Grief and Gateways

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR: GRIEF AND GATEWAYS

by Alex De Pompa

Stories create communities. For the staff behind Augur Magazine, we’ve always wanted not just to publish amazing creative work, but also to build connections with writers and readers around the world. In February this year, we held our second Kickstarter, aiming to fund Years 3 and 4 of Augur. We were astounded when we funded in nine days, and utterly awestruck when we went on to hit four of our stretch goals. Seeing so many people share our Kickstarter, pledge their support, and rally behind us is not something we’ll ever forget. We are so grateful for—and invigorated by—your support, and we are so happy that we’ll be able to publish this magazine for many years to come. 

Amazingly, this won’t be our last Kickstarter for the year! In the fall, we’ll be launching another Kickstarter to fund our new sibling publication, Tales & Feathers Magazine, a pro-paying slice of life fantasy flash fiction magazine. Expect to hear more about Tales & Feathers later this year, and we hope that we can count on your support (in whatever way that looks like) to bring another magazine into the world. 

We’re also excited to say that we’re still planning on hosting Augury: A Conference for Canadian Speculative Fiction and Dreamy Realism this fall as well. The festival will be spearheaded by Publisher Kerry Seljak-Byrne and Senior Editor Terese Mason Pierre, and we can’t wait to share more details about this virtual conference with you in the coming months. We hope that this conference will allow us all to come together (virtually) to celebrate Canadian and Indigenous speculative literature. 

This issue—our seventh—ushers in the next phase of Augur Magazine’s evolution. We are proud to say that it is our first issue paying our writers at the SFWA’s pro market rate. It’s also our biggest issue yet, with eight poems, seven short stories, two illustrations, and one comic. Over a year ago, we accepted H. Pueyo’s short story “Flowers of Cerrado” for publication and slated it for Issue 3.1. We had never published a themed issue before, and so we decided to build out the issue around the themes in that story. The pieces in this issue therefore focus on motherhood and grief—on loss and separation from our families, on found families, on sexuality and complicated desire. We meet characters uncovering horrible secrets, characters frozen in self-destructive patterns, and characters who rail against their fate to fight for a different life. In many ways, this issue is about navigating grief and all of the feelings that come with it—denial, fear, rage, powerlessness. But there are also intimations of hope: of finding respite and strength in our memories, and of remaking ourselves and our worlds. 

These are bleak, frightening, and lonely times. At Augur, we’ve always believed that literature can be the gateway to better futures, to acknowledging and overcoming harm, and to friendship and community. We hope that the pieces in this issue offer you those gateways, or, at the very least, some small comfort and joy in the meantime.