Xenith has a dual nature: the literary magazine is our public persona, while the community is our more introverted heart. All week long, you read the magazine’s latest content, but what of our community? The forums, the blogs, the conversation, the writing workshop? If you’re missing that, you’re missing fully half of what we’re about. These new weekly notes are a glimpse into the best of our community. Every week, we’ll spotlight the strongest poetry and prose, the best blog posts and our most stimulating conversations. Consider it a newsletter, of sorts.

Better yet, consider it an arch wherethrough gleams that untraveled world…

CONVERSATION SPOTLIGHT
What’s the message behind your writing?
Entertainment? Moral message? Encapsulating the contemporary Zeitgeist? In this roundtable, Xenith members talk about what drives their writing. From member Tantra Bensko: “I feel people are waking up as a whole to a lot of illusions they’ve been under before, so writing fiction that mimics that in form, and promotes it to go further, is good. And fiction that tackles the topics that haven’t been allowed to be written about seriously before, other than in Sci Fi, pretending it’s the future, help that along. So, there is a purpose to it, both social and spiritual, for me.”

WRITING SPOTLIGHT

POETRY
One Night Stood by Owen
“And now, we fall like dandelion
clocks in summer, reversed and out of form -
caught by winds of image, hoping
to indulge in one more touch
of collision’s sweetened kiss.”

I believe in Jesus and Love by wickedwitch
“Told you not to believe in art or socrates,
Told you to pull the blinds and hold hands with me,
No love, no jesus, just flesh and neurons firing,
Wrote down the artsiest, nothingest things you told me,
Because all you told me was nothing”

Sex So Cheap It’s Worth It by SparkInTheDark7
“Fuckpoemcheck–
the way he dismissed his women.
Bukowski might’ve jerked off for life,
if he hadn’t needed muses;
and the muse’s role is masturbation.”

PROSE
lessons from history by hevc
This experimental piece, from an Oxford University Classics undergraduate, imagines ancient historical figures doing mundane things in the modern world while reminiscing about times past. Here, the author and Cicero are baking brownies. “We, the figures of history, have forgotten our motivations and intentions after thousands of years of silent death. You’ve kept us alive and waiting, debating and impotently immortal.”

lessons from history ii by hevc
“Augustus and I sat together and watched the evening news. The flat was hot and sticky. They had a fan going in the background, whirling and clicking as it moved from side to side, perpetually saying, ‘no’, ‘no’, ‘no’. Cicero didn’t care for the political commentary much. “‘It’s just not as much fun when you’re left outside.’”

Welcome Atomic Soldiers by system_effect
“They talk about the bomb. Big, they say. Bigger than the ones that ended the war. They squirm in anticipation. The guests are given instructions on the proper procedure. In just a minute now, they will be instructed to look away. It is very important they do not look directly at the blast. Not initially.”

BLOGS
Our Modern Lives, I by hevc
“Sometimes while I am thinking about the future and how good it will be I wonder whether I spend my time like a man waiting for a bus – always peering down the road in attentive expectation for the vehicle with his number on it, creating a vacuum of experience that extends only from himself to the invisible bus in question; in short, inattentive to all else.”

how to focus by hevc
“Some days you can’t be productive. I’m telling you this now in case you think it’s just an excuse that you personally tell yourself, one which isn’t really valid. It is valid. There are days when focus can’t be manufactured, days when tasks are not completed, and therefore days where a sense of satisfaction may be lacking.”

dealing with disarray (or, meditations on mayhem) by hevc
Oxford student Hannah is stranded in California thanks to the volcano that recently erupted in Iceland, closing down Europe’s air space. Here, she muses on dealing with unpredictable events and their fallout. “Things really aren’t concrete at all, but given the appearance of being so simply because statistically they have been a certain way during my experience of them.”