A Letter From The Editor
February 15, 2016
I created Heather because I wanted a space in the literary world for the stuff we don't talk about. I don't mean to say that there aren't publications out there publishing things no one else will publish. That concept was invented by the Internet. There are plenty of publications trailblazing the way for women like Heather, but that doesn't mean that what we will publish here will be redundant, fraudulent or irrelevant.
I've read too many pieces, too many articles and blogs and news stories where I could feel the writer watching me read. Not only were they watching me, they were really pleased with what they had written, the way they had formed their sentences and the metaphors they had used. They wanted me to be pleased too.
Heather is not for pieces like that.
I wanted a space for gray areas, unknowns, uncertainties and dark places. I wanted a space for writing and art that was weird and unperfected and raw. I wanted a space for things that need to be jettisoned into space and for things that need to be buried deep within us to be kept safe.
Learning how to share the things that I'm learning about myself is a process for me. Growing up, my habit was to keep everything to myself. I had opinions, wants, needs and thoughts that I never let out into the sun. What I shared with people was artificial. I said what I thought people wanted to hear.
I'm nowhere near done growing up yet but I think a lot of growing up is shedding those onion layers that grow around us as children and teens. We hear something on TV about how we should feel about a certain issue, we grow a layer. We see something in a magazine about what will make someone fall in love with us, we grow another. We get to the end of high school, even sometimes college, and realize we are seeing the world dully, through the film of everyone else's opinions. Some of us are lucky enough to be able to shed that film on our end.
Others are never able to shake the expectations of our development and education.
This is my roundabout way of saying that this will be a place where we will share authenticity, beautiful and nasty alike. We will share gorgeous words and dirty ones, too. We will look at art that makes us feel sick and other art that makes us feel like we could underground cage fight. We will publish empowerment and self-set-limitations and secrets. We'll publish silliness and sickness.
Basically, I don't know what we'll publish. But I'm excited to find out.
x km