The Gothic Funk Press is the natural child of the Gothic Funk Nation. In 2004, some Flint Expats set up base in Chicago and founded an arts collective based on the synthesis of the “gothic” and the “funk.” It was a romantic movement that utilized the techniques of the 20th century avant-garde for political and social ends.
Today, the Gothic Funk Nation has fragmented. Some fragments, such as the Tuesday Funk Reading Series continue to thrive in Chicago. Others, like the Gothic Funk Press, have returned back home to Flint, with its forests, its swamps, its parks and ruins and factories and houses.
Mark’s Hat is our first effort to promote Flint’s latent literary energy. Despite its apparent material poverty, Flint has a dynamic and thriving art scene, as demonstrated by innovative theater troupes, noisy music all across town, politically-charged performance art, and dynamic interactive and visual arts events. Literary scenes are more problematic, however. Writing is an inherently solitary act. A literary “scene” requires that writers coalesce around something: a cause, a watering hole, or each other. Flint has many successful and innovative writers, but many of us are working in isolation.
To be sure, other groups and organizations are tacking this problem as well, and literary events are far more common in Flint today than they were a few short years ago. The Gothic Funk Press hopes that Mark’s Hat will promote and participate in a conversation about how writers can engage with each other, with the larger community, and with the larger world.
Ah, but this isn’t just a literary journal. It is an experimental literary journal. And while we defined “experimental” broadly when soliciting submissions – we simply defined it as “writing that is intentionally unusual, weird, contradictory, paradoxical, and/or self-aware” – we nevertheless were looking for a specific kind of writing. We wanted writing that was restless and risky. Experimental writing, whether dark or playful or somber or provocative, always poses a challenge. It forces readers to consider the ways that they speak, write, and read; to become aware of assumptions and limitations, and then, sometimes, to transcend them. It isn’t always easy to read such literature. It is often intentionally difficult.
Flint, of course, is also often difficult.
Seemingly intentionally at times.
We hope that this collection makes nonsense out of order and rhythm out of chaos. We hope it inspires you and challenges you, and awakens your mind to the possibilities and problems of language. Above all, we hope it makes you think and feel. Hearkening back to the romantic spirit of the Gothic Funk Nation, we hope that you will not think without feeling, or feel without thinking. Thought and emotion ought to coexist in our community.
Open your hearts, open your mind, and put on your tin-foil caps.
And enjoy!
Connor Coyne
Director of The Gothic Funk Press