Featured Contributors

Suzannah Showler

Suzannah Showler is a writer, cultural critic, and poet. As a longtime vinyasa yoga practitioner, she enjoys taking occasional breaks from her work to do headstands and handstands, and when she writes she uses an internet blocker called “Freedom.” Her most recent book is Most Dramatic Ever, a cultural appraisal of the reality TV show The Bachelor. Showler’s essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed Reader, The Walrus, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. In this issue, she reviews cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s latest graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength.

Matthew Richardson

British artist Matthew Richardson creates collages from curios, postcards, and knickknacks that he has collected over time to keep his work novel and surprising. His art explores how stories and meaning emerge and evolve. Richardson has produced works for the British Library and Britain’s Poetry Society, and he illustrated the tales of magical realist writer Gabriel García Márquez for Penguin Books. For this issue’s Tricycle Haiku Challenge, he composed a new work that mirrors the 5-7-5 syllabic structure of the poetic form.

Vanessa Zuisei Goddard

Buddhist teachings are at the heart of Tricycle’s mission, which is why in 2018 we introduced to the magazine a dedicated Teachings section that has continued to grow ever since. In this issue, writer and lay Zen teacher Vanessa Zuisei Goddard joined our team to steer the section as its editor. For 23 years, Goddard, who was born in Mexico, lived as a monastic at Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York. During that time, she fulfilled various editorial roles and served as creative director and director of operations for Dharma Communications, the monastery’s outreach arm overseeing its websites, journals, books, and various print materials.

Chico Imrie

Chico Imrie was born in London to a family of globetrotting artists. After going to art school in New York City, he worked in fashion, carpentry, horse farming, leatherwork, and bootmaking, and spent time with Amish communities. Eventually he returned to painting and showing his artwork in New York City. His painting Bruce, in “Freedom From Illusion,” belongs to what he calls “the color project.” Imrie paints with ground pigment in bee honey base, which—when applied to archival paper—seems to beam color right into the viewer’s eyes. He practiced a Zen Buddhist calming technique before painting the circles entirely by hand, with no guide. Imrie values collaboration and connection and welcomes conversation about his work.