John Madera

“The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it.” —Simone Weil (J. M. W. Turner's The Shipwreck (1805))

Happy birthday, BIG OTHER contributor Cole Swensen, a poet of extraordinary perceptual fluidity and experimental adventurousness! bigother.com/2026/10/22/f... Cc: @bigothermag.bsky.social

On October 24, 2026, join us in person or online for an evening of readings celebrating BIG OTHER the writers who make literature such a vital space for connection, discovery, and conversation! www.nyimc.org/event/big-ot... Cc: @bigothermag.bsky.social

Read Marcus Pactor's superb interview with Lance Olsen about AN INVENTORY OF BENEVOLENT BUTTERFLIES, where they engagingly explore Henry Darger, experimental fiction, identity, memory, and the art of reading, and more. heavyfeatherreview.org/2026/10/21/a... Media inquiries: please message me.

Thanks, @largeheartedboy.bsky.social for featuring Lance Olsen’s playlist that explores the music behind An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies, his reimagining of artist Henry Darger’s life and work. Read the feature: largeheartedboy.com/2026/10/14/l... (For media inquiries, please message me.)

Happy birthday, Ursula K. Le Guin! bigother.com/2026/10/21/u... Cc: @bigothermag.bsky.social

"I is another." —Arthur Rimbaud

"I want to be a poet, and I'm working to turn myself into a seer...It has to do with making your way toward the unknown by a derangement of all the senses." —Arthur Rimbaud

“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.” —Arthur Rimbaud

"True alchemy lies in this formula: Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse.” —Arthur Rimbaud

With whom did you have a face-to-face conversation today? How did it go?

"When you are not seduced by trivial situations, there is a natural sense of uplifted mind and vast vision." —Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (Image: René Magritte's Le faux miroir (The False Mirror), 1929)

From William Carlos Williams's PATERSON:

"Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face—for me that would be deserving of an award." —Elfriede Jelinek

"The impossible is the least that one can demand." —James Baldwin

Looking for recommendations for solo female audiobook narrators, especially those with a strong literary sensibility and a knack for capturing a novel’s voice, rhythms, and tonal shifts. Who are your favorites? Please share names, samples, or links. Thanks!

"Authentic presence is genuineness that radiates both gentleness and brilliance to others. Cultivate inner authentic presence by letting go of selfishness and by regarding other people's welfare as more important than your own." —Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

"To ruminate upon evils, to make critical notes upon injuries, and be too acute in their apprehensions, is to add unto our own tortures, to feather the arrows of our enemies, to lash ourselves with the scorpions of our foes, and to resolve to sleep no more." —Sir Thomas Browne

"A voice that calms, movements that calm, eyes that quiet—dreams that also do the same, and enliven, too. Be a precious donor of peace and hope. Give love to all you meet, for so many in this world are being torn apart.” —Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī

"Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand." —Henry Miller

“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” —Leonard Bernstein

“Look carefully around you and recognize the luminosity of souls. Sit beside those who draw you to that.” —Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī

"But that shadow has been serving you! What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle. Your boundaries are your quest.” —Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī

"Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn that anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you." —David Whyte

Happy birthday, Big Other contributor Rick Moody! Celebrate by reading these Moody texts I published in the journal in 2025! bigother.com/2026/10/18/f...

Seventeen years of unruly words, unexpected crossings, and marvelous becomings! Join us October 24, 2026 at 6:30 p.m. for a BIG OTHER anniversary reading featuring many extraordinary writers! In person and online at New York Insight. www.nyimc.org/event/big-ot... Cc: @bigothermag.bsky.social

Happy birthday, Oscar Wilde, whose wit and subversive defense of artistic freedom remain as bracing as ever! He understood that art should disturb complacency, that individuality requires disobedience, and that the world takes itself far too solemnly. bigother.com/2026/10/16/o...

"Our sense of yearning for freedom should be so forceful that we feel as if this conditioned existence is an acute illness from which we eagerly wish to recover as quickly as possible." —The Fourteenth Dalai Lama (Image: Willem de Kooning's Composition (1955))

Happy 70th birthday to the incomparable Lance Olsen! A singular literary innovator, fearless experimenter, and generous intellectual force, Olsen continues to expand what fiction can do and how we see the world. bigother.com/2026/10/14/h...

Enter your book[s] published in 2026 for a chance to win a 2026 BIG OTHER Book Award! The awards aim to recognize excellence in literature and to promote and support the work of innovative writers and adventurous presses. Deadline is January 31, 2027. bigother.com/2026/07/27/a...

Happy Publication Day to Lance Olsen’s AN INVENTORY OF BENEVOLENT BUTTERFLIES, a literary marvel narrated by artist Henry Darger! PUBLISHERS WEEKLY calls it “an arresting portrait of a troubled figure," so this is one to discover! Message me with media requests! bookshop.org/a/578/978193...

Happy birthday, BIG OTHER! 17 years of publishing work that makes the familiar strange and unsettles expectations! Thanks to everyone who's helped make this improbable adventure possible! Here’s to more unruly art! Excelsior! bigother.com/2026/10/12/b... Cc: @bigothermag.bsky.social

Delighted to have published Martine Bellen’s marvelous poem “Too Many Ghosts” in BIG OTHER today! Bones, ghosts, frogs, fossils, vessels, deep-sea creatures: the poem’s extraordinary imagery keeps metamorphosing into a fluid anatomy of grief, memory, and the self. bigother.com/2026/10/09/t...

“Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.” —Chuck Klosterman

"Anyone who talks about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life—without grasping what is subversive about love and positive in the refusal of constraints—has a corpse in their mouth." —Raoul Vaneigem

Crazy thought: the writer was actually great before they won the major prize! Imagination, creativity, insight, craft, vision, voice, and a singular way of seeing the world can apparently exist without a trophy. Who knew?

Delighted to publish Elizabeth Robinson’s “How Would You Like to Die?” in BIG OTHER today. The poem is a riverine engagement with death, its accretion of images a kind of consciousness rearranging itself at the threshold of disappearance. bigother.com/2026/10/06/h... Cc: @bigothermag.bsky.social

"Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself—and there isn’t one." —Terence James Stannus Gray

“The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination.” —bell hooks (Image: Alex Grey's Seraphic Transport Docking on the Third Eye)

"Through intimacy and imagination we can consciously create the world we live in together. Through belonging, we connect to ourselves, each other, and everything and, ultimately, remember what we are. We are freedom. We are joy. We are love. We belong." —Sebene Selassie

"My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world." —Adrienne Rich (Image: Alex Grey's Transfiguration, 1993)

From the Tao Te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell: Giving birth and nourishing, having without possessing, acting with no expectations, leading and not trying to control: this is the supreme virtue.

Media conglomerates now annotate fiction like public-health propaganda. A character smoking isn't an ad for cigarettes. The disclaimer doesn't protect us from the image; it insults our intelligence.

I suspect much of the fear of AI takeover, replacement, and human extinction is really a fear of the body: its hunger, desire, illness, aging, mortality. AI becomes the fantasy of intelligence finally escaping flesh. (Images: Francis Bacon's Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962)

On my birthday this year, I finished writing my second book of poems. Somewhere in the middle of writing it, I understood that I was writing a trilogy. Today, I finished writing the first poem of the third book.

Delighted to publish Elijah Sparkman's “'Keeping the Sentence Suspended in Mid-air, Aloft': An Interview with Peter Markus" in BIG OTHER today! bigother.com/2026/10/03/k...

Stay tuned for a new poem by Martine Bellen in BIG OTHER! In the meantime, read Bellen’s “The Doctrine of Notions,” a brilliantly inventive reimagining of a certain fairy tale as a meditation on confinement, self-invention, and freedom! bigother.com/2025/10/04/t... Cc: @bigothermag.bsky.social

Life doesn't have chapters; it’s not even a book, and if it were, it would be a messy text with missing pages, heavy redactions, flip-flopping footnotes, no discernible plot, and no index.