How can I get involved?

If you would like to support Crystal and Flame as a donor, learn more about the project, or collaborate on creating new pathways for a healthy arts economy, please reach out to Maura: maura@crystalandflame.com.

If you are a writer, editor, or designer who thinks you would be a good fit and you’re interested in contributing, please share briefly about your interest: editors@crystalandflame.com.

Join our mailing list at the bottom of the page.

We look forward to hearing from you. Thanks in advance.

A note on world-building and beginning again

Dear Friends,

I find myself at the edge of two wildernesses–that of the natural world, which is rich, thriving and alive, which I know and love as home, and that of the speculative future we are already in, of technology, AI and the question marks it has arrived in public discourse about the value of writers. One of these wildernesses commands my respect. The other is foreign to me, and incites my apprehension–an unknown stranger that I am wary of. In San Francisco, the details of this tension are materially present and in our faces. Perhaps even if the parts of the AI-world that are inventing dystopian outcomes haven't hit your outward reality yet, you can relate.

We talk of democratizing access in the arts, but in the years since the pandemic, have we really invented better stakes for all, or are we only tokenizing with a cleaner performance? What have our collective intentions meant in practice and how do we carry ourselves through to the art world paradigm we want to inhabit? How will writers survive? Or more to the point, how are we surviving? If the wider collective could experience what it takes to live on the frontlines of this moment as a literary creative, would AI already be put to bed?

We live in a world that consistently devalues the labor of artists and writers–monetarily and in other ways. How do we create a world that respects its creatives? How do we initiate stability and share power with health in our creative industries?

Crystal and Flame is an art writing journal and small press project that reflects my relationship to these questions, and forms my attempt to play in the field of answers as an art writer, editor, and literary entrepreneur.

I have ideas for strategies we might employ to shift financial models and paradigms in favor of artists. I cannot know until I initiate these ideas what they will lead to. I know that this project has the capacity to function as a vehicle for experimentation for these attempts–at minimum, providing a platform for the conversation to grow, and at maximum, yielding new systems. I know that our collective cultural health is connected to our willingness to prioritize valuing the health of artists and writers—who are the gills and medicine people of our society—which includes and necessitates an expression of compensation that does not yet exist in practice.

We have an incredible crew of writers, editors, and designers who are actively working on getting beautiful, hope-instigating and world-building content to you. We are currently creating at cost. There is nothing new about this–it is how things have been done for a long time. But just because we’ve done things a certain way for a long time, doesn’t mean we should continue.

Email us directly to learn how you can support the work: editors@crystalandflame.com.

Thank you for your support.

We’d love to stay in connection, let you know when the journal launches, share news about our upcoming events, and update you when our fundraising campaign goes live.

We promise not to spam you, and to send messages only when we have news. To stay on our mailing list, sign up at the bottom of the page.

Thank you for reading, donating, forwarding, and most important of all, for being here.

Joyfully,

Maura and the Crystal and Flame team