the beauty and peril of home

The Beauty and the Peril of Home

by Terese Mason Pierre & Lawrence Stewen

We’re excited to bring you Issue 4.1 of Augur Magazine, our largest issue to date. In these pages, you’ll find love in flora, a welcoming of spirits, the transformation of flight, and, hopefully, something familiar to guide you through the darkness.

This is our first issue as Co-Editors-in-Chief, curating new rooms in this future-facing abode with our combined experiences and perspectives. Deepening our involvement in the magazine’s production process meant more responsibility, more learning on both our parts, and a larger, oft-invited voice in the building of this house. Creating this issue in the second year of the pandemic required extra patience and understanding across the board. Issue 4.1 gave us the space to reflect on how we could show even more care to our all-volunteer staff, given the pressure the world was in, and is still in. We’re immensely proud of our fellow editors for bringing this issue to fruition with the enthusiasm and energy they were able to gift us. Within these walls, and in these times, that is an amazing accomplishment.9

During our pitch meeting, we spoke about how these pieces might work together, but we never really knew what that would look like. What emerged was a complicated navigation of the boundaries and journeys between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

To us, Issue 4.1 is all about home—and the myriad manifestations of that attractive concept. What appears, tricks, and transforms within the space of home, serves to drive and support the characters and speakers through their multi-layered worlds. In some pieces, homes are lost or destroyed, and in the aftermath, we are left with vulnerability and liberation. In others, dread exudes from physical walls or ethereal bindings. Further, some pieces invite an overwhelming sense of nostalgia and homecoming. While contrast and contradictions may trickle through the foundations of this issue, it is this dissonance, too, that defines home for us. Here resides the deep and the light, the dark and the hopeful.

At the end of this journey, we hope that your concept of home, and what a home can be, has changed—or, at the very least, was challenged. Given that many of us are limiting adventures outside of our own personal spaces—we invite you to re-examine what it means to just be in a place and a time, and to celebrate what we hold close, the ways we curate our familiar.

So, what’s next for us? Look out for Issue 4.2 coming later this year. Additionally, we’ll be running a series of creative and professional development workshops in October and November for writers and artists. And, we can’t wait for the launch of our sister publication in 2022: Tales & Feathers.

Thank you for sharing this space with us, Augurians.