Our Story

Experience zigzags, leaps, regresses then spurts forward, tosses frays delays surprises. Narrative revisits manifestation in countless iterations recounted since the Big Bang. Machinations of living breathing striving to make meaning from days and nights of existence. Morning provides for itself.

Breathe Free Press is a place for the essay in every imaginable, inventive form, cross-genre—flash—critical—experimental—travel in particular the lyric essay. 

Narratives are a metronome to mark time: This happened, it happened often and repeatedly with some variations on different backdrops. Most often it happened on the planet earth. Once and only once did it happened on the moon. Einstein’s space-time theory challenges our belief in the illusion of past, present, and future. The illusion, Jean Baudrillard cautions against in Simulacra and Simulation, is the normalization of empty signs of representation.

Breathe Free Press delights in essays testing patterns of perception. We appreciate attentiveness to language and cultural associations. Essays which transform and transgress metanarratives of authority and power structures. Essays to subvert imposed constraints of genre conventions.

Some man, at some time, dominates the human psyche with his emotional ignorance. It is almost as if fate colludes with tyrants to taunt our complacency into action.

Breathe Free Press challenges the normalization of regressive tropes of renascent authoritarianism, illiberal, nationalist power threatening to reverse progress. We publish essays that allude, intimate, insinuate, attempt, analyze, critique, express through compassion and awareness.

No weapon was ever lifted, no peace ever made, no society ever founded in silence. Liberal and illiberal movements form on the page. Modernism repurposed and reinvented representation on the ashes of the material, human, spiritual devastation of two world wars.

Breathe Free Press is an online journal of literary resistance for essays that channel the spirit penned in dog-eared spiral notebooks, in smoky subterranean basements. Nietzsche and Buddha conscious narratives composed to the rhythm of protest that lit the fuse for epochal cultural change.

MISSION STATEMENT:

Breathe Free Press, a literary magazine of essaysim: Essays of resistance, imagination, and social awareness. The personal made global, and the global made personal.

FOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE EDITOR: 

Deborah Di Bari writes essay-mirepoix of multi-genre. Her essays query the silencing of polyphonic voices in recurring dominant metanarratives.

Upon graduation from The Fashion Institute of Technology, Deborah began her twenty-year career in New York’s Garment center as print textile and fashion designer. Her frequent business travel to Europe, and her Italian immigrant roots enticed to live in Rome. Personal events led to her first creative writing class. Deborah holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing awarded her by CCNY.

She founded – published – edited and designed breathfreepress.org.