CYBORG MEMOIRS
is a network of sexy and thought-provoking publishing projects and episodic broadcasts, from one once-chronically online and so-called “individual” currently known as M. Tellez (aka Magus Monk fka number18).
CYBORG MEMOIRS releases dispatches on the following scope of intersecting topics:
grief/rage/smut,
race/class/white supremacy culture,
climate/drugs/environment,
history/ruling class fan-fiction/warmongering,
economics/technological developments/consolidations of power,
dispossession/ancestral memories/media messaging,
and general tides of desire/hope/despair across personal, political, and underworld spectrums.
about
the wordsmith
A Brief Jawn
M Téllez is a heavily cyborg storyteller and sloganeer from the 215. They serve as Minister of Crossroads and founding member of the corner store sci-fi collective, METROPOLARITY.
A lengthy Jawn
M Téllez is a crossroads cyborg who writes and performs speculative tales about desolation/intimacy, class/objectification, borders/land-based memory/media control, and the violence in relying on binaries to order the world. They are a white mixed race person from a working class blended family, and born and raised by the city of Philadelphia*. M is frustrated/pissed with institutional legitimacy/charity, anti-Blackness by white assimilation, and fixed treatments of language and perspective. They serve as Minister of Crossroads and founding member of METROPOLARITY, a corner store sci-fi & thought collective that uses speculative thinking as a shield and wand against standing empire. They consider the common word a handy and inexpensive tool for deconstructing oppressive world-ordering narratives.
M is a Leeway Foundation 2014 Art & Change grantee and 2015 Transformation Award recipient. They are one of METROPOLARITY’s co-editors and a compulsive self-publisher. M’s short stories appear in several Lambda Literary Award nominated anthologies. They have guest lectured, performed, and facilitated workshops at The Free Library of Philadelphia, Swarthmore College, Allied Media Conference, Drexel University, Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, Rutgers University, Haverford College, The New School, Moogfest, and others. They have performed on live radio, in front of crowds in basements, autonomous spaces, professionally mic’d stages, galleries, and community centers. M is knee deep in working on a ‘book’.
Find Follow Contact
Have a mediated relationship through my coercive surveillance streams located @cyborgmemoirs and-or sign up to my monthlyish newsletter. Use my Contact form for something more direct.
about
all that’s left
is a living story, about dispossessed cyborgs and their many borders. It’s a tale that will change over time and become a different memory for each of you. ALL THAT’S LEFT is a series about people. A non-linear piecemeal drama. A fantasy in the present now from the hologram positions of future past. A meditation on all the dystopian movies, comics, and anime of an 80s child mixed race working class survivor lifetime. ALL THAT’S LEFT is about our relationships in systems; the intimate/sexualized and tender/reliant exchanges we develop out of our borders and prosthetics. ALL THAT’S LEFT muses: sex is a power play(?), presentation demands context(?); dignity is maybe all you can fight for and sometimes devotion can suffice(?). ALL THAT’S LEFT is sad. ALL THAT’S LEFT is wistful. ALL THAT’S LEFT is struggling. ALL THAT’S LEFT is about cyborgs, which are really about paradoxes. Paradoxes aren’t welcome in capitalist/colonialist fictions of reality so we find ourselves confronted by the task: How do we dissect the paradoxes of ourselves when we cannot enter a time before we were? ALL THAT’S LEFT is you and me.
A book version is forthcoming, thanks to support from Philadephia’s Leeway Foundation.
Regarding
pronouns
The stories found on this site employ “he” and “she” pronouns for ease of linguistic flow only. Many of the instances of “he” and “she” are non-binary usages that can be kenned through careful reading and attention to nuance. The singular “they” is also used along with other lesser known pronouns for characters that don’t have or want specific genders (for example, hir and sie, xe and hen). Get into it. Language is a living tool and the users define the meanings. Language leaves the grasp of powerful dead colonizers as soon as we pull it through our teeth.
metropolarity
speech advisory
As a general rule, members of METROPOLARITY purposely employ colloquial-local grammatical practices and utilize tenses, temporalities, and points of view that may be jarring or unpalatable for many publications accustomed to institutionally reified forms of the English language. Our practices are deliberate and integral to the political and philosophical messaging within our work. However, this does not mean that we consider ourselves beyond reproach of editing and critique. Language is a tool.
about this URL
cyborgmemoirs.com
This place is the continuation of the personal website I’ve kept since 6th grade in the late 90s, first on AOL Homepages, then to GeoCities (RIP 2010). Eventually I made the jump and bought this domain around 2003. Cyborg Memoirs has been the name of my personal website since 1997, beginning as an adolescent’s disorganized broadcast space on the Web, back in a time when the notion of free bandwidth was just dying out and the Internet was still largely the domain of anonymous nerds with access to desktop computers. My gratitude to S for continuing to host this cyber-lair of mine.
*Philadelphia is a European colony name for this land. It was stolen from the Lenni Lenape peoples through violent European settler-occupation. Every line of my family – and yours – is connected to the irrevocable changes that European expansion & Euro-centric cultural indoctrination brought upon the world. We already exist in the aftermath of an apocalypse.
Amerikkka was never great.