Here in the Slag Glass City, we are deeply engaged with all that is life-giving and life-depleting in cities and their environs, and since early 2020 we have been bearing witness to ways the global Covid-19 pandemic has accentuated the city’s extremes. In Spring 2021 Slag Glass City commissioned nine nonfiction writers from around the world to create micro-essays to help remind us of the messy urban bliss we miss, as well as the ongoing joys and challenges that have sustained us as the pandemic raged on. On June 4, 2021 Slag Glass City, in conjunction with the DePaul Publishing Institute, hosted This Blissful City: an International Reading featuring all nine commissioned writers reading from sites around the world.
Watch the recorded reading and discussion (below) of these nine essays about Denver, Athens, Houston, Tokyo, Beirut, Detroit, Columbus, Chiang Mai, Bangkok and Chicago, and read them here in the Slag Glass City.
“Pandemic, Florida 33004” by Julia Marie Wade
“Another Type of Silence” by Ira Sukrungruang
“The Birds Don’t Stop” by Jasminne Mendez
“Down on the Street at Blake & Sixteen” by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
“It’s the Alcohol Talking (three street scenes and one old memory)” by Renee Simms
“In Winnemac Park” by Peggy Shinner
“Athens: The City I Miss, the City I Love” by Adrianne Kalfopoulou
“Inside the (Seismic) Shift” by Rima Rantisi
“I Went to See the Cherry Blossoms” by Marie Mutsuki Mockett
2021 Student Editorial Board Selection:
“We Need Our Pain” by Madari Pendás
SLAG GLASS CITY · Volume 8 · January 2022
Header and video by Elvert Barnes.
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