iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

“The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination.” —bell hooks (Image: Alex Grey's Seraphic Transport Docking on the Third Eye)

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world." —Adrienne Rich (Image: Alex Grey's Transfiguration, 1993)

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Media conglomerates now annotate fiction like public-health propaganda. A character smoking isn't an ad for cigarettes. The disclaimer doesn't protect us from the image; it insults our intelligence.

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I suspect much of the fear of AI takeover, replacement, and human extinction is really a fear of the body: its hunger, desire, illness, aging, mortality. AI becomes the fantasy of intelligence finally escaping flesh. (Images: Francis Bacon's Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962)

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

"How can we live without the unknown in front of us?" —René Char (Images: On the left, my daughter somewhere in Scotland's misty highlands two years ago, unknowingly also "echoing" Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) on the right.)

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Received today: Karen An-hwei Lee's MARIMO, MON AMOUR (Fiction Collective 2), which features "Einspänner," which I published in Big Other in 2025! Ka-pow! Cc: @fictioncollective2.bsky.social and @bigothermag.bsky.social

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Acquired today: Rae Armantrout's SAFE ROOMS (Wesleyan University Press), which includes several poems I originally published in BIG OTHER! Ka-pow! Cc: @weslpress.bsky.social and @bigothermag.bsky.social

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

167,000 people die every day. Millions from preventable causes. Yet a minor celebrity dies of a fentanyl overdose and suddenly it’s wall-to-wall coverage, tributes, and “gone too soon.” Every death is tragic. Why does fame determine which ones matter? (Image: Gustav Klimt's Death and Life (1915))

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

"It is salutary to maintain a space for the foreign. It is an expression of friendliness that makes it possible to become other to oneself." —Byung-Chul Han (Images: René Magritte's Not to Be Reproduced (1937); The Double Secret (1927); and Decalcomania (1966))

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

"I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go." —Anaïs Nin (Image: Alex Grey's Seraphic Transport Docking on the Third Eye)

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

We were outraged that a billionaire’s yacht failed to answer a distress call, though it was reportedly the nearest vessel. Fair enough. But how many distress calls do we hear every day and decide are not ours to answer?

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

"The Church says: The body is a sin. Science says: The body is a machine. Advertising says: The body is a business. The body says: I am a fiesta." —Eduardo Galeano (Image: Alex Grey's Transfiguration, 1993)

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Hook? Readers aren't fish. And writing isn't reelism.

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

"They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art." ―Charlie Parker (Image: René Magritte's Le plagiat (1940))

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

“If the writer is a sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming.” —Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Image: Remedios Varo’s Creación de las aves (Creation of the Birds), 1957)

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

"Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence. Flow down and down in always widening rings of being." —Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library." —Jorge Luis Borges

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Seventeen years ago today, I passed a lit candle to Gordon Lish, which he later returned to me unlit.

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

"You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time." —Angela Davis (Image: Alex Grey's Transfiguration, 1993)

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

"what do I see: I see a world made, unmade, and made again / and I hear crying either way" —from A. R. Ammons's "Hibernaculum" (Image: David Alfaro Siqueiros's Echo of a Scream (1937))

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

ICE plans to spend up to $20 million to outfit its thugs with electric shock gloves. Why bother with Abu Ghraib’s crude wires and electrodes when you can put it all in a glove? At last, immigration enforcement can embrace the dark side and summon the Sith’s Force lightning with a finger! Progress!

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

"Can America go on living on spin and illusion, hot air and hogwash, and still be my country? I don’t know." —Ursula K. Le Guin

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Every day is National Book Lovers Day! Happy National Book Lovers Day!

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

"In a murderous time the heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking. It is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn." —Stanley Kunitz (Image: Frida Kahlo's The Two Fridas, 1939)

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

“Where are you?” read a text I received from an unknown number today. “In the here and now,” I texted back. “You?” And then they ghosted me, presumably from the there and then. (Images from Eric Pickersgill's REMOVED, where subjects' devices are removed before photographing.)

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

"I believe I have understood our age as that of the absolute corruption of all ideas. Nevertheless, I am of good cheer: for I know that new love can come only from complete decay." —Johann Gottlieb Fichte (Image: Alex Grey's Nature of Mind, panel VI (1996))

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

“There is nothing so certain in our fears that’s not yet more certain in the fact that most of what we dread comes to nothing.” —Seneca "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." —William Shakespeare

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

"You carry within you the capacity to imagine and give shape to your world. It is a pure and blessed way of living. Train yourself to this, but also trust whatever comes. If it comes from your desire, from some inner need, accept that and hate nothing." —Rainer Maria Rilke Image: Alex Grey's WONDER

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

"Days, like the emanations of a dream, gather me up into their secret folds; centred in sorrow, they fall to the green pool of the evening, or burn with solitude or love, a wandering flame of love." —from Denise Levertov's "Days" (Image: Salvador Dalí's Hyper-xiological Sky (1960))

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Delighted to receive an inscribed copy of Andrew Joron's forthcoming essay collection, THE EXPONENTIAL STONE (Madhat Press), today! Great to see that the book has received advance praise from John Beer, Joseph Donahue, and Andrew Zawacki! Kudos and thanks, Andrew!

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Making art is one of the most vital, life- and love-affirming things you can do. So keep imagining and creating despite the horrors, terrors, precarity, ridicule, censure, and uncertainty! (Image: Roberto Matta's Let Any Flowers Bloom (1955))

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

"The infinite tumult of human life is open to those who can no longer exist as empty eye sockets but as seers swept away by an overwhelming dream they could not know." —Georges Bataille (Image: Alex Grey's WONDER (1996))

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Oxford comma be damned, The Toronto Star offers the startling revelation that Sylvia Plath was, in fact, both a New York vigilante and the Shah of Iran!

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

"If a man wants to be sure of his road, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark." —St. John of the Cross (Image: Caspar David Friedrich's A Walk at Dusk" (c. 1830–1835))

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

A wonderful moment: great writer and friend Jennifer Maritza McCauley spotted NERVOSITIES on a shelf at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh! Seeing your book in a library is a special joy! Grateful for readers, libraries, and friends who help stories find their way! Cc: @maritza4770.bsky.social

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

"I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write." —Michel Foucault

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Recently acquired: Best Microfiction 2026 (Pelekinesis), which features Joanna Ruocco’s “iDeath” (which I published in BIG OTHER last year)! Big thanks to the editors for selecting this brilliant story and the many other outstanding works in the anthology! Cc: @bestmicrofiction.bsky.social

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

"Hot enough for you?" three people asked me today. "Not yet," I said every time. My sunny disposition went unappreciated. (Images: Salvador Dalí's Inventions of the Monsters, The Burning Giraffe, Soft Watch at the Moment of its First Explosion, and The Persistence of Memory)

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

"There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it..." —Roland Barthes

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

"If we live mentally on what is not nor cannot be, we end up by not being able to think about what can be." —Fernando Pessoa (Image: Alex Grey's COLLECTIVE VISION (1995))

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

"I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things." —Emma Goldman (Image: Alex Grey's Seraphic Transport Docking on the Third Eye)

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

Is "self-destruct in the final season" a contractual obligation or just industry tradition?

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

"Evil is whatever distracts." —Franz Kafka (Image: Martin Schongauer's Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons (1470–74))

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

"Don't run around this world looking for a hole to hide in. [....] Live in the nowhere that you came from. [....] You have eyes that see from that nowhere." —Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (Image: René Magritte's Le faux miroir (The False Mirror),1929)

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

"There's no blocking the speechflow-river-running-all-carrying momentum that true intimacy is." —Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (Image: Helen Frankenthaler's Riverhead, 1963)

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

One-word writing prompt: Write! (Image: Remedios Varo’s Creación de las aves (Creation of the Birds), 1957)

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

"Sheer abundance of being / floods my heart." —Rainer Maria Rilke (Image: Rob Gonsalves's Here Comes the Flood, 2003)

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

"Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter—but beautiful—struggle for a new world." —Martin Luther King, Jr. (Rabbett Before Horses Strickland's Iskwaaj Nibi (The Last Waterhole: Creating a New World), 2018)

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

"This, my dear, is the greatest challenge of being alive: to witness injustice in this world and not allow it to consume our light." —Thích Nhất Hạnh (Image: Mary Corse's Untitled (Electric Light),1968)

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