Margaret Atwood walked onstage at the Detroit Opera House on January 26, 2026 like someone who has lived several lives and written several more. Her latest book is a memoir, Book of Lives, where she talks hair alongside other existential questions. Her hair, once compared to Medusa’s, has long fed the myth of the witchy, unhinged woman writer—someone more likely to end up like Virginia Woolf than to be sitting upon a white sofa in downtown Detroit at 85, taking the train from Toronto to dodge winter-flight chaos.
Aisha Sarwari
February 23, 2026
On Saturday, October 25, 2025, Runner Magazine presented a lecture by Walter Lucken IV followed by a Q & A moderated by Eleanor Aro and Emily Jones of Michigan Student Power Alliance. The talk took place in the Clara Stanton Jones Friends Auditorium at the main branch of the Detroit Public Library. The event addressed the concerns originally expressed by Lauren Berlant in the text ‘68 or Something. Walter Lucken, Eleanor Aro, Emily Jones, and audience members asked what we can learn by moving beyond the memory of 1968 and releasing our attachment to a triumphant past?..
Walter Lucken IV
October 27, 2025
A simple reflection on how language is used to describe art, and ascribe the meaning of art to others. In a world that has made so much beautiful progress towards the un-empowerment of labels and assumed identifiers, we have somehow come full circle and begun to re-stress and re-institutionalize identifiers onto others [in terms of art and art making], which at the end of the day, only show us how truly cyclical humanity is through our quote-un-quote progress...
Wyatt Thiry
July 7, 2025
The purpose of this essay it to use the writing of German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing as a foundation for a modern criticism on the new consumerist nature of art as complete immersive inclusion. In Lessing’s writing titled Laocoon, he opens with a fictional narrative structure centered around three characters, which is emulated in Mirroring Laocoon...
Wyatt Thiry
June 16, 2025
The following was written as a project proposal for my final metalsmithing class at Wayne State University. I was tasked with writing a proposal for a specific body of work which explained the concepts and design choices that would go into the resulting art pieces. The project ultimately veered off in another direction, but this proposal still stands as a description of what could be. A ‘hypothetical-art,’ if you will...
Wyatt Thiry
May 12, 2025
April 1 Mercury in Aries goes retrograde. Invasive messages of the past...
Theresa Ndrejaj
April 3, 2024
A New Moon in Capricorn on Jan 11 triggers your need to prove your worth to the world. They might not get it but that won't change who you are...
Theresa Ndrejaj
January 11, 2024
On Oct 4 Mercury in Libra. Spare the feelings and turn on the charm. People are only ever going to hear what they want to hear. Might as well deliver...
Theresa Ndrejaj
October 4, 2023
On July 2 Venus in Leo squares Uranus in Taurus. This is the beginning of a mutiny in regards to romance and values...
Theresa Ndrejaj and Brad Taormina
July 4, 2023
The full moon in Libra 16° on April 6 lovingly holds a mirror to her dear Sun in Aries at 12:34am, that's where you start and they begin...
Theresa Ndrejaj and Brad Taormina
April 7, 2023
On January 1, Venus and Pluto meet in Capricorn and you may be digging up family heirlooms. Venus enters Aquarius on January 2, bringing a logical approach to love. A Full Moon in Cancer arrives on January 6...
Theresa Ndrejaj
January 2, 2023
On October 2 at 5am Mercury in Virgo stations direct before it ingresses into Libra on October 10 at 7:50pm. Mercury in Libra wants to hear both sides of the story, making friends through fairness and tactful gossip. A great time for networking and expressing yourself aesthetically...
Theresa Ndrejaj
October 3, 2022
On July 5 at 2:03am Mars, ingresses into Taurus. Mars, the planet of action and desire will slow down in stable Taurus. While Mars was in it’s domicile Aries we felt ready to take action at any moment, our desires were right in front of us. When Mars is in Venus-ruled Taurus, there’s no need to rush. Long-term goals, specifically around finances or creative projects, are what we might be focused on. Saving up for a luxurious bath-robe or a Caribbean vacation. Mars wants to keep it moving but in Taurus he has a chance to take it easy, cautious steps towards sensual pleasures...
Theresa Ndrejaj
July 4, 2022
The ambition of the world’s superpowers to travel to space, leaving our earthly home through sheer force of will and scientific progress, is the same ambition which led them to construct massive social housing complexes like Cite Gagarine, New York’s Queensbridge Houses, my own city’s Frederick Douglass Homes (known colloquially as the Brewster Projects), the Techwood Homes in Atlanta, and to an extent the entire city of Brasilia...
Walter Lucken IV
June 6, 2022
This coming astrological weather will accelerate the ongoing shift of the greater consciousness. It’s all been building up to this. Will we gather the strength to accept this new understanding? How will we nurture this Proustian “vibe-shift”? Spirituality, sexuality, drugs and the passage of time. Welcome to Quarter 2.
Theresa Ndrejaj
April 17, 2022
For the past two years we have been put through the ringer. It might have been foolish to expect last year to be any different than the one before it but we can look forward to a touch of reprieve in 2022.
Theresa Ndrejaj
January 3, 2022
I interpret Trudell’s concept of “being human” as defined by a union of “being” - a physical and psychological body event - with conscientious acts of humanity that disrupt colonial power structures. This alignment of the embodied self and the thinking mind allows us to unsettle normative conditioning and connect to a decolonized version of ourselves. I outline how “being human” simultaneously eschews colonial identities and helps one internalize a decolonized paradigm....
Andrew Kaplowitz and Paris La Don
November 29, 2021
What transforms in the body when it becomes ill—not just physically, but its entire essence?
Marissa Jezak
October 25, 2021
It is not a surprise that the importance of imagery on our society has been growing exponentially for decades, with the adoption of technology solely used to create, produce, edit, distribute, and syndicate it. There are over 3 billion images shared daily, and over a trillion images copyrighted every year. There is an entire system running parallel to culture that stores, showcases, and hides the content created...
Chris McGraw
August 9, 2021
It has always been convenient to implement hierarchies and categorization as a way to understand differences, but in effect, this practice has robbed everything that exists within this framework of its right for more autonomous, natural, wild and enchanting ways to “be” and “engage”.
En·chant·ment (n) a feeling of great pleasure or delight; the state of being under a spell, magic...
Ashley Cook
March 1, 2021
Due to its sheer size, it is difficult, almost inappropriate, to describe the city of Detroit’s current condition with any one-sided perspective. It has recently been branded as “up and coming” because it has a Shinola Hotel, cocktail bars, and street lights that are turned on (in some locations). What can be misleading though, is the assumption that having a Shinola Hotel, and street lights, is all Detroit needs to turn into a healthy city. This raises questions of - Is that really enough?..
Riley Rinnan
January 18, 2021
In the early 2000s self portraiture started to become a central component in defining youth subcultures, with the increased manufacturing of cell phone cameras and escalating popularity of online social networking. People have been making self portraits forever, but before digital photography became such an effortless and widely accessible tool, the self portrait was more of a niche form of art reserved for traditionally skilled artists and photographers. Now it’s omnipresent...
Marissa Jezak
November 9, 2020
It can be interesting to examine a certain complex that seems to mark the tone for the 21st century of Modern humankind; this complex, and it’s contradictions, occur from the experience of existing in a body that is between an “animal” and a “human”. By recognizing the constant interplay between these two states, which can be abruptly broken, or fluidly linked, we can attempt to communicate our experiences as “modern” humans in the modern world, and unpack its profound impact on our understanding of mental health, gender, race, class, nature, species...and machine....
Ashley Cook
October 5, 2020
On July 31st of this year, the Twitter account belonging to Wayne State University’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors tweeted that "lowering Black student enrollment by 40% is nothing to celebrate!" and that the Wilson administration had moved the university "away from its mission to serve our community in Detroit"...
Walter Lucken IV
December 7, 2020
I grew up in a very small Midwestern town. The type of quaint and sleepy place where every neighbor waved to one-another and knew your brother, your cousin and your great grandmother. The private Christian elementary and middle schools I attended had a 100% white staff and student population. My public high school in the same town maintained roughly 98%. I believe the homogeneity of my surroundings and complete lack of representation or education about any other races, creeds, or colors, wove an intentional fabric of “blissful” ignorance which has taken me half my life to begin to unravel and reconstruct...
Christiana Laine
August 24, 2020
This is not an essay as such; it is not expository nor is it persuasive. I have no argument to make. Rather this is an attempt to account for the events that have defined the year. It is a patchwork analysis. It is not a new summation of the present crises by any means, but through repetition and slight iterations, comes a grain of nuance which develops the conversation ever so slightly. The decade commenced with symbolic significance. 2020 was employed to inscribe inspirational social media posts with “Vision is 2020,” suggesting finally that “this would be the year!” But, the year for what?..
Olivia Gilmore
July 20, 2020
As artists we are conditioned to believe that our worth is synonymous with the capital we generate and the admiration we receive. But what power does our work hold, apart from its role in this social exchange? The way art functions not only in a social & political context, but as a tool for healing & self liberation is very relevant in late capitalist society. The exhausting and alienating effects of the economic system we live in tend to be overwhelming, and can cause us to gravitate toward self destruction...
Marissa Jezak
July 6, 2020
literature
What would it mean, as contemporary moderns, to recognize these areas, the hybrids, the blocks of movement of something which is in transition between what it was and what it will be? As many contemporary philosophers and anthropologists are beginning to see this need for control as paradoxical and highly problematic, they are asking “how do we break from these tendencies?” And "what kinds of potential comes with the suspension of our need for control?"...
Ashley Cook
June 8, 2020