"Outcry" Is Coming to HopeWords Literary Journal
My essay, "Outcry: Creating to Resist Despair," is forthcoming in the second edition of HopeWords Literary Journal. Here's the backstory, and why this particular home for this particular piece matters.
Where it started
The essay grew out of a talk I gave at a Creative.nyc salon in January. That talk traced a real turn in my practice. After a cardiac event, I stopped photographing the city the way I used to, aiming, shooting, taking. I started receiving instead. Less hunting for the image, more standing still and letting the city come to me as it actually is, not as I'd like it to be.
That shift produced an archive. Stills, sequences, colors, textures, pulled from the margins of the city. That archive became the raw material for a new body of work on paper: layered, scraped back, sanded, rebuilt, cycle after cycle. Stains and mistakes stay visible on purpose. Nothing resolves into a clean final image, because the record of the reversal is the point.
I titled the series Outcry. Barnett Newman painted a piece with the same title in 1958, after his own recovery from a heart attack. I knew that Outcry had to be the title when I heard it. The tribute and the connection resonated deeply with me.
Why "Creating to Resist Despair"
The essay pushes past the studio process into the theological ground under it. My work runs on a Christian posture of redemption, not erasing damage but tending what's broken. The city as a body, not a battleground.
That's also the argument at the center of the essay: creative work, done honestly, is one of the concrete ways a person resists despair. Not by looking away from fracture. By staying in the room with it and making something anyway.
Why HopeWords
HopeWords is a young journal, and this is only its second edition. That's exactly the kind of home I wanted for this piece. The journal exists for writers and artists who take grief, worry, imagination, and hope seriously, without slipping into clickbait or breaking-news noise. This edition's unifying thread, even without a fixed theme going in, turned out to be imagination itself: the idea that Christian artists carry a responsibility to imagine a new world together.
I'm in good company here. This edition includes first-time HopeWords contributors like Malcolm Guite, K.B. Hoyle, Elena Childress, and Dr. David Doccusen, alongside visual artists Ency, Ash Schlax, Ned Bustard, and Cynthia Brown.
HopeWords also traces back to a conference in Bluefield, West Virginia, a city with its own boom-and-bust, rebuilding story. That's not incidental. A journal born out of a place that knows what it means to lose ground and come back is the right place for an essay about tending what's broken instead of erasing it.
What's next
I'll share the release date and subscription details soon. If you want the fuller version of the argument, the talk that started it, or a look at the paper works themselves, that's coming too.