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Cover
Table of Contents
Editor's Notes
Donations
Submission
Guidelines
Website
Stories
& Essays
A Wedding Toast For Daddy's
Little Girl
_ By Miriam N. Kotzin
Bread
_ By Debbi Pless
Flowers
_ By Rachel Miller
Gyokusai
_ By
Julie Jordan
Hearts Without Armor
_ By
Angela P. Markham
Mental Constipation and Brain Vomit
_ By
Winnie Khaw
My Best Subject
_ By
Ashley Polker
Piper
_ By
Samantha Rae
Requiem For An Author
_ By
R. Holsen
Sometimes It Pours Only Dogs
_ By
Saana Tykkä
The Black Tape
_ By
Brad Jashinsky
Poetry
A Slave To Time
_ By
Clyde Windjammer
Colour
_ By
Kaleen Love
Death By My Lover
_ By
Jessica Tempestad
I Am A Pineapple
_ By
Rachel Miller
Lament For the Lost Soldier
_ By
Melissa Augeri
Laundry Arcade
_ By
Ashley Polker
Left Silent To Dream of Wine
_ By
Kaleen Love
Mortality
_ By
Henry Grieves
Ode To Microsoft Spell Cheque
_ By
Arielle Demchuk
Reminiscent of Society As An Individual
_ By
Henry Grieves
Ship's Cook
_ By
Heather Inwood
The Phoenix
_ By
Kaleen Love
The Raven and the Dove
_ By
Melissa Augeri
Train Dreamer
_ By
Heather Inwood
Art
& Photography
S. Camargo
_ Photography
and Drawings
David C. Clarke
_ Photography
Wiltekirra Samaxionn
_ Photography
Anca Sandu
_ Paintings
Austin
Tanney
_ Photography
Ray
Tsang
_ Paintings
Mark
Warren
_ Photography
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Editor's
Notes
By
Sharon Hadrian
We welcome any and all comments
related to the magazine, our contributors, or the issues raised in
the stories and art that we feature. If you have something to say,
please feel free to drop us an email here.
We may publish your letter in our next issue.
A
few opening comments…
It shouldn’t be kept a secret that the Editorial page was the
last one written and formatted for this issue. With so much
happening over these past several months, I found myself
simultaneously struggling with having nothing and everything to
say.
First
and foremost, I must discuss our writers and artists, because
(clichéd as the saying is) without them there wouldn't be a
magazine. Behind the scenes there is a motley crew of folks who
also deserve credit. First there are my co-editors, Dawn Felagund and
Kirsty Truro, as well as several people who have gone to great
lengths to help us promote the magazine, most notably Angela from www.ThumbBandits.com
and Miriam N. Kotzin (who provided us with a wealth of resources
to get our magazine noticed). But, like a good Academy Award
speech, someone will always be forgotten; thus, if you’re
reading this, I would like to thank you most of all.
Our
Autumn 2005 submissions cycle was a huge success. We received 53
pieces of writing, 3 complete collections of poetry (with some
submitting more than 20 poems for consideration!), and 44
artworks, all sent by 34 contributors from around the world. That
amounts to 195 total works
from all categories!
We
have also chosen six entries (three poems and three stories) as
our Editor's Picks for this quarter. Although we are proud of all
of our contributors, we feel that these entries are especially
interesting, unique, and thought-provoking. Our selections are
denoted on the Table of Contents page by a small light bulb icon.
The
deluge of quality writing and art was amazing, so much so that
when final decisions had to be made we created a third category
(along with the expected Yes/No decisions): “deferred”. We
hope above all else that this classification will help our writers
and artists continue to develop, and their pieces will be
reconsidered for the Winter 2005 issue. As one of my professors
once said, “Nothing is ever written. All good work is
rewritten” (apologies if someone said that before Professor
Schwartz did). This really underscores what we’re trying to do
with Antithesis Common, because although we publish a quarterly
magazine, we also send in-depth, personal reviews to all of our
writers in hopes that they will grow right along with us.
Now
for the real editorial…
Antithesis Common was founded in the Summer of 2005 on principles
of diversity: to publish writing and art that is high quality,
non-confrontational, and unique from what many of us are
accustomed.
Our
world is full of labels: black & white, gay & straight,
Republican & Democrat, and when we begin to live by these
labels and restrict ourselves to only those who look, think, and
act like us, our minds become narrower as the gaps between our
fellow humans become greater. Thus, the Antithesis Common logo is
a rainbow, which represents many things to many different people.
Recently, rainbows have come to mean diversity related to culture,
race, and sexual preference, but they also mean much more. Our
world is a spectrum of color, of opinions, and of different people
coming together as one. Send one single, boring ray of light into
a prism and you get an entire community of colors radiating and
refracting from one central area. Look up into the sky when the
rain is ending and the sun is coming out and you'll most likely
see that same rainbow hovering over your head. There’s no way to
tell where one color ends and the next begins as they gradate
into each other, interspersing and overlapping to become one
singular marvel of beauty and art for all to see.
It's
a simple idea: to ask our readers to think and question what they
are reading and where it is coming from, and yet that just doesn't
seem to happen very much these days. We are living in an
increasingly polarized society, and it would do us all some good
to stop and look—truly look—at those around us. It is easy to
dismiss someone that we've never met who may live on the other side
of the continent and look nothing like us, but it is much harder
to dismiss a sister, a friend, a father, or anyone close to us.
Would you deprive them of their civil rights, or of their right to
love, or their right to think and live freely? Would you provide
for them when they were hungry, homeless and cold? Would you care
for them when they were sick, and then expect the same in return
when you needed help?
Art
and literature can bring us these things, these freedoms and
comforts. To stop and read about the life of some other person
(and let's face it, even fiction is based in some form of
reality), or to ponder the choices that those writers or
characters had to make,
is a small push to close the widening gap that we use to ostracize
ourselves from “the others.”
Single
points of bright, white light are boring. Rainbows are the way to
go.
This
world and the people living in it should all be embraced for their
diversity, for they are our heritage, our present, and our future.
We are all antitheses to somebody, and it is our hope here that we
can bring society together in one common place for one common
goal: the understanding and support of diversity in all aspects of
life.
So
please peruse the magazine at your own speed, but we hope that you
won’t skip anything, lest you miss out on someone or something
you never even knew was there.
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