Happy Honk-oween, Geese!

The Flock has been busy brewing up an SGP MINI for y’all during this fall season. So yes, while we might be silly geese, we’re also witchy geese and eerie geese, geese that like to dress up and partake in our fair share of hiss or honking (is that what the kids call it? Or is it still called trick or treating? They really should start taking after us geese)!

During these short autumn days, shadows descend and the world can often feel scary and haunted. Seeking refuge in the warmth of art often feels like the correct recourse, cozying up to work that is able to hold a mirror to our own thoughts and feelings, transforming them like a fun house mirror would transform our own reflection, allowing us to see something so familiar in a new and exciting light. 

Doing so allows us to see outside of our little autumn burrows, glimpsing more of the world at large, and makes us feel less alone, more whole as a community of artists and writers and creators. It’s why us Editors do what we do, and part of the reason why we felt that an SGP MINI for the season was so important. We’re so glad to produce something so full of love and yearning and ghosts and pain and all things frighteningly comforting.

We hope that you enjoy this spine-tingling special MINI of ours and have a happy honk-oween!

Honklo and Welcome to Goose-Bumps! 

We the Flock cooked up the idea for this issue many months ago as we planned for the future of SGP (nothing scarier than a 5 year plan, am I right?), and have been champing at the bit to read your creepy, crawling, scary, silly Halloween pieces ever since! We hoped to read everything from gothic flash to poems that would scare our feathers right off, and our submitters flockin’ delivered! 

The curation of any and all SGP issues rely entirely on the submissions we receive – our tone, our arc, our emotional beats are all decided after we’ve gotten to play around in the pond – and curating a themed mini issue gave us new and interesting constraints to work within. We’re, of course, always able to find pieces that resonate with us deeply, but we never quite know what shape the collection will take until it’s happening right before our eyes. This SGP MINI, our first Goose-Bumps installment, emerged through the fog as way more “walking-contemplatively-through-a-misty-cemetery-at-midnight” than  “It’s-The-Great-Pumpkin-Charlie-Brown,” and we are oh so thrilled. Our contributors knocked this MINI out of the spider web-adorned nest, and we were able to curate a collection that has been formed entirely by the voice of our writers and style of our artists while still maintaining a consistent and corporeal throughline. 

This Issue was brought together in back rooms on beat-up old chromebooks, at coffee shops, in boyfriends’ houses, and during work hours (don’t tell our bosses!). We hope these pieces haunt you and leave you honkin’ for more! 

Happy Honko-ween! 

The Flock 

Rhiannon and Lexi and Parker Dean and Eric and Annelise and Ian and Julia