Hello sweet geese! Happy Pride! We are so glad you’re here. 

It’s hard not to be blunt and dogmatic: stuff’s flocking rough right now! We know that, you know that, anybody who is paying attention to the world at all knows that. Even the actual geese know it (it’s true, we have a guy on the inside who gives us the hot goss). And while we could feel hopeless and dejected, we here at Silly Goose Press have committed to creating a corner of the internet and literary community that essentially demands hope. Hope and joy and heart and whimsy. We need those things. And, yes, we’ve been known to say that hope and joy and heart and whimsy are acts of resistance, and, yes, they are, but today, this week, this Pride, we are insisting that they also be balms and salves and warm compresses. 

SGP is young and so is our Flock, and it’s hard not to feel (continuously, and in perpetuity) this feeling of now more than ever. Now more than ever we need to come together to fight back, now more than ever we need to organize, now more than ever we need to vote, to dream, to celebrate. And maybe that’s always how the people on the impetus of change feel. Urgency, energy, a pull from something beyond their singularity. And maybe we’re not that special, we’re just a bunch of geese honking into the ether and hoping to build a nest big enough at a pond wide enough for all of our many beloveds. But no matter how it shakes out, we know that publishing an issue filled with queer hope and joy and heart and whimsy is what we have to do. And so we did. And now it’s yours. 

And one last note in the interest of hope and joy and heart and whimsy: we must tell you that we are featuring a whopping SIX artists in this issue who have never been published before! SIX DEBUT GEESE! We are SO proud of you all, and we are so very honored that you chose to share your art with us. We can’t wait to see what you do next.  

Happy Pride! We’ll see you soon. 

Lexi, Parker, Rhiannon, Eric, Ian, Julia, & Annelise

Welcome to our inaugural mini issue, PRIDE: Unedited!

Mini issues are and will continue to be a toe-dip into the deep dive of publishing with Silly Goose Press, an accelerated  version of our process with significantly less time for developmental edits and significantly more pressure on our contributors to check their emails daily! Even from the early daydreaming days of goosery, The Flock has known two things: we want to curate as much work as we possibly can so that we can meet and love as many writers as we possibly can AND we are so gay, and everything our light touches, therefore, is also gay. Producing a mini issue for Pride this year was barely even a question, it was more a rainbowed-out quadrant on our calendar. PRIDE: Unedited is filled with queerness in so many forms, and we feel so honored to offer it to you now.