For generations a formal portrait wasn’t a mere document but an assertion of self-hood: I’m here. Remember me.
On Finding My Grandmother’s Portrait
Thoughts on Photography: Walker Evans’ Polaroids
“People ask me what camera I used. It’s not the camera. Its—.” He tapped his temple with his index finger: it’s the eye and the brain.
They could transform at will the very air they breathed into a variety of sweet songs. Letter from the editor, June, 2026
June ramblings.
Living Ghosts: In Times That Don’t Exist
The supernatural does not require foggy graveyards; it is closer and far more mundane. It manifests in a midnight kitchen, a crowded yet silent subway car, or a house where silence moves between rooms like an uninvited guest.
Every Portrait Tells a Lie
“I might add that portraiture is also a tender art. It tries to hold onto what can’t be contained, which is life itself and a clear view of it.”
May Issue, 2026
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
Letter From the Editor May: The Sticky Little Leaves, the Blue Sky
Springtime ramblings.
How to Love an Owl
I felt like the owl mother to the whole family. I wanted to spread my wings and cover the whole nest, and the father in the neighboring tree as well. To keep them safe and protected, from predators and bad weather and falls, and from us.
More Than Half a Poet: The Grasmere Journals
It’s a strange but probably not-so-strange thing that a beautifully-written account of the baking of bread, of illness and worry, of the beauty of the light on flying crows, the wind on the water, the glow through the mountains, would have such an enduring power to move us.
April Issue, 2026
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
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