It seems more important now than ever to tell our stories and share our stories, and listen to the stories of others. To amplify the voices of anybody struggling to be heard, and to celebrate when the words or images or silences speak to us or bewilder us or transform us. To harness our anger or sadness or joy in a wild productive fury, resonating with the strange perfect words we make our own or the deafening silences we inhabit.
These phantasms are concocted from a little kernel of conscience, or guilt, or fear, or loneliness. Sometimes others see them, sometimes they don’t, they’re shifting and dreamlike, and they operate according to their own rules. They’re unreliable narrators. They’re wise or foolish, in turn; they speak in riddles, they speak a questionable truth, changing and suspect, like all truths.
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.
Cars wait at the light. You are at the breakfast table in bare feet, wearing Jillian’s robe. A woman in a heavy coat labors onto the bus carrying all her things, a line of riders shuffle behind. Brakes release.
Someday he’d write the most perfectly beautiful story ever written, and he’d use one pencil for each word, and then he’d put each pencil back in its chipped plastic drawer until the next time. Some day.
I have long been fascinated with the motion of human hands. Gesture is one of my favorite languages. It’s oddly both universal and specific to one place at the same time.
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.
To me, re-reading a story you’ve loved, after a distance of a few years or even decades, is delicious. (And so is this soup!)
The new snow forgot all boundaries between land and water.
We’re all gleaners, finding beauty and meaning and sustenance in the unlikely, the odd, the overlooked. We’re all magpies, lining our nests with beauty where we find it.
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