GUD: Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Issue 7

Greatest Uncommon Denominator Magazine #7

by Julia Bernd (Editor), Okasha Skat'si, Zdravka Evtimova

FROM THE COVER ART, “Danzante” by Fernando Martí, to the “Invitation” from poet Alicia Hoffman at the close of the issue, GUD 7 will entice you into a dance with words and images that will grab hold of you, take you out of yourself, and leave you breathless. Joseph A. W. Quintela’s “Witches’ Dance” leads off, followed across the stage by a bamba with the (very earthy) divine, choreographed by Okasha Skat’si. “Coconut Pie” by Joshua Ben-Noah Carlson takes you for a turn in an awkward two-step, while David Gullen’s “Just War” whirls you smoothly into an alternate world that nonetheless moves to the inexorable rhythm of history.
As with any good collection of art, GUD 7 has love, death, family, conflict, loss, and healing. But though the themes are timeless, we guarantee you’ve never experienced anything quite like the stories, poetry, and art you’ll find juxtaposed here. The work in GUD 7 spans every kind of stylistic approach and throws down the gauntlet to traditional genre categories—there’s even an essay on genre categories themselves, by cognitive scientist Eve Sweetser. GUD 7 will stretch your ideas of the possible: what art can be, what humans can be, what reality can be. It will pick you up out of the world you thought you knew and set you down somewhere totally unknown, where you can’t even trust your own perceptions—but when you look back, maybe you’ll understand something new about where you came from.
GUD 7 opened to submissions in 2009 and, due to setbacks and circumstances, it was seven years in the making. But the writing and art wouldn’t let us go—we couldn’t abandon the dance. So here it is!

191 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2016

About the author

Julia grew up in Illinois but now lives in San Francisco. She would probably be a linguistics professor if she and academia hadn't had a falling-out a while back; after seven years working as a peace activist instead, she's currently exploring new directions -- or in other words, she's (mostly) unemployed. Besides GUD, she has edited for Night Train and NFG. She likes to think she's open to enjoying work in any genre, but admits that she probably has higher standards for some than others. Good characters are the best hook.