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Cover
Table of Contents
Editor's Notes
Donations
Submission
Guidelines
Website
Stories
& Essays
Balance
_ By
Alison Baumy
Contemporary
Cultural Differences...
_ By
Ninni Siurua
Eclipsed
Yesterdays
_ By
Clyde Windjammer
Healthy Guy
_ By
David J. LeMaster
Immortalis Letum
_ By
Sophie Davis
Last Call For Salvation
_ By
Angela P. Markham
My Fault
_ By
Ro Thorton
Pacific Northwest
_ By
Aaron Hellem
Q-Q Ca Choo
_ By
Billy Pilgrim
The Best Laid Plans
_ By
John A. Ward
The Ecstasy of Cooking
_ By
Sam Nolting
The Girl With the Green Umbrella
_ By
J.R. Earlebeck
The Gods of Houston
_ By
Rebekah Frumkin
Poetry
Athena's Owl
_ By
Amberly Mason
But I Have Never Known This
_ By
Kaleen Love
Clouds On Your Floor
_ By
Savannah Bobo
Crowded Lobby
_ By
M. Blair Spiva
Ever After
_ By
Bennie Johnson
Important Questions
_ By
P.T. Bell
Migration
_ By
Sarah Wassberg
Moon Goddess
_ By
Kristina Diane Smith
Oldest Profession
_ By
Ashley Polker
On Visiting Hay-on-Wye
_ By
M. Blair Spiva
Sodom and Gomorrah
_ By
Jessica Fannin
Wal-Mart
_ By
P.T. Bell
Art
& Photography
Jeremy Harker
_ Paintings
Douglas C. Knight
_ Photography
Jed Knox
_ Paintings
and Drawings
May Ann Licudine
_ Paintings
Danny
Malboeuf
_ Paintings
Alex
Stanbury
_ 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.
Appetizer
Just like last quarter, the editorial was the final piece lovingly
placed into this little puzzle. Although it's often hard to keep
us quiet about "issues du jour", eventually we settled
on letting our wonderful contributing writers and artists speak
for us.
Reading
the "fan mail" that came in after we published our
Autumn 2005 issue was a wonderful experience; whether our readers
were naming their favorite stories, poems, and artworks, or just
praising the overall look and message of the magazine, their
emails made all of the hard work feel "right."
I
dipped my finger in
the thought-dormant bright colors
of my permeating oil paints
waiting
even their containers were lovely.
-Savannah Bobo
I'm
particularly proud of this issue, and not just for the obvious
reasons. Certainly it has proven that people really are
reading our magazine, and that the debut issue was not just a
tiny, fizzling moment in Internet history. But I also think that
this issue is more diverse, and let's face it, when that's your
goal then it's always a good thing. I love that I disagree with
some of the views in the magazine; I also love that I love others,
and I hope our readers will feel the same way.
Our
Winter 2005 submissions cycle, like our debut issue, was a huge success.
In total we received 71
pieces of writing and 33
artworks, all sent by 33 contributors from around the world. This
quarter we're bringing you an android love story, a hotel-owning
dog, love, autism, Frank Zappa, goddesses, philosophy, asteroids,
mirrors on the ceiling, a heavenly cookbook, mythology, discount
superstores, a sandwich lover, and much more.
As
will become our habit, we
have chosen six entries (three poems and three stories) as
our Editor's Picks for this quarter. Because of the incredible
amount of diversity in our pages, it was especially hard to pick
only six pieces this time around. But we did, and our selections are
denoted on the Table of Contents page by small light bulb icons.
Black is not a
color. Black is the absence of the spectrum—light—making it
something less frivolous and more sinister than the rainbow could
ever hope to be.
-J.R. Earlebeck
Main
Course
After
releasing our very successful debut issue, there was hardly any
time to celebrate before planning began for the next issue.
Interestingly, one of the things that gave me the most trouble was
the magazine's color scheme. I envisioned a new, blustery theme
for the Winter 2005 issue, then perhaps something related to cool autumnal
colors, and finally an ever-evolving spectrum of colors after that. As you
can see, eventually we settled on green and a dark red-purple,
which immediately made me think, "Christmas."
Why? We're a secular
magazine, and Christmas is just as special as Hanukkah, Kwanzaa,
any other holiday celebration, or none at all (unless you ask
certain Christians who are trying to boycott stores like Target
because those places prefer the religious-neutral term "Happy
Holidays", but I digress). But there's just something about
red and green in the wintertime that made me feel uncomfortable,
like we were releasing the "Christmas issue." I didn't
want to be so exclusionary, even if it just looked that way.
This is not the only color
complex in the world today, or even the most famous. Colors are
hard to deal with, because they almost always come with labels,
and even using all of the colors at once eventually stirs up controversy.
The rainbow, which happens to be incorporated into our magazine
logo, has been all but ostracized from mainstream society lately
for being "too gay." Never mind that, to most circles of
people throughout history, it has signified diversity in general;
now, if you like the look of these colors or what they used to
stand for, you're gay.
The problem is not that
we're not a GLBT magazine, but that the assumption of labels,
definitions, and meanings (in other words, judging a book by its
cover) is so frustrating. It's not limited to a paint box either;
whether you're talking about clothing choices or skin tones, color
matters in this world. Do you live in a red state or a blue state?
Are you wearing black because you're a Goth? Heard any good blonde
jokes lately?
…And so it will probably
continue for the foreseeable, regrettable future. But in the
meantime, we’ll keep insisting that without color and diversity,
we’d have blackness. Nothing. And really, in that case we’d
rather have purple-reds and greens than boringly dichotomized
black and white anyway, even if someone does inevitably call it
the “gay magazine’s Christmas issue.”
So we’ll keep trying as
long as you keep reading.
Happy Holidays.
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