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Kaleidoscope – Winter/Spring 2013

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Number 66

Winter/Spring 2013

Biannual

Cara Bigony

“Accept the changes, Celebrate the advantages, Find Purposes.” This quote from Mike Shirk, a disabled artist featured in Kaleidoscope, exemplifies the humanity, humility, and honesty you’ll find in the issue. A magazine dedicated to discussing disabilities through art, fiction, poetry, and personal essays, Kaleidoscope is inspiring. This “Significant Relationship” issue (the last print issue before they transition to a digital model) offers comfort to caregivers, understanding to outsiders, and hope to the disabled. Kaleidoscope is different than almost every other literary magazine I’ve read; it is art with a purpose—with a humanitarian agenda and a palpable sense of community.

“Accept the changes, Celebrate the advantages, Find Purposes.” This quote from Mike Shirk, a disabled artist featured in Kaleidoscope, exemplifies the humanity, humility, and honesty you’ll find in the issue. A magazine dedicated to discussing disabilities through art, fiction, poetry, and personal essays, Kaleidoscope is inspiring. This “Significant Relationship” issue (the last print issue before they transition to a digital model) offers comfort to caregivers, understanding to outsiders, and hope to the disabled. Kaleidoscope is different than almost every other literary magazine I’ve read; it is art with a purpose—with a humanitarian agenda and a palpable sense of community.

Tenderness and strength appear throughout the journal in simple interactions. James B. Nicola’s “The Beauty of Gray” shows a caregiver’s life, without romanticizing its daily challenges. And “In Chemo,” a short poem by Kenneth Raymond (Joe) Massingham, the whole process of chemo is glossed in order to magnify one session and image of a loved-one’s touch of his arm. With equal grace and candor, other poets such as Travis Laurence Naught and Sarah Rizutto turn to the judgments, loneliness, and the pervasive feeling of difference that haunts their disability-defined social interactions.

In Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry’s “Imagine,” a couple navigates illness from the inside. Her story cautiously exposes the specific type of disappointment one feels when having a disabled child. She artfully manipulates the detail of being handed a flyer in the hospital into a metaphor that brings us as close as we can get to her experience.

The personal essays in this issue should be published as an anthology. Darien Andreu’s “The Importance of Plato” outlines “hospital time,” illustrating the routine of living in a hospital, a daily living schedule so vastly different and removed from “healthy” routines. Like many stories in this magazine, the smallest gesture assumes major significance. In one moment, finally free from the hospital and able to pet his dog, the author regains temporary control of his life, and sees it as a blessing. And while some stories nestle into a narrative arc, Amy F. Quincy’s essay starts in an extremely vulnerable moment of having been pitched from her wheelchair:

After much discussion, we decided she should grab me by the ankles and pull me over the threshold. I wanted her to hurry before some neighbor walking the dog saw me out of the wheelchair and came to investigate. I should have been more worried about someone seeing my mother dragging what looked to be a dead body into the house.

With a sense for irony and humor, her writing is intimate. Without sugar coating and without negativity, she’s simply telling us, how it is, day in and day out, to live with her disease. She explains the medical, exposes the familiar, and divulges her daily struggle with it.

One of the most moving parts of the journal is its art, but the oils and watercolors are not done justice in black and white. Luckily, the journal’s transition to digital (starting next issue) should solve this. Aside from this printing setback, Tommy Roberts’s “Reflections” and “Monet’s Garden” are two impressionist-inspired landscapes done in watercolor. And his acrylics on paper titled “Freedom,” showing more than twenty hands reaching to the sky, conveys a remarkable multiplicity. His art is uniquely tied to his personal struggle with muscular dystrophy, which he and Sandy Palmer synthesizes elegantly:

The landscape of life includes rough terrain, valleys, mountaintops and a multitude of colors, shapes and textures. When he looks at a landscape he wants to paint, he says, “I select areas and interpret them on the canvas.” He doesn’t attempt to paint every single leaf, branch, or blade of grass. He looks at the entire image and pulls out the areas that intrigue him.

Sandy Palmer’s compilation of Michael and Beth Shirk’s work is equally comprehensive and outlines the couple’s history, and their mixed media and watercolors.

If you can’t buy the last print issue of Kaleidoscope, I urge you to bookmark it on your computer and keep an eye out for its digital issues coming soon. This journal is every bit as literary as every other journal out there, and it has a purpose. And that feels good.
[www.udsakron.org/services/kaleidoscope]

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