We are thrilled to announce that ISSUE 03 of The Champagne Room is now available for purchase! Above is the cover art for this issue, by Carolina Fullerton.
The image of the payphone is representative of the work collected inside the pages of this issue. I write in my letter from the editor about how payphones as they tend to exist in the wild now--far and few between, many abandoned or unworking, turned instead into art--are more like phantom lines, a device one uses to call out into the void, a missed connection made metaphor: the wrong time, the wrong place.
This issue features work by twenty-five different authors whose words we are honored to share with you. I like to think of their words as calls made on such a spectral telephone. The works in this issue are communicating with ghosts, past selves, ex-loves and old wounds, intangible possibilities; there are messages left on a disconnected machine in the form of postcards, fortune cookies, film negatives, recipes, prayers. There is joy within the pages of this issue, and there is ache; there is wandering and returning and wanting to grow.
Copies of ISSUE 03, as well as a bundle deal featuring all three issues of The Champagne Room, can be purchased here. I am proud of each of these issues, proud of where we started four years ago in a bar in Athens, GA with a spark of ambition and a lot of love, and prouder still of what we have become since then with a change in creative partnership and vision, and enthusiastic about what we are becoming. I am thankful for the community supporting us, welcoming us, expanding with us. We are delighted, as always, to share space with all of you.
I owe a huge thank you, too, to my co-editor, Emma--she put so much effort and care into this issue during times when I was unable to, when I was going through a divorce and a move and a massive rearranging. This issue carries so much of her light, and I am grateful for and in awe of her as always.
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Our contributor conversation this month will be with Hillary Leftwich, author of "Ghost Ship" and "Letter" in ISSUE 03. Her thoughts on the lyric essay form, writers she's reading, and the game of submissions will be available on June 15th.
Before signing off, I want to note that I will be taking a much needed summer break from certain editor responsibilities. While we we still be posting a new contributor conversation each month, I will not be writing newsletters again until the fall. I believe, in any aspect of life, in taking breaks when we need them. I look forward to catching up again on the other side, renewed, ready.
Love and Light,
Heather
(she/her)
Founder and Editor, The Champagne Room