Snakes, typhoid, and a mongrel mutt, running wild in Kathmandu in the 1980s.

Themba Lewis - The Table Saw

Exploring Cairo's underground music in the last hours before the revolution.

Themba Lewis - Jasmine Oil

Ellis Lynch 'Carnival'. This is a stunning and vivid portrait of real life, and the brutality that it can bring. This is not a feel-good piece, but the imagery and the telling is spellbinding.

Ellis Lynch - Carnival

Sarah Tavis - Swimmer

Fairuz, tomboys, shooting snakes, dream prophesies of love, Lebanon in the 1980s, and so much more. Zahra Hankir poignantly and expertly introduces us all to Jeddo.

Zahra Hankir - Man Of The Orchard

Joshua James Amberson is a writer based in Portland, Oregon. He’s the author the critically-acclaimed zines Basic Paper Airplane and The Prince Zine. He’s a regular contributor to The Portland Mercury, and is working on both a collection titled Everyday Mythologies and a young adult novel called The Importance of Forgetting.

He teaches writing through Portland Community College’s Community Education program, and has curated the Northwest Literary Showcase at the Helsing Junction Sleepover, been an organizer for the Portland Zine Symposium, an event coordinator for the Independent Publishing Resource Center, and led the music project Letters.

The former co-chairman of the non-profit publishing company S.S.O. Press, he currently runs the Antiquated Future online store. 

Joshua James Amberson - Unsupported Transit

This recording, made in Olympia, Washington, on Mother's day of 2016, is an artifact from an emergent and ongoing process of inquiry into death, intimacy, secrets, and the spaces where they overlap. 

This inquiry began as an experiment with Bordeaux, France-based photographer, Glwadys LeMoulnier and Olympia, Washington-based writer, Sarah Tavis. 
In February, 2015, they closed themselves in a bedroom, in a friend's home, on Vashon Island, Washington, for six hours. Glwadys used a Hasselblad camera to photograph Sarah with ten items that embodied Sarah's relationship to death and intimacy and secrets, such as her grandmother's engagement ring, a scarf that belonged to her dead sister, the skeleton of a leaf. Sarah invoked the witches of her past by casting an energetic circle to contain her work with Glwadys and used tarot cards as a guide for this work. What you are listening to are fragments recorded in Sarah's journal during her time with Glwadys.

Sarah Tavis - Many Deaths

The two short essays that make up this diptych are “Snapshot,” which is about trying to access the past using Google Earth, and “The End of the Future,” about trying to preserve the future using apple trees.

Anne de Marcken - Time Diptych

Special edition from Bangkok, Thailand! In a brief special edition diversion from non-fiction stories, this very real reading comes from the menu at Chicken Home King restaurant, at Pradiphat Soi 9, in Bangkok.

Themba Lewis - The Chicken Home King

Bikini Kill, Kigali, lithium, young love, and suicide. A few memories affiliated with the Potomac river.

Themba Lewis - The Potomac

BLACK RIVER is a writers-based publishing outfit established in 2017, hosting new and established writers. We generally publish non-fiction, but we don’t believe in rules and never say never.