Editors’ Letter: The Magicians or the Fire

It’s springtime and we want to believe in magic. This is what we tell ourselves, coming out of winter, escaping both the romance and treachery of cold through the newly-sprouted flowers. Wrapped in the scent of freshly cut grass, the sky above so blue and infinite, new futures suddenly seem not only possible, but inevitable. 

With the new year’s futile resolutions left behind on dusty vision boards, heading forth into the heat of summer, we become seekers of enchantment. The sunshine of warm days and chlorine air rendering time meaningless. The carnivalesque magic of night imbued with funnel cakes and popcorn. A funhouse mirror distorting even the most playful version of ourselves into something grotesque. But rather than run from ourselves in horror, as we would’ve in a different season, we marvel at our new, warped contours, sparking with curiosity over what strange creatures we might become.

In our most magical moments we are all just animals: sometimes young, often wrong, but always seeking something. 

It is springtime and the last year has been a fruitful journey through chaos, personally, professionally, globally. This is nothing new, but still it shapes what we see when we look back over our days. There are too many mornings of alarms and painting faces to earn a place in the world and coffee snaking through us like some approximation of chemical joy; too many 24-hour news cycles shepherding us from one mind-numbing terror to the next; too many trivial topics trending, mirages begging to relieve us from our privileged guilt; too much forgotten suffering. Some days we believe ourselves too young to be taken seriously, or too old to be taken for granted without convincing ourselves we asked for it. There are many ways to blossom a life into meaning and yet, as the years pass, we learn life is all about playing the long game—even when we don’t trust the other players, or ourselves.  

But if the sum of our lives boils down to how many days we’ve experienced magic, what would we have to show for it? How does a lifetime trapeze dangerously between wishing and belief? 

It is springtime and we want to carnival our lives, but there are deadlines, and there is science, and we are grateful for all we have, and yet magic. It pervades us. We look for it everywhere, even when we don’t believe in it. We are raw and tangled and hopeful. But in some forgotten corner of our memory, someone told us that magic and truth can’t coexist, so we find ourselves seeking to understand life more than we seek to live it. When the world is burning, does magic still exist? When it’s all over, were we the magicians or the fire?

It’s been a year since we compiled a collection of offerings in the form of a fresh issue. But we are here again, sharing with you the poetic and the literal, the scientific and the magical. Regardless of genre, every piece in this issue is telling a story about what it means to believe: to struggle, to trust, to run, to look back with regret, to look forward with all that brought us to this moment gathered carefully in our arms. Some stories remind us how quickly those things once normal become unfathomable to us. Some tell us we are lonely, or not as in love as we thought, or more in love than we ought to be, or incapable of sexting with any dignity. Some render us out-of-breath animals, slicing out a place in a world where no one wants us to survive. Some glimmer like the dreams we don’t wake up from. 

In this issue there is magic. There is wonderment. There is more hybridity than we know what to do with. And yet, it is real, and here, and boundaryless; less interested in definitions than in lived experiences. When we say magic, we don’t mean it literally, but it’s no metaphor, either. It’s the mystic courage within all of us to hope amid the hopeless. To embrace ugliness when beauty has long-since forsaken us. To know possibility is endless, and frightening, and filled with illusion. To gather together after all we (continue to) survive, like wild irises breaking through concrete fissures year after year just to see a single week of sunlight, speaking and hearing each other’s truths—that is a kind of conjuring. 

It’s springtime and maybe someone needs to tell you it’s okay to believe in magic. The glittery kind, the buoyant kind, the dark, twisted, grotesque kind. We’re here to tell you we believe in it, too. Let The Hunger be your mirror. Welcome to our funhouse.

Lena & Erin
Editors & Co-Founders