By Lindsey Grudnicki
I’m truly excited to share this month’s featured journal with you. After a crazy spring – new job, busy days, little time for literary pursuits, etc. – reading Quaint Magazine brought the reader/writer/editor in me back to the forefront. The works featured in this new quarterly online journal are extremely engaging, diverse, and anything but “quaint.”
Lead by Founding editor Kia Groom, the team behind Quaint Magazine has put together an applause-worthy second issue. Publishing work by “female-identified writers” that gives voice “to the strange, the grotesque, and the unusual,” the magazine offers a wide range of poetry and prose that speaks with a strong, unexpectedly unified voice throughout the issue. From the cover art of a human skull encircled by a crown of blooming bulbs, the interplay between death and life, decay and growth, and desolation and beauty is examined throughout; each piece provides a new look at the human experience tainted by ironies, hypocrisies, complications, and mysteries.
Issue Two kicks off with a strong selection of poetry that speaks to the trials of womanhood. Some trials are smaller; in “Astro Advice” by Sarah Bridgins, they are the challenges of trying to be mature, poised, and loving in a world that can be hostile to developing those traits. Kori Hansell’s “Girl of Nightmares” battles imaginary horrors as dreams melt into each other to form a sequence of violence, lust, war, and death that causes the so-called sleeper to “never sleep again.” Other works further investigate these internal forces that prey upon our well-being. Suzanne Wise’s narrator in her experimental work “Please, Space” finds herself resisting “the gravity of my situation” as her memories become a creature of self-doubt, guilt, fear, and loneliness the shakes the ground beneath her feet and threatens to blind her. And in Julie Brooks Barbour’s terrifying “Pursued,” a flesh and blood attacker lurks in the darkness, and his age-old barbarity causes the fleeing women to feel that they are moving both “backward” rather than forward in time. There is a deep pain at the heart of these poems, and one that is arguably universal even as it documents the feminine experience.
The darkness, despair, and powerful imagination initially captured in “Girl of Nightmares” reappears in the sole Fiction selection of the volume. In Amarie Fox’s “Mermaids,” a young girl imagines her home life in mythological terms as she attempts to explain the events she has witnessed. Nearly unreal in their tragedy and violence, the incidents of the child’s past – and the tyrannical, abusive father and lost “mer-sisters” that play a part in it all – become muffled and unclear in the watery vision Fox crafts. The house becomes a “drowned Atlantis,” left to its own destruction, and Fox slowly widens the view for the reader to take in the totality, the inevitability, of the family’s fate.
The pieces in this issue that really hooked me, however, were the amazing Flash Fiction selections. Short, powerful, and extremely imaginative, these condensed works were, in my opinion, the twisted soul of Quaint’s second production. The three pieces, both individually and collectively, pack quite a punch, and, after a reading dry-spell, served as a tonic to draw me back into a higher awareness of the words I was reading. Each piece very clearly revolves around “the strange, the grotesque, and the unusual,” and the writers use a traditional fixture of the genre – a monster – in surprising and inventive ways.
In “Lavendar,” Maggie Bara describes a prank gone awry as a soap-filled fountain comes alive and unleashes a roving beast of lavender bubbles. A city “gone mad” is rescued from its own demise as the creature of suds cleanses the criminals in their jail cells, washes the dirt from the streets, and reforms the very soul of the city with “the smell of a mother.” The monster takes a more familiar form in Colleen Burner’s “Stop Me if You’ve Heard this One” as readers witness an ordinary man’s harmless morning routine while becoming increasingly aware of something revolting lurking in the corner of the room. And in “Keeping Samson,” Diana Rohlman’s retelling of the story of Samson and Delilah, the monster of the relationship is less cut-and-dry than the evil woman in the Biblical version as Samson’s debauchery and cruelty drive his lover to a loss of innocence that may ruin her – or become the source of her own strength.
After reading through the great writing featured in Quaint Magazine’s second issue, I could not help by marvel at the irony of the publication’s title. While it may be a small, well-chosen body of work, the content of this magazine can hardly be described in a way that denotes something insignificant, old-fashioned, or simple. The women writers published in this volume are fearless, their works are profound, and the magazine as a whole is a courageous effort to bring something new and brutally honest to the table. As editor Kia Groom notes in her opening letter for the issue:
“These women, these writers, are not pandering to anyone’s notion of the feminine poetic. When they look inward (and they do – and they should) it is not floral or sentimental. It is neither weak and insipid, nor brooding and maudlin in the manner of those canonized saints of poetry, the men of the Romantic period. They cast their gazes upon our literary idols, tearing them down from their pedestals with a ferocity that will frighten and awe you. Their works are powerful. They are real. They might unnerve you, might disturb, might make you see red. At times, they might delight you. We hope that they might even stir something in your gut, a little flame, something you can nurse and kindle until the burning becomes too much. Until you, too, must stand and speak.”
More than a “little flame” was stirred in me as I read Quaint. Spend some time “seeing red” this month by taking a look at this unique new journal by women.
Read Quaint Magazine here: http://quaintmagazine.com/issues/issue-two/
