It’s about an opening up of possibilities, mental spaces, and physical spaces, but ones that are engendered by trauma.

So, it seemed to be resonant in that way.Īpsara was the opposite because it’s more about creating worlds. It was funny that, as it came out, everyone else was forced the very same thing, and stay at home and become a sort of hermit, or hermitess. Did you get responses from people saying, ‘this is really speaking to me in this moment?’ How do both Apsara and Spellbound seem to you when you look back at them from the moment of publication? Because both projects evolved over quite a while.īishakh Som (BS): With Spellbound, a lot of it is about the day-to-day discipline of becoming an artist, and the character-who’s me-swapping her full time job in office to focus on her art at home, and being housebound, and the emotional instability that comes with that. For me, it has such a strong relationship to spring 2020 and the pandemic. So Mayer (SM): Apsara Engine was one of the first books that I got in lockdown. You can see samples of all of these projects on her website. 2, The Strumpet, The Boston Review, Black Warrior Review, VICE, Buzzfeed, Ink Brick, Hi-horse (which she co-edited), Blurred Vision, Pood, Specs, The Brooklyn Rail, and Graphic Canon vol. Since her Xeric-winning first collection Angel (2003), Som’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, We’re Still Here (the first all-trans comics anthology), The Georgia Review, Beyond vol. In 2020, Bishakh Som exploded like a firework into the worlds of independent graphic novels and the new trans literature, with two books: Apsara Engine, a collection of dreamily interlinked spacetime-defying short stories of bodies, maps and being, published by The Feminist Press, and Spellbound: A Graphic Memoir, about an architect called Anjali who quits her job to work on a graphic novel, published by Street Noise. Call for Papers: Dead Women & Gendered Death in Visual Culture.Akwugo Emejulu on George Floyd Protests.Polish #strajkkobiet Tells the Government to ‘Fuck Off’.The Sarah Everard Clapham Common Vigil: London,.Global Sisterhood: Focus on Afghan Women.The Hate Speech Directed at Amber Heard Must Unite Women Against Resistance to Our Voices.Heard/Depp: A Movement Built on Absence & What I’m Not Saying.To Take My/Our Past and Future Selves Back: Woman, Life, Freedom.Focus Issue Four: New Materialist Practice (Summer 2019).Focus Issue Five: Feminist Pedagogies (Winter 2020).Focus Issue Six: COVID-19 Crisis-Connection-Culture (Autumn 2020).Focus Issue Seven: Female Detectives on TV (Summer 2021).

Focus Issue Eight: Feminist Craft (Autumn 2021).

Focus Issue Nine: Photography & Resistance (Summer 2022).

Focus Issue Ten: Feminist Discourse in Comics & Graphic Novels (Spring 2023).

Apsara Engine by Bishakh Kumar Som