About Me: Why Am I Here?

The written word, the drawn image, the meticulously researched conclusion. These, made by others or myself, have built me, gifted me with the eyes to see the beauty in what I fear, the loss I have felt, and the obsessions with which I could never part.

This magazine is a love letter to such creativity.

This magazine is a love letter to fear.

Fear is most of me, it infests every moment, is the genesis or reckoning of every other emotion; yet I am not unhappy as a result because I know I am not alone and creativity, my own and others, has been kind enough to show me the beauty in human darkness.

I want your short stories, poems, plays, digital art, and scholarly essays that meditate upon the darker sides of the human condition: death, grief, the body, obsession, nightmares, and illness. Give me surrealism, the hard-to-define, the supernatural. Tell me about the monster that used to live under your bed in chilling-enough detail that it might find refuge under my own. Reshape your first experience of grief into a tale about shadows and hallucination. Turn your nightmares into brush strokes that seem to contradict one another's existence.

My name is Lauren Chase, a student at Ohio University, working to create something truly meaningful, on the precipice of a great dream. I hope you will follow me in.