14 February 2025

NAVIGATE

: to steer a course through a medium
: to make one’s way over or through

I recently revisited, very much by accident, The House on Mango Street. Oh, but what a well-timed, needed accident. The introduction to the 25th-anniversary edition has Sandra Cisneros taking us back to 2025, I mean, 1980, when a woman flexing her strength and independence was a mark against her. Cisneros says she wrote Mango Street to stop the “swelling in her heart” from the stories she heard and saw.

I’m inspired by literary activism, and I feel the urgency in my bones when Cisneros later says, “We do this because the world we live in is a house on fire, and the people we love are burning.”

But I also feel helplessly human as I try to navigate translating that uncertainty and chaos into language. (And isn’t that the very best and worst thing about witnessing and creating, the suspension of knowing?)

In this issue of Magpie Zine, there’s an endless amount of humanity. All the works are navigating in their own way—cradling, stumbling, diving headfirst through varying bits of life to break through to some level of acceptance or understanding.

Sometimes, the moment is gentle or “brushingly,” as John August writes in “How the Moonbeam Endows the Rime,” or aching as a heart “filled with lake water” in “The Coast (A Diary Entry)” by Cole Forrest, or as unexpected as a childhood that “slipped out” overnight in Ezra Fox's “To the Student Who Told Me Their Grandmother Died... Twice.”

Other times, the journey is one of longing to be held and feel human, as in Claire Lancaster's experiential writing, or the sensation of being outside of a moment while you're inside of it, as we feel in Brian McNely's “Sneglen.” Or maybe it's rather about how we see other humans, as in this issue’s evocative visual art and the storytelling of Adam Peterson in “I've An Idea Where to Put the Babies.” Or perhaps it’s how we might navigate the in-between of Human and a developing Other, as in “Her Cherry Aftertaste” by Danielle Roberson. No matter where the journey takes us, we can't help but ask ourselves if it was worth it, as Hallie Fogarty reminds us in “Deliberate Displays of Unease.”

To our wonderful contributors, thank you for finding a language to share your witnessing and trusting us with your beautiful work. And, dear reader, we hope you enjoy the experience of navigating your way through the twenty-three offerings within.

xoxo,

Magpie