Now That We Are Here!

Managing editor Jaime Campbell and I worked hard (with the help of new UCI intern Zoha Ahmed) to put out this pre-election issue at the absolute busiest time of the year. I’ll be walking a precinct and, once again, working as a Customer Service Representative for OC Vote. Jaime and Zoha have classes to teach and take. UCI documentarians Kane Le Hong and Brian Nguyen are busy working on a short film about the gallery show celebrating the artist, writer, and activist who inspired this online literary arts journal. This issue’s home page features a gorgeous alternative cover to Aliso Creek, his 1974 book-length prose poem with drawings, a personal and political and ecological cri de coeur which stirs me every time I read it. Oh, and because we live in the Santa Ana Mountains, we celebrated California Admission Day (September 9) by evacuating our house due to the Airport Fire. And then moved everything back a few days later. Thanks, Lewis Long, for your help...and excellent big truck. Good times!

Friends, please make sure to research candidates and propositions. Loudly insist the topic of voting into every conversation or interaction. Wear a button or tee shirt. For more on the subject of elections --- and to be awed, inspired, and impressed --- check out a recent episode of Bibliocracy Radio, where your unshy host celebrates an amazing OC Vote official, and buy and read a copy of Jackie Wu’s On the Front Lines of Democracy: An Election Official’s Story of Protecting the Vote in 2020. 

As always, this issue of Orange County’s unlikeliest (if extremely likeable) online literary arts journal presents OC-themed poetry, prose, art, political struggle, comics, and more. A trip to a Chispa event introduced me to two activist photographers who create and recreate images. Don’t know the work of OC’s “organizing, political home for young Latinxs building power and community in Orange County”? Here’s your introduction.

Award-winning OC poet Gustavo Hernandez shares new work. We celebrate Women For: Orange County. And this founding editor gets to ride his big wave, an important show at Cerritos College Art Gallery featuring --- at long last! --- the painting, drawings, and self-published prose and poetry of Harry Lawson “Peter” Carr (1925-1981), whose illustrations and paintings are our inspiration, and our big, provocative, democratic statement, demand, riddle, or question: “Now That We Are Here We Have To Decide What To Do.”

I’m so grateful for the opportunity to fully embrace my self-appointed and joyful responsibility of proselytizing on behalf of a magnificent artist. Special thanks here (with more to come) to UCI Professor Rebecca Davis, elin O’Hara slavick, Deborah Davidson, Shari Garn, Fiona Lindsay Shen, Amy DePaul, Penelope Moffet, Steve McLeod, Audra Eagle Yun, Kane Le Hong, Brian Nguyen, Jeff Grecny, Susan Andrade, Ellie Cohen, Ray Zepeda, David Peck, Thomas Reifer, Greg Diamond, Murray McNeil III, Roy Shabla, Suzanne Greenberg, Lewis Long, Robert Eberle, Mary Zaragoza, Anita and Jim Dobbs, Peter Morrison and Elaine Rubenstein, Mary Camarillo, Linda Thomas, Joel Cazares of Community Hub de Santa Ana, Lisa Alvarez (always, and for everything) and, of course make-it-happen-and-mean-it (!) Cerritos College Art Gallery Director, Professor James MacDevitt.

The show opens a week before the election. In between getting out the vote, walking your precinct, and doing your best to save our republic, take an evening off to spend time with readers of Citric Acid, artists, writers, political comrades, friends, teachers, and students to hear my opening night lecture (on Monday, October 28) and take in an informal docent tour of the show. I hope you indeed decide to do this! Please share my invitation, and this issue of Citric Acid. And if you value this journal and the voices and visions shared here, please do make a tax-deductible donation to support Citric Acid. Here's a painting you'll see at the show, with details about time, location, and parking below.

Peter Carr | Artist for Survival October 28 - December 10, 2024

Curator Talk: Monday, October 28 at 6pm / Opening Reception: Monday, October 28, 7-9pm

Peter Carr: Artist for Survival is the first large-scale art historical retrospective of the poet, activist, and fascinating outsider artist, Peter Carr (1925-1981). Throughout his life, Carr created idiosyncratic images that were distinctly evocative and expressionistic, many of them explicitly political (he founded the Orange County chapter of Alliance for Survival) and/or inscribed with fragments of his own poetic compositions. A long-time resident of Laguna Beach, a number of the works focus on his social observations of everyday life along the California coast in the '60s and '70s, including his own activism against the encroachment of the nuclear and military-industrial complex into the region. For much of his professional career, Carr served as a literature professor at CSU Long Beach. Following his sudden death, more than four decades ago, his massive personal archive of drawings, paintings, and notebooks passed to his close friend and student, Andrew Tonkovich, himself now a retired lecturer from UC Irvine and the longtime editor of The Santa Monica Review. For over forty years, these works have gone largely unknown and unseen, with this major retrospective being the first time that many of these pieces will ever have been exhibited publicly.

CERRITOS COLLEGE ART GALLERY/Cerritos College

1110 Alondra Blvd Norwalk, CA 90650

Admission Free. Parking $3 in Lot 10 on 166th Street via easy online app.