Half Mystic has long been an experiment in championing work living between literature & song, hope & rage, seascape & horizon. These pieces pull us into sharp-eyed focus, remind us why we’re here & who we’re becoming.
I'm writing this post in North Carolina, which is also where I was, almost a year ago, when Half Mystic emailed me to say they would be including my piece "A Leopard Leaps, Deep in Love" in their Presto issue.
My introduction to Half Mystic was Marie Conlan's Say Mother Say Hand, a book I was assigned for a poetry/hybrid writing class, where we covered such topics as hybridity, prose poetry, lyricism, free verse, narrative, and fragmentation. I'll share a snippet of my notes:
Last time we talked about lyricism/lyric essays, I was most interested in ideas of containment—how form can be both vessel and cage. Lyric essays are, I suppose, my main approach to hybridity, so I find them tricky to think about because the term has come to mean something so broad. Moving forward from this class, what perhaps interests me most is how the lyric essay allows for the symbiosis of intellect and emotion.
To give an example from Conlan, in this section on p. 29, the narrator talks about her psychic, therapist, “daddy issues”—she’s not only thinking, but expressing herself in different modes. Figurative language takes the narrator out of thinking into sensory experience: “I make metaphors about arms. I think how this must be a profound insight into my destructive desire to fall into them, be carried by them, scooped up and salvaged.”
Obviously, any press publishing this kind of boundary-breaking work is going to capture my hybrid-loving head/heart, so when I finished "A Leopard Leaps, Deep in Love," Half Mystic was THE journal I hoped would send an acceptance. I actually bounced up and down when they did.
I've already written about the inspiration and drafting journey of this piece prior to submissions. However, with my acceptance came the caveat that I would be asked to consider further revisions. At this point, my work had only been published as-submitted, so I was a little intimidated, but also excited.
The Half Mystic team, who provided feedback that was both honest and nurturing, guided me through several rounds of revisions. Thanks to them, "A Leopard Leaps" truly reached its formal and poetic potential.
All of this was such a rewarding experience from beginning to end that I kind of can't believe I have the extra joy of receiving a Pushcart nomination. Thank you so much, Half Mystic! And congratulations to my page-mates/fellow nominees, xochi quetzali cartland, Grace Kwan, Aurora Shimshak and Maggie Warren. You can read all our pieces in the Presto issue.
And how did I celebrate this Moment of my writing life? Two (more) prints from The Art of Seth: The Place We Said We Would Meet and Then Came A Different World Altogether.
I reference Seth's work in my curated journal, "A Forgotten Notebook," published by Red Noise Collective, which belongs to the same manuscript-in-progress as "A Leopard Leaps." My writing group is making comments on my ~200 page Google doc as we speak! I hope to submit the whole book (!!!) for publication in 2025.