Letter from the Editor
Still living. Still but living. Still, living. Still and living.
Yes, it’s Still Life—but it’s also more. It’s not what it seems. Nothing is really, when you look hard enough. Look long enough, rearrange enough, persist enough, and anything will take on a whole new meaning. Pareidolia, even. That’s really what this volume is about.
Take, as an example, the editorial art that helped inspire this volume: J.D. de Heem’s 17th century work, Still Life with Flowers in a Glass Vase. It’s difficult to get more quotidien. But, for all its mastery and enduring existence—so far—it was fated to be in a slow state of flux from the first instant of conception. We tend to think of still lifes as static objects; but the original tableau, the image it creates, and the physical painting itself are subject to entropy. The colours fade, the paint cracks and flakes, the objects in it age out of familiarity and become archaic. They surrender to the steady, constant disintegration and reintegration that is the perpetual motion system of this universe. Even digital art—data—decays, begins to fray at the edges with attrition and stray errors. This extends to the word on the page, too. What the writer sets out and reader reads all experience drift, reinterpretation, being shaded and bent by new filters and lenses.
To do this, we’re excited to have both first-time authors and established artists, new voices and familiar ones, voices that deserve amplification, and contributors from nearly every major time zone. This is just the beginning. We aim to make each volume more diverse than the last.
I’m so grateful to everyone who took a chance on us and submitted, and to our fantastic contributors who were brimming with patience as we’ve been finding our equilibrium. Special thanks go out to M.G., S.W., B.A.H, C.R., A.T., D.Y.V., and all my fellow lit mag and small press editors out there who lent their knowledge, expertise, and introduced us to more people in our community.
Enjoy our four acts, our four permutations of Still Life and all the possibility it contains.
Fax Aeterna, EIC