RHYTHM, OBSERVATION, UNDERSTANDING, TRANSFORMATION, & EXPRESSION.
r.o.u.t.e. is an art and literary journal carving paths amidst the unknown.
Lindsey Windland
Artists in Volume II
Valentine m. Valentine
Xyara Asplen
Xyara Asplen strives to be a product of the places that have shaped her. She was born in a flooded river on the Eastern shore of Maryland; grew up in the back of an East Kentucky holler, homeschooled and a little wild, with trees for her best friends; and spent her coming-of-age years moving through the lost prairies of the Midwest to the granite and reds and stone of the Rockies to the madrone forests of the Rogue Valley and finally back home to the edge of Appalachia, where she's been joyfully rooted for the past fourteen years. As a writer, nature connection mentor, intergenerational caregiver, amateur restoration ecologist, and dabbler in traditional arts, she does her best to live and work in the liminal space where animism and science interface.
Beth Feagan
Beth Feagan (she/her) grew up in southcentral Virginia, the Piedmont region. Midway between the mountains and the ocean, tobacco country, poor. She has lived all over but went back home to raise her son so he could grow up in her childhood woods and swimming hole. Since 2013 she has taught at Berea College in Kentucky where she has put down new roots, but she still goes home for holidays and backyard stew.
Libby Falk Jones
C. Phillip Willette'
mirra esther
mirra. She’s deep purple like the inside of a plum or a fancy fig. Been navigating the brambles of traumatic past experiences. It’s true, she has unwittingly jumped right into bramble bushes before. Curation for this literary/artistic journal has been a blackberry among the thorns. In this space she explores the fruit of syntax with all its facets; drupelet by drupelet so when it gets right down to it, her body can assimilate what it’s digesting. Thorn, stem, rhizome, root fruit, flower. Go on, ask her.
Oja, pronounced o-jah, means 'Give Thanks' as in no matter what happens in life, regardless of how it is perceived, that it is a gift, something to be thankful for. There is in truth, only to be thankful.
Oja Vincent
I received the name in a mythical kind of dream. I've had more than a few in my 47 years. Usually it feels as if I am half asleep, perhaps in interruption of REM rest, with some vertigo and seeing unclearly through a haze of what is much like fog levitating around a forest as if freshly conjured by a wicken druid as they navigate an intuitive path to manifest vision.
This particular one happened when I was in grade 8. My family had moved a little over a year earlier from New York to St. Louis. I had taken the pen name in my written poetic endeavors of 'Original James', reclaiming a first name that was eclipsed by everyone in my family, then everyone in society, calling me 'Mike' by my middle name. Original James was my way of retribution for anyone enslaved who had arbitrarily been given the biblical name upon arrival to a particular plantation as explained to my mother by one of her elder friends and our babysitter while my parents both worked continuously to provide for my two older brothers and me.
They are immigrants from Haiti, we say Ayiti, the proper name returned to the entire island by one of my matrilineal ancestors, Emperor Jean Jaques Dessalines. The name Ayiti is Arawak, a language spoken by Tainos, Caribes and at least three other nations' people who inhabited the islands of the so-called 'West Indies' through more than tens of millennia prior to the arrival of the bandit columbus. The Tainos and some Caribe in concert with people from more than 210 kingdoms, city states, villages and regions of Akubulan, better known as Africa, accepted a collaboration with a small handful of Prussians who defected from the armies of the Flor d' lis to defeat Napolean's strongest fighting force deployed to the West to exterminate and erase all resistance to false white supremacy. These are my ancestors along with the French and Spanish enslavers, the Dutch and Scottish exploiters who from time to time gave way to offspring who either raped or entered into loving union with the latter to eventually produce my parents.
Both my father and my mother lost a parent to the devilish machinations of another u.s.-supported 30-year term tyrant (Duvalier) of the variety that has become common around the globe during and since (eg. Mubarak, The Shah of Iran, Simosa, Pinochet, Trullijo, etc). My grandfather, Max, on my father's side and my grandmother, Luc, on my mother's side. As young teens they were each sent to NYC and met at Erasmus High School, which is just a couple miles from where I live in Brooklyn today and sit as I write this.
I was told by ancestors, which I was not certain at the time, during the vision-dream, that I had found my true name; that name that I have had throughout all of my lifetimes; the name of my soul.
Years later I learned in Ayiti, from an elder family member I met serendipitously, that the name was a name given my native Ayisen ancestors. It was similar to the name of the spiritual teacher of Dessalines, a Tiano shaman named Zinga (zing-ghaa) and others. This particular cousin of my father claimed she was a clairvoyant and I could feel her psychic power like static as I stood next to her.
So it has been for the better part of 50 years, I have been Oja since grade 8, and yes, even my mother calls me that. A constant reminder of my path, paved and protected by angels. My mother gave very important guidance in very few words very early in my life. 'There is only one race, the human race'....and ...'Wherever God is, no matter what kind of church or temple, no matter what sect, you will be welcomed'. That being said, anything that I write that is to peoples' liking or inspirational in any positive way, whatever I play, compose or produce that shines light is dedicated to my dear mother. My first teacher, my first doctor, in gratitude, I love you Maman.