How Everything Turns Away: A Novel
A work of speculative fiction about an American professor who has lost his way and a Cameroonian refugee who has last his home. Their lives become entangled through the professor’s dreams.
People of the Deep (graphic novel with Meleko Mokgosi, in progress)
The People of the Deep imagines an alternative world in the depths of the ocean that is populated by those who jumped overboard during the transatlantic slave trade. Through the help of the trickster Legbà, they managed to survive and thrive in this underwater world. But now they face a new threat from the rise in ocean temperatures and decimation of the seas. They must help the People of the Land change their ways in order to save both land and sea. Unbeknownst to them, however, Legbà (in disguise) has returned to demand his extravagant reward for helping them all those centuries ago. He creates division among the People of the Deep, pitting them against each other so that he can assume dominion of the whole world. The projected multi-volume series will tell the story of the People of the Deep, from their origins centuries ago to their present-day fight to overcome the trickster’s greed and illusions, and save our shared planet from catastrophe.
Research Service
Research Service is the collaborative endeavor of Mashinka Firunts, Avi Alpert, and Danny Snelson. We create events that blend scholarly investigation, performance making, and creative writing. Our work goes against the unspoken assumption that intellectual labor has reached its formal perfection in the standard lecture, wherein the only progress occurs in contentual innovations. Our projects seek innovation in the movement between form and content, and propose that research is as much a question of aesthetic inquiry as abstract thought. To these ends, Research Service crafts unique lecture-performances for each concept with which we’re confronted.
Our practice also stresses the communal nature of knowledge production. As such, we seek to position the audiences as nodes within the event-structure, creating a heightened affective situation for the sharing of conceptual labor. We have performed at ICA-Phildelphia, the Drawing Center, the Palais de Tokyo, and elsewhere.
Other Creative Writing Projects
I have also done creative writing for Shifter. My work appears in issue 15, and I co-edited a volume with Sreshta Rit Premnath dedicated to the hugely influential, though seemingly non-existent, philosopher Indira Sylvia Belissop. Premnath and I are also working on a series of short stories about Belissop’s namesake, a down-and-out laborer in the mythic industrial development, The Castle. The first one was published here.
My screenplay, a biopic about Saul Alinsky, is slowly being developed with Rolla Films, Sydney. I am hoping to continue working in this format with several more scripts in production.