BRINK LITERARY JOURNAL
Issue no. 10
Renewal
At first, you might think of spring. A breaking or blossoming. A restoration of what was once, now made new. But renewal can also uproot ground that is firm and hardened, can threaten to break the best of us without warning or pause. Weather renews, as do feelings. But their temperature and touch shift at the slightest alterations, suggesting a delicacy, a tentativeness, a dance. As we celebrate our tenth issue, come with us. We're right at the cusp of renewal. Let us begin again.
VIDEO ESSAYS AND CINEPOETRY
Enter the Video Essay
Some say it’s a writer’s job to break rules; to queer the form, hack the genre, shock the copywriter, unhinge the dialogue, raise the tired bar by weirding it. Was it us back there? Has it always been you? Hybrid writing is nothing new, per se, but maybe its purpose is to explicitly renew: expectations, hopes, and enthusiasms for what writing can be and do.
Leases and vows, cells and bogs, library books and rivalries—Issue 10 renews Brink’s commitment to the video essay, a most refreshing form of literary cease to desist that combines the tactful limits of the page with the delicious potentials of the screen.
“Instar” by Jessie Kraemer captures, in brief, the strange intimacy and ranging headspace of a three-hour phone call across footage so green it will make your bones ache for summer.
Diana Khoi Nguyen’s “Fathers and Daughters” shows us what the lyric essay borrows from the split screen—“Milk-straw in my mouth, my father just beside me.”—through a meditation on watching films and what home video can accidentally capture.
“one thing a thousand times” is the newest piece from poet and video maker Ryley O’Byrne, whose haunting combinations of text and screen-recording imagery will expand your sense of writing that is made to be experienced on (and also speak back to) a screen.