Recent and upcoming work
Some links, some rants
Hello and welcome back to shelf offering, a Tuesday newsletter by Apoorva Sripathi. Writing this newsletter is a crucial, rigorous, and joyful part of my work, so if you’d like to support me, follow 💌shelfoffering on Instagram, and share this post. Thank you.
Hello, I love hiatuses. Since I cannot afford them in real life, I resort to taking them in this newsletter. And because there’s no wrong way to do this (because I’m also working on other things), here are links to my recent work:
A Picture of the Everyday
My essay for Alicia Kennedy’s new magazine, Tomato Tomato, on how the representation in still lifes hasn’t changed very much. Essentially, we are still painting tomatoes, silverware, bread, butter, and wine — everyday objects to remind us of the simple pleasures in life, but also as an expression of both skill and personal history. Painting or drawing what’s in front of us is easy and there is a sort of intimacy in the details, even as the meanings of foods are undergoing a metamorphosis.
Illustrations for Feminist Food Journal
Isabela has been kind enough to commission me to illustrate for their latest issue, Celebrate, letting me have free reign with colours and textures (and hand drawn instead of digital which is their predominant style). These illustrations have come at the right time and I’ve had such fun researching and thinking images, putting together collages, and deliberating on colours. If you’d like me to draw/illustrate things for you (tattoos even), give me a shout! Of course, if you know me well enough, text or email me.
chlorophyll x FFJ: the architecture of food is (almost) here!
We’re aiming to get it out by next week and we’ll post updates on our respective Instagrams and newsletters, so join chlorophyll’s mailing list (we send out updates on when an issue is going to be published, for pitch calls, and snippets of stories that are published that day, and then we take hiatuses till the next one) to be updated. Subscribe to FFJ’s as well here. If you have enjoyed reading the work we’ve been putting out, support us with a donation that helps build our independent literary magazine.
Work has been shit otherwise — no apologies for getting real here — and I have been unfortunately saying this to anyone who asks. Pitches, grants, submissions, and work applications have been unsuccessful but still I persist. It’s actually beautiful how spite motivates me to work harder, to keep on producing words after words, despite there not being any takers. The balcony garden is slow but steady (temperatures have been abysmal this May) and I have managed to harvest a handful of chard and kale and the tiniest alpine strawberry known to man. Stuff like this is what keeps me going — this and money, so if you have any commissions for me (art and/or writing), please get in touch. For other reasons I will talk about next Tuesday, I’m also pausing paid subscriptions here. If you have a bleeding heart that still wants to support me, here is a way. See ya next week.