The Interlude Letters (a selection)
In our reading period for Issue VI: Interlude, we received so many love letters alongside your stunning submissions. Your words made us laugh & thrill & cry, & we found such joy in getting to know the people behind the work, these souls who adore song just as much as we do. Here, then, is a smattering of our favourite notes from Issue VI submissions. Thank you for sharing your warmth with us. We don't take it for granted.
Half Mystic Journal’s sixth issue is a stunning collection of contemporary art, lyrics, and writing celebrating the keystrokes of transitory—the movement in the rest—the inhale before the storm. After years of exploring every breathless permutation of knee-deep sound, the Half Mystic team is excited, this issue, to soften. Step back. Find ourselves brilliantly enclosed, at once heavy & weightless in the beauty of silence. It is available for preorder now.
I was so excited to discover your journal, and continue to be amazed by this new world of literary magazines. I like ones that challenge me to think in new ways and forms, to spread my winged ankles. Thank you for making something so exciting.
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Before anything else: thank you very very much for any consideration at all given to my piece, and for the magazine itself. Half Mystic, as well as other work produced by its staff, is practically spiritual.
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I’m pleased to submit these four poems, attached below, to Half Mystic Journal's interlude issue. I love this theme. These poems treat the idea of space as a unit of meaning and rhythm in its own right, from the caesura of the Old English riddle to the electrons between us and everything we touch. Thanks for your time and consideration.
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I am a writer and university administrator, which means that I spend my weekdays trying to put together financial reports while longingly reading other people’s poetry online. I live in California with one dog and forty earthworms, and my fascination for the last few months has been Scottish and Appalachian folk ballads, the slight but significant variations produced by their oral traditions, and their consistent portrayals of gendered miscommunications. My top playlist at the moment just consists of twenty-four different versions of "The Dowie Dells of Yarrow." I'm currently too enraptured with these songs to be able to produce any coherent artwork surrounding them, but I intend to keep trying!
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What you should really know about me is this: I am an ardent fan of short films, chamomile tea, and Oreo ice cream. Sofia Coppola and Lana Del Rey are my heroes. I am both madly and peacefully in love with the universe.
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Often the instinct to write poetry turns from language to music, which I define as something like rapture that appears on the page in a way I couldn’t have predicted or planned for. If there’s an epiphany, it’s unexpected. If not, that’s unexpected, too. While much of my poetry has a musical quality, at least to my ears, it’s often disguised in the form or style of the poem—in this case, in the style of early Asian poetry, which can be minimalistic in presentation but vast in implication. Yet, I think the music tends to comes up when the poems are read aloud. Looking closely at some of them, I can see where the music comes from. It’s the rhythm, but also the repetition of sounds, and then the way meaning appears not necessarily where you’d expect it to, and hangs in the air, like a single, encompassing note.
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Music to me is harmony and discord. Things that flow together, and things that clash. In my writing, I choose to focus on the discord.
I think my work is heavy with truth, madness, and loneliness. A little bit of chaos, too. My work hurts. It's not always easy to read, but I think it has music in it, both in the word flow, in the transfer of emotion between characters, and the setting.
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My mother taught me about Pagan magic and rituals, about the power of myth and poetry and story, as well as magic in the making: she would create altars and jewellery, items of protection and healing. She taught me to call on fairies and listen to their words. At night she would sneak into my room and write poems in ink of silver or gold from the fairies to me—and finding out she was the one who wrote them did not diminish the magic in those words.
To me, magic lives primarily in words, and in shared moments with the divine. This could be something small, like a child watching a butterfly emerge from its cocoon, or a bedtime story, a song. It could be something bigger, like a mythology or folklore passed down by ancestors. It is found in universal truths, in everyday rituals. I think mindfulness plays a large role in my ability to tap into it, a conscious looking or channeling of its power, and my own power with it. All of my poems are this: intentional magic.
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As you happened to ask, my favourite ice-cream is, well, any, and my favourite waist size is smaller than my favourite ice-cream will allow.
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I went into dance because of my love for music, and my impatience to learn how to play. I could embody the sound and be inside it immediately through dance.
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I've fallen for Half Mystic and the work that you produce partly because of the pure passion that's clear not only in your staff but also in your contributors. Not only are the pieces published stunning but the care and consideration that's put into each aspect of the journal is so clear to see. So often when I read Half Mystic pieces I feel like an egg has been cracked against the inside of my skeleton and I'm feeling the soft yolk drip from each rib. There is a hard bite of emotion softened by the licking of a gentle tongue.
When I've been writing recently, I've been putting on a four hour long jazz or instrumental playlist and then layering a playlist of rain sounds over the top. As someone who loves rain and feels the most productive when there is a mist outside my window and the tap of rain on the roof, I've found that this is the perfect way to evoke that atmosphere whenever I need it. When I don't need to concentrate on writing, I've mostly been putting on Lake Street Dive's new album Free Yourself Up. It's one of my favorites from 2018 and I always find myself singing along and dancing no matter what I was trying to do previously. Definitely check them out if you haven't listened to them already.
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I’ve admired Half Mystic for quite some time now, and I’ve been searching for the right piece to submit, seeing what fits with your mission. Coming across your new theme of interlude immediately struck me as perfectly matched with this poem. Only, instead of the inhale before the storm, it’s the inhale after the storm—the transition from hurt to healing, illness to recovery.
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As far as what music means to me, I can only answer with a brief story: I was visiting the Mall of America last winter on an ironic chronicling of the putrid largesse there and I ate a weed gummy and copped the newest Queens of the Stone Age album and on the ride back home I listened to it and speeding along the night highway from Minneapolis to Winona the track "The Evil Has Landed" played and I heard it for the first time and figuratively became the notes.
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I came across Half Mystic after stumbling across Caitlin Conlon's piece about her accidental discovery of her grandmother's love of music. My writing practice, as well as my approach to music, owes itself to my grandmother as well. When I was 10, I turned off the phonograph on which she was playing an opera of Wagner. I don't remember which one; I do remember the silence with which she confronted me when she walked into the now-silent den and saw me closing the cover of the turntable. It was as if I had plunged her world into black and white, years after she had finally allowed herself—after immigrating from one country to another, decade after decade— to believe life could take place in color. We recovered, she and I. And I can't imagine a better summary of our relationship than Caitlin’s ending to her piece: "Together we created a cacophony of celebration, rejoicing together in our smallness, happy, so happy, to be alive."
The story I am submitting doesn't explicitly reference my grandmother, but it does suggest the way in which silence—or even the fear of it—can be the most painful interlude of all.
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I'm invested in the relationship of poetry with the distilling and expansive qualities of music in rhythmic, tonal and cultural modes, and the paradoxes that can lie within.
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I hope November (and this email) finds you thrumming in vibrancy, and obsessive lyricism. November, for me, is liquidated in the shuddered formaldehyde resin of our latest dissection lab salvage—in the immortalized stagnancy of a bloated heart mid-palpitation, succumbing (betrayed) to its own urgency. It lies within the surrealism of a convulsive looping of Lorde crooning, please could we be tender, whilst I proceed to dissect the vagus nerve from throat to abdomen & cinch the subclavian artery with forceps that mimic the contradicting lyric of Bea Miller proclaiming, you don't satisfy the hunger in my mind / because our bodies are predictable. Whilst discussing Red Doc>, Carson transcribes, a particle is a thing in itself. a wave is a disturbance in something else. waves themselves are probably not disturbed. Music, for me, has always been a cartography of aortic compressions, wherein the aftershocks of its seismographic undulations, of its ground-swells, renege, eclipsing upon themselves in mutiny, saturating me in the resultant deluge. Yet, despite the prehistoric traditions of such tremors being cancerous in their leeching, lately, I have been sourcing music in the sublime, as soundtrack to film, rather than musical, and this poem is hopefully reflection of such subtle nuances, of a scalpel-led vivisection of verse, instead of a bone-saw butchering.
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To me, music means breath and expansion. It is unifying and freeing at the same time. Music is relentless but gentle, dignified but bawdy. I believe Half Mystic Press might be an excellent fit for my creation because, having looked around your website, I think our visions of what the world could be like with a little more compassion are similar.
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I was drawn to this topic because of interludes in my life (after the death of my previous life partner at a young age, for example) that once seemed like horrible departures from the main, but since have contributed greater richness, as an interlude will, to the fullness of the whole.
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Music is the heartbeat I sometimes forget about in the daily floundering in news and podcasts and TV, but return to when I play Billie Holiday in the kitchen, Silver Jews in the living room, Carly Rae Jepsen when I got off work in the evening, and MIA when I'm running through the humid streets of my neighborhood. It's the way I flirt, how I remember to dance after a big old bourbon. It's the sound I draw on when I write, and it helps me title poems. It's the bedrock of painful and delicious memory, as though I have no ex-lovers when I have no Van Morrison, no husband without Wilco, no college memories without Broken Social Scene. It's in every photograph I've taken and late night text sent.
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Searching for sincere publishers of the mystic life, the lyric, I came upon your journal. The open-hearted, unafraid affection toward the artists reading your guidelines for submission is what drew me to you. Please accept my offering. I trust you will find a music that will touch you.