Untitled 1, Phyllis Green, 2021.
Note from the Editor
How best to embody imagination? It looks different to everyone. Equal parts reality and fiction, universal yet personal. Imagination can be an escape, a fantasy, or a nightmare. It’s a perspective, a way of viewing the world unique to each of us. Hope can be considered a function of imagination, as can fear. How best to symbolize something so strange and restless, something both beautiful and terrifying, both powerful and delicate, so varied yet essential?
…I think you can see where I’m going with this.
Of course in some ways it’s an easy analogy; imagination “takes flight,” after all. But also consider that birds are found on every continent on the planet, including Antarctica. They come in all colors, all shapes, every temperament, each species perfectly shaped by millions of years of evolution for every environment imaginable: rainforest and desert, swamps and mountains, grasslands, ocean, caves.
Birds are sometimes magical--for example, the flash of a gemlike ruby-throated hummingbird or the otherworldly cry of a crow. Augury is the ancient Roman practice of divining the future from the behavior of birds. Hawaiian nobility prized the feathers of certain birds as an important status symbol. Yet birds are also quotidian--common brown sparrows are found in every suburban backyard, and scruffy pigeons coo underfoot during the morning commute of hundreds of thousands of people each day.
Birds are hollow-boned and delicate, yet also ferocious--consider the viciousness of Canadian geese, emus, peacocks. We keep parakeets, cockatiels, and lovebirds as pets, yet fear their dirtiness, the potential for disease. With their dinosaur postures and scaly, clawed feet, birds call back to a primal past. Yet we hear them every morning as we wake up, watch them fluttering outside our kitchen windows. Few animals are such a pervasive, yet often invisible, part of our lives as birds. What better analogy for imaginative literature?
This inaugural issue of Twin Bird Review is a celebration of the myriad of ways in which imagination operates – as an escape, an outlet, a way of making sense of difficult experiences, commemorating those we love, conceptualizing time and our own place in the world. Imagination, like birds, are strange, beautiful, pervasive, and necessary, and the contributions in issue 1.1 of TBR seek to embody imagination in all its forms, from artists and writers all around the world, from all different backgrounds.
Finally (though most importantly!), I want to take a moment to gratefully acknowledge our readers and everyone who worked on the issue, everyone who submitted, everyone who has generously donated, and YOU, our readers--without whom none of this would be possible.
Amanda K Horn, Editor-in-chief
June 2023
…I think you can see where I’m going with this.
Of course in some ways it’s an easy analogy; imagination “takes flight,” after all. But also consider that birds are found on every continent on the planet, including Antarctica. They come in all colors, all shapes, every temperament, each species perfectly shaped by millions of years of evolution for every environment imaginable: rainforest and desert, swamps and mountains, grasslands, ocean, caves.
Birds are sometimes magical--for example, the flash of a gemlike ruby-throated hummingbird or the otherworldly cry of a crow. Augury is the ancient Roman practice of divining the future from the behavior of birds. Hawaiian nobility prized the feathers of certain birds as an important status symbol. Yet birds are also quotidian--common brown sparrows are found in every suburban backyard, and scruffy pigeons coo underfoot during the morning commute of hundreds of thousands of people each day.
Birds are hollow-boned and delicate, yet also ferocious--consider the viciousness of Canadian geese, emus, peacocks. We keep parakeets, cockatiels, and lovebirds as pets, yet fear their dirtiness, the potential for disease. With their dinosaur postures and scaly, clawed feet, birds call back to a primal past. Yet we hear them every morning as we wake up, watch them fluttering outside our kitchen windows. Few animals are such a pervasive, yet often invisible, part of our lives as birds. What better analogy for imaginative literature?
This inaugural issue of Twin Bird Review is a celebration of the myriad of ways in which imagination operates – as an escape, an outlet, a way of making sense of difficult experiences, commemorating those we love, conceptualizing time and our own place in the world. Imagination, like birds, are strange, beautiful, pervasive, and necessary, and the contributions in issue 1.1 of TBR seek to embody imagination in all its forms, from artists and writers all around the world, from all different backgrounds.
Finally (though most importantly!), I want to take a moment to gratefully acknowledge our readers and everyone who worked on the issue, everyone who submitted, everyone who has generously donated, and YOU, our readers--without whom none of this would be possible.
Amanda K Horn, Editor-in-chief
June 2023