MASQUERADE
September 22, 2025

Letter from the Editor-in-Chief
This season’s theme, Masquerade, automatically elicits for me images that at once seem vintage and otherworldly. The idea of dressing up or momentarily donning the persona of something or someone other than oneself, has roots across cultures, religions, and traditions. The priest in chasuble and stole. The pet donning mask and tail for pet play. It evokes mystery, uncertainty, debauchery, and fun. Costume provides for us a doorway to move from one reality, perhaps one with more rules, with more structure, one where our conditioned self naturally finds a home, and into a reality where uncertainty pervades.



Anais Nin at the 1953 masquerade, Come as Your Madness, hosted by artists Renate Druks and Paul Mathieson.


For this issue, we had an overwhelming number of submissions, but decided to keep it taut, concise. The pieces featured here all spoke to the desire to seek out new frontiers and to wear new masks, whether in a boudoir shoot, or while shedding the skin of your former spousal identity, or in the exploration of one’s body in the company of another during adolescence. As always, we are grateful for our contributors and for you, our readers.

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This issue’s playlist can be found here.
Visual Art
Irina Tall Novikova
Creature
Jasper Glen
With Everyone Watching
William Wolak
The Mask of Lingering Whispers
Desperate as the Perfume of Mad Honey
With All the Sky Waiting in Your Eyes
Poetry
Haley Hodges
Beyonce Isn’t Mentioned in the Bible
Holiday Noel Campanella
Buried
Vicious
Becky Nicole James
Commandments
Nancy Cherry
Adolescence
In the Northwest
Fiction
Betty Stanton
The Shape in Sunlight
Edward Daschle
The Release Party
Nonfiction
Myrth Killingsworth
Ouroboros
Vic Osland
Myth of a Woman



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