Read the July Issue here.

There’s a saying that women need to learn to speak with the silence between words. Language is the realm of men, in its development, its definitions, structures, audience, outlets, volume, legitimization, in all of its terrible and wonderful noise and power. Women who try to make the words their own, to tell their stories or express their hurt, their sadness, their strangeness, and most especially their anger, are punished and silenced. But in the heavy pregnant pauses between words lies a wealth of meaning, emotion, and strength.

Emily Dickinson is the patron poet of the beautiful silences. The dashes in her handwritten poems defy printed reproduction. They’re of varying lengths, ascending, descending, leading from one word to another or trailing off into a wilderness of silence. They give the spaces substance and vibrance. Dickinson valued silence, she valued the power of the unspoken. “Speech is one symptom of Affection/ And Silence one – /The perfectest communication/ Is heard of none – ” Or

1750
The words the happy say
Are paltry melody
But those the silent feel
Are beautiful –

See how she ends it with a dash? Where does it lead? To the words the silent feel? Though silence is beautiful, and words are inadequate, still…

1251
Silence is all we dread.
There’s Ransom in a Voice—
But Silence is Infinity.
Himself have not a face.

Dickinson gives a voice to everything around her. The birds, the trees, loneliness, solitude, death, anger. They all speak to her in their own strange words. Dickinson finds a way to use words as though nobody has used them before; she claims them (quietly) for herself, and imbues them with all of her wildly-felt strangeness. She gives them new meanings, which are bewilderingly, beautifully, frighteningly out of reach. “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun – “

Of course words aren’t the only way to tell a story. When Philomela threatened to tell the story of her rape, her rapist cut out her tongue. So she wove it in a tapestry. Ukrainian artist Maria Prymachenko used embroidery and bold colorful paintings to tell of the beastly horrors of war, famine, and abuse. Traditional folk art patterns and techniques become the backgrounds for strange perfect creatures born of sadness and anger, though they pass beneath the notice of the men who think of her art as simple women’s work. And Paula Rego harnessed her rage to make strange, explosive paintings, including a series on women who undergo illegal abortions. She channeled her anger and frustration into a “wild productive fury.” And it’s not just women who struggle to speak and be heard: anybody who is considered different, strange, or lesser is denied their voice, and robbed of their stories, thieved of their essence, their history, their worth.

It seems more important now than ever to tell our stories and share our stories, and listen to the stories of others. To amplify the voices of anybody struggling to be heard, and to celebrate when the words or images or silences speak to us or bewilder us or transform us. To harness our anger or sadness or joy in a wild productive fury, resonating with the strange perfect words we make our own or the deafening silences we inhabit.

And here’s Emily Dickinson, again, because she’s speaking to me so forcefully, lately, though I don’t always understand what she is saying, nor do I need to understand. Here she is telling of a pent-up anger that makes her a loaded gun, a vesuvius, and the words are so wonderfully powerful and incomprehensible to me.

My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun

(754)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –
In Corners – till a Day
The Owner passed – identified –
And carried Me away –

And now We roam in Sovereign Woods –
And now We hunt the Doe –
And every time I speak for Him
The Mountains straight reply –

And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow –
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let it’s pleasure through –

And when at Night – Our good Day done –
I guard My Master’s Head –
’Tis better than the Eider Duck’s
Deep Pillow – to have shared –

To foe of His – I’m deadly foe –
None stir the second time –
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye –
Or an emphatic Thumb –

Though I than He – may longer live
He longer must – than I –
For I have but the power to kill,
Without – the power to die –

Share your stories or the stories of people who inspire you! Submit, support, subscribe.

Read the July Issue here. We’re really happy with the way this issue turned out! Very grateful to the artists who let us share their powerful words and images.

Tidings of Magpies’ letter from the editor for June, plus a link to the entire June issue. There’s some very beautiful stuff in this issue, so I hope you’ll have a look, and share.

“I would like to say that these backgrounds, run down, dark, and very quiet have occupied my dreams for years and without them I would not paint these pictures. 

Even as I write this I have an image in my head of me walking down a street at night. There is no traffic and the street is cobbled. It has just stopped raining and my shoes make a metallic sound as I walk, The old brick houses either side are shuttered and I have a vision as I walk of rows and rows of sleeping bodies lying in their beds, unseen by anyone. Is that strange or unusual?”

This is from the interview we did with painter Simon Quadrat, which is one of my favorite things we’ve ever shared. I love his work, I love his answers to our questions, and I love this trail-end of an answer in particular. It seems to me that it sums up not just this issue of Tidings of Magpies, but all issues, and the very reason we create anything or share anything we create.

A dream of a dark street, a thought at first that the buildings are vacant, but they’re not, and though it’s late and the windows are shuttered, in one or two of them light filters around the edges. (It’s my imagination taking over now, because I’ve had dreams like this, though not this dream). Someone is inside working, or dreaming, or lying awake trying not to dream. It is strange and unusual, but also fundamentally beautifully human and universal. Everything that is fundamentally beautifully human is strange and unusual. Inexplicable.

Imagination is the dream of a house, familiar and yet entirely new. Behind every door is an unexpected room, or staircase, or garden, or folly. You’ve known this place your whole life, yet somehow there are entire wings and floors and corridors you’ve never seen before. You follow them wherever they lead, disrupting the memories of dreams of the spirits and ghosts who have lived there. We can try to visit the same room twice, we can try to draw a map of the house, we can try to pin down the shifting spirits, but we never will. So we listen to their beautiful bewildering stories and learn as much as we can, and try to remember enough to share the stories with others.

We’ve been planning our garden and reading Candide, and thinking about a garden as a metaphor for imagination, creativity, and small arts & culture magazines with bird-themed names. Here’s a link to the May issue, which is full of beautiful writing, photography, and art, plus some stuff I wrote myself. Please enjoy! (and share, submit, support)

At the end of Voltaire’s Candide, Candide famously meets a character known only as “the Turk,” who tells him that he doesn’t concern himself with the affairs of the world, rather he contents himself with tending his garden. He has twenty acres, and he cultivates them with his children, “work keeps away three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.” Candide, who has undergone, heard about, and even inadvertently caused great suffering and cruelty, and who has possessed and lost more money than anyone in Europe, reflects deeply on the man’s remarks. His tutor, Pangloss, tries to engage in a philosophical discussion on the matter, and Candide cuts him off to say, “I also know that we must cultivate our garden.” And their friend Martin says, “Let us work without reasoning, it is the only way to make life endurable.”

And they do work. “All the little society entered into this laudable plan; each one began to exercise his talents. The little piece of land produced much…No one…failed to perform some service.” Pangloss tries to philosophize with him again about how they ended up here eating pistachios, in his usual verbose fashion. And Candid once again says, “That is well said, but we must cultivate our garden.” And so ends the story.

Many interpret the Turk’s advice as misanthropic and miserly. They imagine the Turk cut off from the world, alone and miserable. But this is not the case at all. He works with his family, they’re creating their world together. And he welcomes Candide and his friends with great generosity, sharing the bounty of his small land; sherbet and Turkish cream, oranges and lemons and pistachios. Candide is never so wise, assured, and content as he is in the final pages of the book, working with all that he has to build a good place.

We’re just planting our own garden now. As the light makes its way across our small yard–a little more each day, shifting so quickly this time of year–we welcome the plants that come back each year as old friends, and we find new plants to grow–jewel-like lettuces, rosemary and tarragon and flowers of every hue of blue. We plant pollinators to attract bees and butterflies and hummingbirds, we plant fruit bushes to attract berry-eating birds. We dig in the still-cold ground, shifting through soil with our fingers and unearthing worms and grubs. We don’t like to plan it too carefully, we like to grow every pleasing or odd thing we find, and we want it to be a little wild and unruly, we want it to be unexpected but somehow perfect together.

So it is with Tidings of Magpies. Voltaire, of course, isn’t just speaking of planting a garden, he’s talking about creating a world, employing our talents, enjoying the process of working, and of working together, to make something and someplace good. So every month we collect stories and art and photographs–words and images to cultivate our small plot, and we hope that they’ll combine and grow into a fertile garden, a world worth visiting. It’s a little piece of land, but we hope if we cultivate it well, it will produce much.

All of the month’s stories, photographs and art from Tidings of Magpies. (I’m always looking for submissions of writing on film/music/art/food/life as well as fiction, photography, poetry, and art, so please contact me if you have anything to share! Magpiesmagazine@gmail.com)

Letter from the editor:April

Today is April Fool’s day, so I could talk about the joyous and sorrowful foolishness of all human endeavor, most especially of publishing small online magazines named after birds. But instead, in true Magpies’ style, I will tell you about two poems that I love.

This is the end of a poem by Ezra Pound, The Exile’s Letter, which is a translation ‘From the Chinese of Li Po, usually considered the greatest poet of China: written by him while in exile about 760 A. D., to the Hereditary War-Councillor of Sho, “recollecting former companionship.”’

And if you ask how I regret that parting?
It is like the flowers falling at spring’s end,
                    confused, whirled in a tangle.
What is the use of talking! And there is no end of talking—
There is no end of things in the heart.

And this is..

I Know a Man

By Robert Creeley

As I sd to my   

friend, because I am   

always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his   

name, the darkness sur-

rounds us, what

can we do against

it, or else, shall we &

why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for   

christ’s sake, look   

out where yr going.

These two poems have not been far from my thoughts since I first read them decades ago. These words are some of my oldest friends. And since I’ve started compiling Tidings of Magpies these words are fairly constant residents in my mind, echoing in that empty cavern, bouncing off the walls and taking flight with the flocks of bats.

I love to talk, I love to discuss, and banter, and disagree, and agree, and connect, and despair of never connecting, and learn, and share a joke, and share things I love–songs and movies and books, and learn about those things that somebody else loves. I love words so much. And I’m also profoundly fond of silence, and aware that all that is most important transcends words. In a world of constant noise and bickering and shouting for attention, it’s sometimes a joy to remember the weight of silence.

What is the use of talking? I’ve been thinking about this so much, though in my head it’s not just talking, it’s any manner of creating. Any manner of recording what you see and feel, of capturing moments of your lives and dreams, or the lives and dreams of the people in your head. And it’s also the act of sharing that with others. (Including the mad idea of publishing some small-but-mighty magazine.) My naturally buoyant nature, floating like a lost balloon over the ocean of too-much-too-much, is sometimes dragged deep into murky water by the sea-monster of discouragement. (what is the use of metaphors? And are there ever too many metaphors?)

And that’s where these poems come in. Because by talking and creating and sharing we can cope with and celebrate the no-end-of-things-in-our-hearts. And by talking and creating and celebrating we can dispel the darkness that surrounds us. Because what is there to life besides these moments of connection? It doesn’t have to be spoken, it doesn’t have to be with a person, it could (and should) be with your dog, or a tree, or a moody April sky. Sometimes in the middle of the night the darkness of human cruelty and the incessant history of human ignorance and selfishness can be overwhelming. But then I think about people creating things. When people create things, when they work on something they think is good and beautiful, they light a spark, and those sparks dispel the darkness. They always have, and they always will. And that is important, that is essential. That is the monumentally important use of talking.

And sharing these little lights, giving them a voice, letting their voices loose like wayward fireworks, feels important to me, even on this small level. It’s not much, but it’s not nothing. Of course there will be times of much talking and times of silence, periods of great creativity and periods of fallowness, moments of hope and moments of discouragement. Sometimes we will feel that there is no use of talking, and that we can’t talk, but we will find our voice.

And maybe we can never say exactly what we want to say, we can’t find the exact right words, or notes, or strokes of paint, but that doesn’t matter, because the point is in trying.

“The point is in life, in life alone–discovering it, constantly and eternally, and not at all in the discovery itself. But what is the point of talking? I suspect that everything I am saying now sounds so much like the most common phrases that I will probably be taken for a student in the lowest grade presenting his easy on ‘the sunrise….’ But, nevertheless, I will add that in any ingenious or new human thought, or even simply in any earnest human thought born in someone’s head, there always remains something which it is quite impossible to convey to other people, though you may fill whole volumes with writing and spend thirty-five years trying to explain your thought; there always remains something that absolutely refuses to leave your skull and will stay with you forever; you will die with it, not having conveyed to anyone what is perhaps most important in your idea.”

The Idiot, Dostyevsky

All of the month’s stories, photographs and art from Tidings of Magpies. (I’m always looking for submissions of writing on film/music/art/food/life as well as fiction, photography, poetry, and art, so please contact me if you have anything to share! Magpiesmagazine@gmail.com)

Letter from the editor: March

I read about an artist battling illness. She talked about the desire to make something important. She only has the energy, at present, to work on small things–sketches, old half-completed projects, drawings and plans, but she feels a real need to work on something big, something she feels is important. I know she will, and I also know that urge. I want to make something like I create in my dreams. Something pure and glowing and perfectly emotionally honest. And I don’t. I write a line or two, and I think about it on my walks, but I’m not making much right now. And I’m not facing the obstacles she is, I’m just facing discouragement and February doldrums, which always hit me harder than they should. I have no excuse, really.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of creating something important. Been thinking about what it means to create, and how we define important. During the pandemic our definition of “essential” underwent constant revision, and I think the revision is ongoing. The goal posts are constantly moving and shifting on our definition of things we feel we need, jobs we hold valuable, activities we cannot live without.

And now Russia has invaded Ukraine. Sadly it’s not the only place in the world where war, aggression, and violence are driving people out of their homes, breaking up families, ending lives–it’s just the one we’re talking the most about right now. All over the world people are worried about keeping their families warm and fed through the winter. Worried about their homes being destroyed, their loved ones killed. I think about people who don’t have my comfortable life. Who don’t have the luxuries that I’ve come to consider necessities – hot water, electricity, my choice of pretty much any food I can think of. I think about refugees and fugitives – people driven out of their homes by war or occupation. In my own life, I’ve come to realize that it’s the small, every-day things that ultimately make me happy or anxious or disgruntled. What does that look like when your very home, every aspect of your “every day” is unsettled and unstable?

Years ago when we lost power for ten days after a storm, and recently during the pandemic, I found myself so undone by … what? Anxiety? Discomfort? … that I couldn’t concentrate on much of anything, large or small. I could only feel anxious about when we’d get our power back, or about the illness spreading through the world. I couldn’t think clearly about the bigger political picture. I couldn’t think about elections or political tensions or voting rights. It made me wonder about times and places when the bigger political situation causes stressful personal circumstances. Can you find enough strength and hope to change the situation when you’re brought down by anxiety about your next meal, or when you don’t have a safe, warm home, and you’re deep in unforgiving winter? Can you even think about creating something big and emotionally honest and important? What would it look like to create what is in your dreams, at a time like that?

But I think maybe to have a dream, of the nighttime kind or the daytime kind, is to create something important. Certainly to fight against invasion from a dictatorship is to create something important. To find food and shelter for your family is to create something important. Maybe to wake up in the morning and appreciate the slant of hopeful light on your way to your essential work, (and as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence,”) is to create something important.

Though we might always not have the time or energy to create, at times of crisis perhaps art is more important than ever. As Warcheerah Kilima of the ANEW Artists Alliance wisely says, “If all the people in the world did art, a lot of the problems would be solved.”

My wish right now is for peace, for everyone to have the peace, safety, and health to create whatever they feel compelled to make, whatever they deem important. And I also believe with all my heart that if you’re sick or struggling or in a war-torn state, or even if you’re just a human struggling to understand what that even means with the world the way it is and time passing so quickly, I honestly believe that just to get out of bed in the morning, to take care of the ones you love, to take care of people you don’t know, to go through a day finding beauty and trying to be kind, that is creating something important.

Bit of a slim issue this month, but it’s been a short and stressful month. Sharing art and music and passion seems important to me right now, on some level, and I have so many things just on the verge–next month will be a rich garden of art.

As ever, please submit, subscribe, and share.

While I was compiling this month’s issue I found myself, as ever, weaving a fabric of connections between everything that we had shared. A few of phrases kept ringing around in my head in the small hours of the night. A pair from Kurosawa’s Ikiru, Toyo saying “Make something,” and Watanabe saying, later in the film, “I want to do something.” And from (featured artist) Cris Qualiana’s artist statement, “The World became Qualiana’s classroom…The people and places she encountered–distinctive scents, sights, sounds and flavors–filled her sketch-books. And Qualiana met herself, again and again, in various incarnations, through her painting and drawing.” And finally, a line I first met in a song, by 19th century Spanish poet Antonio Machado,

Traveler, there is no path.
The path is made by walking.

My insomnia thoughts turned to the idea of making the world by creating, and of all the ways we make worlds, continually and subconsciously, in our waking lives as well as in our dreams. Some worlds are so fully-realized it seems as if they were discovered rather than created. Henry Darger used junk he found in the streets to create over 15,000 pages of writing and art, a vibrant, beautiful, terrible world bursting out of him. Other worlds are created slowly, haltingly, over time; changing day by day with many false starts, much turning back to try another path.

For Darger and many others, the world of their creation is not meant to be sold or even shared, it’s intensely personal and all-consuming. For many of us in the present day, we create worlds by sharing them, by posting pictures and updates, our every meal and thought and disappointment and achievement. We make a picture of our world that forms our world.

I believe that everyone has some world in their head that has to come out somehow, some song or story or picture. A world they create and discover, where they meet themselves in various incarnations. And maybe it won’t come out in any obvious way, maybe it will be in the unusual spices they add to their meal, or the pictures they take of their dogs, or the stories they tell themselves when they can’t sleep. And I believe that the creative process doesn’t stop with the product, it begins again when somebody reads or looks or listens, so that the person reading, looking, and listening becomes part of the process, becomes an artist, too. So maybe it will come out as the love you feel for a photograph, or the way you’re moved to tears by a story you read. 

Or maybe it will come out in a magpie collection of words and pictures, shared and created with anyone who looks or reads or listens, all of us making the world by creating.

Traveler, there is no path

by Antonio Machado

Everything goes and everything stays
but our fate is to pass
to pass making a path as we go,
paths over the sea,

I never pursued glory,
or to leave on the memory
of the men,this my song:
I love the subtle worlds,
weightless and gentle
like soap bubbles.

I like to see them paint themselves on sun and crimson,
fly under a blue sky
shudder suddenly, and break…
I never pursued glory.

Traveler, your footprints are the path, and nothing else.
Traveler, there is no path. A path is made by walking.

A path is made by walking,
and in looking back one sees
the trodden road that never
will be set foot on again.
Traveler, there is no path, but wakes on the sea…

Some time ago on that place
where today the woods dress in brambles
the voice of a poet was heard shouting
“Traveler, there is no path. A path is made by walking”

Blow by blow, verse by verse…
The poet died far from home
and is covered by the dust of a neighboring country.
As he went away, he could be heard crying,
“Traveler, there is no path. A path is made by walking.”

Blow by blow, verse by verse…
When the robin can no longer sing,
when the poet is a pilgrim,
when praying is no more of use.
Traveler, there is no path. A path is made by walking.

Blow by blow, verse by verse

It’s the new issue of Tidings of Magpies! And my letter from the editor!

Or…Why I Love Tidings of Magpies (In which we try to justify our existence)

I hope you will forgive a little New Year’s introspection. Tidings of Magpies has been described as a “small but mighty labor of love.” And indeed, that is what it is for me. Curating and compiling these articles is a lot of work, to be sure, but it is probably the most rewarding work I’ve ever done. I’m not going to lie, not a day goes by that I don’t think, “Why bother?” And the answer always starts as “Why not?” but in the end I usually arrive at a stronger argument to keep on with it.

Sometimes it seems we live in sad and cynical world, and it’s easy to feel disconnected and discouraged. Surely the best way to fight the darkness that surrounds us is to share art and music and thoughtful writing. And it goes further than that for me, because I love, really love, everything that I’ve shared. And I love it more as I format the work, the more I look and read and understand. And I love it more as I think about how it’s all connected, as I did yesterday, on a grey and gloomy New Year’s Eve, after a couple of years that have been hard for everyone in ways we could never have anticipated.

It’s not a coincidence that I would find patterns in the work we’ve shared, or that those patterns delight me. All of the paintings and photographs and essays and poems that we’ve shared ask more questions than they answer. They’re all poised on the beautiful, murky, poignant edge between humans and nature, light and dark, abundance and decay, society and solitude. They ask what it means to be human, how we find a place in the world around us–the world of man that we’ve created, and the world of nature that we encroach upon. They all ask how we navigate time and history and memory. We need to ask the questions though we will never arrive at the answer, and there’s great joy in the feeling that we’re all walking along this edge together, finding our own balance as we go. And great joy in sharing the stories and pictures and music that have given us light and hope along the way, with generosity and affection.

We’re all gleaners, finding beauty and meaning and sustenance in the unlikely, the odd, the overlooked. We’re all magpies, lining our nests with beauty where we find it.

And so we continue into the new year. I am beyond grateful to everyone who has allowed me to share their work, and I’m very very excited about some of the work I plan to share in the month(s) ahead. I’m thankful for anyone who has taken the time to read, look, share, and respond, and I hope that you will continue to do so! Happy New Year to all, and wishes for peace, health, joy, and inspiration to all of our magpie friends.

Very pleased to share the latest issue of Tidings of Magpies! Brilliant art, photography, nature essays, two more installments of Ralph Brown’s beautiful song-based memoir, a new magpies mix tape, fiction, “Why I Love” articles, and so much more! 

I love everything I’ve posted, and I’m so grateful to everyone who shared their writing and their art. I’m already looking forward to sharing new art, music, and writing next month!

Thank you for reading. As ever, I welcome any comments or feedback you may have. And Please submit subscribe support, and have a look at Tidings of Magpies on Instagram.