COMMUNITY PROJECT

Kamelya is starting an anonymous bilingual publication called Mokh (مخ, which translates to brain) based in the Dearborn area. She hopes to create opportunities for community members to write with & for each other without the pressure to conform to conventions be they aesthetic or socio-political. With the experiment of a curated anonymous publication, it is an attempt to communicate clearly without self-censorship or surveillance on critical subjects such as addiction, loss, grief, pain, identity – offering an opportunity to heal through expression and connection.

By facilitating both online and in-person creative writing/healing sessions, opening submissions online and elsewhere, and welcoming contributors and community to participate in the bookmaking process, Mokh is a proof of concept for a local print publication encouraging authorship and auteurship. As a writer and organizer with a longtime pedagogical and performance practice, Kamelya is interested in the potential for programming, skill-development, generativity, and social change that can emerge from the process of developing a book or a text-based object – in this case, a magazine. Too often, what circulates publicly is not what is most deeply felt, but what is safest to say. Mokh is a living archive which provides the community an opportunity to produce their own poetics and permissions. And through anonymity, this intervention can happen at once in private and in public.