Month: April 2026
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “xxx”? aaa by xxx Story Bio See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “xxx”? aaa by Avril Shakira Villar In 2023, the Philippine government allocated approximately 0.34 percent of GDP to the arts and culture. It is the official numerical expression of a nation’s belief about what counts as productive, what deserves to be resourced, what kind of human activity merits the sustained attention of a state that has other priorities. What this number means, in practice, is that the Filipino artist learns very early and very permanently that compression is not an aesthetic choice. You finish the woodcut because you cannot afford the oil paint. You write the short story because the novel requires a room of one’s own and the room belongs to six other people and three of them work night shifts and need to sleep. What it does not reliably produce is the middle range, the sustained work, the five-year novel, the decade-long film project, the body of work that requires institutional support and a career structure and the basic guarantee that if you spend the next three years making the thing you need to make, you will still be able to eat at the end of it. This is what we have not built. Not the individual talent, which is everywhere, which has always been everywhere, which boards planes at NAIA Terminal 3 and lands in Toronto or London or Singapore and wins prizes there and is claimed then as a Filipino artist by the same country that could not find a way to keep them. The psychic cost of making art inside a structure that does not support it is not documented in cultural policy papers because cultural policy papers are written by people who have jobs and therefore do not feel it. It is documented in the dropout rate and in the number of writers who stopped writing after thirty because the writing was not feeding their children. In the number of musicians who play weddings and corporate events and are excellent at it and hate it with a precision that only people who know what they could have done instead are capable of hating anything. It is tragedy in the administrative sense, the tragedy of neglect so structural it becomes invisible, so normalized it becomes character, becomes the Filipino capacity for resilience, becomes something we are praised for internationally by people who do not understand that what they are praising is our ability to survive conditions that should not exist. The Filipino artist knows all of this from the inside, in the body, without needing it explained. The knowledge is in the hands that finish the woodcut at two in the morning before the shift begins. It is in the short story that is short not because short is the right length but because short is the length that fits in the life. It is in the film that runs twelve minutes and screens in Rotterdam and wins the prize and the director flies home economy class and goes back to shooting commercials on Monday. From the outside, you can see the shape of what was prevented. The novel that would have been written with five more years and a living wage. The career that would have unfolded if the career had been possible. It is the political question underneath the aesthetic one: not how do we celebrate the art that survives, but why must so much of it not survive at all. Avril Shakira Villar is a writer and youth leader from the Philippines. She is the author of I Live Because I Almost Died and an alumna of WriteGirl LA. She is one of the finalists in the English Poetry category of the 2025 Maningning Miclat Art Foundation competition. Her poems appear in Adi Magazine, Evanescent Magazine, Arcana Poetry Press, Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine, Renard Press, and other literary magazines. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “The Economy of the Blade”? The title came last. For most of its life the essay was called “arts funding draft 3” and then “arts funding draft 3 ACTUAL” and then a date, because at some point I stopped believing in the word draft, and I started using timestamps because it is the only record I have. The first version was longer. It had a section on the patronage systems of the Spanish colonial period. It had the kind of transitions that exist to reassure the reader that the writer knows where they are going, which is the tell of a writer who does not yet know where they are going. I cut the colonial section, because an essay about the economics of compression cannot itself be uncompressed. The form has to know what it is arguing. Otherwise it is just a document with a title. What the essay is doing, which I understood only after it was finished, is treating the composite as evidence. The woodcut stands in for every constraint that produces compression as a survival strategy rather than an aesthetic one. The director stands in for every prize that flies home to a country that cannot sustain the career that won it. They are the logical endpoint of a structure, and I rendered the logical endpoint as though I had met it, because in a certain sense I had, because the structure is real even when the specific body inside it is assembled.The Economy of the Blade
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
03/23 • Kenneth Pobo
03/30 • Roberta Allen
04/06 • Avril Shakira Villar
04/13 • TBD
04/20 • TBD
04/27 • TBD
05/04 • TBD
05/11 • TBD
05/18 • TBD
05/25 • TBD
06/01 • TBD
06/08 • TBD
06/15 • TBD
06/22 • TBD
06/29 • TBD
07/06 • TBD
07/13 • TBD
07/20 • TBD
07/27 • TBD
08/03 • TBD
08/10 • TBD
08/17 • TBD
08/24 • TBD
08/31 • TBD
09/07 • TBD
09/14 • TBD
09/21 • TBD