“Music was a helpful place to live in the yearning.” (An Interview with Sara Mae of The Noisy)

There was a time where I saw myself and my desire as violent, and this song is meant to complicate that story.

From the Editor & Contest: Lucy Hannah Ryan’s You Make Yourself Another

Every note of this song of our making & remaking belongs to you.

From the Editor, Literature, MusicTopaz WintersApril 18, 2023Lucy Hannah Ryan

"A name is as malleable as a past, a body, and every other part of the self." (An Interview With Lucy Hannah Ryan)

Even in stories featuring dead characters, more often than not it’s my protagonists that do the haunting, looming like spectres over their own lives, trying to break through and feel real again.

At Least at Times It Knew Me (Lucy Hannah Ryan on You Make Yourself Another)

In the back alley of my mind a taxi leaked orange light against the worst of my wounding and I said, I want to leave that here.

Introducing You Make Yourself Another

Every future wears the name of a self you used to be. The body is a malleable thing here. Whatever you need, you can become it.

Literature, Music, AnnouncementsTopaz WintersFebruary 18, 2023Lucy Hannah Ryan

From the Editor: The Elegy Issue

If we are all the dead conversing with the dead, I like to think the language we use to bridge the space between us is called music.

The Elegy Letters (A Selection)

My work as a writer is aimed at truth which, like a song, cannot be contained.

X: Elegy | Silver-Tipped Swallow: "Debt Collector's Lullaby"

When reporters ask for the secret, you are good at hedging: hard work is a sweet way to say obsession. Pathology is prettier when masked in music.

Columns, Literature, Music, Personal EssayTopaz WintersJuly 17, 2022silver-tipped swallow

“I find joy in singing my dead to life just as often as I find ache.” (Anthony Thomas Lombardi on Elegy)

Elegy can be messy. Elegy is sometimes unhappy with itself, too. Elegy is regrinding the lens again & again & again. Elegy is a reconstruction of joy.

"Grief does not exist only in subtraction." (Geoff Anderson on Elegy)

Elegy is birthed from such discomfort, a speaker navigating a world that hurts precisely because of its horrible resemblance to the one left behind.

Music, Literature, Personal EssayGuestJuly 10, 2022Søren Kierkegaard