Introducing Sforzando, Hag, & Open Call For Staff Members
Dear songbirds, as summer peeks her bright-faced self around the horizon, thank you for filling the sky with your love for Half Mystic Journal’s Issue VII: Aubade! It’s been a gorgeous run & we’ve had the most golden time singing this symphony to a start with you. In case you missed it, Issue VII is available for purchase now—$7 for a PDF edition or $15 for a paperback.
Welcome to the new era of Half Mystic Journal: Issue VIII will sing to the theme of sforzando (the car-struck dissonance; the backslide into wreckage; the single note of shattering). Sforzando is a musical direction instructing a musician to play a note “suddenly, strongly accented”. Issue VIII submissions are open now; send us writing that cuts us open, art steals our breath, music that makes us bleed with half-formed want.
We also have an announcement regarding a change in publication schedule for Half Mystic Journal—starting with Issue VIII, we’ll be publishing our journal on an annual rather than semiannual basis, so each new issue will come out in June. As the number of projects we've taken on as an organisation has increased—with new books, a podcast, in-person gatherings, & continuing our weekly blog—we want to make sure our readers & team aren’t burnt out by all of our releases. This new publication schedule will be more sustainable & offer us more time to carefully craft each journal issue to the high standard you deserve.
Writing & music submissions to our future issues will be open for ten months rather than the usual six, while featured artist submissions will remain open on a rolling basis, as previously. Those who have purchased subscriptions to Half Mystic Journal will continue to receive however many issues of HMJ remaining in their subscription, just spread out over a longer time period than before.
If you’re interested in joining the Half Mystic team & helping us bring every mellifluous perhaps into exquisite & breaking fruition, we’re so excited to share that staff applications are open! HM is a tight-knit, highly-skilled team of writers, musicians, & artists all working on various aspects of our journal issues, books, podcast episodes, blog posts, social media presence, & gatherings around the world. We’re seeking an associate editor, an interview correspondent, a designer, & a social media manager—if any of these roles sound exciting to you, we’d love to receive your application!
Finally, it’s a shadow-bright, far-reaching joy to tell you that preorders for Half Mystic Press’ fourth release are open now. Tamara Jobe’s poetry collection Hag is a reclamation of language—how it holds sway over us, how it moves through everything, a gorgeous annihilation. It is a closer look at how we define femininity for ourselves. We choose our lives, & this collection shows us another way of doing so. We hold the hands of Fate every step of the way, guided by our own power yet to be discovered.
Alina Stefanescu, author of Every Mask I Tried On, hailed the book as “a sweeping, visceral, and brilliant collection of shape-shifting poems that applies Tamara Jobe's mastery of from to the liminal space between the sacred and profane. Jobe transforms every inch of the body into a landscape to probe and surrender. The subversions in this slow incantatory spell are hard to forget. One leaves this book with the pulse of the ‘open-eyed snake poem’ lit wide, inside.”
Meanwhile, Lynsey Morandin, editor-in-chief of Hypertrophic Press, said of the collection, “Painfully relatable and beautifully written, Hag is at once discreet and devastating, an honest and raw glimpse into nature, femininity, and humanity,” while Haley Wooning, author of mothmouth, commented, “Tamara Jobe speaks with the tongue of the ancient priestess. Hag is a tome of the unbearable, the lost, hidden and beautiful. It is the ‘feral hymn / sung only in the dark’, evoking the long-lost, or present, goddess. Jobe writes with a vulnerability so rare it alters the reader and brings them to the edge of the world where they meet, truthfully and irrevocably, themselves at the altar.”
Hag is available for preorder now, & will ship to your doorstep or email inbox August 24, 2019. Do keep an eye on the HM blog & social media in the days leading up to release for exclusive interviews, excerpts, guest posts, reviews, & features with Tamara Jobe; we’re so excited to release this new collection of corrosive tenderness & monstrous femininity, & we know you’ll love it as much as we do!
As always, songbirds, thank you for staying with us. Summer hovers around our heads, bright & sharp, alive despite or because of everything. We’re grateful to be accompanying you on these long nights ahead, grateful both for the destruction & the softness, grateful for this rhythm in our heads that could be a drop of blood hitting the floor or a sun rising for the first time. Here’s to survival & stillness & sky-stuff & song. xx