the 2008 Project QueerLit contest. In addition, your’s truly will be on the Advisor and Review Committee for this round. The submission period opened Sept. 1 and continues through the end of the year.

The Project: QueerLit contest celebrates and brings media attention to unpublished authors of queer writing and opens doors for publication of their work. The contest is open to any unpublished author of an English-language novel with queer and/or bent content.

Authors may not be previously published or contracted to be published for a novel in any form. Previously published chapbooks, nonfiction, shorter fiction and collections of short fiction, and other work published in multi-author collections, magazines, etc. does not disqualify them. A novel with queer or bent content refers to a novel of any genre or blending of genres with LGBTIQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, and Queer), or with alternative themes, situations, voice, or characters. The author (and the novel) does not have to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersexed, or queer to be considered. Queer in this context can also mean a bent or outsider worldview.

All novel submissions are “blindly” reviewed (without knowledge of author’s identity) and rated (on originality, storyline, voice, and, characterization) by members of the Project: QueerLit Advisory and Review Committee, and another applicant.

From these ratings, the top-rated group of twenty-five Semi-Finalists, three Finalists, and a Winner(s) are selected and awarded.

Additionally, aside from the ratings, at least one novelist will be selected from all of the submissions as the Grand Prize winner(s) and awarded.

For more information visit the contest’s official site: www.projectqueerlit.com

The new issue of Ashé Journal is now online and available.

This special full color art issue features the work of Antonio Roybal, Nemo, Ben Baldwin, Joyce Ellen Weinstein, Darrell Black, Tantra Bensko, Janice Lincoln and A.R. Teest. Opening the issue is a essay “Eternity in Ephemerality: An Enduring Enigma” by Patrick Jemmer, Ph.D. and Rachel Jemmer, HND.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–To launch the release of the amazing new novellas Some Phantom/No Time Flat by author Stephen Beachy and the collection The Starry Dynamo by author Sven Davisson, Three Roads Press/Suspect Thoughts Press and Rebel Satori Press are proud to announce the following multiple-author San Francisco event August 31, 2007.

Friday, August 31, 8:00
Stephen Beachy (Some Phantom/No Time Flat)
with Sven Davisson (The Starry Dynamo)
Dog Eared Books
900 Valencia Street, San Francisco
Phone: 415-282-1901
www.dogearedbooks.com

Some Phantom/No Time Flat
by Stephen Beachy
Fiction, 5×8, 240 pages, $16.95
ISBN-13: 978-0-9771582-7-0
Three Roads Press, an imprint of Suspect Thoughts Press

“Henry Miller said that the moment you have an original thought, you cease to be an American. Some Phantom and No Time Flat are great unAmerican novellas.” -Thorn Kief Hillsbery

In Some Phantom an unnamed woman arrives in a strange city, fleeing a violent relationship in her past. Taking a job with disturbed children, her own mental stability becomes more and more precarious. A marriage of The Turn of the Screw and Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls, Some Phantom poses questions about the line between madness and memory, fantasy and abuse, questions elaborated on in No Time Flat. No Time Flat follows Wade, a young boy who grows up on the American plains in an isolated existence with his elderly parents, as he makes his way through a childhood of playground shootings and mysterious strangers. Becoming a wanderer himself, Wade inhabits a sparse American landscape of fleeting connections, missing children, and possible crimes.

Stephen Beachy is the author of two novels, The Whistling Song and Distortion. His fiction has appeared in Best Gay American Fiction, BOMB, The Chicago Review, Blithe House Quarterly and elsewhere, and his nonfiction and critical essays have appeared in such places as New York Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Raised by Mennonites “somewhere in the Midwest,” he now lives in California, where he teaches at the University of San Francisco.

The Starry Dynamo
by Sven Davisson
Spirituality/Queer Theory, 6×9, 264 pages, $14.95
ISBN-13: 978-0-9790838-0-8
Rebel Satori Press

“The bastard lovechild of William Burroughs and Alistair Crowley-or was he spawned of an orgy involving Rashneesh, Pan, Ginsberg, Foucault and a dozen or so of Burroughs North African wildboys?-Davisson’s vision is a rich distillation of subversive thought.” -Trebor Healey

Spanning over fifteen years of work, The Starry Dynamo presents an eclectic evolution of material running the gamut from the erotic to the divine and the erotically divine to the divinely erotic. The work moves from charged and, at times, provocative fiction and prose-poetry to scholarly and thought-provoking essays on spirituality and philosophy.

Sven Davisson is the founding editor of Ashé! Journal of Experimental Spirituality. A rebel-publishing pioneer, Davisson edited the small, yet groundbreaking, zine mektoub from 1989-1995. During that time, he also received a degree in Queer Theory from Hampshire College and studied photography with Jerome Leibling (of the New York Photo League). In addition to Ashé, his work has appeared in Abrasax: Journal of Magick & Decadence, sneerzine, The New Aeon, mektoub, Lambda Book Report and Velvet Mafia as well as the collection I Do/I Don’t: Queers On Marriage.

“With its wide-open definition of the word queer and fearless publishing choices that ricochet from risky to risqué, San Francisco’s Suspect Thoughts Press has made the book world a more interesting place to inhabit. Suspect Thoughts has swiftly become the hot press for connoisseurs of transgressive, intelligent literature.” -SF Bay Guardian

Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism

Anthology scheduled for publication in 2008 by Rebel Satori Press.

The Surrealists and the radical edge of gay lib represent two of the most sweeping movements for liberation of the last century—and both continue to this day. Moreover, the pair also created two remarkable “cultures of desire,” seeing sexuality as a primordial, transformative force, and exploring the power of dreams, fantasies, personae. They provided homes to the flaneur and saw the city and its hidden places as vital, almost alive—and in different, but related, ways both saw the worlds of the imagination and “real life” as overlapping each other. More importantly, the two took such things as actively political—revolutionary in fact. These resonances can be found in the depictions of Paris in Aragon and the swooning landscape of sections of White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples, in the novels of Rene Crevel and the extensions of automatism and dream material in much of Burroughs, in the permeability of text-world-voice in (largely queer) New Narrative writing, in the obsessional desire that animates great swatches of both Breton’s anti-novels and Wojnarowicz’s memoirs. And the list of analogues could be longer…Given this, we feel it’s high time for an anthology of prose investigating this subterranean relationship.

We’re looking for:
Short fiction and essays, prose poems, automatic texts and dream narratives, genre-defying pieces that explore/embody the relationships between gay men and Surrealism as a radical/literary movement exploring desire, the imagination and the fluid boundaries between the world and the mind.

We’d prefer not to see:
Memoirs about how seeing that picture in the MOMA changed your life, writing that takes “surreal” as a synonym for “strange.” And, if your main reference points for surrealism are a couple of Dali paintings, this anthology probably isn’t the place for your work.

Send submissions to: Peter Dubé, PO Box 643, Succ. Place du Parc, Montreal, Quebec H2X 4A6, Canada. Enclose SASE (sufficient Canadian postage or IRC’s) for the return of your material if you want it back. Submissions without same will be destroyed. Email submissions will be deleted unopened.

Deadline: September 30, 2007

All that being said, we’re looking forward to reading you.

The Spring 2007 issue of Ashe Journal is now available:www.ashejournal.com

This issue features the a lead article by David R. Cole, Ph.D. on Techno-shamanism and Educational Research; fiction by Brendan Connell, Tristram Burden and Christopher Woods; an examination of struggles over sexuality, filth and salvation by Diepiriye Kuku-Siemons; poetry by David Finn, Tim Holmes, Matt Mallon, Andrew T. Cutler, Laurie Corzett, Johnathan Sampson; plus reviews and more.

The issues features the artwork, cover design and artist statement of Jason Kraley.

Enjoy!
Sven

Ashé Journal in Collaboration with Rebel Satori Press are actively seeking new and independent writers!

Rebel Satori is looking for book-length works of literary fiction and creative nonfiction focussing on the general categories of personal spirituality, Buddhism, occulture, esoterica, personal growth and social issues. We list these broad categories as a first point of reference, but we will consider material across a very wide spectrum. Rebelious, revolutionary and experimental works encouraged!

Rebel Satori is an independent publisher of books on spirituality and revolutionary personal transformation. Rebel Satori publishes both new/experimental fiction and creative/inspirational non-fiction.

Satori (Japanese; Chinese: wù) is a Zen term for enlightenment. Satori can be found in every moment of life, it is wrapped in all daily activities, its goal to unwrap them to see satori. The Zen Buddhist experience commonly recognizes enlightenment as a transitory thing in life, almost synonymous with the English term epiphany, and satori is the realization of a state of epiphanic enlightenment.
For more details visit: http://www.rebelsatori.com

My new collection The Starry Dynamo: The Machinery of Night Remixed has been released by Rebel Satori Press. The collection includes writing selected from over 15 years of work—fiction, poetry, critical essays and the occasional rant.

Early Praise for The Starry Dynamo
“Davisson is not only an omnivorous reader and spiritual scholar, but he boldly merges the essence of Eastern wisdom with the Western occult tradition, synthesizing the two with extraordinary originality and grace, and providing us all with a glorious body of work all too rare in this decadent and material age. His vision is fresh as newborn myth, as poetry, as well-rendered prose, or the most passionate sex.” —Trebor Healey author of Sweet Son of Pan

Available through your local independent bookseller or through Amazon.

Click here for more details and ordering information

The winter issue of Ashé Journal (#5.4) is now live and online. This special issue is guest edited by Jay Michaelson, editor of Zeek: A Journal of Jewish Thought and Culture.

www.ashejournal.com

Jewish spirituality in the last several decades has undergone multiple revolutions. The liberation movements of the 1960s, encounters with non-Western religious traditions and the cosmopolitanism of the Internet have all left their mark, and have created new forms of Jewishness. Today there are feminist Jews and queer Jews; Jufis, BuJus, and HinJus; meditating Jews and psychedelic shamanic Jews; and even a few traditional Jews scratching their skullcapped heads and wondering what it all means.

Thank God for Ashé, because within the established Jewish community, many of the voices represented here would be considered threatening or foreign. I edit a progressive Jewish magazine, which features cultural and spiritual writing, but we’re still sometimes expected to conform to expectations of what “Jewish” is supposed to mean. It’s been truly liberating to curate an issue of Ashé, where the boundaries are more permeable. Here are pot-smoking Hasidim, Jewish priestesses, horny tourists and political poets. A former dean of a rabbinical school, now praising the Golden Calf. A Poet Laureate… of Queens. And, on the cover, Allen Ginsberg meeting Kabbalah: the Hebrew means “Serpent / Messiah,” and plays off the antinomian Kabbalistic observations that the two words share the same numeric value; the drawing personally inscribed in a book for Ashé’s founder, Sven Davisson.

These are the words and images of a Jewish culture beginning to emerge, a new spirituality that, born from the creators of boundary, now seeks the Boundless.

The issue includes the work of Tom Bland, Mordecai Drache, Susan H. Case, Jill Hammer, Rahel Chalfi, Rabbi Ohad Ezrachi, Jacob Staub, Jay Michaelson, Ruth Knafo Setton, Yoseph Leib, Hal Sirowitz and Sven Davisson; and artwork by Darryl Zudeck, Stan Goldberg, Ken Vollario, Orly Cogan, Joyce Ellen Weinstein, Rebecca Jay, Bara Sapir and Allen Ginsberg.

Ashé Journal is seeking creative and inspiration pieces of short fiction, poetry, art and photography for our Spring 2007 issue (6.1). For this issue, we are particularly interested in pieces that explore the “American sadhu.” We welcome pieces exploring any aspect of youthful independent renunciation with a particularly western flair… skate-rat squatters, punks, straight-edge, krsnacore, riot grrrls and other misfit toys! The flora and fauna of saying no to just saying no… Modern shaman, hardcore Buddhist, postmodern Christian or D all of the above…

Please forward or repost this call to anyone you think might be interested.

Questions and inquiries welcomed.

Please submit material as electronic attachment to
submit@ashejournal.com

Deadline: March 1, 2007

For full submission guidelines, submission FAQ and author agreement, please refer to our website. http://www.ashejournal.com

The Fall ‘06 Issue of Ashé Journal (#5.3) is now available:

http://www.ashejournal.com

Articles include:

Earth and Sky Gods of India and Greece: Finding the Feminine in Masculine Myths by Dirk Dunbar, Ph.D.

All Things Are Like This
by the 13th century Master Dogen Zenji, founder of the Soto school of Japanese Zen
Commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead
by Brendan Connell
A World Divided
by Zen Master Gudo W. Nishijima
The Savage Buddha: Notes on Gautama & the K?p?lika-vrata by Sritantra

Cultural Engineering With Eyes Wide Shut? Playback/Feedback Magicks And The Archaeology Of The Now by Tristram Burden
Teachings by Shakyamuni Buddha and Nissim Amon

Artist Portfolio: Ernest Williamson III
Astroplankton Break Dance
New literary fiction by Sarah Knorr

and Poetry by David Keali’i

plus reviews of Tibetan Magic and Mysticism, Enlightened Courage, The Hundred Verses of Advice, The Complete Magician’s Tables, and Pan’s Road

The Columbian e-zine PAN.O.RA.MA includes a new interview with me.
PAN.O.RA.MA
“ASHE journal the most relevant and interesting occult journal nowadays…” -Kerval Edgar, PAN.O.RA.MA

The Summer 2006 issue is now online, www.ashejournal.com.

The 2006 annual book issue, including exerpts of:

Generation Hex, Jason Louv
Seventy Times Seven, Salvatore Sapienza
The New Reformation, Matthew Fox
The Elijah Tree, Cynthea Masson
Sweet Son of Pan, Trebor Healey
Breakdown, Gregory J. DiStefano

And interviews with:
Jason Louv, Sal Sapienza and Matthew Fox

Plus poetry from:
Mitchell Stone, Jennifer Silvia and Trebor Healey

And reviews of:
Nothing Is True—Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin, John Geiger
Loving Mountains, Loving Men, Jeff Mann
Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels, Hella Winston
Vellum: The Book of All Hours, Hal Duncan
A Scarecrow’s Bible, Martin Hyatt

The Winter/Spring 2006 issue is now online, www.ashejournal.com.

This issue of the Journal includes a selection of spiritual fiction…

Spray Can Mimesis (representation or imitation of the real world in art and literature). New fiction from Jay Michaelson, Farrell Davisson, Craig Gindey and others.

Plus reviews of the magick of Jack Parsons, Love’s Rite, Kabbalistic Tarot, Oracles of the Dead, God, Jr., The Bull of Ombos, Baba: The Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Yogi.

The Fall 2005 issue is now online, www.ashejournal.com.

This issue of the Journal focuses on Gnosticism…

historical to post-modern…

Burroughs to Velentinus.

Contributors include: Alamantra, Catt Shiflett, Jonathan Sellers, Eric Lerner, Anne McGuire, Jeremy Puma and Sven Davisson; plus books reviews and more.

Plus reviews of The Gospel of Thomas (recent editions), The Secret Mark, Gnostic Philosophy, The Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Texts, Join My Cult, The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuberg, The Seven Point Mind-Training, Balancing the Mind, The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage

The editors of Ashé Journal are pleased to announce the publication of the Summer 2005 issue (4.2), www.ashejournal.com

The issue includes selections from the five finalist for the 2005 Ashé Journal Book Awards:
Novice to Master, Soko Morinaga
The Shamanic Way of the Bee, Simon Buxton
Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions, Randy P. Conner & David Hatfield Sparks
The Center of the Sunlit Sky, Karl Brunnholzl
Jesus & the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love, Will Roscoe

Also included in this issue are The Magick of Saints by Adekun, Stories of Hindu Devilry by Mogg Morgan, The Artist and the Tidal Wave by John Goldhammer, poetry by horehound stillpoint and Patrick Frank, as well as reviews of Tritiya-Prakriti, Clay’s Way, The Pseudonomicon, and others.

I Do/ I Don’t took the Lammy for best “non-fiction anthology” at the 17th annual Lambda Literary Foundation Awards gala in New York City. The collection from the cutest duo in gay publishing, Ian Phillips and Greg Wharton of Suspect Thoughts Press, getting dah kudos…

Rumor has it that there’s a second volume in the “Queers On…” series in the offing.