Spring 2022 Issue

Rougarou: Spring 2022 Issue

“Just Not the Same Around Here”- Robin Young

Robin Young works in mixed media focusing mostly on collage and contemporary art making. Her focus on collage art recycled using magazine clippings, masking tape, wallpaper, jewelry, feathers, foil etc. allows her to develop deep into the whimsical and intuitive compositions she is known for. From large, life-sized pieces and 3D sculptures to small postcard-sized arrangements, Robin’s keen eye and gripping esthetic guide her viewers into her own semi-readymade world. Repurposing these nostalgic images for lighthearted and sometimes disquieting messages, Robin’s artistic universe is strange, funky, sometimes perverse and always alluring. Robin lives in the California desert with her creative husband John and lazy dog Comet.

Dear Readers,

 

It is a bittersweet moment when we have to pass on the mantle of editorial power, although the question remains as to whether it is the skin of the werewolf or sheep’s clothing that will be accepted. Perhaps the new moon will tell. Idioms and myth aside, it has been a pleasure to serve as Co-Editor-in-Chief these past two years alongside my partner in literary ferocity, Couri, as well as all of the talented wolves that make up our journal—a fearsome pack to be sure.

 

Luckily, Couri and other members of our masthead have agreed to stick around to help train the new pups, as it were, while I move on to devour other pastures. Only time will tell, I suppose, whether or not they will be greener, but perhaps a true rougarou does not care about such trifles, metaphoric or not.  

 

And so as I bid you all adieu, I am also excited to leave you all with a fantastic buffet of literature and art. If variety is the spice of life, I think this issue offers Cajun-level alterity to whet your appetite. With work from both newly emerging wordshifters and well-published lycanthropes, this issue traverses the domains of the spiritual, the real, and the fantastical alike—or perhaps shows these realms as one and the same. We hope you enjoy this artistic offering, a meal fit for the gods you are destined to become. Saliva makes your fangs glisten all the more.

 

Eat and be feral,

Kym Cunningham (and Couri Johnson)

Co-Editors-in-Chief

“Witness” by Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad

Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is an Indian-Australian artist and poet, who serves as a chief editor for Authora Australis. Her artworks have been published in various print and online literary journals and anthologies including Parentheses Journal, Pareidolia Literary, and Oyster River Pages, and on the covers of Amsterdam Quarterly yearbook, Pithead Chapel, and Stonecoast Review. She is the author of two poetry micro-chapbooks published by Origami Poems Project. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and her art multiple times for the Best of the Net. She lives and works in Sydney on the land of the Ku-ring-gai people of the Eora Nation. Find her @oormilaprahlad and www.instagram.com/oormila_paintings

Fundamentally Flawed by Bethany Jarmul

Janice by David Capps

“Engenheiro Dolabela”by Guilherme Bergamini

Reporter photographic and visual artist Guilherme Bergamini is Brazilian and graduated in Journalism. For more than two decades, he has developed projects with photography and the various narrative possibilities that art offers. The works of the artist dialogue between memory and social political criticism. He believes in photography as the aesthetic potential and transforming agent of society. Awarded in national and international competitions, Guilherme Bergamini has participated in collective exhibitions in 50 countries.

Year Four by Grace Shelton

Heavy Set: A Fairy Tale by Jude Dexter

Automated Writing by Max Blue

Exit Strategy by Daniel Reiner

 

 

 

Travelling Inward 6 by Cristina Iorga

Cristina Iorga has earned an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Iowa and a BFA in Drawing and Printmaking from the National University of Arts in Bucharest, Romania. Iorga’s art is a burst of the subconscious. In her conception, art is concerned with the expression of both the spiritual and the material. Iorga thinks that the expression of pure feeling puts the viewer in touch with an alternative, ultimately spiritual world.  

Sea Change by P.Q.R. Anderson

No Mary in Khashuri by Jacob Reina

notes from the understory (layer 34, direction one)by Rusty Morrison 

Thompson: Submachine Gun or Seafood House by Henry Cherry 

Poem by Maxwell Stenson

 

 

Facing It Together Series by Jack Bordnick

Jack Bordnick’s sculptural and photographic imagery is a reflection of his past and present forces and the imagination of his life’s stories. They represent an evolutionary process of these ideas and how all of life’s forces are interconnected, embraced, and expressed through creative art forms. Bordnick has been part of this creative art world since he can remember, beginning as a product designer and establishing his own design business in New York, Santa Fe, and Europe. These present sculptural images incorporate both surrealistic and mythological and magical imagery, fabricated in textural metallic mixed media assemblages. They are assembled, disassembled, and reassembled. They’re heavily textured surfaces becoming abstractions unto themselves and he allows them to revert back to their origins, from which they came. Enjoy their stories.

Head Editors:

Kym Cunningham

Couri Johnson

Poetry

Editor: Sydney Doyle

Assistant Editor: Spencer Silverthorne

Readers:

Madeline Trosclair

Maxwell Gontarek

Fiction

Editor: Andrew Selcer

Assistant Editor: Harold Bosstick

Readers:

Megan Devito

Chrys Albarado

Charlie Serigne

Nonfiction

Editor: Cat Evans

Assistant Editor: Raquel Thorne

Visual Arts

Editor: Nonah Palmer

Web Developer and Social Media Liaison

Couri Johnson

Copy Editors

Chrys Albarado

Catt Evans