Special thanks:
Kayla Sosa, Editor-in-Chief
Saira Liaqat, Backend Developer
Shawn Grady, Benefactor
all Anthology I writers, poets, and visual artists…
Thank you, everyone.

a note from the founder…

Dear Readers,

Strangers & Karma’s Anthology I represents a piece of Now, the small and ever-evolving part of the universal puzzle that forms the perceptions that affect our individual realities.

We often subconsciously move through the lens of our environments, places that shape us, drive our reactions and ultimately meet us at the precipice of enlightenment. Anthology I reflects such drivers of the human condition, in a way that encourages us to recognize what isn’t being said.

For example, the featured illustration above is an untitled figure drawing that has been sitting in a young artist’s sketchbook for years. Likely considered unimportant at the time, it features a guy wearing a surgical mask as sunglasses. Nothing more, nothing less. But what makes this sketch important to us, what gives its simplicity significance is not knowing what has transpired in the life of the subject since the sketch was drawn. While the surgical mask represents a crisis of the past, it also connects the figure to a crisis of the present, completely through the artist, Iryna Komashchuk.

The info I had at the time was…
• Iryna is based in Kyiv;
• she drew it in 2021 during the pandemic,
• a few months before the start of Ukraine’s latest conflict—an event dubbed 24.

Knowing so little about the actual drawing, other than who drew it and when it was drawn, I felt its message translate into deep curiosity. My imagination begged to know where the drawing’s subject had gone since that moment of silly innovation, during a time when stepping out of lonely shadows meant celebrating what freedoms remained, to sit unafraid in the company of others. The sketch encouraged me to recall headlines, images and war footage burned into memory. My brain began to calculate and connect the known to the unknown of the sketch, form a story, imagine its arc. It made me question what the figure has witnessed since 24, if he is safe, if he has daughters, how his life has changed, what he feels.

Obviously, I wanted to know more about this sketch, so I reached out to Iryna for context:

The sketch was made in August 2021 on the island of Crete in Greece, during vacation. It was of a completely unfamiliar man sleeping in a mask on the seats. We were sailing on a tourist ship from one part of the island to another. It was so sunny day.  This man struck me as very intriguing because he used a medical mask as a sleep mask. You know, those were the times when people even wore masks on a boat in the sea, when the sea breeze was blowing everyone. I hope this guy is fine.

In other curated examples, such as Sophia Falco’s poem, Neighborhood Buddhist with Alzheimer’s, we feel what it means to be revered and quickly forgotten. deb Ewing, into the Dead Sea teaches us how to build significance from insignificance and enjoy the process of creation and its advocacy. Anthony Coleman’s Bad Service shows us how an uneaten dinner represents the lingering loss of a wife and mother. Doug May’s poem, Potsherd, reminds us that the most ancient atrocities are never forgotten, not even by the ghosts of a lost civilization.

So, find a quiet space to savor each piece of Anthology I as a testament to our own realities, how it relates to current events, how we as humans perceive that which is seemingly anodyne or apparently scandalous, and consider how these perceptions may suddenly shift and evolve over time.

Thank you,

Blaire Grady
Founder, Strangers & Karma