"To ask questions about Aspasia's life is to ask questions about half of humanity."

This is an online journal created and edited by Gertrude And. Each publication highlights a single author's work. Aspasiology neither promotes any one aesthetic nor seeks to develop any movement of style. Rather, Aspasiology is interested in creating a community that gives women writers their due attention while acknowledging the differences of our thought processes. After featured writers are selected and submit work, several writers who are part of a pool of responding writers are then asked to respond to the submitted work which is published alongside. Responses can vary in form. The featured author can submit several pieces as well as any type of writing they wish for publication. What the featured writer publishes once they are selected, is 100% up to her. This is because Gertrude is not interested in displaying her own personal aesthetic but rather the variety of our thoughts. A response writer should consider their submission to be an opportunity to publish original work.
Aspasia was a "dog-eyed concubine," a whore, started the Peloponnesian war and was mother to a bastard.  

In the picture above, she is listening to Socrates say what she just said 5 minutes before. Everything about her is suspicious.
Since antiquity, there has been a sincere investigation into who is really at fault for ruining the world. Women have a tendency to come up as prime suspects, especially if someone in power has something to gain from their demise. Often, the very nature of our being is called into question. At our core, we are deceptive, promiscuous, plotting and straight-out liars. From antiquity, Aspasia may be lesser known, but most know about Helen of Troy. You may also want to look up Theodora the Byzantine empress to gain a quick understanding of how for centuries, our wicked ways distort the correct orders of the world and of thought.These are just a few examples mainly from antiquity. Aspasia is central to our project here because she not only tore a hole in that sensitive web of all that is right, but she did so by way of thought. The link of power to thought is borne in the symbolic and artistic renderings of her visage. She is a figure. And while not all women actively ruin the world, the women who do ruin the world by way of some attainment of power, act as an emblematic figuration of our truer potential due to our natural design. 
Aspasiology is in part a study of world-ruining. Through Aspasia, the suspicious act of thought is linked to the truly suspicious act of attaining any kind of power. Poetry is not only a form of thought, but a thought process close to a kind of witchcraft or magic and so when women participate, it starts a chain-reaction of investigation. A thought process that takes shape in the subconscious of a woman can only produce a sort of evil that shouldn't be trusted. Even as I write this, my husband paces behind. My father will not stop questioning me every time I see him about my writing even though I've never told him anything, ever, despite his questioning. It is my refusal to comply and my insistence to continue writing that drives his nervous inquiry. The suspicious nature of our being grows in our core and blooms at the surface with unusual thinking. Women also write things on the internet, they tell their stories that tend to ruin things to the point where men have to call in the authorities to silence. They threaten law suits and give everything legal terms. They need to name it, name it something, hysteria, borderline, call-out culture, whatever, in order to dominate it and see to its demise. And when it comes to poetry, they want to name it as quick as we can write it, so they can call it their own invention. The whole design of Aspasiology is just writing and responding to that writing with no intent to name it anything at all, other than free thought, so that no one else can claim it or make it into something it's not. 

How to be a part of this great study:
Contact the editor and let her know if you'd like to be considered for a current study (featured writer), part of the response pool, or both. Aspasiology is the study of all and any type of person identifying as a woman or as genderqueer, for which the featured writer section is mainly reserved. All genders are welcome for the response pool.  Responses can be prose, poetry, hybrid, whatever! Responses, however, should be complete pieces reflecting that you have taken time with the featured writer's work and not be a general comment about the writer or written in a blurb fashion. Responses should be considered just as much an opportunity to publish original work as the featured work is. Aspasiology also publishes reviews of chapbooks and books. Contact me below with a description of yourself, your work, your interest in participation as well as a few samples of your work and/or a review of a chapbook or book. We will go from there.