From the Editor: The Sevdah Issue
This year, I’ve found myself captivated by the beauty of what might have been. A finite set of notes could build infinite melodies, but we must choose which tune to play. The creative process demands we leave people, places, lives behind. The idea of sevdah, too, is a lamentation of an alternate future.
Six months before Half Mystic’s editorial team began to assemble Opus II, Issue II: Sevdah, I experienced life-redefining personal loss. Only music provided comfort. The artists featured in this issue speak to that marrow-deep bruise, the urge to revisit memory’s photo album even knowing that each page flip erodes what was once true. The recognition I find here arises largely from the pieces’ play with the unsaid. I can hear breath moving through line breaks and white space, the ways we talk around yearning. The Sevdah issue shines best in its sideways revelations, exposing what we’ve always wanted in the shape of its absence.
Our longing leaks through our ecosystems in this issue. We wander familiar mythologies, rebuild the skeletons of worlds we may never see again. Our deepest aches are cradled by the Earth when we can no longer hold them, echoing in bursts of Bachian birdsong and alligators dancing for the lost. And even when we impossibly hunger for a different now, the Sevdah issue presents tokens—mother-of-pearl buttons, lazy magic, a bed of ferns—respooling us back to the memory of what we miss.
If grief is a relearning of every breath, then sevdah is the exhale of its closing suite. This issue loves beyond consciousness. It collects petals from a dying bouquet, tucks them away as though they might live forever. It is a violin note held taut until the drone blends into silence. May Half Mystic Journal’s twelfth issue uncover the tenderness we need to survive this future, and every future waiting in the wings, together.
Opus II, Issue II celebrates the theme of sevdah: a damask veil, a clipped swan’s wing, a memory of a late-night lake with a long-gone lover, when the sky and water turned the same colour and met at the edge of the world. It features the voices of Adam Falkner, Rita Mookerjee, Natalie Marino, Jordan Silversmith, Jared Povanda, Natalye Childress, Angela Sucich, Sophie Crocker, Allison Cooke, Dontay M. Givens II, Nick Visconti, Kathleen A. Wakefield, Amber Cecile Brodie, Amrita Nur, Gordan Struić, and Sjafril—and it is out now.