BirdHouse
Copyright © 2022
BirdHouse Magazine Minneapolis, MN birdhousemagazine com birdhouselitmag@gmail com
Edited by Liam Nekich, Kayla Igantowicz, Mahdi Khamseh, Lili Rojas, and Dante Rocío Also published on Medium and on the BirdHouse website; some pieces may have been republished from Medium
Mission
BirdHouse is a literary and art magazine Inspired by the erce passion of modernists in the early 20th century to break from the clear-cut storytelling and formulaic verse of traditional literature, we aim to revitalize this rebellious nature in our editions and the local literary/art community. We welcome and encourage submissions from all groups and identities: craving diverse ideas and experiences, but also searching for distinctive ways that the experimentation of the work varies with one's background
We seek stories, poems, and art that are "eccentric": pieces which deviate from their, respective, mainstream mediums and experiment with form, content, character, setting, mood, language, and composition We seek pieces that are not afraid to push beyond the status uo, pieces that introduce previously unexpressed views and concepts to enhance the modern literary/artistic canon
Thank You
We would like to thank our contributors for their generosity, willingness for us to handle their work, and for making this edition of BirdHouse possible.
LETTER FROM THE EDITORS
In the past 40 years, cultural discoursespeci cally relating to the arts and humanities has gradually inched closer, deeper, further into a postmodern fallacy that has altered our identities, the ways in which we think, govern our thoughts, what we say, how we react, how we write. e arts have always been a written record of mankind, a sort of manuscript that de nes our human race in all of its di erences e arts have tracked our progressions, our regressions, the rise and fall of societies, kings, ueens, deaths, heartbreaks In times of war, they have
wet our ngers with the very humanity that we had forgotten In classrooms, they act as extraterrestrial worlds that our children's minds inhabit. In laboratories, the serve as portraits of natural truths. In every corner of a street, in the parks in our neighbourhoods, in our bookshelves, even within our thoughts, they are mirrors into our metaphysical selves; removing the veils of an every day society that seemingly exhausts the "hidden human" within us, one which composes our sense of presence, our sense of existence. While this discussion of metaphysics and existentialism in the arts is rather short lived (our Kierkegaard impression is not the best, and Halloween was almost a month ago), it is best to observe that postmodernism has indeed tainted the precedent foundations of the role of arts in mankind While the arts have pushed man inwards, postmodernism rejects the "sel " and bases itself on "group" identity, on society, culture; the "sel " holds no value By extending into a "man made" world, rather than re ecting on the natural capabilities and truths that de ne manhood, postmodernism distorts our sense of reality, deceiving us into an endless sense of uidity
Words, texts, and ideas lack meaning As the "sel " is rejected and no objective truth is accepted, only "groups" are le : warring, opposing, and imposing power upon one another without end. Since there is no sense of belonging, no sense of "sel ", nothing to grab onto for only the sum of individuals is now important, not their composition how can the very record of mankind, our vehicle for expression, accurately portray who we are? Our social constructs, our societies, the things that drive us away from our "natural sense of being" (to roughly call it) do not de ne us; the ability
for a piece of wood to build a home does not de ne its nature Due to this inherent lack of "sel " and objective truth, our artistic endeavors have degraded as well, as the materialistic, postmodern, ideology has created a void which cannot be lled, a void which was previously lled by the desire to know, the desire to expand, the desire to nd objective truths in an unfamiliar reality; a desire which ultimately led to a familiarization of "onesel " (ironic how it is "one" self, not "many" self, not "group" self"onesel "). is has led to a sense of "fake expression", where the arts have diverted to satisfying the "groups" Language has been altered for non experimental reasons Experimentation the very foundation of expansion in every eld, the driving force behind discovery - has been frowned upon out of the fear of o ending "groups"; even the minimal experimentation that exists is "boxed up" to ensure "peace" between "groups" Pieces lack meaning e need for audience replaces the uality of one's work Postmodernism has made us numb to change, numb to curiosity, for it is too busy dealing with "groups", the satisfaction of "groups", engagements and disagreements with "groups"
Postmodernism is turning writing into a dying craft.
Postmodernism is too busy ensuring that everyone is pleased, that this imaginary reality of conformity and arrogance is xed in stone And while the 1920's was an era (particularly for the United States) of materialistic conformity, now we are in a bizarrely similar era: an era of "conformity of thought" (it seems as if Orwell's 1984 is hauntingly becoming a reality).