Summer 2024

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Editors

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Fiction Contributors

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Visual Art Contributors

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Nonfiction Contributors

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Drama Contributors

Welcome to our Summer 2024 Issue! To kick off the spring season in the northern hemisphere, we hosted our Spoken Word Showcase in collaboration with The Red Megaphone on the 21st of April. This event saw several writers perform gripping readings of their work live on video call. For everyone on the Spellbinder team, this was a fantastic opportunity to see the faces behind the incredible pieces of writing we’ve had the pleasure to publish over the years. It was also exciting to connect with writers who were featured in our recent issues and also from when our publication was much younger.

Moreover, one of our favourite parts of the Spoken Word Showcase was reading the lovely messages people left in the chat, which showed support for other writers and enthusiasm for the publication. We’d like to share a small sample of these sweet messages which stood out to us in particular…

“Spellbinder really is such a delightful publication.”

“Such incredible work being read and published!”

“Thanks so much for organising this lovely event. I’ve really enjoyed everyone’s work.”

Furthermore, this season saw the introduction of our first Spellbinder competition, titled ‘Variations of the Sky.’ Advertised over social media, this flash competition welcomed visual artists to submit their work within a one-week period. Two winners were selected and each of them had a choice of a paperback copy of the spring issue of Spellbinder or a free monthly subscription to our website. We plan to announce the winners soon and make their works available on a special page of our website. This is the first of two flash competitions we endeavour to judge annually, the other being one for writers, which we will arrange later in 2024.

As promised in our last issue, we also released our new podcast episode hosted by Ashlynn and Doriana, which is a conversation between Spellbinder co-founders, Amber and Linda, as well as Parishka, creator of The Red Megaphone. We are hoping to record many more episodes in the coming months. Working with The Red Megaphone on both the Spoken Word Showcase and this episode for our revived Spotify podcast, Spellchats, has been a wonderful experience and a testament to the power of sharing and collaboration within literary communities.

As usual, Spotify will also be the platform through which we share our issue playlist to accompany you through your reading of the issue. Our collection of works for July is diverse and entertaining, from a poem told from the point of view of a plant to an extract from a play which uses the motif of cherry blossoms to navigate the themes of loss and grief. Our fiction section is very select this time; nevertheless, stories are brought to you in abundance still as one of our writers has taken the term ‘short story’ to a whole new level by narrating four interlinked stories in one. We are also publishing a nonfiction writer who has experimented with the form of a letter in which to tell their tale. Additionally, we are proud to exhibit a drawing by Ugo Galli for our Featured section and to include Shee Gomes’ mesmerising work with patterns on this season’s cover. We hope all of our readers will appreciate the talent of our wonderful writers and artists.

We are now at the halfway point in the calendar year and just three months away from the fourth anniversary of Spellbinder being founded. We look forward to continuing to strive to make the literary and artistic world a more accessible place and one in which more talented creatives can find their audience. We also aim to evaluate our goals and missions as a publication and continue to work towards achieving and maintaining these. We very much hope that we will be able to celebrate our fourth birthday with you all in our usual way at the online Anniversary Party in early October.

For those in the northern hemisphere, we wish you all the best for a bright summer, and for those in the south, keep warm this winter.

Amber Kennedy, Editor in Chief

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We have created a playlist inspired by the Summer 2024 Issue. Feel free to play it while reading:

Poetry shortlist – Spring 2024

Vanessa Napolitano	Heaven
Cameron Carvalho	Grief
Liam White	A Dream Through Celestial Spheres
Susan Gordon Byron	Medusa’s Sonnet

Fiction shortlist – Spring 2024

Pegah Ouji	In the Name of Those Optimist Iranian Fools
Matthew Evan Thomas	Blushing Clouds
Christy Hartman	Every Fibre

Drama shortlist – Spring 2024

Yangzhou (Yao) Bian

Twenty Twenty-Two

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