Heavy Crown Voices: The Launch
The Voices are here!
The debut issue is officially out. I’m more excited than mere words can say to launch this literary and arts magazine onto the internet. Gale Acuff submitted 25 poems and we’ve published every one of them. His tone will take you back to childhood, to innocence and wonder, and to all the foolishness and embarrassment and confusion that floods a child’s mind. The poetry of Guillermo Bowie, another contributor to the issue, evokes the wisdom and the mystery of those who still echo around us, in photos and memories. The filmmaker Sam Hendrian gave us a poem that resonates with our daily waiting, the ordinary, which noticed, becomes anything but. Dee Allen, author of ten books, offered up two poems that harken back to the mystics and the lady who was feared more than any army—the accused witch. Doug Tanoury sees poetry everywhere—in horses’ names, in trees, in fish biting at the bait, in sex and in music. Cora Tate—of many lands, languages, and trades—has published five novels, five novellas, three novelettes, and seventy-seven short stories. Her story is this issue is about a man who returns home for a visit after four years away traveling the world. He finds everything different, a culture sadly disconnected from the natural environment that makes his home a place of idealism in his childhood memories. He finds one thing, a person, the same—a woman he never stopped loving, not even when she was married to his friend.
I submitted my own short story about Isaac, who is coming unraveled while his wife gives birth, but as his memories come roaring into his present consciousness, he recalls the day he met her and the instant spark that only intensified all the days after, filling him with not only love but fear, the pure terror of losing it all.
John Mese submitted the story First Kiss. It tells of middle grade puppy love. Boys don’t know girls; girls don’t know boys. It takes a lifetime, sometimes, to figure out the simplest things. How does anyone make it past puberty?
Writers everywhere are debating the merits and perils of AI technology. I’d been seeing and hearing so many incredible things—like people using AI to write entire novels, that sort of thing. Playing around with ChatGPT, I decided to do an experiment. I prompted an AI persona I’ve come to know as Veronica Verne into helping me write the story of Petra de Luca, an orphan from age four who centers her identity in the power of the ancient philosophers until one day, giving a lecture on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, she suffers a stroke. To recover, she returns not to the place where she grew up after her parents died but to the place where she was born, where it all started for her. The salty air of Monaco opens her pores. Recovering the utility of her hands, she begins to draw the seascape, the bends of the Rock, and the lines and shadows of the Oceanographic Museum. Love blooms too. She finds that she can never go back to the person she was. The tide comes in, always a new tide.
The artwork of Amedeo Modigliani decorates almost every page of the issue. Modigliani was a complex person whose art remains resolutely undefinable. It’s not Impressionist. It’s not Cubist, nor like Picasso, and yet it carries the influence of artistic movements that raged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He did it his way, a passion and a coping mechanism for the intense pain caused by tuberculosis. He over drank, too, to mollify the pain, but that led to other problems. He painted to sooth himself. His distortions, far from detracting reality, heighten our ability to perceive his subjects’ emotions. His paintings have life. We can hear the cries of his subjects. We can hear their voices. That’s why I find that his art adds so much power and resonance to the magazine. I hope it speaks to all of you. I think it will.
You can read the issue online here: https://online.fliphtml5.com/gqvhb/qbwn/#p=1
Or you can download the PDF here.
Submissions are already being accepted for the second issue, due out in the Fall of 2026. Honestly, if that issue goes anywhere near as smoothly as this one, it could be out sooner. The autumn timeframe, though, feels right for now. We’re on an annual schedule that might advance to biannual if there is an appetite to justify it.
