Weblog: Brave Soul Collective features VEP!

Tim’m West, co-founder of Brave Soul Collective, recently published an interview with Steven G. Fullwood, founder and publisher at Vintage Entity Press. Check out the interview.

Below is an excerpt from the interview:

Tim’m: Steven, I’m quite familiar with your work. It’s strikingly “brave” in the rather bluntly comedic way that you broach a number of provocative topics that many people won’t touch. I think of you as the writer who says what other people think about saying. It requires a special sophistication to be truthful about things that we often dance around: our closets, its skeletons, and the dirty laundry they wear. I also remembered when you first contacted me about the work of Brave Soul Collective. Can you speak a bit about your own sense of connectedness to the work we’re doing and how it manifests in your work as an author, publisher, archivist, and culture critic?

Steven: As an author and cultural critic, I am always pushing myself to do better work. That means I cannot afford to stay in safe spaces for too long because I get antsy and I know it’s not where my truth lies. I grew up trying to protect myself from all things hurting and in the hiding spaces I created, there was an awful fallout. Still feeling the aftershock. One detriment was that hiding impacted my ability to really sympathize and connect to people, much less value their love and support in any meaningful way. My writing is one way to be brave, test things out, see if what I say I believe is something I actually believe. As a publisher, it’s my goal to publish writing that is inherently brave by exceptional authors, two of which are Cheryl Boyce Taylor and G. Winston James. VEP is fueled by imagination and love and a fierceness to simply speak life and truth and honor and to challenge those things that frighten and keep us static. It’s a labor of love that has helped me realize how vital the written word is, and how it can transform life. As an archivist, the work I do with the Black Gay and Lesbian Archive is to collect, preserve and make available to the public the universe of non-heterosexual history and culture of people of African descent. It has taken a Herculean effort to bring this project to completion and it’s because of the communities I serve as an information specialist and my dedication to preserve cultures that have been ignored or dismissed up until recently largely because the people who created it have been ignore and dismissed from public discourse. The fact that non-heterosexual blacks folk and abroad have created in every media, for the last century, despite the various homophobic and racists environments they live in, is brave. My job is to makes sure these artifacts are preserved, so someone can get to these stories, read them, and perhaps share them.

Brave Soul Collective is an education, outreach, and support organization for gay / bisexual / transgendered / questioning HIV positive and negative individuals living their lives in truth through the arts. BSC aims to help stop the spread of HIV&AIDS, by serving as a platform for honest discussion about prevention, stigma, and personal responsibility. BSC is committed to encouraging artistic freedom, expression, and creativity in members of the arts, and same gender loving communities.

VEP thanks Tim’m and the BSC for their time, energy and effort in supporting our work.