
Sojourner's Tent Press
Our Story
Our sojourns began creating protest literature and art at a state college with a troubled past (home of the May 4th shootings). In that little college town, a need for a profound and ‘noisy’ self-expression that could crack through the surrounding and, at times, crippling societal ignorance surfaced and found its fulfillment through an offering of underground comics, chapbooks, and posters peddled at local concerts and independent bookshops across the midwest and West Coast.
I
After having traveled across the United States for three months, our immediate relocation to Israel haralded a string of big changes. During our first year living in the Gush Etzion, and after the traumatic birth of our first child, our orientation within society sucked into an inward hell. Due to life-threatening circumstances, as surrounding social conflicts and dangerous situations began to mount, we found ourselves running back to our families in the United States. From that point onward, the 7-year journey through adversity, disillusionment, and near-death would reconfigure old priorities and bring us back to our art with an even stronger pull towards community involvement at the Artist's and Healer's level.
We hope our press at Sojourner’s Tent can develop into a creative space where artists, writers, and visionaries alchemize self expression with the grit of ordinary life to birth profound mind-altering concepts into realization. Our purpose: to sojourn around and past the ‘gatekeepers’ of mainstream publishing and put underrepresented art and literature out into a reluctant world.
‘Outsider’ literature and art is the current interest of this press, with less of a direct focus on any societal ethics and morals inherent in publishable works and more of an artistic sensitivity to giving a voice and body to difficult subject matter in an unconventionally imaginative way. Some examples of what this press looks for include graphic novels, zines, comics, short-story/poetry anthologies, art books, and chapbooks that dismantle the pop-image realities of mainstream and underground social issues.







David
"I am a toddler rummaging through boxes of toys, impelled by inner restlessness, longing for play and exploration. But instead of toys, I have a big box of social conventions and ideas, a great big box of mind. Its contents:
tarot and kabbalistic archetypes; vintage music and fashion; exploration of physics, anthropology, and history outside the academic mainstream-- such as the works of Emanuel Velikofsky and the Electric Universe Theory; spiritual traditions across cultures; oral tradition and storytelling; psychedelics and psychedelic writers such as Terrence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson; learning about the relationships between herbs and the human body, the different models for understanding the human body and the subtle bodily energies that bring it life; decommodifying the concept of health; looking for the magic inherent in the world; relationship-based lifestyle and economy; building relationships for their own value rather than as a means to an end, and comparing/contrasting the artificial distinctions between internal and external reality."


Hilary
"I'm a conceptual/visual artist, writer, aspiring blogger, healer-in-training and mother of three with too many interests to list them all. Some of my current (and life-long) fascinations and hobbies include:
cooking tasty, allergen-free food for my family; learning with my children, exploring cities and wild landscapes, making things; natural and impermenent sculpture; self-sufficient and sustainable lifestyle; wandering around and living in new and interesting places; the ocean and its ecosystems; human sexuality and tantra; physics and genetics; numerology and Hebrew Gematria; ancient
mythos and archetypes; the traditions of magic from around the world; the healing arts; linguistics and etimology; the literature and storytelling of North America and Eastern Europe; expressive arts therapy; indie zines and graphic novels; Jungian psychology; the life and work of Sigmund Freud; Robert and Aline Crumb's comics; the work of Harvey Pekar; everything
Woody Allen; and the writings and Autism activism of Amelia Baggs and Dr. Temple Grandin."