Substack  

I shan’t update this website journal with every piece of writing I post there, as aim to write something as close to weekly as possible. However, I share below the first piece of writing that I have opened the substack with. It is somewhat of an attempt to ‘introduce’ Mousai, and myself, so perhaps has meaning here, in the sense of a renewed purpose.

mousaijournal.substack.com

Mousai is a multidisciplinary art journal, centred around platforming artists and writers working broadly within themes of Transgression, Esotericism, and Liminality. It is an independent publishing project, committed to offering space to those who are otherwise ‘othered’, without issuing censorship over the challenging, demanding, and subversive topics they express.

At its core, Mousai publishes a journal curated around the broad aforementioned expressions, but also works on intersecting issues specifically centred around particular themes. 

With this substack, I aim to share some aspects of the work of Mousai, but also to share some of my own writing, as the individual poet / writer behind the more important work of Mousai. 

Most of what I do is in service to Mousai, however as a journal and platform it serves much more than just my work, and is above me as an individual. In sharing some of my own writing here, I hope to offer some meaningful insight into the mind behind Mousai, but also as a writer in and of their own right. 

Thus, to connect my own work with other writers and readership seems like a blessing that substack, at least in my current naivety, appears to be offering a meaningful forum for. 

Most of my work is expressed through poetry – or at least my attempts at such – but does also sometimes straddle prose and longer form essays, which predominantly, if not always, form themselves around the experiences I have within themes such as occultism, transgression, magic, anarchism, activism, subversion, and a sense of my place within the world as a trans woman.  

On a personal note, I mention the latter as it is paradoxically as relevant as it is irrelevant to my work. I am a trans woman. Circumstances make it important to state, but my status as such bares no necessary relevance to my work, and it shouldn’t invalidate me as someone doing this work based purely on that fact. It does though, so very often, in the opinions of many within society. Society as a whole, but also within more subversive circles, making it all the more important that I do state this, and persist with what I am doing regardless. Mousai will, and does, stand with trans people, and those of all minorities and marginalised peoples, in our fight to respond to our increasing erasure. In the same way that something can only be as a-political as unwilling one is it to have a view on anything; transgression and subversion can only mean something if one has a view and a position on things that can so rarely be devoid of politics. 

Transgression, which lies at the centre of what Mousai does; in both its core and intersecting issues, will mean something very different to everyone, and Mousai / I seeks to propose to universality nor objective meaning. 

However, it is important to discuss the above, as I see an increasing amount of instances within which individuals within movements that would typically consider themselves ‘transgressive, subversive, and/or countercultural’, subscribe to exceedingly conservative, Neo-liberal, and regressive views. It is a vile paradox, that such, and in extreme but increasingly common cases the fascists and/or right wing minds amongst us, have managed to manipulate so many into thinking that the increased erasure and oppression of such marginalised groups of peoples are in fact acts of resistance and defiance against a majority, ideology, or agenda that they somehow manipulate to be perceived as ‘greater than and/or taking over them’.

This is of course false, to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear. It is manipulation, not transgression. Most of all, it is regression.      

Experience has taught me that authenticity, and a willingness to be vulnerable enough to state and stand by who you are, and what you believe, is the only way to make life somewhat acceptable. So to finish this short introduction by revisiting how it started, Mousai’s work is firmly rooted in transgression, as is my own writing. It exists within the liminal cracks of the world, giving platform to artists and writers whom explore and expose them, and ultimately represent ‘the other’. Without the taint of commercial or capitalist commodification. 

It, and I, always will. 

And, with that subversive purpose, seek to propose no universality in what it is that we mean by and with ‘transgression’. 

To define is to confirm. 

However, the increasing erasure of marginalised peoples is something that Mousai places itself vehemently against. Mousai is bigger than me, but not to stand against the rise of transphobia, racism, fascism, homophobia, misogyny etc….would be a betrayal of everything that Mousai represents and platforms, and of myself as a human. 

The views and actions purported against marginalised peoples are the antithesis of transgression. 

Point the arrow at the corners of the world that collectively target us all, irrespective of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality etc. 

Question and disagree, but never at the expense of anyone’s right to exist.