ISSUE THREE // wINTER 2016
"Good Girl" features the work of 32 contributors and examines the spectrum of disappointment that encompasses the experience of the "Modern Woman" while confronting the very nature of the concept. in honor of every woman who has ever been asked just how she manages to 'do it all,' or has been criticized for not doing enough, issue three will showcase a range of perspectives trapped within and breaking free of the social expectations of Woman.
"Good Girl" is available for preorder through our Kickstarter campaign. Selfish will also be guest-starring at the 2016 LA Art Book Fair at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in February and the LA Zine Fest at the Majestic Downtown in March.
Kelly Lorraine Andrews' poems have appeared or are forthcoming in PANK, Prick of the Spindle, 90s Meg Ryan, and Love Me, Love My Belly, among others. She is the author of the chapbooks "I Want To Eat So Many Kinds of Cake With You" (forthcoming, Dancing Girl Press) and "Mule Skinner" (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). She co-edits the online journals Pretty Owl Poetry and Hot Metal Bridge, and has a hand in creating B.E. Quarterly, a hand-bound zine. You can see a slideshow of her cats at her website and she occasionally posts awkward thoughts @felinepoetess.
Adele Ball is a graphic designer and artist in the Graphic Design MFA program at VCU. She is interested in conditional practices of space and language. She is also into girl gangs, flags, and paper...and she makes a mean blanket fort.
Andrea Beltran is from El Paso, TX. Her poems have recently appeared in Pilgrimage, Redactions, Quiddity, Cargo, and Luna Luna. She likes to make postcards. Find her @drebelle on Twitter and IG.
Claudia Bokulich is a painter living in Philadelphia. She received her BFA from Tyler School of Art, and her paintings grapple with the contrasting ideals of lust. In her large-scale portraits, she presents questionable feelings of power and ecstasy, but also of guilt, isolation, and vulnerability. When she is not painting, she enjoys reading biographies, exploring cemeteries, and watching Italian cinema. She currently works as a gallery assistant as well as a children’s art educator. Follow her on instragram: cloudybok.
Laura Brun, a poet from small-town Kentucky, received her BA at the University of Southern California and her MFA at the University of Pittsburgh. She’s currently serving lattes at a coffeeshop in downtown Pittsburgh and her work is found or forthcoming in Booth Journal, bluestockings, Rawboned, Pretty Owl Poetry, and the Pittsburgh Poetry Review.
Ginger Buswell isn't sure. She thinks she writes to grasp the mystery of our corporeal existence. Her thoughts on writing and corporeality verge on the mystical and, at times, the mischievous. She has occasionally enjoyed spreading rumors about René Descartes. During business hours Ginger has served as editor at such prestigious publications as Molossus, When in Drought, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her writing has appeared infrequently in Sparkle & Blink, Harlequin Creature, Yay! LA Magazine, and the A3 Review. She lives in Los Angeles with two well-meaning chihuahuas and several pseudonyms.
Rachel Cabitt is an NYC-based photographer and web designer, finishing up her Photography & Imaging BFA at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Web Director of POND Magazine, she splits her time between photographing young, like-minded artists and fan-girling at hipster Brooklyn boy concerts. She's sassy, but sweet, and is currently working on her senior thesis entitled, "Daisy." You can follow her daring (and not-so-daring) escapades on Instagram.
Maria del Rio is an editorial, fashion, and lifestyle photographer currently living in San Francisco, CA. Born in Mexico and raised in New Mexico, art and culture have been in the forefront of her life since day 1. Getting her start to photography at 15 years old and finding an escape in the Darkroom, she started her journey assisting, and taking classes at local community colleges. Maria worked in social work for 6 years while doing photography recreationally, before finally taking the leap into photography full time in 2010. She’s always on the hunt for a good adventure on an artist’s budget, which usually entails sneaking into anywhere that might have a good free cocktail, music or a cool view. Her clients/publications include Refinery29, Everlane, Nylon, and her mother’s fridge. Follow her on Instagram: @delriophotography.
Keaton Fox is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work reflects and distorts the varied realities of the Information Age. Fox studied Video Art at Syracuse University and her work has received international recognition, having been exhibited in countries such as France, Italy, New Zealand, and in multiple cities across the United States. She recently moved to Detroit after working as a Teaching Media Artist at Cambridge Community Television in Boston, MA. In January, she will be an artist-in-residence at the Alys Foundation, where she was invited to create a site-specific installation for Digital Graffiti 2016. Follow her on IG @keaton.fox_.
Agatha French is a Los Angeles-based writer, reviewer, and editor. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gigantic, NANO Fiction, Burrow Press Review, Everyday Genius, and The Nervous Breakdown, among others. She is deputy editor of the online literary magazine Coda Quarterly; co-creator of Four Eyes Project, set to launch in spring 2016; and food editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
While both small and feral, Gabrielle Gilbert exists as a junior writing major at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.
Penelope Gazin has a vagina but doesn't let it get in the way of making art.
Raised in Alabama and Florida, Colleen Itani spent most of her youth despising the South and fried food. Her work deals with vulnerability, emotional intelligence, and social engagement. Flirting with wit, her art serves as a physical representation between conflicted feelings of confidence and naivety. Currently residing in Tampa, she no longer dwells on once being told, "You're not as pretty as you could be."
Hannah Johnson is a bisexual feminist currently working on her MFA in Poetry at Mills College in Oakland, CA. She is co-moderator for Non-Mono Perspective, a blog for people with non-monosexual identities.
Molly Kaplan is a writer, artist and explorer from the San Fernando Valley, CA. She dumps most of her creative endeavors on her website, desertbeaver.biz, which, like Molly, is usually under construction. Interests include fonts, issues of existence, pets and perversions.
Shola W. Lawson discovered the power to capture imperfect moments that later become nostalgic by drawing on her own awkward teenage experiences with style, body image, boys, and trying to fit into the suburbs of Portland. Shola shoots primarily in 35mm with her Pentax k1000, a Leica Mini II, and expired disposables. Shola lives and works in northeast Portland with a calico cat named Reva.
Marisa Malone is interested in memory, embodiment, and cultural influences on femininity. She explores these themes through writing, letterpress and drawing. She is the author of two self-published chapbooks and her poetry has been published in BlazeVOX Journal. She lives in Oakland, CA and is likely to be found in a thrift store or browsing a book shop.
Grace Mateo is a Brooklyn artist interested in creating dialogues. She has developed her skills in intensive personal studies, at educational institutions, and throughout the boroughs of New York City. Her work often addresses socio-economic conflicts, gender, and mental & physical health issues in a variety of media. Through engagement with the viewer, Grace seeks an exchange of understanding through discussion and celebration of our similarities and differences. In words, pictures, and video she is unafraid to transcend limitations. She loves pizza, holograms, tattoos, zombies, and unicorn onesies.
Naomi Moser is a Brooklyn-based video artist and poet. Her experimental feminist narrative videos have been screened at film festivals in Brooklyn, upstate New York, St. Paul, MN and online. She has worked creatively abroad at two artist residencies in Andalucía, Spain. Naomi's favorite things are archeology, travel, the New Museum, refried beans, and streaking.
Calley Nelson does not know what she’s doing with her life because she went to art school. She’s currently playing journalist at Chicago Magazine, singing flash fiction in basements and combing through novel submissions for Curbside Splendor. Everything is temporary.
Kristin Økland is an artist and writer from Southern California. Her work often investigates the intersection and narrative between the feminine and the Other, both textually and visually. Sharks are her favorite animals.
Gabi Pérez is a photographer and writer from a small island in the Caribbean: a place she considers to possess the perfect latitude. She now lives in the Big Apple where she is a local at various 99¢ pizza joints, and has unwillingly become accustomed to rodents... A lot of her days are spent clicking things like the shutter button and the hearts on instagram. She is cynical by nature, fluent in spanglish, and spends most of her time studying herself and others.
Jackie Pick, once and future Jersey girl, is a former teacher and current word monkey in Chicago. She is a contributing writer to the Herstory Anthology: So Glad They Told Me (Spring, 2016) and to Multiples Illuminated (Spring, 2016). She is the co-creator and co-writer of the upcoming short film Bacon Wrapped Dates and occasionally performs sketch and musical comedy in Chicago. You can follow Jackie on twitter and Facebook, where she mostly just apologizes for not updating her blogs (here and here).
Giorgia Sage is a writer, San Francisco native, and is still not sure how she ended up in the middle of Connecticut, where she is studying Art & Design and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University. Her poems have been published in Your Impossible Voice, Sugar Mule, Barking Sycamores, and The Found Poetry Review, among other journals. Her work and various endeavors can be found on her website, instagram, and twitter. She herself can often be found crying on public transportation and moving worms off sidewalks during rainstorms.
Yumi Sakugawa is a comic book artist and illustrator, and the author of I Think I Am in Friend-Love with You, Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe, and There Is No Right Way to Meditate. Her comics have also appeared in Bitch, The Believer, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014, The Rumpus, and other publications. A graduate of the fine art program of University of California Los Angeles, she currently lives in Los Angeles, where she spends most of her time as a wannabe foodie and pursuing the next perfect taco-truck taco. You can find her on twitter and instagram.
Devika Sen is a printmaker currently studying graphic design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. A bicoastal girl, she grew up in a small town in Northern California where she learned everything she knows about silkscreen printing. Her prints communicate feminist issues she feels strongly about and draw inspiration from Cuban poster art. She's still figuring out what she's doing with her life, but for now she's hard at work on her Angry Girl series. She's an Angry Girl herself, but still working on being unapologetic. If you like her prints, you can find them online at devikasen.bigcartel.com.
Erin Shipley is an artist and multipotentialite based in Brooklyn, NY. She is an alumni of the International Center of Photography (GS '15) and holds a BA in French from Goucher College. Her most recent work, Enough, centers around relationships with her family, and the paradox of transition from child to adult and back again. Erin aspires to dance a little every day, drink more water than coffee, say what she means, and mean what she says. Today, she means feminism and business. To see the big picture, find her on tumblr and follow her on IG.
Sable Elyse Smith is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. Her practice considers memory and trauma while enacting an undoing of language—sifted through the archive of her own body. She has performed at the New Museum, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Eyebeam, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA.; and is currently working on her first book. Smith has received awards from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and Art Matters. She is currently part-time faculty at Parsons The New School for Design.
Charley Star is an award-winning fine art, portrait and lifestyle photographer, as well as a poet and writer. Her portrait and wedding photography have been published in numerous national magazines, several wedding books, and in all the top wedding blogs. Her fine art photography has been exhibited in several exhibitions in LA and Southern California, and she has an upcoming group show at the South East Center for Photography. Her poetry and writing have been published in several national and regional magazines as well as several online parenting blogs. She is working on her first chapbook of poetry. Charley is a mom of three, and therefore spends a lot of time discussing heavy-hitting political issues like whose turn it is for the Legos. She has mastered the art of hiding out in bathrooms to write small novels on her phone without little babes underfoot. She writes a blog on the beauty and heart of motherhood at somethingstrongandtrue.com and lives in LA with her family. Find her on IG @charleystar // @somethingstrongandtrue.
Darcie Wilder lives and works in New York. Her work has appeared in Logue Magazine, New Hive, and on MTV. She has a book forthcoming from Sorry House. She tweets from @333333333433333.