Editor’s Letter Issue 12

Come walk the edge with me and see the space between planes. The transference here is both land and water, living and dead. The coast is a doorway that passes in equal sides.

How long we have forgotten.

This opening and closing is a sea gate for those who walk earth, but from beyond it is the reverse. These shells that grind beneath my feet are the last echoes of the boneyard left ashore by the water. Beneath the tide those gone become anew, as nothing submerged is wasted. The debris left here is from humanity.

A creature that swam these waters from birth once died and sunk and then was covered. In this grave it rested, changing, transforming in a dark chrysalis where years are counted in millions. Its phase was ongoing and part of the ever-shift yet it was dug into and drawn up. It was strung out and squeezed and shaped. It became a container for the very substance it lived within. Now time is minutes, as the water inside it is drank and the bottle discarded. A single-use headstone for an exhumed grave.

Seaside Gothic is more than a magazine, now. It has become a collective shared by the writers and documenters and readers and subscribers. A collection of collectors. It should stand for more than what makes it, and so I stand for more. We are neither of the land or the sea, not tied to the rules of either yet with a foot in each.

Pirates and pioneers.

The edge will remain after we have all crossed it. Whilst it is in our charge, we should care for it.

And so we shall.