The new issue of Mixed Nerve will go live tomorrow. It will be my last issue as editor and publisher. I thank all who have enjoyed the e-zine and contributed work to it over the years.

Aloha,
Pat Matsueda

This photograph shows Heart Centric, a beautiful painting by Ezra Li Eismont created for The Lotus Tribe Eco-Learning & Research Center, run by Samira Sharif and Michael Gushard and located in Novato, California. The painting will be featured in the next issue of Mixed Nerve, guest-edited by Tia Ballantine and Perle Besserman. Other contributors to the issue are as follows:

Art

• Calvin Collins
• Domenico De Rosa
• Gita Meh

Fiction

• Oren Ashkenazi
• Lee Kofman
• Brigid Lowry
• Leialoha Perkins
• Francesca Rendle-Short
• Supriya Singh

Nonfiction

• Gabrielle Welford

Poetry

• Michael Bates
• Alison Brackenbury
• Clint Frakes
• Will Hochman
• Jee Leong Koh
• Gill McEvoy
• Helena Nelson
• Ruth Pitter
• Henry Chinedu Ugboaja

Also in the issue are editor’s notes by Tia and Perle.

• Editor’s diary
• Tia Ballantine
• Perle Besserman
• Melissa Chimera
• Steve Heller
• Hal Lum
• Robert Miller
• Adele Ne Jame
• Betty Winstedt

Please keep in mind the following:

• these pages won’t display the frames, merely the content;
• you must click on each page to advance to the next one; and
• if you want to print the frameset and the frames, you’ll have to do a screen capture.

To the right is one of my favorite images. It is beautifully crafted and highly original and merges two parts of who I am: writer and dragon-year baby. I found it on the internet but neglected to record where it’s from. If anyone recognizes it, please let me know. Thanks, and thank you for your support of Mixed Nerve

In the last issue of Mixed Nerve, George Beetham Jr. had a good essay on Alaska. Some of the photographs he took of the state accompanied the essay. A more extensive set appears at Webshots.

Big guns George Beetham Jr., newspaper editor, and Gary Mawyer, medical editor, on a recent field trip. Mawyer says the location “is in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, and is at the Mule Shoe—or Bloody Angle as the Northern troops called it—on the Spotsylvania Court House battlefield, and was taken I guess the day before the anniversary of the attack. The other view I think I sent [photo to come] is roughly pointed at the spot where Leonidas Marr would have been standing at the far tree line when he was promoted to lieutenant and spared from the assault.”

The Mekong River, which is the subject of a beautiful photograph by Keith Yabusaki, is under threat. If you are interested in finding out more about the campaign to save the river, go to Save the Mekong.

Melissa Chimera, whom I mention in the editor’s diary, will be participating in another artistic project soon. Here is her description of Moving Cultures: Intercultural Dialogue:

I’ll be part of a multi-cultural, cross-disciplinary project sponsored by RMIT University, Melbourne and Guangzhou University. It brings together twenty nine artists, filmmakers, photographers, musicians, poets, writers, linguists, and philosophers from China, Melbourne, the United States and the United Kingdom. We will take a train from Guangzhou to Tibet where we will spend ten days. We will make collaborative art according to our diverse oral, visual, textual and musical backgrounds in response to the mini train “city” we’ve created and to our ever-changing environment. We are living in a world with moving cultures, where borrowing, exchanging and hybridizing happens more frequently. This project is a living experiment of this practice, enhanced by elevational (sea level to 12,000 ft) and political changes. We will exhibit our work in Lhasa and possibly at Guangzhou University on the return.

For links to coverage of Melissa’s work, click here.