Failure to protect

Once when I was in Gothenburg, I was abandoned on the street at one o’clock in the morning by my fiancé. The buses and trams stopped running that late at night and so while he jumped into a cab to get home, he left me behind. On purpose.

He was angry at me. I don’t know why, I rarely knew why. Maybe he had gotten embarrassed that evening or a comment was made by someone that he didn’t like, and as usual the anger and punishment was dealt to me.

I didn’t have the money to take a cab home myself. So when he phoned me from his ride, I asked him if he would he pay the fare for me when I got home. He told me to walk. He wasn’t going to pay two fares.

The Wonder of What We Stand to Lose

I’m so excited to share with you my cover story, The Wonder of What We Stand to Lose, for the winter issue of Venü Magazine 2017/18.

In this issue, I cover the work of pastel artist Zaria Forman. Zaria creates large-scale drawings inspired by her trips to the Arctic and Antarctic aboard the National Geographic Explorer and NASA’s Operation IceBridge. Zaria’s story is not only about creating beautiful work, but it also shares her personal story and her mission to spread awareness on the very real concerns of global warming.

Venü Magazine Cover Story by Lisa Mikulski

Here is an excerpt from the story:

Changing and shifting, the exact subject matter of Zaria Forman’s art can never be captured again. Unlike paintings or photos of landscapes or landmarks – those places where an artist can return again and again – the icebergs of the Arctic and Antarctic are melting and the waters of the Maldives are raising. By the time Forman has completed a drawing, the natural landscape that once existed has diminished and transformed.

Forman has made it her life’s mission to provide us with stunning large-scale artworks of icebergs, glaciers, and the sapphire blues of thousand-year-old ancient ice. In addition to providing us with these highly detailed and majestic views – she creates her work using only her fingers – the work serves to call attention to the urgency that climate change is having upon some of the world’s most vulnerable regions.

Traveling with NASA and National Geographic Explorer, she has passionately sought to capture the story of what we stand to lose. However, rather than bringing to us the tragedy of what is unfolding in these areas, Forman brings the beauty of what she has seen.

“There is, of course, all kinds of bad news out there about climate change. There’s the fact that the past three years have been the hottest on record, extreme weather is wreaking havoc all over the world, the polar bear population in the Arctic is in rapid decline, and now we’re faced with an administration that ignores these problems – contributing to environmental decline with their denial of it,” says Forman.

Make Trump Irrelevant

Make him irrelevant.

This man is a scourge upon our nation and a plight upon the world. Since returning to the US, I’ve been pretty quiet about politics and my opinions on this guy. I’ve sat, listened, and watched him actively work to destroy and divide our country and I’ll be honest, his behavior rings so damn familiar to the reason I escaped from Sweden that it serves to re-traumatize me. The same type of behavior. The same holier-than-thou attitude. The same vindictive, vengeful, smirking personality. The same brilliant, two-steps-ahead, crazy-making cancer of an individual with an agenda for harm and hate. This is the destructive and vicious handy-work of the wildly creative animal known as a malignant narcissist.