Kick Out the Bottom: A Shared Account of a Detroit Mystic

Erik Mortenson is a literary scholar, writer, translator, and faculty member in English at Lake Michigan College in Benton Harbor, Michigan. After earning a PhD from Wayne State University in Detroit, Erik spent a year as a Fulbright Lecturer in Germany before journeying to Koç University in Istanbul to help found the English and Comparative Literature Department. After spending more than a decade abroad, he returned to the U.S. shortly after the 2016 coup. His scholarly work focuses on American literary and visual texts and their intersection with the cultural concerns of the twentieth-century. Erik has published numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as three books: Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence (2011), Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture (2016), and Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey (2018).

Christopher Kramer (Christopher of Detroit) is the author of the novels The Invisible Histories of the Spiral Mountain (2014), The Erotic Tales of Bucephalus (2017), and Dominique's Confession: A Roaring Twenties Dark Romance (2020). In his tales of magic and mysticism, he examines philosophical dualities, transitions of the psyche, alternate realities, and spiritual revelations. Christopher is also an artist and illustrator with over twenty exhibitions. His illustrations appear in the Tenebre Horror Anthology (2021) and Illustrated Worlds magazine (2023). His work also appears in the first edition of Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare (2012) in a limited-edition print.