I am Malana Kline, the writer and artist behind the creative side of New Jeanland.
If you have found me in the Creative Quarter, this is the name you are most likely to see. I use my own name for my poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, visual art, photography, and the other things I make when an idea refuses to leave me alone.
I have a degree in English with a concentration in writing, although my relationship with writing began long before anyone gave me a fancy piece of paper about it. I am interested in language at its most intimate: what people cannot quite say, what they almost say, what gets buried beneath anger or humor or silence, and the strange little details that survive after everything important has supposedly ended.
My poetry tends to live somewhere between restraint and emotional catastrophe.
My fiction is often interested in memory, identity, uncertainty, impossible spaces, and people attempting to behave normally in circumstances that have made normal behavior increasingly unreasonable.
My visual work is another extension of the same instinct. I like creating characters, little worlds, fashion sketches, photographs, strange symbols, and things that exist mostly because I wanted to see what would happen if I made them.
I also have too many hobbies. This has not yet been recognized as a medical emergency.
So Who Is Bullie Jean?
Also me.
Bullie Jean is the pseudonym I use for my opinion writing, political commentary, debates, media criticism, and the portions of New Jeanland where I am considerably more likely to start asking inconvenient questions.
The separation is deliberate.
There are things I want to put my real name on because they belong to me as an artist. There are other things I would rather publish through a distinct public voice; one designed for argument, commentary, irreverence, and occasionally poking things with sticks to see what happens.
Malana writes the poems.
Bullie starts the debates.
Both of us have access to the website. This was probably an administrative mistake.
What I Do Here
As Malana Kline, I oversee much of the creative work that makes New Jeanland feel like a place rather than merely a website.
That includes poetry, fiction, creative projects, visual art, photography, design experiments, and whatever new medium I have decided to become interested in this week.
New Jeanland was never meant to be confined to one subject or one kind of creation. It is a home for curiosity: serious work beside silly work, political essays beside poems, research beside art, and carefully constructed projects beside things made primarily because they delighted me.
The common thread is not subject matter.
It is curiosity, and perhaps a certain resistance to staying in the appropriate lane.
Welcome to the Creative Quarter. Please ignore whatever Bullie is doing across town.
