Above is the foulweather logo designed by Kara (My sis in law). It was originally a zine cover for a project I did called 'Coming to Amerika.' I got tired of spelling Amerika with a K for a variety of reasons and decided to scrap it after four zines worth. We tweaked the old logo a bit to come up with the current image. I worry that it looks too phallic but I like it too much to start over.
I am now pleased to announce that the first issue of foulweather will be out very soon. It is currently in a warehouse in Oakland CA awaiting to be bound, packed and shipped up to foulweather's current home in Portland Oregon. I am getting a few hundred copies printed and hope to have them available at several local book shops. All going to plan the zine will be available online also. I'll post the links when that happens.
The loose goal of foulweather is to publish creative nonfiction that combines the personal with the political while providing a few laughs. The theme of issue #1 is neo-colonialism. It seems pretty random but as I was assembling everything together it made complete sense. I was fortunate to have a couple of great contributors who were already working on projects that were tackling this theme. Max Macias, a radical librarian and Saeed Farouky a Palestinian filmmaker wrote a couple of personal essays that question what it means to assume a national identity or subscribe to a particular culture. I wrote a piece on the film The Battle of Algiers, another on cultural imperialism and finally there is the saga of my expatriate existance as a Welsh youth in Bahrain. Confessions of a Guilty Expat is part of a more ambitious project I am working on but more on that at a later date.
In other news, the online literary journal www.smokebox.net is soon to publish a short story I wrote about poo. Look for it in April. It is called Thomas and I.
